SOUNDTRACK
Having completed our mission in the wraith queen's former domain, we prepare to take the long trip north, around the great lake, and eventually confront the fire demons Svarog showed us. On our way back, we see that they've made some diplomatic overtures to our village:
We lose most of our wood and two children. (Per Codex request, I left the kids in the village before venturing out. This is about five turns later. The little redshirts don't waste time.) All the adults recover from their burns, though, so we don't care! Our band continues to return home, when:
Oh, these fucking dicks. We had just enough mithril for a suit of armor, and any competent fighter in a suit of mithril armor is a god of the battlefield. We decide to pay them a visit:
And walk away the proud owners of a ferocious guard rat.
We'll probably be gone for over a day. The village now has six defenders, and we've been doing regular sweeps of the surrounding area, so it will probably be okay. For good measure, Chabor and Pendantra spend a day putting up signs around the village:
This Area Under Protection of Prince-Archbishop Rat
Are You Sure Your Dick Doesn't Resemble Cheese In Any Way? Do You Really Want To Take That Bet?
WARNING: Rat Nearby - Could Turn Into A Wererat At Any Time
"That should do," Chabor says.
"Hope you don't all get murdered!" Pendantra tells the villagers.
The journey north is underway, when we see:
"Hold the fucking phone," Milohna says, bringing the expedition to a halt.
"What's wrong?" Karina asks.
"If you recall the werewolf who crowned me as Moon Queen?" Milohna says. "That's him, and the remnants of his pack that didn't kneel to me."
"Ah," says Karina.
"We have unfinished business," Milohna explains.
"Luckily, we're mostly businesswomen here," Pendantra says.
"And retards!" says Granny.
One extremely dead werewolf later, we find:
TLDR: The demons served Svarog in the past, but in the time since his fall from power, they have instead been busy holding a contest to see who can be the biggest bitch. Right now, their entire race is tied for first place, so most of them are off serving fire dragons instead of our Lord.
"BURN THE HERETIC," Granny says. "So says the Solar Creed!"
"What does the solar creed have to say about witches?" Milohna asks, rolling her eyes.
"I haven't read that far, but I bet it's something really cool," Granny says. "Like 'always suffer the witch to live! In fact, we're not even sure why we said 'suffer!'"
The thread narrowly voted for Demon Diplomacy, so just killing these assholes is out. The dialogue choice I picked was
supposed to open up a path to call all the demons pussies and shame them into falling in line behind Svarog; unfortunately, the text for that was identical to the generic dialogue option to parlay with them. The other version had a chance of recruiting a better version of the svarozek we got from our divine quest, but it's okay. This course is the manlier one. We are tasked with slaying a mighty elder dragon who lairs far to the west!
Before setting off, our band prays and sacrifices a nearby cave full of bears to Svarog and to Arengee.
Svarog does not answer.
Arengee speaks twice as loud. The fiercest foes rout when they hear our lord's shout. We welcome Elf #2 to our band, naming "him" Overkill. (This one also has boobs and is clearly pulling a Mulan. I'm onto you, Lesbian Battle Elves!)
We spot some nomads en route but ignore them for now, until eventually:
We have our first five-skull encounter.
Dragons are the toughest enemy in the game, this one landed in the offensive deck, and then the computer got first draw. Uphill battle. Baba Yaga ended up absorbing most of the dragon's breath, and we managed to end the beast. What treasures await us in the dragon's hoard?
Slightly worse than what we got for killing the spider queen with our starting party circa turn 5. Huh. Demon Diplomacy is starting to feel overrated.
It's okay, though. Our brave deeds in his name have brought us the favor of Lord Arengee. Not only does Baba Yaga not die during the night, but:
Yeah. We get another one. We name him Excess.
Wait, him?
Not pictured: boobs of any sort.
This issue requires immediate attention. Milohna, Karina, and Bolebur halt the expedition and form a tribunal of inquiry into what's going on with their elves' genitals. "You could just ask u--" says Excess.
