quen up and face the water hag
May. 18th, 2020 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/3cHAhqp
so last night’s Witchering got off to a late start because DF had to have the kind of phonecall with his dad where he completely reverts to his native accent. (I overheard him pronounce the word ‘water’ as ‘worter’ and knew it was gonna be another hour at least.) And poor MM had been up too late for her needs-9-hours-of-sleep biology the night before, and was just sitting on the couch listlessly listening to her night owl 5 year old playing loudly next to the baby monitor upstairs, waiting for the kid to go to sleep so she could go up and also go to sleep. (if she goes up while Girl is still awake, then there are Shenanigans and it doesn’t work out well at all. You gotta wait for the silence.)
Poor MM was very invested in the Plague Maiden quest and we wanted to do it while she was awake, so we tried to just dive right in as soon as DF was off the phone, but… it’s not quick.
We went in massively spoilered;akilah12902 had written about how she’d had to revert to an earlier save because doing what seemed right had wound up with such a fucking horrible outcome, so I’d read about that and was like well all that sounds horrible, no thanks. (If you would like a coherent explanation as well, her Creature Feature on Plague Maidens is succinct, interesting, and informative.) And I’d mentioned sort of off-handedly to DF that this was not a straightforward follow-the-arrows quest, and DF was like, *heavy sigh* just tell me, so I did, and he was like, “Huh, well, we’ll see what it really looks like.” But– anyway– if you don’t want to be spoilered for this quest, well, honestly, you wouldn’t be reading my recaps anyway??? So like take that under advisement.
DF says, after the intro where the weird raspy-voiced super-American not-Dandelion talks while the game’s loading, “And now you know… the rest of the story” and i had to look up Paul Harvey because it was slightly before my time and I was like what is that from so just in case you were wondering, I am in fact older than DF but in pop culture years he’s way older than me. I blame him being an only child.
So, we’re on Fyke Island. We Quenned up and dealt with a water hag, right off the bat. Turns out they really really really don’t like being on fire, like even more so than regular people, so that’s not as difficult as it might be anymore.
Inside the tower, a rat runs by, with a helpful little label above its head that just says “Rat”. DF asked, “is that rat’s name “Rat”???”
oh good, the loot’s an old goat hide. MM: “Maybe he can turn it into silk” [we were horribly offended during a previous inventory arranging session to discover that in the crafting tab you can dismantle linen thread into silk somehow, or vice versa I don’t remember, and like, that’s not how any of this works? but maybe it’s magic? but why would that be magic? wtf]
wtf is stammelford’s dust it sounds like an STD? ayy level 10! Powerup! Not a lot of time for celebration, but this quest is extremely generous with the XP, for the record, you get a lot of points for just looking at things.
we’re like. detective-ing around with this magic green lamp, and Kiera keeps breaking in to talk to Geralt on the Magic Whizzbang Talker Device. It was actually confusing– at one point Geralt starts talking and he’s using a strangely like, well-supported and not gravelly voice, and I realized belatedly it’s because he’s talking on the phone, more or less. How does Geralt already have a phone voice? how is he used to that? Worldbuilding question…
this is taking concentration. Sherlock fucking Holmes here. oh no now there’s a sad lady ghost, we have to talk to her.
oh gross, a sad lady ghost who got eaten alive by rats while paralyzed. I mean, we knew that was coming but like, gross, people.
And here’s the thing: if you haven’t been spoilered for this quest, there is no way you would figure out what was really up. Like, no way. We went in looking for the clues, knowing there were clues, and nothing, nothing anywhere in the actual text of the game gives you any idea that like, This Is A Plague Factory And This Ghost That Is Weirdly Different From Other Ghosts Is Going To Kill Thousands Of People If You Don’t Take A Specific Set Of Actions. We were like ok all we know for sure is that we shouldn’t go take her bones so she can get off the island, where’s the supporting documentation for this?
