Curate of Curiosities

Previously on The Reconstruction, the newly formed Six Stars guild didn't get the opportunity to actually reconstruct anything, but they did solve the city's vermin problem. And since our doing so has given us a permit to work outside of our home city, so we're heading to the nearby city of Nal to solve more problems. In contrast to the relatively clean Wadassia, Nal is a really dirty place.

From the in-game glossary:

A collection of Human-controlled neighborhoods and districts united under a purportedly corrupt, slightly militaristic Human controlled organization (see NALIAN OFFICERS). Nal has few notable exports, and nearly all of its labor is for self-sustenance, with over half the food supply coming from the neighboring city of Wadassia. This tends to strike a chord of bitterness with many citizens of Nal, who feel threatened or resentful of most other less-troubled nations. Crime and slavery are commonplace, with much of the city's revenue coming from housing and entertaining parties traveling from east through to Wadassia or Lake Blaylox. Visitors are encouraged to avoid most streets after nightfall, and to seek out inns or places of hospitality early, before prices increase for the late crowds. There exist no records for the official 'founding' date of Nal, nor any discernible evidence as to when it even adopted this name, but it is likely some of the structures and families in the area had existed at least as long as neighboring Wadassia, and perhaps even longer.

It's filled to the brim with slavers, which doesn't make it a good place for Shra, but Dehl, being the submissive little daffodil he is, does not object to being sent there, despite the rest of the party's concerns.

Naturally, the game takes this opportunity to reacquaint us with Rehm Sikohlon, lizard swashbuckler extraordinaire.

And it looks like our hero has misplaced his documents in that same city, and so will need them back if he doesn't want to end up needing to be rescued like those guys in the prologue. And something tells me that Private Clap won't be much help.

Here's a pro tip: You don't actually need to avoid getting caught. You don't even get the formality of Rehm's party gaining bonus favor for being stealthy. Subversive!

And so we begin chapter 2, "The Red and the Blue."

A new city means a whole new populace whose trust we need to earn, and another linear questline to get us there.

Now that we're here, I would like to discuss how building your characters' stats works.

Instead of traditional experience points, defeating enemies gives you three types of essence, for body, mind, and soul. However, you can also earn essence outside of battle, such as by finding certain objects on the overworld or reaching guild ranks that are multiples of 4. You use them to upgrade either health, attack, or defense for each aspect. There's no purpose in putting points into offense if a character has no attacks that scale of that stat, so put all your essence for that type in defense. For example, Dehl has attacks that scale off his body and soul attack stats, but none using his mind attack, so all his mind essence can safely go into defense. Putting points into health in any aspect isn't worth the effort for now.

In the meantime, characters also have skill and mana points, which are earned during battle by performing combat skills and magic, and are both used to upgrade their skills and give them new passive abilities. Not every party member has access to both of them, so this is more of a hassle than it needs to be.

Oh, it's Brenetto again. I should have mentioned this earlier, but his awesome invention that he had us gather the pieces for was an abacus. Now, he's gone a few steps up the tech tree and is trying to build a calculator. For that, we need to expose three rocks to three different sources of natural heat.

But before we do that, let's do the Nal-Guard a few favors.

Quest number 1, "The Breaking." Split the party up into three groups, each accompanying to kill a total of 10 skeletons on three different paths. Yep, just like in chapter 1. It looks like you're intended to have two members for each group, but here I chose to put three members on two groups each, leaving one guard to fend off the skeletons on his lonesome. This ends up leading to all six party members facing a skeleton and two Boneswirls, which are clouds of scattered bone fragments. I guess if you don't have a fully intact skeleton to animate, some random fragments will do just fine.

Now if you weren't such a useful healer, I would have benched you the moment we took on a seventh party member.

Speaking of that seventh party member, she's a walking tank, with decent support skills, but she's slow as hell, so she probably won't see much use. But don't worry, after she joined, the game introduced the Support mechanic, where you can have reserve party members support active party members for stat bonuses, while still receiving the essence that the active party member gains. The problem is that setting it up is the game's most annoying mechanic, as you have to select your active party members one by one, and then select which party member will support each of them, even if you have to make a minor change in your party lineup.

Here's our third guild: the Scourge Clad, led by Skint. I was willing to overlook the fact that Havan's guild had only three members, but this so-called guild has only two! And at least they managed to help with the bug problem; while I can see these two surviving a few encounters with skeletons, I'm sure they'll have much worse luck with whatever bigger problem is behind it.

