We'd finished the voting, and both light and dark parties agreed to Mr Malwick's offer:
This might come back to bite us in the end later, but who cares about that when we now have a wand of fireballs?
Anyway, the Dark team had more in mind. They proposed to lead the dragonflies into town to murder the NPCs so they'd be free for looting. So that's what we set about to do.
That is dead Mr Malwick, very much dead. I doubt it has any impact on accepting his offer though, but I guess we'll see.
Another NPC in town that we wanted dead was this bard, as she is carrying one of the things we need to win the contest. It's quite simple actually, without her lute, we can't end this tutorial island. We can either shell out 500g for the lute, try to steal it, or have her killed one way or the other. Trust our devious dark-siders to choose the latter.
It turns out however, that the guards in town are remarkably efficient in killing dragonflies, so I had to rest to have them respawn, then lead them into town anew, to finish off the bard. Even then a few NPCs survived. I didn't mind though, as one of them has a useful ability:
Hideous, but the ID item skill is useful, and so is her xp boost.
On the northwest part of the island, where the dragonflies were, there is a small shed holding 4 crates. In one of those crates you can find a shell, one of the items neede for winning the contest. Another way of obtaining a shell is to buy one off an NPC, but that costs money and we're rather fond of our gold ourselves.
Here's a look at the rather sparsely populated map (check the minimap, the green dots are NPCS..
We're not quite done yet, we still have to find a bow, a fancy hat and a tile from the old Temple of the Moon, so that's where we're headed next:
Our very first dungeon! As can be expected, the monsters within aren't exactly thrilling.
The inferno bat can shoot fire at a distance. Apart from that, these are unremarkable.
There's also a fire-rat that I failed to get a screenshot of. Also unremarkable.
Spiders are more of a threat, as they can poison your characters. Poison lowers Might, Endurace, Accuracy and Speed by 25%. Reduces combat efficency and lowers Hit and Spell Points to 50% maxmimum over time. Cured by a Cure Poison spell or potion. Nasty.
A change from MMVI is that the perception skill in this game will mark out locations of interest for you, if the score is high enough. This wall for instance is hiding a secret chest.
The flashing red colour is quite noticeable. And in this tutorial dungeon, just having the skill is enough, no need to put points into it yet.
There are more adversaries in this dungeon however. You just don't think so at first..
Having this charming fellow suddenly turn hostile would come as a complete surprise, right? ... Right?
Behind a secret door, we find another quest item.
Thats the tile. There's still chests to loot here however, and in one of them, we find yet another quest item.
Now, when trying to leave with our loot, our pal Sal stops us..
If I were as bald as him, I'd get pretty crancy too, if some hoodlum tried to sneak off with my hat. But I digress, we're the good guys here, and he's the bully, so we keep the hat and kill and loot him instead.
And he had a longbow! The last thing on our quest list!
Here's a map of the place:
1. Tile
2. Hat
3. Sal Sharktooth
The purple marks on the map are secrets that are visible if you have the perception skill. As far as tutorial dungeons go, this one is rahter forgiving as long as you have the DotG buff running from the pedestal outside. Without it, this could be a dangerous place.
We go to Thomas the Judge and turn in our stuff.
Now we're not finished with the island yet.. There were rumours about a dragon, and there were those missing adventurers.. And then there's the large cave we haven't explored just yet. I wonder what could live inside this?
Just inside the cave we find a shield labeled "contestant's shield" and this note:
The cave is also populated by a handful of rats (that are supposed to act as decoys, giving you time enough to loot the shield and note, and possible other items if you're quick enough) and the dragon!
Red dragons are the toughest of the bunch. They have 1300 hitpoints, and hit for 16-128 points of ranged fire damage.
The trick here is to kite the dragon. We're in an enclosed space facing just the one dragon, and all our characters have ranged weapons. You should not just use the strafe key (ctrl) as you'll be moving too slowly if you do. Instead, you run perpendicular to the dragon while listening for his breath attack. Once you hear the attack, run, you'll see a tiny red dot on the mini-map representing the projectile. Make sure it misses you, then turn to face the dragon, hit the "a" key to attack once with all your characters then quickly turn to the side again and resume running.
Each attack with and ordinary crude bow that connects deals 5d2 damage. And be prepared that even with DotG active, you'll be missing 5 times out of 6, killing the dragon takes a while.
Having the wand of fireballs helps a lot, as it does around 35 damage a pop and doesn't miss, unless you're careless with aiming and manage to fire it into the ground..
And sure enough, soon the dragon succumbs.
to Lightbane, for getting in the killing blow.
Now, just as in MMVI, when looting a dragon, sometimes the body stays behind. This can (and will be, just this once) be abused. I save-scum and eventually wind up with a nice artifact and stop mucking around.
This artifact is good, but there are better ones out there. I'd just gotten a bit tired with the savescumming, and we'd fulfilled the primary reason for doing the savescumming anyways (amass gold enough to buy all training on the tutorial island). The boost to water magic will help with the duration of Lloyd's Beacon when we finally get that spell.
