Duration: 9:19

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The first door we find in the basement is, according to Lily, the “Victim’s Door”. Built from 277 planks, one for each of the first templars, it can only be opened by a templar and mage working together. The templar has to give an oral password, and then the mage has to use magic to break the seal. Lily knows the password, and after she states it we use our magic to get past the door without a problem. On the other side of that door is a hallway where we find the door to the phylactery chamber itself. I have our character take out the rod of fire and try to melt the locks, but Irving was right—magic doesn’t work on it. Lily and Jowan are a bit confused, until Jowan exclaims that he can’t cast spells. They now realize that the original plan won’t work and aren’t happy, but I point out that there’s another door in the hallway. There’s little choice but to carry on, so we continue.

The rod does work on this door and we get through, but not unopposed—a “suit of armor” next to the door comes to life and engages us! These are Sentinels, and they act as magical guardians of the basement against intruders. We’ll have to fight our way through them if we want to enter the phylactery chamber, but this first one is defeated relatively quickly. Besides our own spells, Jowan has a couple of fire spells that work quite well in combat, and I double-team the Sentinel with our Shock spell and Jowan’s Fire Blast for excellent results. Once that’s done, I have Jowan cast Flaming Weapons; it’s a passive spell that’ll cause Lily’s dagger to do additional fire damage with every strike. We then resume our advance, defeat a group of two Sentinels, and move down a long hallway. Some rooms we come across have valuable loot items, which I make sure to pick up. We then open a door at the other end and defeat yet another two-Sentinel party.

After this particular skirmish, our character hits Level 3, so I decide to take a time out to allocate our points. As always, we have three Attribute points, and I put all of those into Magic to raise our Magic statistic to 25. We also earned a Skill point—we receive those only every third level, so those are quite valuable—and I invest it in the Coercion skill to gain Improved Coercion. That makes us more persuasive in dialogue, which isn’t that useful in combat but is great from a role-playing standpoint. Finally, we get to pick a new spell, and I choose Glyph of Paralysis. Glyphs are essentially magical markers in the ground that have various effects, and this one paralyzes any enemy that walks across it unless they manage to resist. It functions as something of a magical land mine, and I expect it’ll be invaluable for the tough fights later on in the game.