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“This is the last session we’ll have for this,” I said, as DF got out the Xbox controller and booted up the Witcher 3. [I am writing this well after the fact, if it wasn’t obvious.]
“I mean,” MM said, “if we do it without you I’d have to take notes, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No, no,” DF said, “I’m fairly certain that Geralt will have no problem simply resuming his hard drive slumber in your absence.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
DF shrugged. “The game is from 2015,” he said, “it’s not like it’s going to suddenly be out of date.”
“Fair point.”
So, we settled down for one more session. On the docket: Honor Among Thieves, and a random collection of what we’re starting to term Chicken Sandwich Bandits because so many of them have a chicken sandwich as their loot.
Well, I hadn’t really understood that the reason Dandelion got it into his head to rob Sigi Reuven’s credit union was to bankroll some operation of Whoreson Jr.’s, in part to pay for the repair of the phylactery Ciri had. Whoreson requested that specifically for the chaos it would cause the other three crime lords of Novigrad, surely, but Dandelion was only working for him to help Ciri.
Anyway, it seems somewhat overly-complicated.
Meanwhile, Geralt is out for a jog, apparently, running through the countryside doing odds and ends kinds of quests. At the moment, the Apiarian Phantom, which is some kind of monster that is randomly freezing people to death, along with some beehives.
The beehives are all owned by a family of… halflings? Related to the one that Geralt freed from the upstairs of Junior’s casino, apparently, and one of them has a beat-up face, but is not the same guy. IDK man.
It’s weirdly idyllic, we’re picking berbercane and wolfsbane in a pleasant meadow while looking for clues. And here come drowners in mass quantities, and some Drowned Dead, who are like bonus-level drowners.
We followed the tracks to an abandoned half-constructed house, where another conveniently-placed halfling gave us a key to get into the fully-constructed basement, wherein the Phantom was hiding– ah, it’s a random Hound of the Wild Hunt. Fortunately it escaped in a cutscene that called Roach for us, as we were supposed to give chase on horseback.
We ran for a while and then just picked a likely-looking field and got off, and then fought the hound. Having put a point into a skill that lets you convert Adrenaline points into Vitality in moments of extremity saved our bacon, as Geralt definitely almost-died from this fucking thing and then revived at the last second. Hounds of the Wild Hunt, for the record, don’t give a fuck about Axii but really really really don’t like Igni.
Eventually we melted the thing, and got paid for saving the halflings’ meadery. Thence to the next little quest marker, which involved saving some lady’s hens from a mysterious marauder. The mysterious marauder turned out to be a bunch of refugee children in the woods, and Geralt resolves the quest by convincing the old lady she should adopt the children.
On the way out DF paused for a moment, and I was like, “Why can’t Geralt just stand somewhere like a normal person?”
“Google Earth,” DF said, “always takin’ pics,” and rotated the camera to look at Geralt’s majestic streaming hair in the perpetual sunset.
Back to Novigrad, for Deadly Delights, which features a succubus.
An amusing moment in the initial interview: the guard we’re speaking to as we find out the details of the quest is wearing questionable armor featuring the little circles that are meant to protect the wearer’s elbow joints… over his ears. Sort of… innovative I suppose?
MM is trying to predict how much clothing the succubus will wear, in her Sorceresses/Strumpets/Concubines Hierarchy Of Women’s Outfits In This Fucking Game. “She can’t have her tits out,” I said.
“I mean,” DF said, “she could, there have very much been tits in this game.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. There sure have.
Meanwhile DF is maneuvering Geralt through a crowd roughly the way he himself walks through a crowd in real life, featuring Having No Idea Where His Shoulders Actually Are; he tends to ram people a lot. Amusingly, the NPCs tend to universally make weird sex grunts when rammed like that, and sometimes the women make disturbingly pleased little “ooh” noises that are absolutely not what a real person would do if someone rather large and substantial and wearing armor actually rammed their ass in a crowd. (Fortunately for the real-life crowds DF is occasionally in, he does not generally wear armor, though he does very occasionally, it’s worth mentioning…) (ha that got me to look through old pictures, here’s MM on an extremely festive occasion, yes she is extremely decorative)
Anyhow we followed a scent trail inconclusively but then found another clue that led us to a whorehouse. Which featured an assortment of Strumpets in booty shorts, occasionally gyrating purposelessly on tables to no apparent audience. The amusing thing was that the whorehouse functioned like any shop, and so DF hauled up his inventory and sold all the junk he was carrying around, featuring ten human skulls among other things.
