Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 13:10

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Alistair, Daveth and Jory are all in our party now, and I review their equipment. We’re the only mage in the party—Alistair and Jory are warriors while Daveth is a rogue—and all three of our teammates are well-armed and armored. However, none of them are wearing amulets or belts, and since we have a surplus of both I make sure to equip everybody with our extra gear. With that done, I lead the group to the Ostagar gate. The guard knows we have business in the forest, so he lets us pass. We’re now out in the wilderness.

We don’t get very far into the woods before we encounter enemies—not darkspawn, surprisingly enough, but the local wolves. There are two small packs of them that charge our position, and it serves as something of a warm-up for the tougher fighting we’ll face later. Even on Nightmare, they’re not that difficult, as they’re vulnerable to our character’s magical attacks and the fighters can easily out-muscle them. Even when our mage gets swarmed by three wolves while the others are all beating up on a lone paralyzed wolf—the Glyph of Paralysis is still useful—I manage to eliminate them with spells pretty-much single-handed. Still, there’s much tougher opposition in the woods, and that’s driven home as we advance a bit further. We come across a badly wounded soldier, who manages to tell us that his unit was ambushed by darkspawn and he’s the only survivor. We bandage him up and he heads back to camp, but Jory’s definitely shaken by this. He expresses fear over the extreme dangers the darkspawn pose, but Alistair calms him down. As a Grey Warden, he has an inherent ability to detect darkspawn, so it’ll be impossible for them to catch us by surprise.

After that, I actually decide to focus on finding the flower we need to cure the sick dog. It’s fairly close to a nearby wall, and we successfully find it without further opposition. With the flower claimed, I head back into Ostagar and give it to the kennel master. He’s excited to have the flower and is now confident that the dog will be back to normal in a day or two. He asks us to come back after the battle and see if the dog “imprints” on us—mabari hounds choose their own masters, and this one knows the role we played in helping it—a suggestion we agree to. That concludes the side quest for helping the mabari hound, but we’re not done in Ostagar yet. I return to the quartermaster and sell him the wolf pelts we looted from the fight in the wilds, and also buy two important recipes I skipped earlier. The Health Poultice is a more advanced version of the poultices I can already make, and the Lesser Injury Kit heals injuries sustained when party members are KO’ed. Our Herbalism level isn’t high enough to make either one, but once it is I’ll be able to create them right away. With that, I lead the group back into the Korcari Wilds and prepare to finally confront the darkspawn.