(Warning! This post contains spoilers about Icewind Dale. If that bothers you then just skip it. Also it is brought to you by… Gretel! Since this post is less boring than hearing Hansel preach about Ilmater)
Before beginning there was something that I forgot to mention in the last post. The party delivered Mirek’s family heirloom back to him, the one they retrieved from a yeti. As usual, he was thankful for the party assistance as it was the only thing he had left to remember his family now that he was all alone in the world.
Ok. Continuing from the last time, our heroes had rested up, resupplied and were ready to travel to mysterious temple in the mountains. The travel took them almost two days and they arrived at their destination during the night. As they approach the temple a Verbeeg, which seems to be a type of giant, comes running at them. Fortunately, he isn’t running to attack the party but rather running away from the temple.
The party wasn’t able to extract much information from him before Red Toe, the verbeeg, run away. All he told them was that he was a guard at the temple until some bad priests came in and started killing everybody. Red Toe then fell to the ground, pretended to be dead and when the opportunity came, just run away as fast as possible. Well, that wasn’t a situation they were expecting but nonetheless they had to investigate the place.
Inside the temple the first priest they meet is pretty angry, to say the least, and accuses the party of being some other murderous band of adventurers.
Our heroes try to clear the confusion but the priest doesn’t want to listen. He just orders the guards to attack and the party have no choice but to defend themselves, ending up with the death of the priest and the guards.
As they explore the temple they find several bodies of verbeegs and priests strewn around. While the ones that are still alive just attack them on sight! Again, the party find themselves without a choice but fighting to defend themselves, making the whole event very tragic.
On the first floor they don’t any clues but they do find some books with some history of the region and some with the history of the drows. I am just pointing it out because I find it neat when games add in-game books you can read. 🙂
There were also some other loot too, of course, but nothing interesting of note.
The second floor, underground, gave better results though. After fighting their way through that they found some huge double doors that led to an inner sanctum. The good news is it seems they were in the right track as it seems the artifact was indeed in there at some point. The bad news is someone else seem to have gotten there first and stole it!
The party decides to put their Sherlock Holmes hat to find some clue to what happened there. Unfortunately just putting a hat doesn’t give you the abilities of the most famous detective from fiction so they were only able to find the obvious: there was a dead priest that didn’t belong there as he was wearing the outfit of a priest of Talona. In his posession was a mysterious green liquid that not even Alladin could identify.
The party discussed who should volunteer to drink the liquid, just to find out what it did. But they each quickly gave an excuse of why it would be a tragedy to the world if the liquid turned out to be poison and they died from it. So they agreed to take it to Arundel instead. Maybe he would be willing to drink it!
They quickly returned to Kuldahar and told their findings to Arundel. He was disappointed at the news and asked if they found any clues about what happened. They gave him the vial of mysterious liquid and to their disappointment he didn’t want to drink it either. However he was able to identify it. Apparently that is a snake poison, one that needs to be used fast after it extracted least it loses its effectiveness. There was only one place in those mountains that could live, a place called Dragon’s Eye. So he gave the usual warning about how they should take care as the place might be dangerous (oh, the understatement!) and gave them directions to it.
And that is what we’ll be covering in the next post! Personally, I am already getting scared since this is one of the places I barely remember and that was a hard one at that! But again, we’ll get to that in the next post of the series. 🙂
I think this next place you’re going to is where my party has been for the past few weeks (months?) that I haven’t been playing. If it’s that place, then it’s definitely pretty hard and I haven’t been too motivated to get back to it.
Oh wait, now that I think about it, there’s some other place you’ll need to go first, but since that place is pretty hard too, it could still be the one you’re thinking about!
It’s funny how no one in the party could think of any other way to find out about that liquid besides the idea of drinking it. 🙂
I remember my first couple times playing IWD, I would collect a copy of every book I came across and stored them all in some lady’s house in Kuldahar. I may have even taken them all out of the cabinet before the end of the game and had my party take them into the next game playthrough when I reimported the party into a new game. I could be getting things mixed up a bit with Neverwinter Nights though since I definitely collected books in that game too. Not sure why I kept doing it since these games aren’t like Elder Scrolls where you might have a good reason for collecting stuff and keeping it around, but I did!
Oh, gods, I don’t even remember how the area after the next one is. This temple was already harder than the previous area due to the spellcasters and because I was often getting two vebeegs at a time. Most of the time they were all together too!
Well, despite their fairytale origins they aren’t the smartest bunch. Everytime they need something identified they just give it to Alladin to use a spell on it. This was not an option this time so the only option they had left was drinking the potion. Fortunately Arundel was knowledgeble enough about it to save the day!
I don’t think I like them enough to do the same. I think I might just sell those to that NPC in Kuldahar that deals in antiquities since if I need or want it again I can always buy it back. I just like to have them around in case I want to know more about the lore of the world. Same with the Elder Scrolls series.