Let's play Lords of Xulima

From what I can tell, you're not the only one with this problem. Unfortunately, if screwing with the resolution doesn't help, then I don't think anything is going to do it for you.

Is the text size in the LP screenshots too small? I don't want to be insensitive, but this is an issue I don't experience, so I'm not sure I understand. I'm personally playing at 1280x768, for what it's worth.

Some of it is smallish, but for the most part I can read the screenshots fine. But they look blown up. As for understanding, my eyes are definitely shit, but I don't often have this problem. Ah well...

Lords of Xulima just got a major update that includes an editor. Sounds like you can change the rules of the game. Want to remove random encounters (and boost the XP rewards for the fixed encounters to compensate)? There's a mod for that!

As for the LP... well, there's a Crawl tournament going on right now. But when we come back, we'll still have the vanilla experience. Gaulen has a new portrait, so you have that to look forward to!

PREVIOUSLY ON LET'S PLAY LORDS OF XULIMA: KILLED HERALD

AND NOW



When we last left our adventuresome crew, they had just cleansed the temple of Alnaet and learned the whereabouts of the four final keys. That's getting ahead of ourselves, since we haven't entirely retrieved the first four, but good to know all the same.

We got some levels in the process. Cecil is one level shy of learning the attack spell that's too weak for me to even bother giving to Rosa, so you know you can expect good things here.



If you read this really fast, it looks like it says "Altar of Toilet," and the statue suggests that the Lady might even be worshipping the porcelain god. But that's not what it says, and that's not what she's doing.



Exploring a bit more of the environs of Khornil's castle nets a level up for Rydia. Heralds Light (yes, they do) is a pretty decent ability that we'll want to pick up when Rydia has the spare skill points, which should be somewhere around level 40 at this rate. (That's only a slight exaggeration.)



A lucky skill book bumps Edge's Shuriken skill up a notch. While that's only worth one skill point in the long run, it gets his ability ahead of the level curve in the short run. Shuriken are amazing, so this is a good thing.

The other skill books in this image stand a very good chance of rotting in our inventory for the rest of the game.



An even luckier skill book bumps Gaulen's herbs skill to the next level. This is also a one-point skill, but it caps out at level 30, and the earlier we can achieve that, the more stats, resistances, and skill points we'll get out of the deal.

By the way, the entirety of this update is Old Portrait Gaulen. If you were looking forward to his dashing new art, keep looking.



Here's an action pose of the Yotum Young, the smaller version of the Yotum Adult that we unluckily encountered first. Any enemy big enough to serve as its own encounter has some way of hitting more than one of your party. Our back row isn't thrilled about that, but I've pumped their constitution enough that they aren't too far behind the front row (although Cecil has much better armor than Edward).



JBear keeps singing the praises of Dispel. I guess I should pick it up; Rosa has skill points to burn. Eventually, she'll burn some of them on Elemental Protection, but at this stage of the game, it's not so helpful.



WOOF WOOF

Why yes, I am making a note of every Cursed Hound encounter.

Ever play Star Control 2? You should; it's great. There are these mining drones that will run into you every so often, increasing in frequency as the game goes on. There's a way to contact the point of origin and get them to disable the drones, but it's way out of the way, and you'll find it very late in the game unless you have a guide and go out of your way to finish that sidequest. In similar fashion, we'll eventually find a way to end the waves of Cursed Hounds, but we need to go to the hardest area in the game to do it.

Cursed Hounds are the only renewable source of monsters in the game, though, so if you were looking to exploit every last experience point, then you wouldn't want to finish that quest anyway. But as you know by now, optimal Lords of Xulima play sucks.



At this point, it occurs to me that with Khornil gone, we're free to explore the main area of Hamaleth, the map where we fought the Ulnalum Guardian. I told you to forget the name of this map because it's not important. I apologize for mentioning it again; it really isn't important.



This is our first run-in with the Moatauro. (Moatauro, mo problems, as they say.) It takes a real beating, but it's not terribly interesting otherwise.



Slightly less uninteresting is the Grazteron, who inflicts moderate wounds with its attack. The mohawk ostrich family is also notable for a guaranteed drop of eggs that heal you. Not a huge deal, but nice all the same.



Once you make it through those enemies, your food problems are solved for life. Our food supply is at four days and change...



...up to six, but we're interrupted by a giant tree.



