In this game [Pug, mightiest wizard in Midkemia] will be played by a doofus who's less competent than a 19-year-old who just happened to bumble into the plot after running out of ways to embezzle his dad's money.
BaK was extremely cool for its time; its fandom wiki is one of the projects I can touch right now (while I don't have spoons for the ones that matter more).
From the lore page: Of course there aren't just two kinds of elves, no author who starts introducing multiple brands of elves ever stops at two. You fool, you absolute rube, you will drown in elves of every kind. /CACKLES
I do like (if it's well-paced) worldbuilding where clearly defined categories of things gradually devolve into "wait these distinctions might be more artificial than our behavior so far has appreciated and also there seems to have been a lot of additional stuff there all along that we didn't know about." (We all start from zero.)
That's the timeframe, yep! The game's extremely nostalgic for me but it's also genuinely well-written for its genre and I always had a great fondness for the shop music.
Raymond E. Feist wrote the novelization after other people (with his permission) wrote the game and he put in a vaguely bemused author's note at how surreal it was to play through it a bit and basically encounter his own worldbuild through a good-faith but spottily successful effort at interactive fanfiction
Always loved these moredhel riddle locks. (Except when Gorath's not around and I have to remember to cast Union so the characters can read the letters.)
The corn is interactable -- to tell you, throughout the game, that it isn't ripe. And every scarecrow is too solidly planted to be arbitrarily pulled out of the ground. Ask me how I know.
Duke Romney in Chapter 3: "In their own way, the Guilds are more powerful than princedoms. You mark my words. One day the enfeoffed of the Kingdom will cross swords with the Guilds and it is not likely to be a bloodless affair."
Random book I found on the 15th-century activities of the Medici family: so here's how much the nobles HAAATED that Florence was governed by limited-term elected representatives of its twenty-odd labor/trade guilds and how the Medici (who were powerful but not nobility) kept thwarting their attempts at an armed coup
the thing about Florence was that it kept annexing other areas but only Florentine citizens had a role in its democratic process; the governance-by-guild system was cool but also limited to the city
there was a rule that nobles weren't allowed on the guild-representative board and the nobles were all "but we don't NEEEEED that rule anymore!" and trying to reduce the number of guilds allowed representation by limiting it to the largest ones, and the guilds were all lol we see what you're doing there
meanwhile everyone had to be in a guild to do skilled work, even if there was no guild specifically dedicated to that work; sculptors were lumped in with apothecaries for some reason? which was An Issue.
In BaK, it's mostly taken for granted that the Kingdom will be fine despite the whole two-chapter bloody guild war plot as long as the Prince is in power.
ok look, especially as it's established in the first two minutes of the game that it is not the moredhel way to bury their dead, why is there a graveyard in Caern and why are all the names like THIS:
We are like unto the Eledhel in our ways of the dead. Once a moredhel falls in death, that which lies upon the ground is a living thing no more, only rotting meat, unworthy of further attention. Only when we intend great insult do we inter our kin. WELL I GUESS EVERYONE HATED ALL THESE FOLKS THEN \o/
(actually only Gorath drank, all "no, Owyn, it is I who shall drink first, just in case!" and then all "mmm this must be a healing well 'cos I'm feeling real good")
the game does play up Gorath's growing protectiveness over Owyn, all the more tragic because the book notes that he's 200 years old and both his children are dead
Also Owyn is very copypasta in every scene where he stands next to other party members, especially Gorath. It's a big deal that elves are Much Taller Than Practically Everyone.
So in the first couple of chapters, the party can visit someone who is trapped in his house in the Dimwood because he ignorantly blamed all his problems on a local witch (the aforementioned Wilindi) and poisoned her well, so she was all "I'll give you problems" and conjured giant scorpions to attack any time someone knocked at his door.
The party can neutralize the poison, whereupon Wilindi admits she went a little overboard with the scorpions (they were hurting innocents too, which she did not intend), but if they return to the poisoner's house, he is absent.
In Chapter 7, Wilindi is away doing magic stuff for the good of the Kingdom, but if the party visits the poisoner's house, it is abandoned and contains only a single Wooden Chest the size of a bread box, with 24 uses.
Isn't it great? Some real vintage programming humor there. "Oh wow we can do 3D vector stuff, why not make the party go vertical also but for no reason whatsoever."
In the spirit of If I Were Writing This, my most general and objective issue with the storytelling is that the deep lore ends up being the endgame but isn't really a focus until Chapter 8 and even then could be ignored as flavortext until Chapter 9 (the end).
