Images are a little weird in this update with small text / inconsistent sizing, apologies – should be mostly fixed in future updates, I originally had this uploaded elsewhere
The ‘character creation’ in Torment is very barebones, just choosing a few stats. It’s not too bad for what it is – a sudden opening where you and the Nameless One have to quickly figure out your identity for yourself – but it does leave you a bit of an odd spot if you immediately want to be a Mage/Thief. I recall that one of the game’s goals was that character creation should be spread out a bit over the game itself, in a sense.
The general recommendation for people is to play Torment as a Lawful Mage. I agree, and Fighter’s probably second choice. But since this is a semi-pacifist run I think the stealthy, pickpocket class is fitting. We’ll also be Chaotic, for the continued sake of putting a new spin on things, though I think most people are happy to mostly mix Chaotic and Lawful as they come. You can see from my stat spread why mage is recommended though: my Int and Cha are already higher / as high as my Dexterity, my primary class stat. Usually I’d also go 18 Wisdom, and it would’ve made more sense to just drop a Dexterity point and bump that up later, but hey, sticking to theme here.
So, here we are. This is the Nameless One (the one on the left, not the skull). He’s us! Looks like we’ve seen better days, though I guess we’re in no place to complain considering the guy next to us. This, so he says, is Morte, our tank. Silent ‘E’, going by voice-overs. Most skulls I know don’t talk, but we’ll roll with it. Apparently we’re in ‘the Mortuary’, a morgue where the Dustmen dispose of and prepare Sigil’s dead. It’s also got ‘all the architectural charm of a pregnant spider’, apparently. Morte’s words, not mine.
Morte’s fun. The traditional tank is a stoic guy or girl in thick armour; Morte’s an annoying floating blip that somehow makes rude gestures at people. He’s also the closest thing to an ally that we have right now. There are words on our back, but we can’t read them ourselves at the moment. Fortunately Morte can take a good look at our back side and tell us. Let’s get the closest thing we have to a goal:
‘No wonder my back hurts; there’s a damn novel written there.’
We’ll just pick up the journal and… ah. It’s gone. Well, hopefully Pharod isn’t a common name.
To escape, we’ll have to commit our first kill in a sort-of tutorial, one of I think four absolutely mandatory, undodgeable battles in the game. One of the zombies holds the keys and at this stage the only way to get it is to kill them. A moment of silence. In case you’re wondering what zombies are doing here, the Dustmen reanimate corpses of people who in life sold their ‘body’ to them, for use in manual labour. For the sellers it’s a good way to make a quick buck, though a lot of people find it distasteful. In fact, you can find a note begging the Dustmen not to follow up on a guy’s contract, in return for a gift he has elsewhere. This note is found, alas, in one of the zombies; he was buried with it and evidently the Dusties missed it. Not that they likely would’ve paid it much mind.
Technically I got Morte to do it, but for the purposes of this playthrough there’ll be no distinguishing between my kills / party kills. Don’t feel too bad, though. You can quiz Morte about the morality of your actions beforehand, and he says they’ll likely be raised afterwards:
But don’t just take his word for it; you can find a note saying things to the same effect. I’m still going to avoid ‘killing’ any of the others here, however. There’s some more we can do with the other zombies, though. First, let’s talk more about alignment. I said we were going Chaotic. In Planescape terms that means a few things, and it’ll be effected by a few philosophical arguments yet to be flung our way, but it’s also associated with impulsiveness. A lack of decorum and a liking of joking around. And a lot of the time, compulsive lying. Hm. Maybe we should be more concerned about Morte. What this means is that I will be flirting, joking with and querying every single mindless, mute zombie here.
Morte: Psssst. You see the way she was looking at me? Huh? You see that? The way she was following the curve of my occipital bone?
TNO: You mean that blank-eyed beyond-the-grave stare?
Morte: Wha- are you BLIND?! She was scouting me out! It was shameless the way she WANTED me.
TNO: Wanted you to go away, maybe. She was obviously too distracted by ME to pay attention to some stupid bobbing head with a big mouth.
Morte: You? Yeah, right! Trust me, chits beyond the grave don’t care about all that ‘physicality’ and ‘I’ve got a body’ and ‘I’m all scarred and tough-looking.’ They want guys with SPIRIT. That’s me, chief. You? Corpses like YOU are as common as copper.
TNO: Whatever, Morte. Let’s go.
There are also mysteries to be pierced, puzzles to solve, zombies to (peacefully) loot. We’ll be returning here later to finish off some of it.
You heard the word ‘dead-book’ earlier. Well, there it is, that massive thing in the middle. Like I said, the Dustmen manage the city’s dead; this is where they catalogue them all. If it’s not obvious, being ‘in the dead-book’ is a euphenism for ‘being dead’. The elderly man by the book is one of the Dustmen, Dhall. Morte warns us not to talk to him, but TNO insists. It’s good to listen to TNO here (believe in yourself), as Dhall is evidently one of your few conspirators. He’ll give you a lot of info on your current past: you, Restless One, keep springing back to life. When your wounds are very severe, you forget more and more. You’ve travelled with others before… and they’ve all died, resting here in the Mortuary. He asks we take people with us no more. We are probably not going to live up to this request.
This is also our first chance to learn about Dustman beliefs. Dhall is close to dying, now; you can visibly hear him wheezing in old age. And like many an old man, he’s tired. The Dustmen preach that this life is an illusion, full of suffering and misery. Everyone’s already dead, and this world is a shadow of real life, perhaps an afterlife of sorts. Everyone and everything’s stuck in an endless cycle of suffering, until they finally let go of life, passions, and enter the True Death, nothingness.