There is none. You just have to– not pick the option that seems most sensible. And then you leave the encounter and there’s no information on what to do next. So you wander around looking for more clues, which there aren’t really– you can find some other ghosts, or echoes of what happened, but they don’t tell you much. I guess them observing that the rats in the basement seem sick is a clue? But it’s not a Hey Don’t Take Anything Off This Island With You kind of clue, especially since the place is filled with loot that you of course are going to take with you because that is the basic mechanic of most video games, that you pick up things you find to use later. And like, there’s a ghost that definitely is of someone who came later, a looter, he observes that everyone here’s been dead so long it’s amazing there’s stuff to find yay and then something killed him, but like. It’s obvious there’s bad shit in here? It’s not surprising your Sad Lady Ghost might kill someone who came to steal? Like, that’s not much of a clue, except confirmation of why Kiera should be interested, because this is an ongoing Cursed Situation that’s getting people from her village killed and thus is reasonably her business as the village witch relying on the villagers’ goodwill to not get turned in to the witch-hunters. [Except having purposely spoilered myself further, I get that we’re not supposed to find that a plausible reason for her extreme interest in this site, so this bit kind of fails on two levels.]
There’s also a conspicuously Locked Door, and we’re like ah, that must be a clue too. What’s Behind That Door, hm??? Exciting. So we searched and searched, and I finally was like heyakilah12902 where is the key to that door and she was like Oh. There isn’t one. It’s just another door to outside, that’s locked. You can go outside and look at it from the other side. That’s all it is.
Well what the fuck, why have a door at all? Or why not have it unlocked, or Aard-able or something? The quest is confusing enough, why put in a random dead-end like that just to make you run around and verify that it’s nothing? (We later verified: Yeah, that’s just the other entry door. It’s just locked, it goes from outdoors to the main entry lobby area. I guess to show that the peasants didn’t break in that way, but were let in the front door? But it doesn’t say that, Geralt doesn’t observe that, it just looks like all the other quests where part of it is that you have to figure out how to unlock a door to find out what’s behind it. And like, it says outright, elsewhere, that yeah, the peasants were let in, because clearly nobody expected the mob to attack.)
So we tried to leave through the door we’d entered through, and then the sad lady ghost became a monster and was like RAHHH WE FIGHT NOW, and we were like okay so she is not just a sad lady ghost, that’s good to have confirmation of. She is, in fact a Pesta, and now we can look up what a Pesta is and – see, though, like, that’s also spoilering yourself. You can’t just get through this quest on the information presented and arrive at a correct conclusion!
ANYHOW back to the fun recap. So the Pesta killed us, because DF was slightly distracted because poor MM had passed the fuck out on the couch and the baby monitor was silent, so he had to wake up his wife to put her to bed and she was very sad and confused and he promised not to do anything too fun or plot-significant without her. But we’ve kind of written this quest off as being, like, not adequately explained in-universe anyway, so we’ll finish it up.
So we did. Reloaded, fought the Pesta briefly, then went back to Kiera who obligingly told us where to find the Missing True Love the ghost is obsessed with, so there’s that; there’d been no indication we were going to get any further leads on how to finish the quest if we didn’t agree to take the pesta’s bones, which because we were spoilered we knew would end up unleashing plague on the Continent, which is super fucking gross and not what we wanted to do. (I guess the justification is that I mean it doesn’t mean Geralt can’t go on to win the game so like, whatever, it’s just a quest outcome, either one is fine narratively, but like, gross, do not make us entertain ourselves while locked in on a quarantine by unleashing a fucking plague in our Escapism Pastime Universe??? What the fuck, I get that we can’t blame the game devs in 2015 for not forseeing this, but like. Gross, guys. Like, I wouldn’t want to vacation on the Continent anyway but don’t make me responsible for having killed half of it?????)
So then we could find the man, and you know I don’t know how long it’s supposed to have been since this poor girl got eaten by rats, if her boyfriend is still alive and still pining it can’t have been long but like, all the corpses are dried skeletons except the ones who aren’t, and like. What. What’s a coherent timeline? We don’t need one.
ANYHOO we bring the guy back with us, and we decide to go find the last few ghosts we might have missed talking to because you get 40 xp every time you see one and that’s a lot of fuckin XP so it’s worth doing but it’s kind of a boring slog to wander around and try to get in exactly the right spot to get the thing to go off and show you… not much by way of clues generally… and then we sort of got stuck in the basement because the forlorn boyfriend was following us around and could not take a hint to get out of the fucking door? and we had to like, dance around until he let us past so he could follow us back up the stairs? I get being clingy my dude, we had to kill several wraiths that were specifically mad at you, but like. Back the fuck off, my man.
