Witcher 3: Monster Bone
Jul. 11th, 2020 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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So for the 4th of July my Dude and I stopped off at DF&MM’s in Rochester; I continued on toward the farm for more agricultural laboring, and Dude went back to Buffalo to continue his self-isolation working from home, but we had a small precious respite of socialization.
We sat outside on the patio and had a little fire and made smores and the kids ran around and were goofy. In the midst of this, DF went to fix some bit of playground equipment, and came back to where the adults were sitting and declared “I put it in a new hole,“ standing with his hand propped triumphantly on this ridiculous axe/sledgehammer combo he owns.
He’s prone to declarations like that and long ago we decided it was best to never enquire as to the context.
As dusk drew down, the kids vanished indoors to be put to bed, and we adults decided not to sit out and get mosquito-eaten, but rather to come inside and close all the windows and doors and blinds. We contemplated watching a movie, but DF was on transplant call and had done two consecutive days with 14-hour shifts (and had suddenly discovered that despite being firmly within the liver transplant team, he could be drafted in emergencies by the kidney transplant team, so that was a somewhat unpleasant surprise; fortunately, his portion of the job is largely unchanged.)
Anyway, he was loopy enough that he thought Xboxing would be fun, so we all got drinks and settled in and he fired up Witcher 3 again.
“We only play Xbox nude and drunk now,” DF said. “New household rules.”
“Oh, okay,” my dude said, and stood up to unfasten his pants. Unfortunately, both of them were bluffing, but that would’ve made this playthrough write up MUCH more entertaining. So, if you prefer, I give you permission to simply imagine that everyone in the room is drunk and naked, as I recount the events onscreen. (What it says about me that I’d still be taking notes is, well, let’s just not consider that too deeply.) (I do think we’d had about a bottle of wine apiece, except that DF had stopped at one glass in case he got called in, so we’d had four bottles between, mostly, three people, and then MM moved on to just drinking a glass of straight vodka that I had assumed was water until I got a whiff. Well, listen, you only live once.)
We loaded the game and were in Novigrad… underwater, breath half used up. “What the fuck,” said DF, “why am I underwater?”
“Well, I mean, in a second you’re going to die of it,” I pointed out, and he swore and had Geralt pop up to the surface. The water was only like nine feet deep.
“What the fuck,” he said, and got out of the water, and Geralt, unperturbed, proceeded to run around near the wharf in Novigrad.
We happened upon a strumpet, who with a sultry sort of fretfulness, gave Geralt a quest to save Crippled Kate’s from a bunch of hooligans who had taken it over to drink all the booze in it.
The hooligans were triflingly easy to defeat with a single application of Axii, which Geralt only bothered to apply to one of them; the rest of them obediently packed up and filed out after their slightly dizzy leader, without questioning his sudden transition to obsequious compliance. The delighted strumpets came back in to reclaim their home.
“This girl’s wearing the Pennsic Uniform,” DF said. (A crop top and broomstick skirt.)
“Oh, yes,” MM said, “I own at least three of that outfit,” which gives rise to the question, why don’t we ever dress up for these gaming sessions? Drunk and naked is one thing but Pennsic Finery would be hilarious. I guess the omnipresent jingle belts would be awkward when dealing with children violating bedtime curfews… The costumes for this whole thing are very Pennsic, as is the combat, but there’s officially No Death Allowed at Pennsic so that’s one very important difference, there.
Geralt didn’t let the strumpets pay him for his work, figuring they’d suffered enough loss of income. Meanwhile DF went to the inventory screen and browsed the list of quests he’d been meaning to get to, and decided it was time to go to the Temerian Peasant Hideout to find out what the deal was with the girl with the shirt open to her navel. Like, she’s not a strumpet, she’s not a mage, why doesn’t she wear a shirt?? We must know.
Weirdly, even though we just finished a quest with Roche a few hours of gameplay ago, there was some kerfuffle of re-introducing him as a character, that made us wonder whether the right save was loaded. But I had by then recollected the ending in water of the previous session, so I reassured DF that this was in fact the right save.