You can practically imagine Chris Avellone and any other of the development team going over the concept of the game (a quest to restore your mortality), looking over the Dustmen, and thinking ‘Well, geez, we’ve gotta include these guys’.
However, our current existence is basically blasphemy to Dustman beliefs. They’d likely shove us in a crematory if they knew of our state. Fortunately for us, Dhall believes we have to come to terms with death on our own time, which is why he’s been hiding our name out of the records. We can find one removed scrap of paper elsewhere. For now, let’s continue.
Welcome to the other races of Sigil. Everyone ends up here, but tieflings are a noticeable presence, since Sigil so often harbours beings from the Lower Planes. It’s also our first chance to see some of Planescape’s grotesqueness! I’ve been pulling things out of walking corpses, unstitching things out of closed jaws, etc. but now we get to have Ei-Vene operate on us. She’s near-blind, so mistakes us for a zombie. Unlike in real life, letting this strange lady pull needles into you will be ‘strangely painless’ and give you a permanent +1 to your max health. The other mechanic introduced here is memories: as we watch her operate on a corpse, we can remember operating on one ourselves. We hid some goods in zombie no. 42, but alas, we can’t get them without ripping out his spine. But we still get 250XP for remembering.
Of course, I mentioned earlier that I was interrogating every mute zombie for no reason? Time for some pay-off!
One of these zombies is not a zombie at all. It’s an Anarchist in disguise, spying on the Dusties. You can dig him for information, do some things for him, etc. You can also alert Dhall or another Dustman to his presence. Still, I don’t know what the effects would truly be. Would they throw him out? Hand him over to the courts? Is spying an executable offense? At the same time, while he’s not actively doing anything malicious beyond listening for info, I’m unsure whether it would be wise to just stand back and let an Anarchist operation continue without interference at this stage.
Let’s take a lighter, truly righteous path, and shake him down for all that he’s worth. I lie that I’ve got new orders and we’re here to replace him; he needs to leave now and give us all his stuff for the operation. Before he goes, I also get information on the exit out of here; apparently, aside from the front door, there’s also a portal out that can be unlocked with a certain key, a crooked bone thingamabob. The key’s likely somewhere upstairs. For pretty much no reason, I have him operate on me to disguise myself as a zombie. This is one peaceful way to do things, as the Dustmen won’t accost you, but it means you can’t run (as zombies shamble along). There are other ways to handle things, so it’s probably not worth it for most. I break the disguise immediately.
Upstairs I continue my trend of looting zombies. When the Dustman come up I have two options: say that I was here to visit either one of the Dusties, or attend a certain ceremony for someone dead. I use a mix of both; for the former, you can either say you’re visiting Dhall, or [Lie] and use the made-up name ‘Adahn’. I methodically go around telling every single Dustman in the Mortuary about the wonders of Adahn. I’m sure this will in no way lead back to me. If you tell the Dustmen the truth, you get attacked. With my Dexterity, I can also reach out and quietly snap their necks before they can set off any alarms – but that’s not very pacifistic, is it? Finally, we go downstairs. I figure out how to dispel the runes of some giant skeletons, but while this isn’t direct combat and it’s worth a whole chunk of XP it still results in their ‘deaths’, so I decide to spare their boney, boney lives. Finally, the most important thing to be found around here…
I’m glad I have CHA/INT high enough to unlock the third option, as I don’t have heart enough to either lie or admit I don’t know her. This is Deionarra, and among other things she has a nice theme. She was one of the Nameless One’s former companions – more than that, even. Now she exists trapped as a ghost, bound to the world by her love for the Nameless One. We’ll discover more about her later, but for now, we have no memories of her or our past relationship. Deionarra will provide a way out of here, as well as the ability to Raise companions from the dead, but I believe it’s possible to skip this conversation entirely, either through talking with the Anarchist for the answer or doing what I’m about to do in a moment. You really shouldn’t, though. Deionarra has some pretty vital information for us:
After countless lifetimes, unknowable years, we are running out of time. If we do not deal with our little resurrection problem, eventually we’ll have no mind but just… existence. Probably not the best outcome. Deionarra also has some prophecy stuff for us, although you can turn her down. Before she’ll prophesise for you she wants some confirmation.
My answer, I think, saddens her a bit. But I don’t think I can make that vow yet. She tells me:
Finally let’s wrap things up. This is Soego. Soego’s a bit different from the other Dusties. First of all, he keeps mysteriously twitching.
[‘If I may ask… are you all right? You look tired.’]
Soego manages a weak smile, and the corners of his mouse twitch slightly. ‘I have recently taken ill… minor fevers, nothing more. Sometimes they make sleep… difficult.’
Secondly, Soego is a bit of a reverse from all the other Dusties. He actually knows everyone who’s supposed to be in here, so if you try to bald-faced lie about Adahn he’ll catch you out (though you can back out of it). You can also outright tell him the truth, and he’ll note that you do look like you’ve been partly prepared by the Dustmen. If you try to snap his neck… well…
It won’t work; his neck’ll twist alright, but he’ll be unharmed. Concerning.
Deionarra and the Anarchist unlocked a portal for me, but through sweettalking I can convince Soego to just let me out the front door. In my case, rather than tell the truth I say I’m here to visit Deionarra, and ask him how she died. He doesn’t know, but she’s been here (as a corpse, I assume) for some time. Her father still visits. With that, I’m out the door and into Sigil, escape successful.
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Mortuary?
Since I decided to flirt with every female zombie in the Mortuary, I think I heard all of Morte’s bizarre inappropriate comments. Of which my favourite was: ‘You don’t need an identify spell to know what she wants.’