But hey, I'm sure he can take whatever this town can throw at him. After all, he has a sword sticking out of his back, and the only reason he didn't die from is because shra have Wolverine-tier healing factor. The other thing is that he's wearing the same type of armor as Zargos, who earned his from fighting for the monarchy in the revolution from ten years ago, yet something tells him he doesn't look the type to support monarchy.

The more concerning thing, according to Dehl, is that he might one of those Si'Shra mentioned back in the prologue. But he's not rambling about conquest or Tezkhra like the one that Rehm dealt with, so probably not.

What encouragement? Pointing us at the person that we were going to talk to anyways? Just because you can't see the exclamation points above quest-givers' heads doesnt mean that...okay, maybe the guild can't see them either, but still!

Now that we're rank 8, we can chat up this young lady, who clearly wants a piece of Dehl. Sorry, but I'm sure he'd much rather settle down with a nice lady Shra.

On to our next quest. Now that we've gained the required trust from the Nal-Guard, we can now take a quest from this red-shirted officer. Some Shra slaves have been broken out of their captivity by sympathizers, and now they've joined the bandits. Guess whose job it is to round them up again.

Let's put the extremely blatant fantasy racism aside for a moment. Bandits? I guess that they'd be appropriate enemies to deal with, given what kind of town this is, but really? Along with rats, they are the generic RPG trash mob.

Quest 2, "Routing Season." To get some extra points, you need to avoid stepping on the traps laid across the ground, that look like the stock RPG Maker pendant asset. Like the Tchiitra scouts back in chapter 1, they can be a bit hard to make out against the floor tiles.

Once you deal with one, you have four minutes to make your way to the other camp before the bandits make a run for it. It's best if you already have a group in position, but the time limit is generous enough that you could theoretically make it from one camp to the other on foot, even with a full party of six. You can even check this campfire for one of the heat sources that Brenetto needs. This quest can be repeated, in case you missed it the first time.

It would make things a bit easier, since one of the bandit camps has a Magimarauder, who is the main source of this quest's challenge. She comes packing Heat Wave, which operates similarly to the Broodmistress' Carrion Boil, but does heat-elemental body damage, so if you bring the cold-elemental Dehl along, you're in trouble.

If the whole forcing escaped Shra back into slavery thing rubs you the wrong way, then don't worry. You can help what I presume to be those same shra give their captor the slip right after.

Oh, I see how it is. This is all leading up to Qualstio turning into fantasy John Brown, as he leads the charge to free the Shra from their slavers. Either that, or he settles for delivering more Marvel-style quips.

The game comes with a guide on how to recruit all of the available characters. You will need it to find out about this character.

After getting far enough in chapter 2, you can sometimes find this guy with a hat in the very southeast of the city. Talk to him three times, and only when it's not raining, and then his lover will show up and tell you that he's gone nuts, and that you'll need to look for him in the hunting grounds. Incidentally, there you'll also find the other two heat sources that Brenetto's looking for.

From there, just talk to him, and he'll babble about how his wife disappeared. Yes, hire the antisocial, mentally unstable creep into the guild. I'm sure only good things will come of it.

And now we're smashing up an illegal speakeasy, which I'm of mixed feelings about.

Yeah, I initially had the Prohibition Era in mind, but the fact that it's bringing about a public health crisis feels very topical. Or maybe that reinforces the Prohibition comparison, what with what moonshine was doing and all.

Quest 3, "Still At It." Finding the stills without getting caught isn't hard at all. Neither is finding tiling errors.

This will definitely make up for us aiding the slave trade in the last quest.

Quest 4, "Bones About It." All these corpses being reanimated has done a number on the soil quality, so you need to get each of your party members to the other side of this swamp, one by one. The gimmick is that walking over certain mud tiles will cause them to sink, making them impassable for a full minute. And there are only two clear paths you can take, so you'll have to do a bit of waiting before you can get your stragglers across.

Judging from the music, this is the chapter's miniboss, even through you're fighting a horde of normal enemies. Sure the same thing happened with the Firefiend, but at least that was the very first time you saw one.

Anyway, they can be nasty, since they have an AoE attack that can do quite a bit of damage. Let me explain how physical attacks work first. There are three types of physical attacks and three types of armor. Slashing attacks are effective against light armor and ineffective against heavy armor, piercing attacks are effective against medium armor and ineffective against light armor, and crushing attacks are effective against heavy armor and ineffective against medium armor. The Boneswirls' AoE attack is a piercing attack, which two of our party members are weak to, and their regular attack is a slashing attack, which two more of our party members are weak to. This makes Zargos an excellent tank for this battle, as he has heavy armor, which resists their regular attack, as will as solid body health.

