The Awkward Middle Part

I just hit what I think is probably about the 2/3 mark in Divinity: Original Sin: Enhanced Edition, so I thought this would be a good point for me to pause and capture my thoughts and feelings thus far. Bottom line up front: I'm having a blast, enjoying this game a ton. I recently got back from a nice week-and-a-half-long vacation, and an embarrassingly long part of that vacation was spent daydreaming about getting back to play more Divinity.

 

 

Party and mechanical updates first:

I just gained access to what's probably the last major zone of the game, and semi-coincidentally just hit Level 17. I've been taking a mostly-completionist playthrough, exhausting all the side-quests that I can and taking nearly all of the optional fights; but I'm not following a walkthrough so I'm sure there are at least a few quests that I haven't discovered or have failed to complete. I'm also not squeezing out every last bit of combat XP (such as by attacking friendlies).

 

 

I'm mostly following the build guide from the excellent FAQ, particularly where it comes to attributes, talents and skills. Recapping my particular loadout here:

Rion is my party face and archer. As the guide notes, archers don't synergize as well as other classes so you'll likely have spare ability points; I've given him an extra point in Bartering, several in Leadership, and recently even a little Charisma. He has relatively high Perception and Initiative so he usually goes first in combat, and with some Loremaster he can inspect the enemies to determine their strengths and weaknesses.

 

 

Combat tangent: once you get a few levels into the game and have multiple combat skills on your characters, it's pretty much always worth activating things like Melee Power Stance or Ranged Power Stance. These boost your damage at the expense of your chance-to-hit. But importantly, your activated Skills can never miss, but they are boosted by the Power Stance, so there really isn't a tradeoff. (For Archers, you furthermore have the many special Arrows, which also can't miss.) You should have a few low-cooldown skills like Ricochet or Crippling Blow that can come off cooldown every turn or two, and enough other skills to use your Action Points on guaranteed-hit skills.

 

 

Back to Rion: I now have Rain of Arrows, an amazing Level 15 Master Skill, which does insane damage to every enemy in a large AOE: incredibly, even if there's only a single enemy I'm better off using this skill (even in damage-per-AP calculation). That's one of the fresh and surprising things about the Divinity combat engine: in every other RPG I can think of, archers are single-target damage dealers, while in D:OS:EE they are probably the best AOE damage dealers, more so than mages.

Other skills Rion has, in roughly descending order of coolness:

• Flurry unleashes a huge number of arrows in a 45 degree cone. This is incredible against large bosses: if you can make them all hit, even the strongest enemy is likely to go down in one turn. It's also good against a group of enemies, again if they are positioned well enough so not too many arrows are wasted.
• Splintered Arrow is a versatile attack that does high damage which is divided over every enemy in an AOE. Somewhat counter-intuitively, it is usually better to position the arrow so only a single enemy is struck. Unlike Rain of Arrows, which does the same damage to every enemy depending on how many are present, Splintered Arrow will do more damage to a single enemy than to multiple ones, and prior to getting the Master Skills it's probably the highest single-target damage you can deal. There are some times where the AOE is better though, if you're facing a large number of weak foes. I think that due to how armor works in the game, though, the results can be disappointing if you divide the damage against just a couple of high-armor enemies.
• Ricochet is a great bread-and-butter attack. It can bounce between multiple enemies if they're close enough. Even if there's only a single enemy, though, it does more damage than your basic attack, and is guaranteed to hit. 
• Barrage fires three arrows against a single enemy. Pretty good, though again I feel like the armor system means it does less total damage than a single 3x attack would inflict.
• Special arrows can be really helpful, though honestly I'm not using them very much at this point of the game. Early on arrows like Knockdown can be huge for crowd control. Quite a few fights have gimicks where specific arrows could come in handy: enemies being very vulnerable to a particular damage type, say, or a fire that needs to be put out, or some wooden furniture blocking an exit that you'd like to blow up.
• Fast Track is a generically useful minor Scoundrel Skill. You basically give up 2AP in your current turn to gain 2AP in each of the next two turns for a net gain of 2AP. Worth toggling for longer fights, or if you just have a few AP left and nothing to spend it on.
• Conversely, Adrenaline will give you 1/2 of next turn's AP immediately, but take away 3/4 of the AP on your next turn. This is a net loss of AP... but taking actions now is much more important than taking actions later. These days I often finish entire battles on the first turn, often before the enemy gets a chance to move. And even if a battle does stretch on to multiple turns, getting to completely eliminate an enemy (via death or CC) can make up for essentially skipping your next turn.
• Outside of combat, Walk in Shadows is very useful. You can steal anything without getting caught while you're invisible. You can also interact with forbidden (red) object, enter forbidden zones, or walk by (potentially invincible) enemies without being noticed. I rarely use it in combat, but it does allow you to avoid attack-of-opportunity if you ever need to relocate while next to a foe, and makes it a lot easier to Escape if you need to flee a combat for some reason.
• Other skills that Rion has which I almost never use: Doctor (minor heal and specific status effect clears), Farseer (boosts chance to hit - as noted above, skills can never miss), Infect (haven't tried it yet, maybe it's good), Wildfire, Firefly, Burn My Eyes, Oath of Desecration (very useful but I usually cast from another character), Summon Undead Warrior, Malediction.

I've prioritized taking the Traits that relate to Archery, including ones to reclaim special arrows (which I regret - I'm swimming in special arrows) and Elemental Range.

Rion's Leadership has been extremely helpful. With gear he is now at Leadership 6. This gives big bonuses to everyone else in the party, including enough Initiative that we always get to go before the enemy, deal extra damage, avoid negative status effects, etc.

 

 

My second PC is Noor, a mage who has mostly specialized in Pyrokinetic and Geomancy magic, although she's also skilled in Witchcraft and currently advancing her Aerothurge and Hydrosophist skills. She knows a lot more skills than Rion, and her role in combat varies more depending on the enemy and the battlefield. Her top priority is typically CC, though. Most often she will use something like Blitz Bolt to close the gap with enemies, then try to follow that up with Static Touch on anyone nearby who isn't stunned yet, followed by Freezing Touch and Bitter Colt. She'll also use Burning Touch to try and inflict a flame DOT. But again this is all situational, obviously if we're fighting fire monsters who are healed by fire damage then she won't do that.

 

 

There was a point in the game when Summons were feeling really strong, so she would often summon a Poison Spider or a Wolf or something. Just having another body on the battlefield could be really helpful, as enemies will waste their limited abilities on that summon and leave the rest of us to do our thing. More recently, though, I haven't really bothered summoning in most battles. It feels like I'm better off just dealing direct damage.

As mentioned above, one of the surprising things about D:OS is that mages generally have less AOE than archers. That's definitely true at the Novice level, and even mostly at the Adept level, with a handful of exceptions like Fireball. Once you finally get to the Master level then this opens up and you do get really powerful AOE spells, like Hailstorm (which does huge damage and has a great chance at additionally freezing enemies) and Meteor Shower (also huge damage, likely to inflict Burning, and creates a big fire surface that will inflict more damage when enemies path across it).

I do really love how different the various spells are. As one specific example, many ranged spells like Flare will travel from your caster to the target. These can be obstructed by the environment, so even if you can see them and are in range you may not be able to hit them. Different spells have different paths, with some traveling in straight lines and others arcing, so if one spell can't path another one may. Then there are some spells like Headvice that don't path at all, and just require you to be able to see the target - but if you had previously hit them with Fireball and they are now standing in a cloud of smoke or steam, you won't be able to see them to target them! But then there is good ole' Boulder Bash, a novice Geomancer spell that sends a big ole' rock crashing down onto a point on the ground. Since this drops from right above, it can't be blocked; and you can unleash it even if you can't see the target. It is somewhat balanced by doing less damage than other elemental spells of the same level. Anyways, it's great to have such a big toolkit of options for fightin' in this game.