The light-siders did the same dances-with-dragons thing, and got rewarded with a much more awesome artifact!
The best armour in the game.
The map of the lair:
1. Dragon
2. Contestant's shield
Not much to say about this dungeon really, other than killing the dragon doesn't really seem to be what the designers intended, though they didn't put in anything preventing this from happening. So I see it as a way to reward the tenacious idiots like myself that actually try to kill it.
And now, with the dragon dead, we return to Lord Markham.
Taking the ship from the docks, we're teleported to our new acquisition, the Castle Harmondale! We even get treated to a short clip:
The first thing we do is walk up to our castle and knock on the front door.
Alright! We have a butler!
Too bad about the greenskins, we'd better get inside and sort them out.
Now, this is the first time we enter our castle, and it's in a sorry state and since more passages will be revealed later, I shall not be posting a map yet. Inside there's plenty of rats and goblins.
Since we got a quest to kill them all, we proceed to do so.
In a chest near the throne room, we find a peculiar note.
Seems we have a traitor somewhere, and the goblins are planning a large-scale attack on our newly acquired castle. That will not stand.
So far though, the castle is in a sorry state. Here's what the rooms look like
There are four doors in the main hall at the sides. All look alike. Later they will be occupied by vendors and a temple. M:
Now that we've actually won the contest and gotten a castle of our own, things have been scribbled in our history book:
The mentioned conflict between elves and humans over this place will rear its head later in the game. You will be called upon to cast your votes when that time comes.
With the castle cleared of hostiles for the nonce, we go to our faithful butler.
Ah, and he gives us a quest to make our castle presentable. A true
There are other quests to be picked up in the village of harmondale.
We'll be doing the second of these quests in this update. The others will have to wait as they're based in other overland maps.
Our questbook as it looks now.
In the next update, you'll get to see the Barrow Downs. That place can be quite annoying, as you'll get to see.
In this update however, we found out about a certain Hairbaugh that was a spy for the goblins. And just next to the inn is a man with that name:
To my knowledge, this is the only disguised goblin in the game. He isn't any tougher than a hobgoblin however, so he's quickly disposed of. The overland map is densely populated with goblins just as you exit town, and those groups are tougher than what we've encountered so far, in particular because of their higher hitpoint pools. Take a look at the third tier goblin, the lord:
40 hitpoints still isn't much however, when all four characters in the party have bows and the skill to use them.
We soon find both an obelisk, and a central fortified position with a sad letter in it.
In MMVII there's only 14 obelisks to be found, one less than MMVI, but the premise is the same. Find them all, puzzle out their meaning and receive phat loot.
South of the village of harmondale is a tiny hamlet. Let's call it harmondale south. In it are a few NPCs offering membership to a few spell-guilds, and there's an NPC offering the first promotion quest:
Seems like Kayerts will soon be promoted to Initiate, if I keep true to my word and finish the Barrow Downs in the next update.
Close to harmondale south is a pathway leading upwards. There we find both a dungeon entrance and the arbiter, which works somewhat like the seer in MMVI, in that he can provide us with hints to what we should do next:
Nice to know that our bro here can give us information if we need it. And if we should happen to lose any quest items he can magically provide us with duplicates.
Nearby is a series of caves which we will of course enter, to clear them of beasties and search for the missing Arcomage player.
The caves are rather straightforward. They're inhabited by Troglodytes and oozes. The latter of which are the greatest threat, as they are immune to physical damage just like in MMVI. In MMVII however, there's a fire spell called "fire aura" which enchants a weapon to deal additional fire damage. The enemies are quickly dealt with.
In one of the tunnels we find the bones of a dead adventurer together with some notes and an Arcomage deck:
Pretty basic information. Winning the Arcomage games aren't too challenging as you can see from the video in the post above.
In another of the tunnels, we find a wall laced with ore.
This ore can be turned in at some NPCs, and they will make random items from it. The lower quality ore, the lower quality item. Iron ore isn't really worth much, but it only takes a single slot in the inventory, so consider it vendortrash.
A map of the Caves:
1. Arcomage deck and note.
The plusses denotes ore-bearing walls, and the asterix a stat-boosting barrel. What the arrow denotes I have forgotten.
This dungeon can be real nasty if you haven't picked up the fire aura spell. With it, the oozes aren't much of a threat, and troglodytes are comparable to goblins in threat level, so if you can make it to these caves, you should be able to clear them out as well.
With the caves searched, we return to town with the bad news:
We get to keep the deck.
Let's go play.
As to how the (second, didn't get a video of the first) game went, look at the video above. This one is easy, later matches will be harder, meaning longer.
. That's no way to do business, Mr. Malwick, so fuck you very much, nay.
I've had the screenshots ready for more than a week, I've just been too lazy to produce the actual update. 