There’s an Axii option, talking to the house’s madam, so we took it. They reward you so handsomely in XP every time you use Axii, it’s pretty evident they want you to just do that. So we did, and the madam told us where the succubus lives. (She’d been being super judgy before that. Like, lady, you run a whorehouse, and by the looks of it not well, you are not in any position to be judging Geralt’s life choices.)
(We were also like, DF, it looks like you can hire the prostitutes. DF was like “I am not going through the rigamarole of getting a mystical veneral disease for this quest, forget it.”)
On our way to the succubus we had to stop and listen to the bards in the middle of the square, because they were working very hard and nobody was appreciating them.
The succubus herself was sort of anticlimactic. Because, here’s the thing– she’s sapient. Geralt’s like hey, I know what you are, and she’s like yeah I know what you are, and he’s like so listen you killed some guys, we can’t be having with that, killing guys makes them hire a Witcher. And she’s like, I see that, and I only killed them because I was threatened. He’s like fair, fair, and at this point you could have fought her, but like. It seemed mean. So he was like listen can you get out of town? I don’t think it’s safe for you here anyway. And she’s like yeah I was kind of thinking that. So he’s like then you’re good? You got a safe way out? and she’s like yeah, I’m good. And he’s like cool, then I’ll lie to the people who hired me and I never saw you, chill? and she’s like yeah, chill, and that’s it.
I guess you can fight her and kill her and get some rare component but like. Why? She was chill. Also she was not dressed particularly racily, and she had goat legs and like, full-body markings, so that was interesting.
I’m gonna cut this in half and do the last, final, last bit of writeup later: we went to Skellige just for shits and giggles for our last night, to do one piddly little quest before it dropped off for being too low-level, and I’ll write about that later.
“This is the last session we’ll have for this,” I said, as DF got out the Xbox controller and booted up the Witcher 3. [I am writing this well after the fact, if it wasn’t obvious.]
“I mean,” MM said, “if we do it without you I’d have to take notes, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No, no,” DF said, “I’m fairly certain that Geralt will have no problem simply resuming his hard drive slumber in your absence.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
DF shrugged. “The game is from 2015,” he said, “it’s not like it’s going to suddenly be out of date.”
“Fair point.”
So, we settled down for one more session. On the docket: Honor Among Thieves, and a random collection of what we’re starting to term Chicken Sandwich Bandits because so many of them have a chicken sandwich as their loot.
Well, I hadn’t really understood that the reason Dandelion got it into his head to rob Sigi Reuven’s credit union was to bankroll some operation of Whoreson Jr.’s, in part to pay for the repair of the phylactery Ciri had. Whoreson requested that specifically for the chaos it would cause the other three crime lords of Novigrad, surely, but Dandelion was only working for him to help Ciri.
Anyway, it seems somewhat overly-complicated.
Meanwhile, Geralt is out for a jog, apparently, running through the countryside doing odds and ends kinds of quests. At the moment, the Apiarian Phantom, which is some kind of monster that is randomly freezing people to death, along with some beehives.
The beehives are all owned by a family of… halflings? Related to the one that Geralt freed from the upstairs of Junior’s casino, apparently, and one of them has a beat-up face, but is not the same guy. IDK man.
It’s weirdly idyllic, we’re picking berbercane and wolfsbane in a pleasant meadow while looking for clues. And here come drowners in mass quantities, and some Drowned Dead, who are like bonus-level drowners.
We followed the tracks to an abandoned half-constructed house, where another conveniently-placed halfling gave us a key to get into the fully-constructed basement, wherein the Phantom was hiding– ah, it’s a random Hound of the Wild Hunt. Fortunately it escaped in a cutscene that called Roach for us, as we were supposed to give chase on horseback.