 

 

Gosh... I wasn't going to list all of Noor's abilities, but I'll go ahead and shout out some of my favorites:

• Blitz Bolt. Fantastic combination of caster mobility and enemy CC. Would be great even if it didn't do damage, and the damage is respectable. I put this on my fighter as well.
  
• Headvice. Great for straight-up damage. Blindness is a surprisingly great status effect - it isn't technically a turn-skip like Stunned or Frozen, but blind enemies almost always end up not able to do anything, so it accomplishes the same thing.
• Burning Touch, Shocking Touch, Freezing Touch. All great, low-AP, decent damage, quick cooldowns, can inflict great status effects.
• Bitter Cold. Can disable an enemy for 3AP at range. Crazily cheap spell. (A lot of Aerothurge ones in here!).
• Boulder Bash. As noted above, this is really useful for getting at hard-to-reach enemies; can pair with Fire to set the oil surface on fire for more damage. Great when an enemy is almost dead and needs to be finished off.
• Rain. Used more out-of-combat but sometimes during a fight. Incredibly useful spell, cheap way to disable a bad status effect on your dudes, and can wreak havoc with a lot of fire-themed enemies. I love the huge range, too.
• Regeneration. Heals are great! Again, used more out of combat, but can be handy inside it. Remember that healing magic damages zombie enemies - not every undead is a zombie, but there are quite a few, especially at the start of the game.
• Vampiric Touch. I always forget I have this, but it's great: a rare non-elemental damage type, and you get a free heal as a bonys.
• Oath of Desecration. I'll put this on my warrior, either for fights where mages aren't much use, or if I have spare AP. Great damage boost for them.
• Destroy Summon. There seem to be fewer summons later in the game, but they still happen, and this is a custom-made counter.
• Mute. Silence an enemy caster. Incredibly helpful against some powerful bosses.
• And, more recently, Hail Storm and Meteor Shower for insane damage. I have to admit I've cheesed a few fights lately by casting one of these as an opener - they cost 11AP, so typically you would have to save points and wait for the second turn to cast, but if you cast out of combat they are essentially free.

One non-magic skill I like on Noor: 

• Winged Feet. This is only useful in a couple of places, but is very useful when needed. This lets you completely ignore any surface, including lava as well as fire, snow/ice, electrified water, etc.
  

As my Gamefaq guide notes, due to the limited number of Ability Points in the game, if you were to bring your magic schools up to 5 then you would be able to learn 2 Master spells from those schools, but would only be able to max out 2 schools; if you go to 4, then you still can learn 1 Master spell, but can cover 4-5 schools. That gives you the same number of Master spells, as well as all the Adept and Novice spells, giving far more versatility. So anyways, that's what I've been building towards.

Noor is also my go-to for Pickpocketing and Lockpicking. I think I've pickpocketed a single person in the entire game, which was necessary to solve a quest. She got the required points from a Trait and temporarily swapping in gear. Likewise, she carries some rings to put on when we need to pick a lock, which is basically never. There's almost always a key you can find nearby to open the lock, or you can bash it open or otherwise bypass it.

I'm also usually traveling with Jahan, another mage who starts off with Aerothurge and Hydrosophist skills. I'm building him very similarly to Noor, but focusing on the opposing skills. Jahan is also my dedicated crafter; this only required a couple of Ability Points, he starts with the Scientist trait and the rest can be handled from gear.

In combat I use him similarly to Noor. It is really nice to have two mages - if one of them fails to inflict Stun, I have another chance from my backup mage. Or if we have enemies coming from multiple directions they can split up and handle things on either side. If one of my mages gets CC'd, I have a fallback who can try to clear status effects, and so on.

Finally, Madora is my melee fighter. I continue to use her like I did in my first play-through. She'll activate Melee Power Stance for the above-listed reasons, then usually close the gap with Battering Ram or Thunder Jump, ideally incapacitating a couple of enemies but at the least inflicting damage and saving AP on movement. For a follow-up she will Whirlwind if there are a bunch of enemies nearby, or else Flurry or Crippling Blow if there is only one. 

 

 

Thanks to her high Strength, Madora is also the packmule for the party. She lugs around a couple of barrels that may come in handy (Ooze, Oil and Water), and on longer excursions she'll schlep back the heavy armor and large weapons I want to sell. (Rion, as my main character, usually ends up carrying most items, but he'll offload pieces as needed. Jahan gets all the raw crafting ingredients, except for heavy ores that get sent directly to the Homestead or that Madora carries. Noor carries some specific items like keys, plot books, and all the grenades I carry and never use but that Might Come In Handy One Day). Madora also has items for Telekenesis, which like Pickpocketing and Lockpicking is almost never necessary and isn't worth investing Ability Points in but sometimes can be handy.

Let's chat about crafting!

 

 

I've written a lot already about my mixed feelings about crafting in D:OS. It is much much better in the EE than in the classic version, with discovered recipes automatically added to an interface. It's an activity that can feel tedious - you need to collect a ton of random low-value items, hold onto them in your inventory, then spend time doing stuff with them. You'll likely need to adjust gear along the way too; it isn't worth maxing out your Crafting and Blacksmithing abilities, so you'll probably just invest a few points and get the last with gear, but that does mean more micro-managing before and after crafting sessions. And not everything you can craft is worthwhile. Crafting isn't really required at all for the game; outside of maybe a couple of quests where you need to craft a unique item, it's mostly an add-on.

All that said, crafting can have really significant benefits, and for me it has been worth the investment of time. The main advantage is money. There is a finite and limited amount of XP in the game, but there is an infinite amount of gold available, if you buy raw ingredients from merchants and craft profitable recipes. Infinite money in turn lets you buy top-notch gear, which in some cases can be even more meaningful than additional levels. I've been following the crafting guide in that one Gamefaq, with the caveat that I don't really bother with the Magic Needle and Thread or its constituent ingredients, since it isn't consumed on crafting. My recent habit has been to do a crafting cycle each time I reach a new level: travel back to my crafting station, craft everything I can, then do the circuit of visiting merchants to sell my wares, buy additional raw ingredients, and window-shop for worthwhile gear. I mostly do this on level-up since all the gear you craft will be at a higher level and thus more valuable; also merchants reset their inventory on level-up, and you'll see higher-level gear from them.

While I don't spend as much time doing this, crafting can also be useful for making a few specific items to use. The main examples I've found are magical amulets and belts. I recently made Rion a whole set of Charisma-boosting items so he could more consistently complete some persuasion minigames without reloading. At lower levels you'll be able to craft magic amulets long before they appear in loot tables, so making them makes a noticeable difference.

 

 

While it feels a bit different than the making-new-items form of crafting, you also use the crafting interface to enhance existing gear. The main things I do are:

•  If I have a really good sword for my fighter or bow for my archer, add a Tormented Soul to set +2 STR and +2 DEX to it. These are fairly rare, but they do periodically show up in merchant inventories, and rarely while questing, so don't hoard them all for Level 20.
• Add Metal Scraps to good metal chest plates you want to wear for an extra +10 armor. Similarly you can add leader scraps to gambions and so on.
• Use a metal chest piece at an Anvil to remove the movement penalty and turn it into a slight speed boost.

There are a few other things you can do, like using Essences to change the elemental damage bonus of a weapon, or using Nine Inch Nails to make boots slip-proof, but I rarely do those.

A quick note on crafting that wasn't immediately obvious to me: I think that each piece of gear has a potential "slot" for each available type of modification. You can do different types of modifications on an item and those will stack, but different instances of the same type of modification will overwrite the previous one. For example, if you add Air Essence to a sword it will add Electrical damage; if you add Fire Essence to that same sword it will remove the Electrical and add Fire damage. If you then add a Tormented Soul you'll keep the Fire damage but additionally gain the STR and DEX stat bonuses. The crafting UI will happily let you overwrite an upgrade with the same upgrade, so you could burn all of your Tormented Souls on a single Sword and still just get the basic +2 effect. Just looking at an item's stats doesn't reveal which "slot"(s) have been used.