Roche was square-jawed and noble at us for a bit, and we got a quest to go save Ves (Shirt Open Girl) from herself, which seems sort of weird/dumb but like, I guess, that’s, what’s going on? OK cool. On the way out of the cave, DF accidentally made Geralt walk through a bonfire and set himself dramatically on fire, but it does tend to go out quickly enough when that happens. So, for the record, Witchers are slightly fire-retardant. (akilah12902 informs me Quen will put you out if you’re on fire, as well as stopping bleeding, so that’s a useful bit of knowledge. We did not utilize this knowledge. DF maintains an irrational prejudice against Quen, in part because to be fair it’s fairly useless in Death March mode.)
Now, I’d forgotten, but the steel sword Geralt currently has is like, this ridiculous fucking scythe of a Fantasy Blade that clips straight through the scabbard and looks goddamned silly. My dude, who has only ever been present for one other episode of this game play, was like “… what is that sword. That’s a big sword.” And the rest of us were laughing too hard to get out a “that’s what she said”.
Anyhow. We met up with Roche in some godawful countryside with hanged peasants, where Ves was off on a mad chase to try to keep Nilfgaardian soldiers from executing peasants on suspicion of being partisans.
We instantly died as soon as the fight started. Whoops.
“That’s ok,” says DF, “now I know how the controls work.”
“Well,” my dude suggested, “is it time for Gwent now?”
Ah, so he does know how this game works. Maybe. DF meandered through the inventory screen after the game reloaded, taking a moment to equip himself, and my dude proved that no, in fact, he hasn’t seen much of this, when he asked “wait is that just raw meat?” and DF was like “crunch crunch!”
Geralt instantly got polearmed to death on the reload. “Shit,” said DF, “we gotta grease up for this.” And part of the quest is that we have to save Ves, and she’s got a status bar displayed with her health and it’s getting lower and lower as we fuck around. “All right,” DF said, “we juicin’,” and decocted himself up.
This time he started off the fight by setting a bunch of Nilfgaardians on fire. Some of them are kind of fire-resistant too. It is super, super, super fucking handy that your enemies are by default fire-resistant, because you can just Igni a crowd and only burn your enemies.
We did manage to rescue Ves. Finally, finally, someone else noticed she’s not really wearing a shirt, and was like, “why is your navel showing” and she was like “none of your business” which I suppose is a reasonable answer.
At the end there was one wounded Nilfgaardian and Roche was like “ah we should be merciful” and I get that Geralt’s supposed to be noble here, but like, the guy’s fucked up and there’s no medicine in this game and also, as Geralt pointed out, he takes jobs for Nilfgaard sometimes, having a survivor to go and be like “yah this white-haired Witcher showed up and fucked us all up” would be fucking awkward, so DF opted for the dialogue option of “why leave a witness alive to linger in agony what kind of mercy is that really”, and maybe that was wrong but we went on with our lives.
Meanwhile, the children of the village have come out, since the fight is over. DF ran Geralt around to loot the bodies and there were children literally playing on top of the corpses in several cases, which was a bit annoying and also disturbing. Like… guys.
Anyway. We poked through the loot, and switched out the lovely matching Griffin armor for a ridiculous Guy Fiery flame-patterned sash gambeson, but the stats are better so. Welcome to Flavortown I guess.
We decided to go Check Out The Devil’s Pit. It sounds badass. We wandered away picking flowers and killing lvl 6 nekkers. We found a bandit camp with a lot of wooden staircases and chased people around and killed them, but it wasn’t super exciting, there was a random pit to hell that you couldn’t interact with in any way. Maybe it was supposed to be a mine? I don’t know.
Just to see what would happen, DF Igni’d a goat. “Rude!” Dude exclaimed, but we actually did manage to loot the meat so this went down better than the Skellige Bunny Crimes incident.
Anyhow. Radovid wants us to repay him for giving us Junior by going and getting him Phillippa Englebreit. Earheart. Whatever. He’s got a bunch of witch hunters posted up outside her hideout– apparently they chased her there as an owl, which sounds like a really great high-speed chase I’m sorry there’s apparently no depiction of.