We kill it, and Rydia gains a level. In doing so, she teaches the Herald of Valvet a new trick: Fireball, a spell that does a large amount of damage to one enemy and a smaller amount to anyone standing next to that enemy. It also sets all of those enemies on fire. It's a very good spell for this point in the game, although at 80 PP, the Herald won't be casting it too many times in a single summoning. It costs 30 PP at level 1, going to 60 at level 5.

Anyway, this is the single best food spot in the game. If we find ourselves running low or about to embark on a long journey, we'll stop by this area.



I totally scummed this treasure chest. The contents of locked treasure chests are determined upon completion of the lockpicking game, and it's simple if time-consuming to save before opening the chest and reload until you get something worthwhile. Of course, it hardly bears mentioning at this point that optimal Lords of Xulima play sucks, but this was a sufficiently high-level treasure chest that it was worth my while to spend a few minutes here. This is a very nice piece of body armor.

Look at me! I'm walking on water!



The path looks to be about knee-deep, though, which I bet leaves your shoes wet for days afterwards.

Here's the gate to the Temple of Nalaet, which will be one of the last places we visit if memory serves.



Oh, right. This is literally the only reason you'd ever need to remember the name Hamaleth. This area is the target of one of Velaskar's quests, but it's a little beyond our capabilities at this point.



The garden isn't the first area we've fought demons, but it is the first area where we'll really fight them exclusively and in earnest. These guys are real jerks, capable of draining PP from multiple party members with one action. Since our capacity to keep fighting is dictated by our PP, these are more taxing than many harder enemies would be.



That's not to say they're pushovers, either. They deal good damage, and their attacks inflict heavy bleeding and occasionally silence. Also, the entire party is essentially out of PP at this point.



The battle claims Cecil, and of the survivors only Rosa has any PP left (and even that's only because she leaned on Divine Prayer for healing). The experience rewarded by this fight in no way justifies the trouble it gave us.



In conclusion, screw the garden, so we're back in Velaskar to clear out the canyon. You might remember that we're looking for clues some jerk left behind when he died. It won't be relevant for a little while still.



This is more interesting! We noticed the mausoleum earlier, but there was an intimidating-looking bird guarding the entrance. With it out of the way, let's take the plunge.



This is the second-smallest mausoleum I've ever seen.
Hold on. I think there's a secret door.



Aha! Just give this skull a kick and we're in like Jinn.
Excuse me, the correct term is "Ifrit."

This is about where secret door triggers start getting ridiculous, but at least it's pretty obvious that there is one here.



Like every mausoleum, there's traps. This one has more than its RDV of secret doors, too.



If this is your first time playing and you haven't been training Perception, you're in for a painful and unproductive trip here. If you have a Mage, she might have but probably hasn't learned End of Flames yet -- it's a level 22 spell. You could burn a scroll to get through here...



...but if you find the hidden doors, you don't need to.

The central chamber is also full of fire, and while you don't need to extinguish it, you won't get a chance to rest between walking through the fire and fighting the boss.



This guy. Real pain in the neck. How much of a pain, you ask?



We just squeaked out a win here. I don't remember what was in the tomb, but it was not commensurate with the trouble it took to attain it.



Side note: the trainers are by far the wealthiest citizens in Xulima, even if we're their only patrons.

NEXT TIME ON LET'S PLAY LORDS OF XULIMA: MAYBE A WITCH OR SOMETHING, I DUNNO

OLOXPS COUNT: 16 (mushrooms, locks and traps, cereal plants, encounter clearing, herald of Golot, bard songs, Golot's blessing, mausoleum keys, the arena, minions before bosses, riddle imps, Odendro drops, DLC, well of souls, Cursed Hounds, treasure chests)

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES:

• The arena in Sorrentia has ever more monsters to kill.
• Cunavarn's quests still want us to kill witch, find the thing, find the dead person, and collect the loot.
• Velaskar's quests still want us to exterminate monsters, collect the loot, find the person, find the dead person, and collect the other loot.

(FYI, the screenshots in your earlier updates seem to be dead links ATM. They were fine as of a couple weeks ago.)

Ever consider taking away Rosa/Rydia's weapons? The damage/stun chance eventually falls off so much as to essentially be non-existent, and I got some good mileage out of taking away my casters' weapons entirely and giving them a "light" shield.

You may as well sell them, then. I don't know if I was lucky or just more willing to roll with the loot (there were a couple of abilities that I learned purely to use a skill book on if they looked at all useful or interesting), but I've only sold one skill book all game (it was for Wounding Strike, and my only axe user, the Barbarian, didn't have access to the skill).