 

 

I mentioned before about how I go through a crafting/selling/buying circuit on each level-up. I think I only started doing that around maybe Level 10 or so, though it probably would have been better to start earlier. The great thing about buying gear is that you get a lot more looks at good items than you do from loot. You'll definitely be able to find good gear while questing, but you're very likely to see better gear while shopping.

Making gear decisions is pretty decent in D:OS. In some RPGs it's really straightforward, with a single stat like "Armor" to max. In some games you can just look at something like the Gold Value to judge the relative worth of two pieces.At the other extreme, some games have extremely specialized and situationally useful stats, incentivizing you to hold on to everything in case it's useful; or they surface mathematical values without clear underlying formulas and leave you to figure it out (are you better off with an item that gives +10 flat damage, +10% critical hit chance, or +20% critical hit damage?). D:OS has a pretty wide range of available bonuses and stats, but also a comprehensible system, so after putting some time into the game I can now pretty quickly and easily judge whether a particular gear item improves on a previous item. Without further fanfare, here is my priority list for gearing:

• Attribute boosts are the most important. These are usually prioritized before anything else.
• Within this, your character's primary attribute is the most important: DEX for rogues, STR for warriors and INT for mages. These have huge impacts in your chance to use skills successfully, the damage you do, and the cooldown of your skills. These linearly scale up with benefits until 23, and any excess over 23 is wasted. I'm finally starting to bump up against 23 at level 17 so it takes a while to get there.
• Once you're finally able to reach 23 in your primary stat, next focus on Speed, then Constitution, then Perception. All of these boost your Action Points which are the main economy in combat. Speed gives additional AP each turn, CON limits the maximum number of AP you can have (so if your CON is too low then your high SPD is wasted), and PER boosts your starting AP in the critical first turn. All of these have very useful secondary benefits as well: movement for SPD, vitality (hit) points for CON, initiative and spotting secrets for PER.
• You can ignore (not value) other attribute boosts. STR is basically useless on a rogue or mage.
• Next, relevant abilities that you use in combat. These are actually pretty rare, but occasionally you will see something with +1 Bow; more often you might see a bonus to Willpower or Body Building or something. 
• You'll probably want to carry, but not necessarily wear, gear with boosts for out of combat, like Crafting, Blacksmithing, Pickpocketing, Lockpicking, etc. These aren't worth buying from shops, you'll find enough while questing.
• Armor value on chest pieces or damage numbers on weapons. Higher is better, natch.
• Bonus (elemental) damage on weapons. Having is better than not having, higher is better than lower.
• Higher item levels. It's better to have high attributes on a low-level item than low attributes on a high-level item; but particularly for weapons, damage can scale off the level, so higher is better.
• The rarity tier by itself isn't important, but higher tiers will have more stat bonuses, which can result in a better item, but other times only adds more cost. It isn't worth buying a Divine Belt for your mage that boosts Shield, Lockpicking, Stealth and Dexterity.
  

Let's dip into the story a bit!

MINI SPOILERS

So, this game is all about "source" and "sourcery". Your two PCs are "Source Hunters", members of an organization devoted to finding people and monsters who practice Source magic and eliminating them. Kind of like the Inquisition, I guess. In the first few hours of the game, there are quite a few times that you run across a person who practices Source magic and seems harmless: genial, pleasant, maybe a bit apathetic. There may be some dialogue along the lines of "I'm not bothering anybody, why are you persecuting me?" which seems like a very reasonable question. In every single case, though, the Sourcerer turns out to be A Very Bad Person, and in-game you are always better off attacking them ASAP instead of trying to use diplomacy. This felt a little jarring at first, as I am the nice guy who always wants to be nice to the nice people, but was also very effective, as it communicates "Sourcery = Bad" far more effectively than mere exposition would. You know Sourcery is bad, because every Sourceror you have met has tried to do bad things to you.

 

 

It's a bit surprising when much later in the game you finally meet up with Icara the White Witch and learn that she also practices Sourcery. There have been a whole bunch of times up until now that we've heard "Maybe Sourcery isn't as bad as you thought it was", but now it seems like that may actually be true. I'll probably write more about this in my final blog post, but my current understanding is that Source is very dangerous but not necessarily inherently evil. Like, I dunno, maybe nuclear fission or something. It nearly destroyed the world years ago so everyone is understandably very leery of it.

 

 

As a side note, the word "Sourcery" keeps tripping me up. It is not "Sorcery". Confusingly, "Sorcery" and "Sorcerer" are also used in the game, but far less frequently, and they have their standard meaning of an individual with innate magical talent. I am mildly curious if all this makes more sense in the original... I presume Flemish?

I appreciate the level of lore in this game. I've complained in the past about being overloaded by encountering a brand-new fully-fleshed-out fantasy world every time I want to play an RPG, with a complete new history, list of deities, unique races, nations, system of magic, etc. The series Divinity has its lore, but it's mostly lurking in the background, not demanding your attention like Elder Scrolls or Pillars of Eternity do. There are various books you can find in libraries, like in many of these games, but they're just as likely to have a funny little story or a slice-of-life vignette as a bit of history. And those books are usually just 1-2 pages long, exactly what my attention span is these days for RPG lore.

 

 

One thing that did catch my attention is a reference to all of the gods disappearing thousands of years ago, and nobody knowing how or why that happened. I think that might be a callback to one of the previous Divinity games, or possibly a call-forward to D:OS 2. These games are all set thousands of years apart, which is pretty great, since they don't need to worry much about continuity between them. I imagine that in some game you can make a big decision about What Happens To All The Gods, and that all gets collapsed into this pithy little sentence sitting on a shelf in this game.

 

 

Jumping around a lot: I really love the End of Time, which serves as your main base of operations in this game. It's a bit like the Pocket Plane in Throne of Bhaal or the Labyrinth in Torment Tides of Numenara: it's a location out of space and time that you can travel to at will. It's visually really cool, suspended amidst a beautiful star field.  It has great mechanics too: throughout your quests, but especially as you advance the main plot, you discover Blood Stones that turn into Star Stones. Each time a Star Stone is reclaimed, a medium-sized new area will unlock in the End of Time. These new areas are all useful in unique ways: access to limitless storage, a character redesign and respec, a convenient place to stash companions out of your party, a way to hire new mercenaries, a variety of new shops, a crafting forge, and so on.

As noted above and in my previous post, I've been traveling with Madora the fighter and Jahan the mage, the same as in my original Classic Edition game. In this go-round, I went ahead and recruited the other two companions Bairdotr the archer and Wolgraff the thief, just so I could do their companion quests. I think I've now completed Bairdotr's and gotten a ways into Wolgraff's, and... it doesn't really feel worth it. Per the guide I've peeked at, there are only maybe 3 or so plot points that advance their personal quest. The dialogues can be interesting, but your mechanical reward is really just that one quest that might give something like 3000 XP, which is trivial in the scope of the game. I think the quests would feel meaningful if you were traveling with them all the time, but since they aren't usually in your party, you're missing out on the far more common reactive dialogues that occur during main-plot story beats and exploring areas. I don't regret doing their quests, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to others: it's more fun to just stick with your core party and not micro-manage swapping people in and out. It's probably better to save the other two (whoever your other two end up being) for a potential future playthrough.

Some other quests have really weird pacing. In Silverglen, which is around level 11 or 12, you get a quest from Brandon to get some Tenebrium ore from the Troll King. But getting access to the Troll King requires going through Maradino's hideout, which is much much much further into the map. By the time you do that, you will almost definitely have already reached Sacred Stone, which has a ton of Tenebrium, as well as a book that teaches you Tenebrium, which is the main reward from Brandon's quest. When you do get access to the Troll King's real lair, everyone is Level 15. It's just weird - I do appreciate the game's relentless flexibility in progressing in any order you like, but it does feel like something was changed during development that still feels awkward. I felt similarly about the SparkMaster quest from Act I.