So we started off by talking to the witch hunters, who were kind of… they’re a bunch of thugs with dorky chinstraps and bowl haircuts and they’re rude to Geralt, so like, fuck those guys.
We left the rude dorks behind and went down into the weird compound. There were some Aardable walls and some debris. “Ah, nekkers,” said DF.
“They just want to neck with you,” put in MM.
They did not. They cornered Geralt, who wound up stuck in a dead-end passage without an escape except falling to his death, so he fell to his death. Whoops. Reloaded, had some more difficulties with the nekkers, realized belatedly that they need ogroid oil, duh.
Properly lubed, we resumed our fight and in the midst of it, leveled up to Level 17. Not too shabby. We also recollected that nekkers do not like being on fire, which, being a guy who can produce fire from his hands on command, that’s a useful bit of information and made things go much more smoothly. Also also, DF realized belatedly he’d been using his steel sword instead of the silver one for the nekkers, which also explained why he’d been doing so poorly. Right, right, that’s how this game works. (I pointed it out. “Wait, isn’t that your steel sword? The huge one?” and DF was like “That’s my pork sword” and we all groaned at him, but like. I’d asked for that, pretty much, hadn’t I.)
One of the nekkers dropped “Monster Bone” as loot, which Dude saw and started singing. “Monster boooooone,” he sang, and MM and I were like “Yeahhhh” in unison and DF was like “Monster Bone sounds like the name of a funk album”
Then there was a roaring fire creature, an Ifrit or somesuch, which, like, well. It was on fire, so we figured it was probably an elementa or something. Also Aard puts out fires sometimes, which did help with this.
“Oh,” DF said, “he’s killable,” and proceeded to kill him. When he disappeared I was like “oh, he teleports?” but then he didn’t reappear, and DF was like, “No, he doesn’t teleport, I just obliterated him.” Oh.
In Philippa’s lair, where she was not (though there were owl feathers), we perused the assorted loot. Blood-covered gemstones seemed like a really really odd thing to find, until we discovered that she’d been using them to grow new tissue on to replace her eyeballs that Radovid had removed for her, which is just gross all around. Also, we picked up a book called Care For Your Sword, Soldier! which is far more peppy than I’d expect for the subject matter. We also got a chipped megascope crystal, which seemed useful and important.
So, now it was time to pick a fight with the fucking witch-hunters, apparently. There might’ve been a way not to fight them but fuck those guys. “Time,” DF said with some satisfaction, “for some Axii executions.” Oh, and Dude Oil. Mustn’t forget to lubricate for dudes.
“Why,” I asked, as we killed another witch hunter, “does everyone drop creepy dolls as loot?” Why on earth wouldn’t a middle-aged religious fanatic with a bizarre uniform and a bowl cut have a creepy doll on him? Why indeed.
Anyway. We left the cave, and the dead witch hunters, and made a beeline for Triss in Novigrad to see what she thinks. We trust her more than Radovid; maybe she did some weird bullshit to Geralt in the past but at least she doesn’t seem to think chessmen have literal pulses. “We find her terrible fake American accent endearing,” DF said. As we spoke to her, she clipped through a chair twice.
We gave her the megascope crystal, and she played back whatever message she could find on it, which was Phillippa talking to… some other sorceress… about regrowing her eyeballs. Well, fair subject matter I guess.
We left, and wandered through Novigrad. “Giant-ass sword,” DF muttered to himself, watching the Stupid Fantasy Blade clip through the scabbard again. And Whoreson Jr still got shooters out here, who keep trying to kill Geralt, and I’d almost suggest that they know Geralt killed Jr but if they know Jr is dead why are they still in his gang? Very confusing.
Anyway. I had something deep to observe, here, that Dude pointed out, about the whole ecosystem thing here, and I just can’t recollect what it was, so I’m gonna leave this in drafts a tiny bit longer as I try to remember what the fuck it was. Ah, I don’t remember. Someone tell me a punchline!