Looking at the ones that you have in that screenshot, though, I'd think that Powerful Strike is at least worth considering on the Paladin. It doesn't add a lot of extra damage, and doesn't scale well, but it's better than nothing on fights against enemies that are immune to Stun.

My favourite skill books by far were ones that let me learn expensive skills on classes that are "bad" at them, like free ranks of Armour on my Mage/Priest. I was bummed that I never found any Polearms books, though. In fact, I feel like the back-half of the game has far fewer skill books in general (unless I've just started missing them; they're hard to see sometimes).

I must admit to being a little worried that I did this too early myself. There was a 3rd tier of hound that I saw several of in the area that you speak of, but they had yet to show up in my periodic hound battles. I get the feeling that I must be under budget on "time".

I didn't know that this was a thing. I... I was happier not knowing. >_<

I'm starting to worry that I missed something, because I recently dinged 40 and these are still on my to-do list. I have reason to believe that I'll be re-visiting both areas soon, but the low XP/Gold rewards lead me to suspect that I'm expected to finish them much earlier.

The screenshots are hosted entirely on Steam, who shouldn't be deleting them, but I don't know if the links are subject to change.

Rosa already has a shield and a mace. Rydia might do better with a shield than with her current polearm, but weight is a major issue with her.

There are no random enemies in either area, and both have good loot. You can go in with a teleport crystal, wander around letting starvation kill off everyone but the cleric, and have himself heal until that runs dry, picking up some good stuff in the process well before the game expects you to be there (by which point you'd better have a really good Terrains skill). In both cases, the dead guy is close to the entrance, but if you don't sequence-break, then the quests are inconsequential by the time you finish them.

Yeah, I'm seeing broken screenshots, too. I guess Steam is messing with your storage.

That's weird -- I'm seeing everything on the first page. Can you give me an example of an image that's not working for you?

Well, that's weird. Last night, the screenshot of that armor you got wasn't working. Now it's showing up just fine.

Yeah, everything looks fine for me now as well. Maybe some kind of server hiccup? *shrug*

INTERMISSION: HERALDS

Now that the Lords of Xulima editor has been released, the inner workings of the game are laid bare. I've long wondered about the Heralds (Rydia's summons), and since I'm going to research them anyway, I might as well document them for you, too.

The Herald of Nalaet is our healing summon. It's already learned all the skills it's going to learn, which does not speak well to the endgame viability of this ability. That's Light Heal, Cure Wounds, Mend Bleeding, Regeneration, and Greater Heal. Cure Wounds and Mend Bleeding stay useful throughout the game, and Greater Heal is never bad, but it'll be outclassed by Mass Heal and later Divine Restoration. If it learned Divine Prayer, that would at least give it something to do when its PP runs out. Remember, the five skills in that list are literally all the herald can do besides defend.

The Herald of Taliet is the ice/lightning summon, focused on paralysis effects. It gets a basic attack that inflicts freezing, and it learns Shock, Blizzard, Lightning, and Thunder Storm. That's a pretty good spell set, although it again lacks the highest tier of magic (Frostball and Lords of Thunder), and its Thunder Storm caps at rank 3. The heralds are also bad at figuring out what an enemy is weak against, so I'd expect this herald to use ice and lightning interchangeably, even though they really aren't.

The Herald of Kersket is the tanky earth summon. It has an entirely physical skillset, consisting of "hit the enemy," "hit the enemy harder but with less stunning," "hit the enemy along with whatever's behind it," "throw a stone at the enemy" and "throw a stone at three enemies for half the damage." That's really unimpressive, but physical damage is at least consistent.

The Herald of Velvet is our signature fire summon. It's learned four of its skills: the basic attack (which can cause burning), Sparks (weakest fire magic, doesn't cause burning), Flames (fire magic that hits an enemy and the one behind it), Fireball (as described in the previous update), and Inferno. If you've been following along so far, you'd expect me to tell you the name of the actual strongest fire spell here, but Velvet is the combo breaker: it actually is Inferno. On the other hand, it only learns two out of five ranks of Inferno, and Inferno costs 60/75 PP at rank 1/2, which means it'll cast it twice before losing steam.

The Herald of Febret is the clerical summon. It learns Mass Stun Relieve, Remove Poison, Organic Resistance, Elemental Resistance, and Magic Resistance. It learns Remove Poison last at level 7, and if I bothered using it at all, I would probably stop there. Mass Stun Relieve and Remove Poison are both single-point skills, and I wouldn't rely on the herald to cast the correct Resistance spell for the situation. A very narrow-use herald, all in all.