Anyhow. It was an annoying, but super-lucrative quest. and in the end, the young man is brave and the horrifying monster is like “KISS ME” and he’s like “Yes I will do that”– which is surprising given how horrifying the monster is, and Geralt turns his back out of apparent respect, which is sort of cute and sort of sad and sort of funny.
And he dies, and you feel bad for him, but then you get
400 xp
which is the largest number I’ve ever seen awarded at once like that, holy fuck, really we’re halfway to level 11 already now, Christ almighty. I guess they want to level you up quickly; this is a lvl 6 and having done it earlier would’ve really made some of the other shit we’ve done while underpowered kind of easier?
DF said he felt a little cheap for taking the spoilers, but like, there were not adequate clues in-game. I suppose you could muddle through but like. What the fuck. I guess you probably get a lot of XP for unleashing a horrific plague upon the Continent but I don’t want to find out?
So we went back to Kiera and got another tiny quest from her and DF was like, fine. fine. MM will be mad if we do anything important but this is small and probably quite easy, so we’ll do this one.
Enroute to tracking down Kiera’s missing mail, a level 7 bandit began chasing us. DF rode on until we were at our objective, watching the little red dot chasing– the fight music stayed on– and finally he just got off Roach, turned around, Aarded the guy off his horse, walked over and stabbed him as he lay on the ground, which killed him completely in a single shot. It was pretty epic actually, and was exactly what I’d always hoped leveling up to level 10 would mean.
(That’s not actually a very high level, but it sounds high to me, who has never played a video game.)
(DF is really cavalier about Quen, btw. I’m like, why don’t you use it more? and he was like meh it only saves you from one hit, mostly it’s not worth it and I’d rather cast an active sign with that energy, because I can dodge and I can heal so I’d rather do damage? Fair point but it makes me twitch. yes, I know you can level up Quen and make it more useful but that’s not for a long time yet.)
We also got accosted by the Pellar and given another quest that seems time-sensitive but probably actually isn’t. Like, he says “midnight tonight” and that’s fine but I bet the midnight part is the only bit that really matters. Geralt doesn’t know what day it is. I don’t know what day it is. This is all very #relatable.
Tonight we’re going to see if Kiera wants to bang, but only if MM is available to be wildly amused about it. We stopped, once we’d given Kiera a soft not-right-now to her invitation to find out what was in that box.
so last night’s Witchering got off to a late start because DF had to have the kind of phonecall with his dad where he completely reverts to his native accent. (I overheard him pronounce the word ‘water’ as ‘worter’ and knew it was gonna be another hour at least.) And poor MM had been up too late for her needs-9-hours-of-sleep biology the night before, and was just sitting on the couch listlessly listening to her night owl 5 year old playing loudly next to the baby monitor upstairs, waiting for the kid to go to sleep so she could go up and also go to sleep. (if she goes up while Girl is still awake, then there are Shenanigans and it doesn’t work out well at all. You gotta wait for the silence.)
Poor MM was very invested in the Plague Maiden quest and we wanted to do it while she was awake, so we tried to just dive right in as soon as DF was off the phone, but… it’s not quick.
We went in massively spoilered;
akilah12902 had written about how she’d had to revert to an earlier save because doing what seemed right had wound up with such a fucking horrible outcome, so I’d read about that and was like well all that sounds horrible, no thanks. (If you would like a coherent explanation as well, her Creature Feature on Plague Maidens is succinct, interesting, and informative.) And I’d mentioned sort of off-handedly to DF that this was not a straightforward follow-the-arrows quest, and DF was like, *heavy sigh* just tell me, so I did, and he was like, “Huh, well, we’ll see what it really looks like.” But– anyway– if you don’t want to be spoilered for this quest, well, honestly, you wouldn’t be reading my recaps anyway??? So like take that under advisement.DF says, after the intro where the weird raspy-voiced super-American not-Dandelion talks while the game’s loading, “And now you know… the rest of the story” and i had to look up Paul Harvey because it was slightly before my time and I was like what is that from so just in case you were wondering, I am in fact older than DF but in pop culture years he’s way older than me. I blame him being an only child.
So, we’re on Fyke Island. We Quenned up and dealt with a water hag, right off the bat. Turns out they really really really don’t like being on fire, like even more so than regular people, so that’s not as difficult as it might be anymore.