So for the 4th of July my Dude and I stopped off at DF&MM’s in Rochester; I continued on toward the farm for more agricultural laboring, and Dude went back to Buffalo to continue his self-isolation working from home, but we had a small precious respite of socialization.
We sat outside on the patio and had a little fire and made smores and the kids ran around and were goofy. In the midst of this, DF went to fix some bit of playground equipment, and came back to where the adults were sitting and declared “I put it in a new hole,“ standing with his hand propped triumphantly on this ridiculous axe/sledgehammer combo he owns.
He’s prone to declarations like that and long ago we decided it was best to never enquire as to the context.
As dusk drew down, the kids vanished indoors to be put to bed, and we adults decided not to sit out and get mosquito-eaten, but rather to come inside and close all the windows and doors and blinds. We contemplated watching a movie, but DF was on transplant call and had done two consecutive days with 14-hour shifts (and had suddenly discovered that despite being firmly within the liver transplant team, he could be drafted in emergencies by the kidney transplant team, so that was a somewhat unpleasant surprise; fortunately, his portion of the job is largely unchanged.)
Anyway, he was loopy enough that he thought Xboxing would be fun, so we all got drinks and settled in and he fired up Witcher 3 again.
“We only play Xbox nude and drunk now,” DF said. “New household rules.”
“Oh, okay,” my dude said, and stood up to unfasten his pants. Unfortunately, both of them were bluffing, but that would’ve made this playthrough write up MUCH more entertaining. So, if you prefer, I give you permission to simply imagine that everyone in the room is drunk and naked, as I recount the events onscreen. (What it says about me that I’d still be taking notes is, well, let’s just not consider that too deeply.) (I do think we’d had about a bottle of wine apiece, except that DF had stopped at one glass in case he got called in, so we’d had four bottles between, mostly, three people, and then MM moved on to just drinking a glass of straight vodka that I had assumed was water until I got a whiff. Well, listen, you only live once.)
We loaded the game and were in Novigrad… underwater, breath half used up. “What the fuck,” said DF, “why am I underwater?”
“Well, I mean, in a second you’re going to die of it,” I pointed out, and he swore and had Geralt pop up to the surface. The water was only like nine feet deep.
“What the fuck,” he said, and got out of the water, and Geralt, unperturbed, proceeded to run around near the wharf in Novigrad.
We happened upon a strumpet, who with a sultry sort of fretfulness, gave Geralt a quest to save Crippled Kate’s from a bunch of hooligans who had taken it over to drink all the booze in it.
The hooligans were triflingly easy to defeat with a single application of Axii, which Geralt only bothered to apply to one of them; the rest of them obediently packed up and filed out after their slightly dizzy leader, without questioning his sudden transition to obsequious compliance. The delighted strumpets came back in to reclaim their home.
“This girl’s wearing the Pennsic Uniform,” DF said. (A crop top and broomstick skirt.)
“Oh, yes,” MM said, “I own at least three of that outfit,” which gives rise to the question, why don’t we ever dress up for these gaming sessions? Drunk and naked is one thing but Pennsic Finery would be hilarious. I guess the omnipresent jingle belts would be awkward when dealing with children violating bedtime curfews… The costumes for this whole thing are very Pennsic, as is the combat, but there’s officially No Death Allowed at Pennsic so that’s one very important difference, there.
Geralt didn’t let the strumpets pay him for his work, figuring they’d suffered enough loss of income. Meanwhile DF went to the inventory screen and browsed the list of quests he’d been meaning to get to, and decided it was time to go to the Temerian Peasant Hideout to find out what the deal was with the girl with the shirt open to her navel. Like, she’s not a strumpet, she’s not a mage, why doesn’t she wear a shirt?? We must know.
Weirdly, even though we just finished a quest with Roche a few hours of gameplay ago, there was some kerfuffle of re-introducing him as a character, that made us wonder whether the right save was loaded. But I had by then recollected the ending in water of the previous session, so I reassured DF that this was in fact the right save.