And after we're done, we go into this cave, inhabited by this guy who admits to animating the dead, and promises to stop when asked nicely. I guess he's not your ordinary necromancer, since he is raising an army of the living dead, but it seems to be by accident, and not out of malice for the living or anything like that. Actually subversive!

And that's the living dead problem taking care of. As Dehl says about it:

I've had my fill of skeletons, surely. I am even beginning to mistrust my own.

It's the Blue Guard again! And they've found...something! Once the mage council finds out about this, they'll be set for life!

I really hope you're wrong about this, Qualstio. I feel that elitist mages aren't all that subversive.

Sigh. Ignoring Santes' idiosyncracies, our next mission is to clear boulders from the nearby mountain pass.

They're basically impervious to any form of conventional damage, so the only way to deal with them is to push them to the far side of the battlefield. However, only three characters have skills that can inflict knockback, and only one of them can do so with any reliability. In the meantime, you get harrassed by Bloodhawks, that spam an attack that knocks you back.

Though they can't be that big of a problem when you can just walk over them like this.

I guess since Fell's here again, this means we're at the end of the chapter. Let's leave before she starts rambling about balls falling off a cliff or whatever nonsense.

Like before, her real purpose was to inform the party that a new quest giver will come to town soon.

She talks about her husband wanting to "escape from the world." Oh no. We've dealt with bugs, skeletons, bandits, drug runners, rocks, and birds, but I don't think any of us are equipped to deal with suicidal husbands.

We talk to Desmon, the husband in question, and he tells us that there's an overpopulation problem on the horizon, so we need to find more land to settle. Okay, nobody so much as hinted at anything of this nature. Between the plague from 10 years ago and the looming food shortage brought about by the Tchiitra, I have the feeling that it will be a while before it becomes an issue.

While this map seems to show the entirety of the known world, there's a mountain range right at the southern edge, so he suspects that there may be more land and resources on the other side of it. I'm not going to lie, I did not expect this RPG to borrow plotlines from crackpot conspiracy theories straight out of Facebook.

The gimmick for this quest is to clear a path for Desmon to go through, while making sure to avoid lowering his morale by giving him the all-clear before the way ahead is safe. Step one, fight some more birds.

Second, root in the grass for a snake, in what appears to be the only random encounter in this entire game so far.

Next, fight some bandits. Even the game isn't sure how they ended up in this pass, but I'm sure they might be aware of its existence as well.

And then, you have to get Ques to distract some birds that the party is perfectly capable of dealing with themselves. Even he seems to think that this is a horrible idea!

Lastly, you have to guide our client through a maze. It's not hard at all.

Just when you reach the top, you get attacked by a giant bird, because this chapter needed an end boss. Compared to the Broodmistress, it's disappointingly easy. The Bloodhawks that accompany it are as annoying as usual, but once you deal with them, you'll find that it can't do much on its own aside from trying to push you back.

Looks like that was all that was blocking the way to the edge of the world. According to the glossary, this world has been populated for at least several millenia. Surely someone would have have found this passageway by now? I mean, we ran into some bandits on the way here, and I'm sure that they could have dealt with the Bloodhawks as well as we could.

See, I was feeling this Facebook conspiracy theory vibe right from the start of the quest, but his ramblings about the gods just cements it. And then he jumps off the cliff.

So he was suicidal after all. But what could we do about it? We're monster slayers, not therapists. And hey, that's only as far as you and Desmon can see, if we could somehow sail far enough to the south, we're sure to find something.

Since this request ended in a less-than-ideal manner, we might be in trouble with the city's authorities. But don't worry, Qualstio has a friend the next town over who can let us crash at his place. In the meantime, no one but Dehl seems to be affected by the fact that a man jumped to his death in front of them.

And that was chapter 2. Unlike with the previous chapter, I have a better idea as to what this chapter's title refers to. There are two different factions in Nal that the group was helping, the Nal-Guard, who wears blue armor, and the Officers, also known as the Red Shirts. We still haven't reconstructed anything just yet, though.

Yet while the chapter did start up with a decent connecting thread with the skeleton problem, after they're dealt with, we're left with the boulder thing. And the premise for the final quest came out of nowhere. Again, nothing in the first two chapters suggest that there's a problem with overpopulation: on the contrary, the second chapter in particular seems to present us with a population that's barely hanging on. And all we get from the quest is a dead quest-giver and a guild on the run.