When we left off, we'd created our heroine, Amaira Grayson, a sickly Half-Orc given a new lease on life. Seeking fortune, she boards a zeppelin headed for the great industrial city of Tarant.
(I've rewritten this post a few times now, trying to hit an engaging and readable Let's Play format for Steemit. Let me know what works and what doesn't, in the comments!)
In the opening cinematic, our blimp comes under attack by machine-gunning prop planes apparently piloted by ogres, and plummets in a flaming heap to the Stonewall Mountains. A gnome fatally wounded in the disaster begs our aid: take his ring to "the boy," who will know what to do. That's our extremely cryptic main plot quest!
When the FMV concludes, we're standing beside a tangled, burning heap of metal with bodies strewn all around. Most of the corpses are named after those pregenerated characters we chose not to use! It's clear that the starting scene was not designed with high resolution in mind: with the viewable field expanded to 1600x900, you can see those characters spawn as NPCs, then keel over with a death scream as soon as the board finishes loading. Hah.
Before we can even move, we're pulled into conversation with a robed human named Virgil. He's understandably amazed that Ms. Grayson emerged unscathed from a deadly fireball. Less understandably, he takes this to mean that Amaira is the reincarnation of the elf deity Nasrudin, worshiped by a religion called the Panarii. We express our skepticism, and Virgil advises that we speak to his mentor, Elder Joachim, in the nearby town of Shrouded Hills.
Virgil is our first AI-controlled NPC follower. It's a bit annoying how aggressively the game thrusts him upon you, but he's well designed for the role: he's a competent fighter without being so badass as to overshadow you, he has healing spells in case you don't have the means to top up your health, and he has a handful of other useful skills you might not otherwise have access to.
Now we get to roam around a bit. There's bits of detritus scattered everywhere--chunks of steel, springs, bottles of wine--which I dutifully pick up, not sure what will be useful later. Before long, Amaira becomes encumbered, losing a bit of speed thanks to all the junk she's lugging with her mediocre Strength. Some things I pass to Virgil to schlep around, some I deem to be common enough to safely leave behind (metal plates, filaments). Even so, I live with a slight encumbrance penalty for now.
A few things do stand out:
Ginka Roots and Kadura Stems grow around the site. Every time I collect a set of both, I combine them using my Herbology skill to make Healing Salves. There are such things as healing potions, but those are magickal in nature, so as I grow more technologically skilled they'll be less and less reliable--part of why Caelyn recommended starting with Herbology!
We also get into our first fights, battling the uncommonly aggressive wildlife around the crashed blimp. Combat in Arcanum can run in real time or turn by turn, but the real-time mode is glitchy and hard to control, so I play exclusively turn-based. Early game combat involves a lot of comical failure: you miss a lot, and even sometimes critically miss, injuring yourself or damaging your equipment or falling on your butt. In the picture below, you can see I hit with my boomerang less than half of the time, thanks in part to the fact my Strength is one point under what the weapon requires. Thankfully, these wolves, boars, and "kites"--a sort of goblin--are even worse at fighting than we are.
Mostly, these battles are only good for experience; each time I land a hit, I get a bit of progress to next level. (Virgil hitting things doesn't help. If I were more concerned with playing optimally, I'd tell him to let me do the fighting, but meh.) There's one tough Kite Shaman at the south end of the map, though, who guards a Magical Chest with random loot. We strike gold this play, finding a magic staff, a magic mace, a magic suit of human-sized armor, and a magic suit of half-ogre-sized armor. This is spectacular: not only can I upgrade Virgil's armor and staff, but the mace and large armor will be perfect for our second follower NPC, soon!
There's just one side quest in the starting area, as far as I know. In a cave near the crash site, you find a tormented ghost who claims to have been cursed by the wicked priest Arbalah. When you pay Arbalah a visit, the priest informs you that the curse was done in self-defense, or at least retaliation: the spirit was a bandit who murdered the priest's family in order to steal a religious artifact.
Here we have the first of Arcanum's take on the morality-meter trope. Opposite your magick/tech slider, you have a good/evil gauge: the typical do-goodnik/murder-hobo dichotomy. With Arbalah, we have the option of siding with the ghost and killing the priest (ebil), or talking the spirit into telling you where its surviving partner is hiding with the artifact, and retrieving it (goob). I'm not planning to pursue any consistent moral path this playthrough, but in this case, the quest reward for helping Arbalah is a blessing that improves NPCs' attitudes toward you. Given I'm fighting an uphill battle against anti-half-orc prejudice, I'll take any reaction bonus I can get! I beat up the second bandit, retrieve the artifact (some sort of incense burner?), and give it back to Arbalah.
Between cleaning out the crash site and completing Arbalah's quest, I level up to 3, earning two character points. One point I put into Strength, to relieve me of that accuracy penalty for the war boomerang. With the second, I begin the tech college of Electricity, getting the Electric Light schematic. It's only mildly helpful in itself, but it's the prerequisite for the Charged Ring, an extremely useful stat-boosting accessory.
While doing that level-up maintenance, I notice an entry in my journal saying I was "Scarred by Wolf". Apparently, in one fight with an actually-dangerous wolf (placed in a narrow pass to encourage you to zoom out to the world map to skip it) I suffered a severe wound somehow. So my already not-great Beauty stat will be even crappier until I can get to a surgeon capable of fixing me up. Whoops!
Barring wandering the world map looking for random encounters to grind, which I have neither need of nor interest in at this point, there's nothing left to do around the crash site--we're ready to head into the town of Shrouded Hills. Next time, marginalized folx gotta stick together: we weather some bigotry and recruit a half-ogre!
My play queue for reviews to come. See a game you'd like me to write about? Comment here and I'll move it up the list!
My Steam wishlist. Feed my backlog, and I'll play and review your gift straightaway!