Roche was square-jawed and noble at us for a bit, and we got a quest to go save Ves (Shirt Open Girl) from herself, which seems sort of weird/dumb but like, I guess, that’s, what’s going on? OK cool. On the way out of the cave, DF accidentally made Geralt walk through a bonfire and set himself dramatically on fire, but it does tend to go out quickly enough when that happens. So, for the record, Witchers are slightly fire-retardant. (
akilah12902 informs me Quen will put you out if you’re on fire, as well as stopping bleeding, so that’s a useful bit of knowledge. We did not utilize this knowledge. DF maintains an irrational prejudice against Quen, in part because to be fair it’s fairly useless in Death March mode.)Now, I’d forgotten, but the steel sword Geralt currently has is like, this ridiculous fucking scythe of a Fantasy Blade that clips straight through the scabbard and looks goddamned silly. My dude, who has only ever been present for one other episode of this game play, was like “… what is that sword. That’s a big sword.” And the rest of us were laughing too hard to get out a “that’s what she said”.
Anyhow. We met up with Roche in some godawful countryside with hanged peasants, where Ves was off on a mad chase to try to keep Nilfgaardian soldiers from executing peasants on suspicion of being partisans.
We instantly died as soon as the fight started. Whoops.
“That’s ok,” says DF, “now I know how the controls work.”
“Well,” my dude suggested, “is it time for Gwent now?”
Ah, so he does know how this game works. Maybe. DF meandered through the inventory screen after the game reloaded, taking a moment to equip himself, and my dude proved that no, in fact, he hasn’t seen much of this, when he asked “wait is that just raw meat?” and DF was like “crunch crunch!”
Geralt instantly got polearmed to death on the reload. “Shit,” said DF, “we gotta grease up for this.” And part of the quest is that we have to save Ves, and she’s got a status bar displayed with her health and it’s getting lower and lower as we fuck around. “All right,” DF said, “we juicin’,” and decocted himself up.
This time he started off the fight by setting a bunch of Nilfgaardians on fire. Some of them are kind of fire-resistant too. It is super, super, super fucking handy that your enemies are by default fire-resistant, because you can just Igni a crowd and only burn your enemies.
We did manage to rescue Ves. Finally, finally, someone else noticed she’s not really wearing a shirt, and was like, “why is your navel showing” and she was like “none of your business” which I suppose is a reasonable answer.
At the end there was one wounded Nilfgaardian and Roche was like “ah we should be merciful” and I get that Geralt’s supposed to be noble here, but like, the guy’s fucked up and there’s no medicine in this game and also, as Geralt pointed out, he takes jobs for Nilfgaard sometimes, having a survivor to go and be like “yah this white-haired Witcher showed up and fucked us all up” would be fucking awkward, so DF opted for the dialogue option of “why leave a witness alive to linger in agony what kind of mercy is that really”, and maybe that was wrong but we went on with our lives.
Meanwhile, the children of the village have come out, since the fight is over. DF ran Geralt around to loot the bodies and there were children literally playing on top of the corpses in several cases, which was a bit annoying and also disturbing. Like… guys.
Anyway. We poked through the loot, and switched out the lovely matching Griffin armor for a ridiculous Guy Fiery flame-patterned sash gambeson, but the stats are better so. Welcome to Flavortown I guess.
We decided to go Check Out The Devil’s Pit. It sounds badass. We wandered away picking flowers and killing lvl 6 nekkers. We found a bandit camp with a lot of wooden staircases and chased people around and killed them, but it wasn’t super exciting, there was a random pit to hell that you couldn’t interact with in any way. Maybe it was supposed to be a mine? I don’t know.
Just to see what would happen, DF Igni’d a goat. “Rude!” Dude exclaimed, but we actually did manage to loot the meat so this went down better than the Skellige Bunny Crimes incident.
Anyhow. Radovid wants us to repay him for giving us Junior by going and getting him Phillippa Englebreit. Earheart. Whatever. He’s got a bunch of witch hunters posted up outside her hideout– apparently they chased her there as an owl, which sounds like a really great high-speed chase I’m sorry there’s apparently no depiction of.