A few other quests are odd or underwhelming. It doesn't hurt the game, though. There is so much going on, and I never felt like I was wasting my time or not being rewarded.

For the main plot:

For the record, I'm considering "Act 2" to basically be everything in Lucella Forest and Hyberholm. (Having an "Act 1.5" now seems like it may be a marquee Larian thing, like Lathandar's Monastery in BG3.) It basically picks up after defeating the resurrected Bracchus Rex. Some of the main story beats I remember are:

• Searching for the White Witch, who you eventually learn is Icara. She is the sister of Leandra, aka The Conduit, who seems to be the main villain(ess) of the game.
• Along the way you encounter the Immaculates, a sect that eventually proves to be more of a cult, all cheery and helpful on the surface but with some sinister stuff underneath.
• The Immaculates have converted much of the town of Silverglen, a small hamlet in Lucella Forest that has historically supported nearby mines. These days most of the mines are overrun by goblins or trolls. There is a particular interest in mining Tenebrium, a unique ore that is in high demand but causes a high physical toll on humans who come into contact with it.
• As you infiltrate the Immaculates, you come to learn their philosophy. It's essentially that lower beings should serve higher beings. For example, a human is higher than a chicken, so it's right that a human eat the chicken to support and strengthen himself. As initiates rise higher in the cult, they learn the extrapolations of those teachings: that some people are better than others, and it's right and good to sacrifice lesser humans to support greater humans. And ultimately, the Immaculates should sacrifice themselves to support the greatest being, the Conduit.
• This ultimately ties in to bigger plot stuff. I'll probably cover that in my next post.
• But I'll note that Leandry/The Conduit has been using Tenebrium to create immortal beings named Death Knights. Originally designed by Bracchus Rex but "perfected" by her, they will form an unstoppable army that will conquer and then destroy the world.
• The Conduit and her cohort seem to ultimately be nihilists. They want to unmake the universe, to return to an original state of amorphous void.
• Leandra and Icara were both sourcerers and used to be close. It seems like all of this may have started over jealousy - Leandra loved a man who loved Icara. This led to a rupture in their relationship, and may have sent Leandra down this dark path.
• I'm trying to remember now what the big story beats in Hyberholm were. There's a subplot where the King of Winter took control from his seasonal siblings and covered the land in snow and ice. (Bring solid footwear!) There's something to do with imps, and parties of Immaculates searching for something, and I think Leandra is trying to make something in the Elemental Forge but I can't remember now what it was.
• You eventually find a way to disable the Death Knights' immortality, thanks to exploiting a failsafe Leandra built into them when she designed them. You also learn that the mage... Maradino, I think? ... should know Leandra's whereabouts, which points you in the direction of the Phantom Forest and Hunter's Edge, where I'm going to say Act 3 kicks off. 

 

 END SPOILERS

That's probably a good point to hit "Publish" on this post! It's been hard to refrain from playing this game for long enough to write this up!

Alexandra Petri Slept Here

And another excellent birthday book: Alexandra Petri's US History! I've been a fan of Petri's work for several years now. During my time as a Washington Post subscriber I consistently got kick out of her humor column, and she's been excellent whenever she flits across my social media feed.

 

While I hadn't thought about this before reading it, the conceit of the book reminds me strongly of Dave Barry Slept Here, a book my parents had that I devoured many times while growing up. Both are satirical looks back over the history of the United States, which are really funny on your own but become even more funny if you're already familiar with the subject matter, as there is usually a deeper layer to the jokes. Both books also bear covers with the classic scene of Washington crossing the Delaware but with the authors added to the boat - I imagine this is a deliberate homage.

The structure of the books turn out to be very different, though. I haven't read DBSH in years, but as I recall it's written in a sort of faux textbook style, with chapters covering discrete eras, occasional graphs and illustrations, and pop quizzes or discussion questions. Petri's book, in contrast, is a collection of faux "original" documents. Each one is basically a riff off an existing item, but presented as a first draft or alternate version or something. For example, there's an outline of The Federalist Papers using Hamilton's original idea to keep readers' attention throughout the serial by making "Publius" a three-dimensional character the audience would root for instead of an aloof narrator. There's a letter from Coronado in which he excitedly writes to the king describing what's very obviously a lie. There are transcripts of Nixon's tapes but only the parts involving Checkers the dog. And so on.

The other surprise was that, despite the title, it ended up being more about American literature than US history. I haven't counted, but I'd guess that about 2/3 of the sections are purely literary: riffs on Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, Sontag, Wolfe, Thompson, and tons more. That isn't a complaint! I love literature, and am probably even more familiar with these stories than I am with the history, which again adds to the delight as there are more in-jokes and subtle references to capture.

One advantage of this document-based approach is that the form and voice changes constantly throughout the book. There are letters, articles, Yelp-style reviews (of Ford's Theater!), screenplays, diaries, pitches, and more. It's all funny, but sometimes the wit is elevated, other times very blunt; sometimes it's mostly the concept that's funny, other times the concept is rote but the wordplay is hysterical.

There were multiple points where I had to stop and put the book down and ask myself, "How did she come up with this?!" The example I'm thinking of now is "Shirley Temple Jackson," which (why not!) mashes up the child actress Shirley Temple with the psychological horror author Shirley Jackson. It's deranged, a really bizarre idea and also a shockingly good imitation of Jackson's writing.

All in all, this is a perfect book for just about any occasion or setting. I enjoyed reading snatches from it while relaxing on vacation, but it would also be perfect for commuting, as a pick-me-up after a hard day, or really anywhere. Each "document" is nicely bite-sized, typically just a few pages, and stands on its own, so you can dip in and out at will. They're arranged chronologically and it makes sense to read that way, but there wouldn't be anything wrong with jumping around either. In any case - I had a blast with this book; I don't get to read Petri's columns as often these days, but I'm glad to see that she has published some other books as well, and I'll look forward to checking those out as well!

Mythmaker Mythmaker Make Me A Myth

For my birthday this year I received the wonderful book "The Mythmakers", which is a graphic novel about the friendship between J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. It was a pretty quick and delightful read. Most of the content was stuff that I "knew" already from previous biographies and other readings, but I think this is the first book I've read that specifically focuses on the pair's relationship, and it draws out some strong resonance through this presentation.

 

The book is kind of a dual biography, but it's set in a framing story about myth. Two characters, a wizard and a lion, address the reader and talk about the history and importance of myth, along with related styles like epics and legends. They introduce you to Tolkien and Lewis, comment on their lives and react to their experiences. I was a little lukewarm on these characters at first - their dialogue can feel a bit cutesy, and I was eager to get back to the humans - but they strongly grew on me, and the last few pages with them were incredibly touching.

"The Mythmakers" is very interested in their faith, both separately and together, including Tolkien's influence on Lewis's religious searching and his later qualms with Lewis's religious writing. This book isn't only about faith, but it is a central theme, which I think is great since faith was so important to both of them. It goes into some depth on the conversations they had, how they saw myth as intersecting with religious belief, and other people in their circle who participated in this fellowship.

Any time I read about the Inklings I get a feeling of wistfulness. I think most of us have or will experience a friend group that vibes well together, but eventually falls apart: usually not through any big blow-up or acrimony, but the changes in life (people moving away, having a baby) or dynamics (new partner, new habits) that make it less fun and fulfilling, and ultimately just sort of stops. The Inklings seemed so incredibly vibrant, productive, and most of all fun during their strong early years. It's interesting to see the various perspectives on things like Charles Williams' addition to the group and how that changed the dynamics. In The Mythmakers, it's shown how Tolkien's feelings got hurt by another member's consistent complaints about elves.

Likewise, Tolkien and Lewis's own personal relationship, which was incredibly close and fruitful early on, eventually cooled. They remained cordial throughout their lives, but it is always sad to see how they lost something special they once had.

Which is all part of why I ended up appreciating the framing story in this book - while temporally the happier stuff happened early on and the sadder stuff came later, by breaking out of that chronology and into myth we can refocus the story, which lets things end on a really encouraging and sweet note.