We ran for a while and then just picked a likely-looking field and got off, and then fought the hound. Having put a point into a skill that lets you convert Adrenaline points into Vitality in moments of extremity saved our bacon, as Geralt definitely almost-died from this fucking thing and then revived at the last second. Hounds of the Wild Hunt, for the record, don’t give a fuck about Axii but really really really don’t like Igni.
Eventually we melted the thing, and got paid for saving the halflings’ meadery. Thence to the next little quest marker, which involved saving some lady’s hens from a mysterious marauder. The mysterious marauder turned out to be a bunch of refugee children in the woods, and Geralt resolves the quest by convincing the old lady she should adopt the children.
On the way out DF paused for a moment, and I was like, “Why can’t Geralt just stand somewhere like a normal person?”
“Google Earth,” DF said, “always takin’ pics,” and rotated the camera to look at Geralt’s majestic streaming hair in the perpetual sunset.
Back to Novigrad, for Deadly Delights, which features a succubus.
An amusing moment in the initial interview: the guard we’re speaking to as we find out the details of the quest is wearing questionable armor featuring the little circles that are meant to protect the wearer’s elbow joints… over his ears. Sort of… innovative I suppose?
MM is trying to predict how much clothing the succubus will wear, in her Sorceresses/Strumpets/Concubines Hierarchy Of Women’s Outfits In This Fucking Game. “She can’t have her tits out,” I said.
“I mean,” DF said, “she could, there have very much been tits in this game.”
“Oh yeah,” I said. There sure have.
Meanwhile DF is maneuvering Geralt through a crowd roughly the way he himself walks through a crowd in real life, featuring Having No Idea Where His Shoulders Actually Are; he tends to ram people a lot. Amusingly, the NPCs tend to universally make weird sex grunts when rammed like that, and sometimes the women make disturbingly pleased little “ooh” noises that are absolutely not what a real person would do if someone rather large and substantial and wearing armor actually rammed their ass in a crowd. (Fortunately for the real-life crowds DF is occasionally in, he does not generally wear armor, though he does very occasionally, it’s worth mentioning…) (ha that got me to look through old pictures, here’s MM on an extremely festive occasion, yes she is extremely decorative)
Anyhow we followed a scent trail inconclusively but then found another clue that led us to a whorehouse. Which featured an assortment of Strumpets in booty shorts, occasionally gyrating purposelessly on tables to no apparent audience. The amusing thing was that the whorehouse functioned like any shop, and so DF hauled up his inventory and sold all the junk he was carrying around, featuring ten human skulls among other things.
There’s an Axii option, talking to the house’s madam, so we took it. They reward you so handsomely in XP every time you use Axii, it’s pretty evident they want you to just do that. So we did, and the madam told us where the succubus lives. (She’d been being super judgy before that. Like, lady, you run a whorehouse, and by the looks of it not well, you are not in any position to be judging Geralt’s life choices.)
(We were also like, DF, it looks like you can hire the prostitutes. DF was like “I am not going through the rigamarole of getting a mystical veneral disease for this quest, forget it.”)
On our way to the succubus we had to stop and listen to the bards in the middle of the square, because they were working very hard and nobody was appreciating them.
The succubus herself was sort of anticlimactic. Because, here’s the thing– she’s sapient. Geralt’s like hey, I know what you are, and she’s like yeah I know what you are, and he’s like so listen you killed some guys, we can’t be having with that, killing guys makes them hire a Witcher. And she’s like, I see that, and I only killed them because I was threatened. He’s like fair, fair, and at this point you could have fought her, but like. It seemed mean. So he was like listen can you get out of town? I don’t think it’s safe for you here anyway. And she’s like yeah I was kind of thinking that. So he’s like then you’re good? You got a safe way out? and she’s like yeah, I’m good. And he’s like cool, then I’ll lie to the people who hired me and I never saw you, chill? and she’s like yeah, chill, and that’s it.
I guess you can fight her and kill her and get some rare component but like. Why? She was chill. Also she was not dressed particularly racily, and she had goat legs and like, full-body markings, so that was interesting.
I’m gonna cut this in half and do the last, final, last bit of writeup later: we went to Skellige just for shits and giggles for our last night, to do one piddly little quest before it dropped off for being too low-level, and I’ll write about that later.