"Shut up," Milohna explains. Evidence is catalogued, presented, analyzed. Petula is summoned as an expert witness. Baba Yaga performs divinatory rites, hoping to solve the Mystery of the Missing Donger for good. Eventually, they determine the following:
a) There's only one art asset for the elven wanderer event, and it's male-looking.
b) The text referring to the wanderer as "he" in the event occurs regardless of the elf's actual gender.
c) However, elven wanderers can be male or female. When in doubt, the ones with the feminine features . . . are just elves, stay in doubt.
The ones with the
boobs are women. Hence they get sorted with the women during striga attacks.
d) Bandit Captain gender is a social construct. It defaults to male for pronoun purposes during the bandit encounter event, but if the captain decides to join the party post-sexin', a gender is randomly assigned. This can turn people gay or straight at random.
In conclusion, the devs spent way less time thinking about Gender in a Post-Darkness Society than this LP has. I can't hit that level of efficiency at this point, but I'm going to start trying now.
*
The final quest location to please the fire demons spawns:
Right outside our village. We'd like to parlay with those nomads we passed, so we're actually going to turn around and take the long way home, going back around the lake.
En route we find:
A leshy wants us to kill a bugay. We've never said no to a request to kill things! Blood for the Sun God!
The bugay's crew have decided that blood magic's probably the answer to all their problems, and since they don't have a reliable source of blood, they've been murking humans. We negotiate a favorable agreement with them, because Bugay Diplomacy gives us a large amount of ancient wood. Then Karina elects to renegotiate the agreement, starting by giving the Bugay a stab with the Peace Pitchfork.
After the battle, we get a small pinecone demon who's generally useless in combat and in challenges. That's okay, we've got a mission for her. We give her a week's worth of food and single, shitty sword, made from quartz, which is actually worse than wood. She can't actually pick it up (refer to being useless). That's okay. We send her off toward the nomads.
Meanwhile, the main band ventures to the far north. There were two five-skull lairs there. Lairs are generally more difficult than other encounters of the same challenge rating. The werewolf lair there has something like six Milohna- equivalents there, backed by 10+ alpha wolves. Trying to fight them would probably result in a wipe, but the raider lair near it:
Falls to simple intimidation. Let's see what we HOLY SHIT
Raiders' lairs generally give some of the best drops in the game, but this is still an amazing amount of loot. Most of it's top tier and will be put to immediate use. We give the spear to Granny and the two-handed swords and axe to our new elves. The dragonbone armor goes to Bolebur, and Karina takes the chain mail.
(Steel is the second strongest metal, and chain mail--heavy armor that's made primarily from steel--is the second strongest armor in the game. Equipment without descriptors--"axe," "spear," "chain mail"--tends to be endgame-tier loot or just shy of it. Thea is aware of how shitty it is!)
The main expedition now turns east, where the pinecone demon makes contact with the nomads:
And gets a shitload of moonstone for her trouble. (You can trade a weapon as long as you have one, and the quality of the materials you get isn't dependent on the quality of the weapon . . .)
It then rejoins the main party, and we lurch home. Enemies attack us on all sides, but they can't break our spearwall.
We eventually reach the rogue svarozeks' hideout, just outside our village:
And cast out the demons infesting it. (It's just a battle with four svarozeks; it's nothing special.)
Demon Diplomacy Mission: complete. Now all we have to do is wait for the game to acknowledge our feat. I'm sure that won't take long.
In the meantime, there's also Orc Diplomacy!
In which, after collaborating to unlock some treasure, the leader of an orc warband loans us an orc worker as a symbol of friendship between our peoples. We'll see how that works out in the next section. If we'd accepted her proposed exchange, we'd have gotten a very good orc fighter, on par with Karina. However, given that half our party already consists of even better fighters, and the other half is noncombat specialists who can also fight, this is a pretty bad bargain. Because we refused her offer, she just GAVE us an orc worker who's even stronger than the warrior would've been.
In the meantime, the strain of having to behave diplomatically and for such little reward has taken its toll on our heroes, so we're going to begin scorching the earth of everything near our village that isn't us.