Inside the tower, a rat runs by, with a helpful little label above its head that just says “Rat”. DF asked, “is that rat’s name “Rat”???”
oh good, the loot’s an old goat hide. MM: “Maybe he can turn it into silk” [we were horribly offended during a previous inventory arranging session to discover that in the crafting tab you can dismantle linen thread into silk somehow, or vice versa I don’t remember, and like, that’s not how any of this works? but maybe it’s magic? but why would that be magic? wtf]
wtf is stammelford’s dust it sounds like an STD? ayy level 10! Powerup! Not a lot of time for celebration, but this quest is extremely generous with the XP, for the record, you get a lot of points for just looking at things.
we’re like. detective-ing around with this magic green lamp, and Kiera keeps breaking in to talk to Geralt on the Magic Whizzbang Talker Device. It was actually confusing– at one point Geralt starts talking and he’s using a strangely like, well-supported and not gravelly voice, and I realized belatedly it’s because he’s talking on the phone, more or less. How does Geralt already have a phone voice? how is he used to that? Worldbuilding question…
this is taking concentration. Sherlock fucking Holmes here. oh no now there’s a sad lady ghost, we have to talk to her.
oh gross, a sad lady ghost who got eaten alive by rats while paralyzed. I mean, we knew that was coming but like, gross, people.
And here’s the thing: if you haven’t been spoilered for this quest, there is no way you would figure out what was really up. Like, no way. We went in looking for the clues, knowing there were clues, and nothing, nothing anywhere in the actual text of the game gives you any idea that like, This Is A Plague Factory And This Ghost That Is Weirdly Different From Other Ghosts Is Going To Kill Thousands Of People If You Don’t Take A Specific Set Of Actions. We were like ok all we know for sure is that we shouldn’t go take her bones so she can get off the island, where’s the supporting documentation for this?
There is none. You just have to– not pick the option that seems most sensible. And then you leave the encounter and there’s no information on what to do next. So you wander around looking for more clues, which there aren’t really– you can find some other ghosts, or echoes of what happened, but they don’t tell you much. I guess them observing that the rats in the basement seem sick is a clue? But it’s not a Hey Don’t Take Anything Off This Island With You kind of clue, especially since the place is filled with loot that you of course are going to take with you because that is the basic mechanic of most video games, that you pick up things you find to use later. And like, there’s a ghost that definitely is of someone who came later, a looter, he observes that everyone here’s been dead so long it’s amazing there’s stuff to find yay and then something killed him, but like. It’s obvious there’s bad shit in here? It’s not surprising your Sad Lady Ghost might kill someone who came to steal? Like, that’s not much of a clue, except confirmation of why Kiera should be interested, because this is an ongoing Cursed Situation that’s getting people from her village killed and thus is reasonably her business as the village witch relying on the villagers’ goodwill to not get turned in to the witch-hunters. [Except having purposely spoilered myself further, I get that we’re not supposed to find that a plausible reason for her extreme interest in this site, so this bit kind of fails on two levels.]
There’s also a conspicuously Locked Door, and we’re like ah, that must be a clue too. What’s Behind That Door, hm??? Exciting. So we searched and searched, and I finally was like hey
akilah12902 where is the key to that door and she was like Oh. There isn’t one. It’s just another door to outside, that’s locked. You can go outside and look at it from the other side. That’s all it is.Well what the fuck, why have a door at all? Or why not have it unlocked, or Aard-able or something? The quest is confusing enough, why put in a random dead-end like that just to make you run around and verify that it’s nothing? (We later verified: Yeah, that’s just the other entry door. It’s just locked, it goes from outdoors to the main entry lobby area. I guess to show that the peasants didn’t break in that way, but were let in the front door? But it doesn’t say that, Geralt doesn’t observe that, it just looks like all the other quests where part of it is that you have to figure out how to unlock a door to find out what’s behind it. And like, it says outright, elsewhere, that yeah, the peasants were let in, because clearly nobody expected the mob to attack.)
So we tried to leave through the door we’d entered through, and then the sad lady ghost became a monster and was like RAHHH WE FIGHT NOW, and we were like okay so she is not just a sad lady ghost, that’s good to have confirmation of. She is, in fact a Pesta, and now we can look up what a Pesta is and – see, though, like, that’s also spoilering yourself. You can’t just get through this quest on the information presented and arrive at a correct conclusion!