The Valheru were imprisoned 2000 years ago in the Chaos Wars and they and their fate aren't really important to all the laypeople we meet. Pug knows a lot about them but doesn't really have a reason to bring them up except when trying to figure out what happened to Timirianya,
and even then the fact that they could be a current threat doesn't come up until Chapter 9. There's almost nothing about the moredhel fascination with Valheru artifacts and power (even when there's plenty of opportunities to explore that with Gorath), and the first six chapters are all about mustering of troops and political maneuvering
None of the PCs have any reason to think about the Valheru, and aside from a few forgettable and/or skippable conversations, only Pug has any reason to care or worry (because surprise, James, Prince Arutha, who is not a player character and whose POV we don't get, didn't tell you everything and you only realized that in Chapter 7).
One way to partially patch this issue without changing any of the existing characterization would be to have Tomas join the party at the beginning of Chapter 8. He's wounded and no longer immortal so he wouldn't OP the party, and we could get his impressions of Timirianya, as someone who was once possessed by a Valheru, rather than having that hinted at
in Pug's notes ("but you, Thomas, would know more about the possibility of Valheru interference on this planet than I could guess" yeah that would be cool if Thomas were here to read that, but he was sick and Aglaranna made him stay home).
He can still start out as a naive young squire who only knows what he could surreptitiously learn because his dad wants him to be a business estate manager noble and whatever. The party visits plenty of places where he could pick up more knowledge about the Valheru and whatnot and just fold that into his studies.
Over the first few chapters, he could get interested in these super-powerful beings who controlled the dragons and the elves and rampaged all over the cosmos and were only stopped by the Midkemian pantheon in a conflict that killed or disempowered a bunch of the gods still worshipped in the Kingdom.
He could get to see some of whatever Gorath's experience is of having the Valheru be such a big part of moredhel history. He could get told off by the eledhel (they spend half and hour in Elvandar, tops, after all the buildup, and practically none of it is told), for whom the Valheru were a matter of bloody remembered history,
and as a human who wants to become an authority on all the interesting things he can share the knowledge but not appropriate authority over it. So then, when Chapter 8 arrives and he sees firsthand what the Valheru did to Timirianya and the lengths to which its powers went to drive them off, it would hit much harder.
Suddenly the Valheru aren't a cool fun research topic. The planet they devastated will never be the same again. It would be a big character growth thing for him.
And Pug's Chapter 9 infodump would hit much harder too, because at this point Owyn (and Gorath, who should have had big opinions about this whole thing but is never shown to have any thoughts on it) would know enought to really be horrified at what could happen if they fail.
I think also there's a tonal whiplash where in the first few chapters you can wander all over the map and do oodles of unnecessary sidequests - even Chapter 4 encompasses several cities, even if they're all in the Northlands -
but then Chapter 5 is limited to the area near Northwarden, Chapter 7 to the Dimwood, Chapter 8 to Timirianya, and Chapter 9 to the [redacted] caverns where the [mcguffin] is hidden. Especially in Chapters 8 and 9, almost nothing happens that isn't directly related to the chapter objective. No cities, no shops, no unnecessary NPCs.
If I were going to work on that part of the game's pacing, I think I'd combine Chapters 5 and 6 (which take place simultaneously anyway) and find ways to switch between the parties for different parts of the chapter. that way Owyn could at least meet with his old teacher Patrus once more before Chapter 7
Instead of finally arriving in the Green Heart for the sole purpose of heading straight to Elvandar, Owyn and Gorath should find a clue that directs them to some other elf and get swept into the eledhel battles against the moredhel trying to invade Elvandar.
I know the point of Timirianya is that the Valheru left it a wasteland, but the landmass we end up on is tiny and there is NO discourse with the Panath Tiandn; they're just there to be random-encounter enemies.
(This is apparently part of the greater Feistian issue with The Pantathians Are Just Totally Evil Forever; the game would be a chance to mess with that. They've been on the planet for 2000 years. At least give 'em factions and an economy.)
Chapter 9 suffers from "we have the most powerful magician with us now, he can just transport us directly to the goal where all we have to do is fight through the magical protections on site." That's partly why the party is still Owyn, Gorath, and Pug in Chapter 9; once they escape Timirianya, there's no time to waste
and Pug has to go to the place immediately with whatever help he has on hand. He was weakened on Timirianya and needs Owyn's help, but it's less clear why he doesn't just drop Gorath off at Krondor (as they did Gamina) except purely to have some muscle in the party.
At least make it impossible to teleport directly into the caverns and plop the party a few cities away so they have to do some traveling as Pug regains his strength.
