About Time I Finish This: Hi! I’m Spider! (Avernum: Escape From the Pit pt 7)

So, last time we met a dragon, he didn’t eat us but we did kill his pets.

We could go south now. But Fort Draco is still nearby and we might as well take a look before we head all the way south.

It helps that a job board posting fori t has shown up in Formello.Fort Draco is the kind of place that in an other fantasy setting would be full of dwarves. I’m pretty sure there’s no dwarves in Avernum which is convenient because well… what would the Empire do with them? Exile them to the surface?

Anyway, there’s an inn near the entrance, maybe we can find work inside?

Grant here tells us about Motrax but we handled that already. She’s also looking for her familiar which well…

Ok. It turns out you can find said familiar on the other side of the bar.We’re not getting involved in this.

The foundry here is home to two people, Bill and Bill. Yes, the same name. They run the foundry, making ingots from the ore brought in from the mines and ensuring the foundry does not exploded.There’s a good emphasis on the not exploding part, if this thing does explode? They’ll feel it in Castle Avernum.

Th important thing for us here is they need win to keep the workers motivated, and will happily buy any bottles we can bring them. Cheap wine mind you, they don’t want the fancy stuff.The smithy is next door. that handle the job board quest and nets us a breastplate.I should probably note a quirk about how armor works in this game. Armor isn’t only limited by a character’s carrying capacity, which is based of strength. There’s also a matter of weapons accuracy. Heavier armor reduces your to-hit chance. If the character in question is a pure warrior this isn’t a major concern as your weapons skills should be high enough to counter the accuracy loss, but for hybrid characters it’s something to keep in mind.

Heavy armor also interferes with mage spells, Thought there is a trait you can put points into to help counter that.

Aife here is an alchemist next to the smithy.Sadly her skills aren’t of any use to adventures like us. so no healing potions here. She does however, want Aranea fangs and will pay for each pair we can bring in. The Aranea being a race of vicious giant spiders, There’s a cave of them to the west.

There’s another boathouse here, but I don’t see a reason to get a boat just yet. We’ll want one eventually to explore Avernum’s lakes, just not now.

sue here does laundry, you can even pay her 10 coins to clean your equipment, though as far as I can tell there’s no in-game benefit to doing this.

She’s also apparently met Golizar. Huh.

Finally, we can buy food of Carlos. He also mentions he might have work for us but he needs to hear more about is first. Tales of our exploits and the like. “Come back in a few levels.” basically,

Anyway, we should probably head west now, but there’s an unexplored section to the east that might have a few things.A ramp at the northeast corner of Avernum confirms what I said earlier: The Empire is plugging any exits it can find.We also find hot springs. I’m not sure if there’s a use for these. Maybe we can tell about them for a quest?

finally, all these entrances around here are mines. There’s no game play use for them though.If you appraoch one, you get this text. If you chose to enter, you get some text about how you poked around, found nothing of interest then eventually got shooed out by the guards.