So we started off by talking to the witch hunters, who were kind of… they’re a bunch of thugs with dorky chinstraps and bowl haircuts and they’re rude to Geralt, so like, fuck those guys.
We left the rude dorks behind and went down into the weird compound. There were some Aardable walls and some debris. “Ah, nekkers,” said DF.
“They just want to neck with you,” put in MM.
They did not. They cornered Geralt, who wound up stuck in a dead-end passage without an escape except falling to his death, so he fell to his death. Whoops. Reloaded, had some more difficulties with the nekkers, realized belatedly that they need ogroid oil, duh.
Properly lubed, we resumed our fight and in the midst of it, leveled up to Level 17. Not too shabby. We also recollected that nekkers do not like being on fire, which, being a guy who can produce fire from his hands on command, that’s a useful bit of information and made things go much more smoothly. Also also, DF realized belatedly he’d been using his steel sword instead of the silver one for the nekkers, which also explained why he’d been doing so poorly. Right, right, that’s how this game works. (I pointed it out. “Wait, isn’t that your steel sword? The huge one?” and DF was like “That’s my pork sword” and we all groaned at him, but like. I’d asked for that, pretty much, hadn’t I.)
One of the nekkers dropped “Monster Bone” as loot, which Dude saw and started singing. “Monster boooooone,” he sang, and MM and I were like “Yeahhhh” in unison and DF was like “Monster Bone sounds like the name of a funk album”
Then there was a roaring fire creature, an Ifrit or somesuch, which, like, well. It was on fire, so we figured it was probably an elementa or something. Also Aard puts out fires sometimes, which did help with this.
“Oh,” DF said, “he’s killable,” and proceeded to kill him. When he disappeared I was like “oh, he teleports?” but then he didn’t reappear, and DF was like, “No, he doesn’t teleport, I just obliterated him.” Oh.
In Philippa’s lair, where she was not (though there were owl feathers), we perused the assorted loot. Blood-covered gemstones seemed like a really really odd thing to find, until we discovered that she’d been using them to grow new tissue on to replace her eyeballs that Radovid had removed for her, which is just gross all around. Also, we picked up a book called Care For Your Sword, Soldier! which is far more peppy than I’d expect for the subject matter. We also got a chipped megascope crystal, which seemed useful and important.
So, now it was time to pick a fight with the fucking witch-hunters, apparently. There might’ve been a way not to fight them but fuck those guys. “Time,” DF said with some satisfaction, “for some Axii executions.” Oh, and Dude Oil. Mustn’t forget to lubricate for dudes.
“Why,” I asked, as we killed another witch hunter, “does everyone drop creepy dolls as loot?” Why on earth wouldn’t a middle-aged religious fanatic with a bizarre uniform and a bowl cut have a creepy doll on him? Why indeed.
Anyway. We left the cave, and the dead witch hunters, and made a beeline for Triss in Novigrad to see what she thinks. We trust her more than Radovid; maybe she did some weird bullshit to Geralt in the past but at least she doesn’t seem to think chessmen have literal pulses. “We find her terrible fake American accent endearing,” DF said. As we spoke to her, she clipped through a chair twice.
We gave her the megascope crystal, and she played back whatever message she could find on it, which was Phillippa talking to… some other sorceress… about regrowing her eyeballs. Well, fair subject matter I guess.
We left, and wandered through Novigrad. “Giant-ass sword,” DF muttered to himself, watching the Stupid Fantasy Blade clip through the scabbard again. And Whoreson Jr still got shooters out here, who keep trying to kill Geralt, and I’d almost suggest that they know Geralt killed Jr but if they know Jr is dead why are they still in his gang? Very confusing.
Anyway. I had something deep to observe, here, that Dude pointed out, about the whole ecosystem thing here, and I just can’t recollect what it was, so I’m gonna leave this in drafts a tiny bit longer as I try to remember what the fuck it was. Ah, I don’t remember. Someone tell me a punchline!