The game: makes a point of Gorath's mixed parentage, noting that everyone can tell he's half human because he has (gasp) some straggly facial hair. Also the game: basically every human the party meets mistakes Gorath for an eledhel because the eledhel and moredhel are so alike.
Liallan, Delekhan's current political-marriage consort, isn't Moreaulf's mother, so there must have been a previous consort who took a human lover? I guess?
I'm not doing any of it systematically, so the fact that it's a wiki no one else is editing works out for me; no one cares if I make five punctuation edits in a row.
and there's a quest with a fourth NPC that the second NPC is involved with, and I'm not sure if the second NPC sticks around in the game after that's complete
now the question is, if I return the missing ruby to Captain Belford but put off defeating Nago until Chapter 2, 3, or 6, does Isaac still appear in those chapters, or does he disappear once he gives us the ruby?
And does Isaac's "are there mind-readers in the area" dialog, in which he talks about Devon (unlocking Devon's dialog about him), show up if Nago is not yet defeated but the party has also not encountered any magical traps? And does the party have to talk to Kiefer Alescook first, or is that only important for the dialog about the ruby?
I think the party can reach the area where Isaac's lurking without tripping any traps, and I think they can also reach the only other places that refer to Nago's dream-sendings (Brother Marc and the beleagured Temple of Sarth), and I think the mind-reading dialog becomes unavailable once Nago is defeated, but this is a lot to verify.
The above keysmash is brought to you by several trips back and forth between Eggley and Hawk's Hollow trying unsuccessfully to get Isaac and Devon to talk about each other in Chapter 2.
If Isaac doesn't talk about his pokiir game with Devon, Devon won't talk about it either, which he has to in order to unlock the option for him to teach us some Defense skills.
Also confirmed: the Mind-Readers dialog does not need the party to have triggered the "how are they anticipating our movements" dialog on the magical trap south of Zun, though I did accidentally trigger the trap north of Yabon and will probably have to restart the game to make absolutely sure no trap is needed.
I am cracking up at the character descriptions in this Betrayal at Krondor let's-play log.
Gorath['s] entire civilization has descended into fascism and now he has to ask a bunch of idiot humans for help to stop them getting exterminated.In this game [Pug, mightiest wizard in Midkemia] will be played by a doofus who's less competent than a 19-year-old who just happened to bumble into the plot after running out of ways to embezzle his dad's money.Of course there aren't just two kinds of elves, no author who starts introducing multiple brands of elves ever stops at two. You fool, you absolute rube, you will drown in elves of every kind./CACKLES
this game though, honestly
Always loved these moredhel riddle locks. (Except when Gorath's not around and I have to remember to cast Union so the characters can read the letters.)
Sometimes the letters on the tumblers spell out unrelated words that are not the correct answer. XD
\o/!
Oh no, giant pixel spiders!
The corn is interactable -- to tell you, throughout the game, that it isn't ripe. And every scarecrow is too solidly planted to be arbitrarily pulled out of the ground. Ask me how I know.
What am I supposed to do with an Armorer's Hammer that has 0 uses
PFFFT
Nundecamp: "Beldogal Clan"
Weldaam: "Beldogal Clan"
Indabul Laz: "Golbandek Clan"
Olvundekai: "Pobel Clan"
Eldoban: "Beldogal Clan"
Vell Hulbandek: "Pobel Clan"
Mobalgalf: "Golbandek Clan"
Plubneband: "Pobel Clan"
Culdenvalk: "Yulvend Clan"
We are like unto the Eledhel in our ways of the dead. Once a moredhel falls in death, that which lies upon the ground is a living thing no more, only rotting meat, unworthy of further attention. Only when we intend great insult do we inter our kin.WELL I GUESS EVERYONE HATED ALL THESE FOLKS THEN \o/
weldaamhey Patrus I have a question, and the question is: why
Forever happy that Tolkien made riddle games inseparable from fantasy.
Oh hey it's the triforce
Dear whoever read "beautiful elven forest goes here" and thought "ah, Mirkwood!": no.
The well: actually alcohol
The party: I don't know what I expected
For all the game's insistance that the Book of Macros is Not A Book, It's A Magical Device, that sure is a book.
lololol surprise, James, the Prince of Krondor doesn't tell you everything
YOU DARE TO DISPARAGE THE GOOD WITCH WILINDI
BWOIIIING
that way Owyn could at least meet with his old teacher Patrus once more before Chapter 7Also the game: basically every human the party meets mistakes Gorath for an eledhel because the eledhel and moredhel are so alike.
grain