One final thought - I was delighted to see that the author John Hendrix is a professor at my old school! I really want to check out some of his other work now; in particular, he has a graphic novel about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's struggle against Adolf Hitler that sounds right up my alley.

Accelerando

I rarely blog about short story collections, and haven't been consistently blogging all of my Charles Stross novels, but I do feel compelled to jot down some thoughts on Accelerando. This is, yes, a short story collection from Charles Stross; but it reads much more like a novel than I expected it too. It might be a bit closer to a classic serialized story, as the stories were originally published in various sci-fi periodicals, but they do tell a unified, fairly linear story.

 

MINI SPOILERS

The stories in Accelerando were written around 2000-ish, and are set in their near future, which is chronologically near our own present. That's one of the things that first caused me to fall in love with Stross through novels like Halting State, where it's science fiction but science that is extrapolated just a few years out from today, based on very firm research being done today.

The main character for most of the book is Manfred Macx, who in many ways is an archetypal cyberpunk protagonist - he even unironically dons mirrorshades at one point. He's very much a Free Software Foundation type of person, creating things and then releasing them for the world to use for the benefit of all mankind. He is pretty strategic in his directions, though. Depending on his idea and the situation, he may grant it to a particular person or entity who he thinks will accomplish the most good with it, and be willing to follow any guidelines he has in mind. Others are just copylefted to the net.

In this future, there is some form of "social credit" system, although I don't think Stross ever uses that specific term. Macx is broke in a traditional sense since he doesn't have any money, but thanks to the massive goodwill he's generated over the years, he doesn't want for anything - he can always find a place to stay, a computer to borrow, a seat on an airplane. This puts him at odds with Pamela, who at the start is his lover but becomes his nemesis: she is a freelance agent for the IRS, a kinky dominatrix who has very traditional values when it comes to raising a family and supporting the government. She is exasperated at Macx, who could easily have earned millions or billions of dollars that could be taxed by the United States, but instead has opted for non-pecuniary remuneration.

Macx reminds me a lot of William Gibson, specifically how he is always living just a little bit further in the future than anyone else. He accomplishes this by always being constantly online, monitoring all the gossip and announcements and speculation: he can draw the connections before anyone else because he has his eyes in every subculture. If Macx didn't exist, his ideas and inventions would still come into being, but some time later, most likely by some corporate group or avaricious entrepreneur. As the book continues, we learn more about the nuts and bolts of how Macx does what he does. There's a stunning sequence when Macx is mugged and has his glasses stolen; this results in the loss of his memory and even his personality. More startling, his mugger becomes Macx, carrying out his schemes and planning new ones. We come to realize that Macx has offloaded most of his memories to digital storage, which he can access on demand through his glasses - well, "access" implies a passive "pull" model, but what Stross depicts is more of an active "push" model. Macx has previously set up agents that take care of the grunt work and just notify him when he needs to take some specific meat-space action. But those "agents" really are, in some way, Macx too - he created them, and when people interact with Macx, they're interacting with the version of him as mediated by his programs.

I won't do a blow-by-blow of all the stories, but the thing I loved most was how it telescopes out into the future. Those early Macx chapters are all very believable and feel like they could be happening now - if Google Glasses had taken off and gotten multiple generations, if the FSF had acquired a truly wealthy benefactor. Macx is pointing the way to the future, but eventually the future arrives and overtakes him. Of course many other people, and eventually everyone, adopts the augmented intelligence he has championed. However, he draws the line at implants, which he sheepishly admits feel weird to him. But the younger generation doesn't have the same qualms, and so their augmentations are an order of magnitude faster and better than Macx's. He fades into a secondary supporting character, and eventually a revered but irrelevant elder as his biological daughter comes to the narrative foreground.

One major change is a sort of "fuzzing" of individuality and eventually reality. If you note someone else who seems interesting to you, you might offer to share some subroutines with them; if they reciprocate, those parts of your greater-self personalities may run a simulation of what your lives together would be like. Because they are just digital, they can run at much faster speeds than biological life, so they could run an experiment of many years of cohabitating in under a minute. You could then each check the results of the collaboration and use that to decide whether to explore greater intimacy together.

There's a recurring subplot about the question of personhood and rights. Early on, Macx is contacted by a colony of lobsters who had been uplifted by a revanchist Soviet Union. They have become self-aware and long for their freedom. Macx arranges for this; specifically, though, they want to leave their lobster bodies behind, and instead become a digital intelligence that is beamed into the depths of outer space. Meanwhile on Earth, people have become more comfortable with concepts of cloning: someone might choose to clone a beloved elder who has passed away, or create cloned versions of their own offspring in the event of some calamity, or the classic gambit of cloning yourself. Besides biological cloning, though, there is digital cloning too. Near the end of the book, technology has advanced to the point where people can upload their consciousness into, well, "the cloud"; once there, it's possible to "fork" your "self", creating two (or more!) copies that start off as identical but may be set on separate tasks. In one example that's great because it's so mundane, a person encounters a loquacious talker when entering a party. He has wanted to talk with this person for a while, but knows that doing so will eat up all his time at the party. So he creates one fork to stay and participate in this dull conversation while the other fork continues mingling with other guests. Ultimately those forks can reintegrate, at which point their memories will join together and synthesize.

So you end up with a variety of conscious entities: AI who have become sentient, non-human animal species that have grown intelligent, humans who have augmented their consciousness with digital agents, humans who have uploaded their consciousness and become purely digital, and, eventually, created beings who have always been digital. Macx can see where this is headed decades earlier, so one of his priorities is to ensure that "human rights" are carefully reconsidered and updated for the coming era of multiple intelligences.

Another thing I've always loved about Stross is how he thinks about the girders that underlie the worlds he creates. How does the economy work in a Berkeleian universe where people experience life through direct neural stimulation rather than through their biological sensors? Well, it ultimately comes down to bandwidth and compute power: these are the actual limited resources; within the digital world, actually experiencing, say, a stage coach or a steamboat or a jet plane are all equivalently "expensive". In the italicized sections fronting each short story, Stross describes how much computing power is held within biological brains versus computers, and notes the point where this crosses over. One of the most striking developments comes when the insatiable demand for additional computing power leads to the demolition of planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, and eventually the gas giants will be taken apart, their raw material reworked into "computronium", the engineered matter that will expand the grid of digital power. This sounds shocking, but does make a lot of sense: a tiny ping-pong-sized ball of computing power can hold enough capacity for an entire world to experience full lives.

There is an early, brief discussion of the Mormon church in Accelerando, and by the time it reached the end I thought it was surprisingly aligned with some aspects of Mormon theology. Stross isn't Mormon, of course, but in some ways this felt like a Mormon book in the way that, say, Ender's Game never did. The idea of researching ancestry and praying for the salvation for the previously deceased sort of segues into a world where you can collect all known information about a person, and essentially take a crack at "re-souling" them. Of course, for a pre-digital-age person this will be less likely to match who they "really" were, but it still may satisfy the needs of their "summoner"; people who have lived more of their lives digitally can more accurately be studied and reborn. And the explosion in resources does give each person the capacity to essentially have their own universe to create and guide and even populate with new sentient life: the only limit is the amount of matter in the Solar System.

Much like with Halting State, I found myself thinking of Neal Stephenson novels while reading this, but Stross wrote his books earlier. Halting State's MMORPG reminded me of T-RAIN in REAMDE. Accelerando has a lot of overlap with Fall, particularly the idea of digitizing consciousness and living in a purely digital world. In Accelerando, though, this is just one step along a long process, and the veil between living and dead seems at most porous, at least irrelevant; in Fall, there's a much more severe chasm between the living and the dead, mostly due to the different speed at which Bitworld runs.