ANYHOW back to the fun recap. So the Pesta killed us, because DF was slightly distracted because poor MM had passed the fuck out on the couch and the baby monitor was silent, so he had to wake up his wife to put her to bed and she was very sad and confused and he promised not to do anything too fun or plot-significant without her. But we’ve kind of written this quest off as being, like, not adequately explained in-universe anyway, so we’ll finish it up.
So we did. Reloaded, fought the Pesta briefly, then went back to Kiera who obligingly told us where to find the Missing True Love the ghost is obsessed with, so there’s that; there’d been no indication we were going to get any further leads on how to finish the quest if we didn’t agree to take the pesta’s bones, which because we were spoilered we knew would end up unleashing plague on the Continent, which is super fucking gross and not what we wanted to do. (I guess the justification is that I mean it doesn’t mean Geralt can’t go on to win the game so like, whatever, it’s just a quest outcome, either one is fine narratively, but like, gross, do not make us entertain ourselves while locked in on a quarantine by unleashing a fucking plague in our Escapism Pastime Universe??? What the fuck, I get that we can’t blame the game devs in 2015 for not forseeing this, but like. Gross, guys. Like, I wouldn’t want to vacation on the Continent anyway but don’t make me responsible for having killed half of it?????)
So then we could find the man, and you know I don’t know how long it’s supposed to have been since this poor girl got eaten by rats, if her boyfriend is still alive and still pining it can’t have been long but like, all the corpses are dried skeletons except the ones who aren’t, and like. What. What’s a coherent timeline? We don’t need one.
ANYHOO we bring the guy back with us, and we decide to go find the last few ghosts we might have missed talking to because you get 40 xp every time you see one and that’s a lot of fuckin XP so it’s worth doing but it’s kind of a boring slog to wander around and try to get in exactly the right spot to get the thing to go off and show you… not much by way of clues generally… and then we sort of got stuck in the basement because the forlorn boyfriend was following us around and could not take a hint to get out of the fucking door? and we had to like, dance around until he let us past so he could follow us back up the stairs? I get being clingy my dude, we had to kill several wraiths that were specifically mad at you, but like. Back the fuck off, my man.
Anyhow. It was an annoying, but super-lucrative quest. and in the end, the young man is brave and the horrifying monster is like “KISS ME” and he’s like “Yes I will do that”– which is surprising given how horrifying the monster is, and Geralt turns his back out of apparent respect, which is sort of cute and sort of sad and sort of funny.
And he dies, and you feel bad for him, but then you get
400 xp
which is the largest number I’ve ever seen awarded at once like that, holy fuck, really we’re halfway to level 11 already now, Christ almighty. I guess they want to level you up quickly; this is a lvl 6 and having done it earlier would’ve really made some of the other shit we’ve done while underpowered kind of easier?
DF said he felt a little cheap for taking the spoilers, but like, there were not adequate clues in-game. I suppose you could muddle through but like. What the fuck. I guess you probably get a lot of XP for unleashing a horrific plague upon the Continent but I don’t want to find out?
So we went back to Kiera and got another tiny quest from her and DF was like, fine. fine. MM will be mad if we do anything important but this is small and probably quite easy, so we’ll do this one.
Enroute to tracking down Kiera’s missing mail, a level 7 bandit began chasing us. DF rode on until we were at our objective, watching the little red dot chasing– the fight music stayed on– and finally he just got off Roach, turned around, Aarded the guy off his horse, walked over and stabbed him as he lay on the ground, which killed him completely in a single shot. It was pretty epic actually, and was exactly what I’d always hoped leveling up to level 10 would mean.
(That’s not actually a very high level, but it sounds high to me, who has never played a video game.)
(DF is really cavalier about Quen, btw. I’m like, why don’t you use it more? and he was like meh it only saves you from one hit, mostly it’s not worth it and I’d rather cast an active sign with that energy, because I can dodge and I can heal so I’d rather do damage? Fair point but it makes me twitch. yes, I know you can level up Quen and make it more useful but that’s not for a long time yet.)
We also got accosted by the Pellar and given another quest that seems time-sensitive but probably actually isn’t. Like, he says “midnight tonight” and that’s fine but I bet the midnight part is the only bit that really matters. Geralt doesn’t know what day it is. I don’t know what day it is. This is all very #relatable.
Tonight we’re going to see if Kiera wants to bang, but only if MM is available to be wildly amused about it. We stopped, once we’d given Kiera a soft not-right-now to her invitation to find out what was in that box.
