Having charted most of the perimeter of our first island in the previous play session, when we came together last weekend, we decided to see if we could find the trader. So our first order of business was exploring the black forest areas more, and marking any burial chambers we found in the meantime.
During this, Kade joined our game. On his own playthrough, he’d already beat the Elder, and was poking around the swamps hoping to find iron. So while we were just a little behind, in terms of gear, we were about the same.
Turns out that there was no trader on our first island. That was fine – we just turned our attention to exploring the new island where we’d previously made a little portal camp.
Having four of us now, and two who already beat the Elder, we made our way in that direction with every intention to take him down. Thankfully, it seems as if there was a mountain range to the west, a protective barrier between the swamp and the meadow/black forest area that we needed to traverse to reach the Elder. So, actually getting there wasn’t difficult at all.
Thanks to the experience of the others, we were quickly shown how to fight the Elder – using bows and ducking behind pillars to avoid his massive AOEs.
The problem came from the forest itself, however. We must have had a spawner somewhere out there because we were getting a trickle of Greydwarves coming through from time to time to cause trouble for us.
Sadly, I didn’t get to see the boss go down because in one such Greydwarf attack, I was paying more mind to the Greydwarf Shaman than the boss. I thought I was shielded, but I was not, and he made short work of me with his vines.
I was the only death we had during that fight, but we all scored a Swamp Key.
More excitingly, as I was running back to find my gravestone, Kade asked, “Hey, what’s that bag icon on the map?”
Turns out, the trader was located only a short distance away from the Elder’s boss fight!
Uplifted by this turn of events, we quickly went to investigate and see what he had to offer. Most of it was quite expensive, but the two items we were advised to pay attention to were the circlet and the belt.
Quickly, we set about making plans to put a portal near the trader’s camp. We’d run across burial chambers on the way, and had the cores we needed. So I circled back to the meadows to get the fine wood.
This would result in my second death of the night.
In returning to the trader’s location, I passed a little too much to the east, unknowingly stepping foot in the plains for all of two seconds. I already knew what waited in the plains, and made a quick turn-around. But it was too late.
Deathsquito found me. Just that fast, too.
I’d just eaten, so I survived the first two hits it scored on me. But it followed me deep into the forest and my stamina couldn’t hold out. So, the third hit took me down.
Bummer.
Well, now we knew that this island didn’t just include swamp, but also plains. Lots of death and discovery.
It was yet another corpse run for me, but once we got back together, we set up the portal next to the trader. Now it was time to head back to the Forest Base, gather our gold and valuables, and see what we could buy from it.
We had enough to buy one circlet and one belt. Seeing Amoon already had a belt from his own playthrough, we began to focus on gearing up everyone else.
I suggested that Kade hop back on his game and bring his gold and valuables to purchase himself something from the trader, since he hasn’t found one on his game yet. He did that and was able to pick up the belt.
I opted to take the circlet and be the light for the time being. We had a bunch of burial chambers marked that we hadn’t explored, so that was our goal. We began to systematically hit up the chambers and trolls to gather gold and valuables, bringing that back to purchase pieces of gear bit by bit.
By the end of the play session, everyone had a belt and almost everyone came away with a circlet as well. All in all, a lot of progress for one night!
Next up for this upcoming weekend (hopefully), avoiding the plains and exploring the swamps!