The few blurbs I've seen about Accelerando describe it as a collection of stories about the singularity, which it probably is, but I did like how the characters within kind of pooh-pooh that idea. There's an early discussion about the singularity, and everyone has a different idea about it. Some think it's just around the corner. Others think it's impossible. Others think it happened centuries ago. Others think it's meaningless. That variety of opinions felt very real to me, which leads to the surprising groundedness of this book.

END SPOILERS

I haven't gotten much into the actual plot of the book, especially the back half, so I'll just note that it's highly entertaining, surprising and rewarding, as I've come to expect from Stross. This book has been a great read, bursting at the seams with ideas. It's kind of shocking that it was written two decades ago; while we aren't living in this world, it did an amazing job at predicting many developments, and even better at anticipating the concerns we'd have today. Overall this is much more of a hard-sci-fi book than, say, the Merchant Princes or Laundry Files series, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in a nice meaty speculation about our digital future in the universe.

Profanity: Duplicate Virtue

This is probably the longest gap I've had on the blog between posts updating my progress through a game, but here we go: I've returned to Divinity Original Sin after more than a decade, and this time I intend to finish it!

 

My memory of events is slightly hazy after all these years, but I think what went down was: I was playing the game, really digging it, wrote a post and kept playing. I set it aside when Dragon Age: Inquisition came out. I loved DA:I, played it all the way through, then immediately replayed it in Nightmare Mode to unlock achievements. Somewhere in there, Larian announced and then released the Enhanced Edition to D:OS. This was a significant update, modifying the game engine as well as the contents (somewhat analogous to the changes between Shadowrun Dragonfall and Dragonfall: Director's Cut), and they released it as a separate entry on Steam (though giving it for free to all owners of the original "Classic" D:OS).

 

Of course, saved games were not compatible between the two versions. Everything I read said that the EE version of the game was a significant improvement over the (already highly-praised) Classic and there was no reason at all to stick with Classic. But by that point, I had sunk dozens of hours into the game and didn't relish the thought of starting over again from scratch. And on the other hand, I was still much less than halfway through the game, and didn't like the idea of spending so much time playing through an "inferior" version. Compounding all this, I loaded in my last save, and had that awkward moment where you come back to an RPG after several months' hiatus: I couldn't quite remember what I was doing, the big-picture story I'd been unfurling or my immediate quests. I decided to just permanently set it aside and focus on the other new games coming down the pike - and replaying DA:I yet again!

 

In the years since then, I've been repeatedly blown away by the developer Larian's work. I played all the way through Divinity: Original Sin 2, which has the best combat system of any RPG I've ever played. And Baldur's Gate 3 was a huge delight, with fantastic storytelling and an amazing world to explore. I've been feeling that itch since BG3, and wanting to go back and finish D:OS 1 EE. And now I am!

 

 

After all these years, my memory is a bit vague, but I think I've been recognizing some major improvements in the EE over Classic. Crafting is a huge one. If I recall correctly, originally you would read recipe books but the recipes wouldn't be recorded anywhere, so you'd need to hold on to the books and refer back to them (or copy them down on paper yourself or memorize them, but there are hundreds of possible recipes). And the recipe books are kind of jokily written, which is great for flavor but not for clarity. In EE, there's a full Crafting window that includes all the recipes you've read about in books, as well as the ones you've discovered yourself through experimentation. The actual crafting is much easier in the new interface, where you can either select from a list of results or free-form drag in potential items; it filters out your whole inventory so you only see craftable ingredients, which is a huge cognitive help.

All that said, crafting in general is still something I feel a bit ambivalent about. It is a very cool system, something I think I admire more than I enjoy. The sheer scope of it is impressive, much richer and wider than in most other RPGs, with lots of intermediate ingredients, items you can source from anywhere, the ability to craft food and potions and other consumables and equipment and upgrades. That said, only a small fraction of the items you can create are actually useful. I mean, everything does something, but (at least on normal difficulty) you're generally finding plenty of stuff just out in the world. In my game there are a couple of item gaps I was able to fill with crafting, particularly amulets; but I needed to look up those recipes online. Overall the D:OS crafting feels kind of midway between a "gamey" crafting system like in Dragon Age and a "realistic", non-game-y system like in Ultima that simulates an entire economic production chain.

Another difference I noticed from my original play-through was how the dual player character conversations played out. One of the signature features of D:OS is that you create two characters at the start of the game, not just one as in most RPGs. Any given conversation will initiate with one character, but the second PC will have an opportunity to chime in at key moments, particularly when making a decision. I recall role-playing both sides of the conversation in my initial playthrough. In the EE, I pick the response for my currently controlled PC, and the other auto-responds. I eventually realized that that's because I assigned each PC a "Personality" at character creation, which I think picks their response. You can change this partway through the game when you unlock an option to redo character appearance. I switched each to "No AI" and now it's back to the original behavior of you (the player) picking each PC's dialogue responses. So that's good. I have noticed that I'm still approaching the dialogues a little differently: I'm being a bit more min-max-y this time around and reloading after discussions if I don't like the Traits that get assigned, whereas I think in my initial playthrough I had a firmer role-playing mindset.

 

Last change I've noticed from Classic: I remember having major problems dealing with surfaces in the first game. I was constantly walking into poison or into electrified water and Having A Bad Experience. That seems to be happening way less in this EE game. They may have eased up on it, either redesigning combat encounters and the maps to have more forgiving surface layouts, or updating the underlying system to make it harder for your party to activate hazardous surfaces. But it's also possible that I'm just now better at recognizing and avoiding surfaces after the hundreds of hours I've played in D:OS2 and BG2. I do vaguely recall that... hm, I think in D:OS2 the movement cursor would turn red if you hovered over a surface, which definitely doesn't happen in D:OS1 EE, so there are still some times when I think I'm skirting the edge of a surface but I end up accidentally stepping into it and getting in trouble. And I keep forgetting that Bull Rush activates any surfaces you travel through, so if you charge through burning grass and/or a poison cloud you will end up burning and poisoned, even if your start and end positions were clear.

Okay, on to my experience in the new game:

I decided to create all-new PCs instead of redoing my abandoned ones from Classic. I consulted this guide, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants some help. It's spoiler-free, helpfully opinionated without being dogmatic, and written from the ground-up for EE, unlike other information floating around that was based on Classic and never fully updated. In my first playthrough, my cleric Tindali always felt weak; after reading through this guide, I now realize that's because she was splitting between STR for her weapon attacks and INT for her Water magic. You should either go all-in on INT and get multiple schools of magic, or focus on STR and just supplement with utility spells that don't depend on INT. My dagger rogue Sariya felt a lot more powerful, because she was just focusing on DEX, Scoundrel and Dagger, which all went well together.

 

This time I created Rion, who is mostly a pure ranged Archer/Ranger (DEX and Marksman, so far no points in weapons and alternating between Bows and Crossbows, but I plan to specialize in Bows), and has some small splashes in Pyrokinetic, Witchcraft and Scoundrel for utility. Rion is generally my face, although he doesn't have much Charisma that doesn't really seem to matter much; he does have decent Bartering so he handles all buying and selling, and he has Loremaster to identify items. My second PC Noor will be a generalist all-schools Mage, but for now she's mostly focusing on Pyrokinetic and Geomancy, since I've also recruited the NPC Jahan who starts with Aerothurge and Hydrosophist. I haven't put any points into Dirty Deeds, but Noor will swap into Lockpicking and Pickpocket gear in the rare occasions we need it. Jahan, in addition to his magical combat also handles crafting and repairs. Rounding out the party is Madora, a two-handed warrior. Currently she's laser-focused on Man-at-arms but I plan to give her some utility as well.

 

 

I also had Jahan and Madora in my first game, and briefly contemplated using different folks, but I like their personalities and builds so I'm mostly sticking with them. There are another two recruitable NPCs available: Wulfrum, an archer thief, and Bairdotr, a dagger rogue. I've recruited them and immediately dismissed them, as apparently they gain experience along with you whether they're in your party or not. I have no memory at all of either character; it's possible I didn't run into either one the first time, but it's more likely that I didn't realize that they were recruitable: if you have a full party, the game doesn't make clear that they are potential companions, and it's also possible to lose the recruitment opportunity through rock-paper-scissors dialogue. I'm planning to do their personal quests but haven't traveled with either NPC yet.

I'm taking the Pet Pal talent this time. I think I intentionally skipped it in my first game; I don't exactly remember why, but I may have read an article noting that the animal dialogue adds a more comedic element to the game, and I might have decided that I didn't want that. It does add more of a sense of humor, which I enjoy a lot: I've had more than enough Dark Fantasy in my life, I'll enjoy a few puns and silly voices, thank you very much. More importantly though, talking with animals can help you solve quests, and even more importantly, GET new quests you wouldn't otherwise be able to pick up. There's limited XP in this game, so that's a very precious commodity!

 

As with D:OS2, there's effectively a soft level cap from the limited amount of experience available in the game. You can earn exploration XP by entering a new area for the first time - this might be as minor as a hidden cellar or a locked shed. You earn combat XP by defeating enemies. From peeking at online games, a lot of people will intentionally attack otherwise friendly or neutral characters in order to get their precious XP; I'm more likely to take an optional fight in this game than I would otherwise do, but so far haven't felt comfortable fighting friendlies. Finally, you can get XP from completing quests. These can take a long time, as there is usually a decent story involved that unfolds after multiple hours of encounters, but it's a significant amount that can often lead to a new level. Overall all three sources feel well-balanced and worth pursuing.

 

 

Even a decade after release, this game is still ridiculously fun, almost dangerously so. No: definitely dangerously so! I'd play it all day long if I could. When I'm not playing it, I'm hearing the battle music in my head (any one of many catchy themes) and thinking about what I want to do next. It isn't QUITE as finely tuned as D:OS2, but is definitely scratching that itch, in ways that even BG3 didn't manage (as much as I love that game).

I think I'm bringing to this play-through the epiphany I received in D:OS2. In most RPGs, combat is the chore I need to get through in order to experience the story, which is the reward I actually want. In D:OS, combat is the addictive and fun reward that keeps me coming back, and I find myself clicking through story, eager to get back to fights. Not at all to say that there's anything wrong with the story - it's a fine fantasy tale, and I do appreciate the different tone it has from many other RPGs. It's more a testament to how darn good their combat is.

MINI SPOILERS

Plot-wise, I think I'm more or less caught up to where I stopped playing originally. I think I'm past the first big "Zone", having revealed the whole map around Cyseal and I think wrapped up all the quests I can in that area (though I may have missed a few small things). The big storyline here deals with the epidemic of undead who have besieged Cyseal for two years. You uncover a pretty complex conspiracy, with several mysteries and turns and identity revelations. Lots of people aren't what they seem like. You eventually learn that a cult has been trying to acquire some knowledge held by the long-dead sourcerer-king Braccus Rex. They recruited Thelyron, the medic in Cyseal, to locate Braccus and raise him from the dead. To accomplish this he created (or raised?) several other powerful beings, but those beings then began raising undead of their own, and the whole thing spiraled out of control. Nobody was happy, not even the cult since he couldn't find Braccus. You take down all the lieutenants and eventually the reborn Braccus himself.

 

 

I'm now early in the second section, around the smaller village of Silverglen. I do like how each town has its own economy - Cyseal is a harbor town built primarily around fishing, while Silverglen is a mining town deep in the woods by a mine. There's more cult business here, and some fun quest chains around a bunch of troll toll collectors (Larian really loves wordplay). I also need to find a witch who is the sister to a villain.  I'm at level 9, it sounds like the soft cap is around level 21-23 or so.

END SPOILERS

So far there really haven't been any major branching plot lines like you'd get in a BioWare or CD Projekt Red RPG. But it also doesn't feel like it's been running on rails. There is almost total freedom in where to go and what to do, feeling much more like an Ultima than a modern RPG. There's some soft gating in the form of difficult enemies blocking the path, but you don't need to pass story beats to access later parts of the game. You also have a ton of opportunities to advise other NPCs in how to act or to express your reactions to events, and can have your PCs speak with a unified voice or convey diverging views. All that to say that so far I'm not missing the lack of Virmire-style choices. This game is doing something else, and on its terms doing it well.

 

I'm looking forward to jumping back into it. I think that from here on out the content should be all-new to me, but set in a system I'm quickly coming to adore.

Far from the Madding Crowd

I recently finished reading "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki. I had to look up that name just now to spell it - I've been a fan of James' writing for two decades, mostly his excellent column "The Financial Page" in The New Yorker, and have been curious about this book for a while, but just finally got around to reading it. My immediate impetus for checking it out was noticing it on this list of best financial books as compiled by Larry Swedroe. A lot of those are books I've already read and loved, a few I know I'm not interested in, but a few ones like this jumped out at me and gave me a nudge to finally read them.

 

 

TWoC is a great read, the kind of book that's entertaining and makes you feel smart, like you've learned something both personally useful and true about the universe. It feels a bit Malcolm Gladwell-y, in the best positive sense. Like a lot of books in this genre, it's focused around a simple thesis: in this case, that groups of people tend to make better decisions than individuals. Groups are more than the sum of their parts, smarter than the smartest people in them, and can collectively arrive at solutions beyond any individual.

The first example he opens with is the classic example of a contest to guess the number of items in a large jar - how many gumballs or jelly beans or ping-pong balls or whatever. At a state fair people will write down their guess and submit it. At the end, if you add up everyone's guesses and divide by the number of entries, you'll end up with a really great approximation of the answer. In fact, that average answer will often be closer than any individual guesser. He gives a lot of other examples of groups collectively arriving at good solutions, both to complex problems (finding where a submarine landed deep on the ocean floor) and seemingly mundane ones (how to walk down a crowded sidewalk).

One thing that surprised me, though, is that after introducing the thesis, he spends more time exploring examples that seem to contradict the thesis: cases where crowds acted dumbly, where adding more people led to a worse solution, where something that worked well at a small level failed to scale up to a larger one. I think this really helps clarify the main point: by seeing what doesn't work, we can identify what does. The real world is, of course, complicated. We can't say "A always causes B!" We can say "A usually leads to B!" And then we can think about why that's the case, and what makes it more likely for A to lead to B, and what obstacles might prevent A from reaching B.

James classifies the types of problems crowds face into three main types, what he calls "cognition problems," "coordination problems" and "cooperation problems." (Again, this feels pretty Gladwell-y.) Cognition problems are the simplest type, and are cases where there is a specific right answer to find. You don't know at the outset what that answer is, but at some point in the future you will know whether you chose correctly or not. The gumballs-in-a-jar problem is one example, and so are "Where did the submarine crash to the ocean floor?" and even "How much money will this company earn over the next 20 years?" or "Who will be the next President of the United States"? There are multiple ways that groups can organize to tackle these problems, and he is a big fan of a "market" organization, where people bid on their best guesses: putting some skin in the game seems to drastically help the accuracy of predictions. (As a loyal Patreon subscriber to Election Profit Makers, I was intrigued by the description of the Iowa Electronic Market, a forerunner to PredictIt, Polymarket and other modern prediction markets.)

In a "coordination problem," there isn't some fact (past, present, or future) that you're trying to uncover. Instead, a group needs to decide how to accomplish some task, with everyone acting as individuals. Most of his examples here involve traffic, like busy New York City sidewalks or congested freeways. What's interesting about coordination problems is that, as a species, we are actually really good at coordinating, and we tend to do it without much thinking or direction. When scientists studied pedestrians, they discovered that pedestrians don't walk directly behind one another: each one walks slightly to the side of the person in front of them, so they can peer over their shoulder and see what's ahead. We do that for our own benefit, so we can be prepared if foot traffic is snarling ahead, but it also benefits everyone else in the group, since it keeps traffic moving smoothly.

Another example he looks at that I really liked is seating on a subway car. During rush hour, there are more riders than there are seats available. So we have a coordination problem to solve: who should get seats? The unspoken system we've landed with is simple: if you'd like to sit, and there's an open seat, you take it. (With of course caveats for handicapped seats.) Now, you can definitely argue that this isn't an optimal system, and it certainly isn't the only system you can imagine. Maybe we should prioritize giving seats to the people who have the longest to ride - that does seem fair. But if we were to implement that system, then you would need to have some Seating Czar on each subway car, who would quiz each rider as they boarded, compare their travel plans to others already on the car, and reassign seats as needed. Or each boarding rider would need to quiz every other rider to determine their seating order. The system we ended up with is good enough, much simpler and has way less overhead, and it actually does end up having an effect like that ideal system: people who are riding for longer will have more chances to claim seats, so while it won't necessarily be "fair" 100% of the time, it will be pretty fair most of the time. That's decent coordination.

Pretty much everything in the book is based on published scientific studies, not anecdotes, which I appreciated. In the coordination section, he notes that a lot of our behavior is strongly influenced by culture. People feel strongly about queues, for example, and will react strongly if someone asks to cut into a queue; on the other hand, people are much more willing to give up a subway seat if politely requested. The line is a more powerful force in our psyche than a subway car. Behavioral economists and sociologists have played "coordination games" in different countries around the world, and found differences in how players behave. Which is fine - again, for coordination there isn't necessarily a "right" or a "wrong" answer. We can all agree to drive on the left, or we can all agree to drive on the right, and as long as we're all doing it the same way we've successfully coordinated.

The last, and most challenging, class of problem he considers is the "cooperation problem." In this case, you are trying to solve a problem and make something happen: work as a construction crew to build a building, or as a party committee to put on a prom, or as NASA to bring a shuttle of astronauts safely back to Earth. One of the inherently hard things about this type of problem is that there isn't a clear black-or-white "right answer", but there definitely are good outcomes (everyone had a good time at Prom!) and bad outcomes (nobody had a good time at Prom!). With a cooperation problem, you need to decide what needs to be done, how to do it, and execute on it.

There are lots of different ways to organize things. You could have a pure committee, where each person gets one vote, and everyone does what the majority says. You could have a dictatorship, where one person (the boss) decides what to do, and makes everyone do it. And everything in between: pyramidal management structures, affinity groups, multiple classes of participants, etc.

In general, James likes broad-based groups, to tap into the wisdom of crowds. Adding more voices can bring in more ideas, help identify blind spots, and lead to better outcomes. He goes into a lot of detail on where this is and isn't effective. Diversity is very important - not sociological diversity, but people with different perspectives and background who bring unique thoughts to the table. Adding a bunch more Harvard MBAs likely won't improve decision-making, but adding a mix of MBAs, long-time employees, outsiders from other organizations, and customers will.

He writes about "private knowledge," which just means something unique that one person has which isn't shared by everyone. This could be some expertise, but also just having had a previous experience in the past, or knowing a random fact. The sum of all the private knowledge in a group will be greater than the private knowledge of even the most knowledgeable person. So an interesting quality of many group dynamics is that, if you add "dumber" people to a group, the decisions that group makes can actually become "smarter". The total knowledge of the group increases additively, it isn't reduced to the mean.

But, how the group is organized has a huge impact on realizing this potential. There's a long and kind of heart-breaking example of the Columbia explosion, and the days of internal NASA meetings that completely failed to handle the problem. (The underlying issue: there was a botched takeoff, which damaged the foam and protective heat tiles. When it re-entered the atmosphere at the end of the mission, the intense heat destroyed the shuttle.) One big aspect of this was management: the mission manager chair Linda Ham quickly settled on an interpretation of the facts that she liked, and downplayed and cut off other voices who suggested alternative (and, it turns out, better) explanations. This is a really wrenching section to read, I think especially because the dynamics shown here are often seen in workplaces throughout the country, but with the severest consequences.

James doesn't just blame the one person at top (even if the fact one person was driving everything contributed to the problem). He rhetorically asks, what was the difference between the Apollo 13 mission and the Columbia mission? One answer is that the Apollo 13 ground control was much more diverse. As he points out, that is a kind of shocking thing to say: when you see photos of the Apollo-era ground control, everyone has identical haircuts, identical classes and identical short-sleeved shirts. But because NASA was so new, everyone had worked somewhere else before joining. Some were ex-military, some were in manufacturing, some had worked in research labs, some managed retail stores. By contrast, by the time of the Columbia disaster, NASA was a much more insular and bureaucratic operation. Most people there had joined right out of college and spent their entire careers inside NASA. Because of that they all shared the same culture, similar mindsets and attitudes towards hierarchies. That made it far less likely for someone to speak up to challenge the decision of a leader, and even less likely to press on an issue once they had been shut down.

The book is filled with nifty examples like that. It is very much a relic of its time, having been written in 2004, and I felt a little sad reading James's praises of Google. I was reminded of just how magical Google was back then - you could type something into a search box and it did a really good job at finding you the information you needed. He explains how the PageRank algorithm works, which is essentially a voting mechanism, tapping into the "wisdom of crowds" to find the most useful information instead of relying on a single authoritative source (a la Yahoo at the time). Google's fall from grace has been well-documented, and I'm a bit more sympathetic to their decline: even before the disastrous decision to remove the wall between Search and Ads, Google had been dealing for over a decade with an entire SEO industry that had sprung up specifically to manipulate its algorithm into unduly weighting preferred sites. Voting worked well when the data was clean, but when you vote with dirty data you'll get dirty results.

It was also interesting to read about business in the window after the tech bubble crash of the late 90s-early 2000s and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. I don't think the GFC invalidated anything he wrote here, but he certainly would have referenced it if it had already happened. In the context of this book, an asset bubble like tech stocks is probably a more applicable example than a systemic financial problem like the GFC.

I think of James primarily as a business writer, but TWoC as a whole is much less about business than I had expected. He draws mostly from science and sociology, with smatterings of history, pop culture and other fields. There are more business examples as the book continues, but he mostly pays attention to how things work inside individual businesses, especially at the level of small teams. This is much more micro than most of my business and econ reading these days, which are far more focused on macro. But the micro level is much more applicable to our lives, the level where we can recognize problems and systems and personally act to fix them.

I found myself thinking periodically of Nexus while reading this, and parts of this book seemed to be in conversation with that one, but that may be because I read them back-to-back. Both books are interested in information, and have examples where adding more information leads to a worse outcome. Returning to that gumball example, late in the book James recounts a study where a professor ran the classic experiment, and as usual got a pretty accurate result. He didn't share this result with his class, but instead asked them to submit new guesses, this time prompting them to note that the container was made out of plastic, and that the area under the cap could contain additional gumballs. All of this is information students could have, and maybe did, observe in the first round, and all of the information he shared was true. And yet in the second round of voting, guesses came in significantly over the actual answer. Having an authority figure inject additional information skewed the natural accuracy of the crowd and drew it astray. That's interesting!

Overall I think the Wisdom of Crowds is a more optimistic book than Nexus. It's hopeful that crowds can identify the truth that points to an underlying reality, collectively making discoveries. That isn't a guarantee, and there are definitely ways that crowds can be drawn astray or hijacked by bad actors, but in general we as a society do our best work when we're cooperating in groups. He has some thoughtful pages on the implications for democracy as well. It's pretty shocking how poorly informed voters are: most people (at least as of 2004, though I doubt it's much better now) believe that the US spends 20-40% of its tax dollars on foreign aid, when it's actually less than 1%. Collectively, we're shockingly ignorant about economics, foreign policy, and most big-picture topics. And yet, we (historically) have done a decent job at electing leaders who do a decent job at handling those things. Some of us daydream of a technocratic elite that knows stuff and can do things, but the dumb masses end up with a system that works just as well, and is (theoretically) more resistant to capture or authoritarianism.

So, yeah! I liked this book, it's one of those general topics that I think will be interesting and relevant to most people.