The Herald of Raznet is the starting offensive summon; we have a few ranks of this. It gets a basic attack that may cause bleeding, a stronger attack that may wound, and less-stronger attacks that cause poison, sleep, and crazy (the Lords of Xulima version of confusion). That's pretty good -- I'd take this over the similarly-physical Kersket herald any day. We'll invest in this herald if we get a chance.

The Herald of Golot is a one-trick pony. It generates gold from your enemies, capping at an amount dependent on the enemy's level. Gold is always useful in that it can be exchanged for skill points, but it's never in such tight supply that I'd really want to use this. For it to work, you have to drag battles out until it's finished, which is why this herald made the OLOXPS list.

The Herald of Alnaet is the holy summon. It learns Divine Armor, Dispel, Life Absorption, Light Beam, and Divine Ray. (Energy Absorption is listed in the editor, but it never gains any ranks of it.) That list has the inauspicious distinction of being filled with spells I didn't bother teaching Rosa, although the herald does get Divine Ray all the way to rank 5, at which point it's the best single-target damage you'll get from a herald -- even before you factor in the double damage to undead and demons. Rosa won't get the chance to learn Divine Ray until level 32, whereas a Divine Summoner taking a rank in Alnaet every level will max it at level 31. Very good for that point in the game.


So what do we learn from this? Here are my takeaways:

• Divine Summoner is a weaker class than Mage throughout most of the game. That's not unexpected; it makes up for it with its "fire-and-forget" spells that leave it with lots of turns to spend chucking items or curing ally conditions. If you are the kind of player who keeps an iron grip on your consumables, then use Mage over Divine Summoner.
• The heralds of Kersket and Febret are hot garbage, and Golot's is probably not worth using either. Alnaet's is surprisingly good.
• While the herald of Nalaet has occasionally been invaluable, I think I would ditch her if I could do it all over again, going with Velvet/Raznet for a double offense.

I took one peek at this thread and now I want this game even more (it was on my wishlist). Does the game have any voice-overs at all, and can I record all my friends grunting and casting magic and put the clips in with their faces to make it seem like they are in the game?

Certain key enemies (the princes, the witches) have voices for their very first line of speech. You can absolutely put your friends' faces into the game, as evidenced by the LP, but as for their grunts, you'll need to keep a tape recorder nearby for the full experience.

PREVIOUSLY ON LET'S PLAY LORDS OF XULIMA: KILLED VAMPIRE

AND NOW



Here's Gaulen's new look! I kind of prefer his old look!

While I was here, I took the opportunity to show off more Numbers. Gaulen is sitting at an attack value of 128, derived from his Agility stat (43), his Axes skill (20 x 5 = 100), and the weapon he's using (-15 for the heavy battle axe). This is a nebulous value that affects accuracy, damage, and status potency. Despite what I said I'd do at the start of the LP, I've obviously been pumping his AG instead of his ST. Strength has a more direct effect on his damage (although it's still low: something like +0.3 per point), but for Gaulen in particular, I want lots of wounds, and with his sky-high Agility, I usually get them.



We have a little more business in Karraga before we move on to new lands. First, there's a mausoleum to disturb. The lore mentions a "the Ancient Yotum," and the definite article in that title indicates that we'll probably run into it before all's said and done.



Right off the bat, a trap. You have to do a little dancing next to the stairs to notice this before you run face-first into it.



The name of this mausoleum game is levers surrounded by traps. You can't disarm these spike traps, but there's always a way around them. Mausoleums (mausolea?) have no random encounters, but you can still die quickly if you're careless.



In one of the treasure chambers, we get a sneak peek into our near future as a wall-mounted statue pelts us with a fireball that deals entirely too much damage.



Much of the treasure in this dungeon is located in these nondescript pots. Among the other tidbits I gleaned from the newly-released editor is the fact that the treasure-bearing pots are randomized: the pot that I'm raiding here might not have anything when you play the game. This is also true of skeletons and other potential treasure sources, and each one draws from a different pool of potential items.



The guardian of this mausoleum is a garden-variety mummy, who poses a greater danger to your wallet (in the form of curses) than to your life.



Tomb-raiding yields experience. Our log reports it twice; I'm not sure if that's a mistake. Insert your own weed joke here.



The tomb contains a modest pile of gold and a decent ring.



Immediately outside the mausoleum is this group of jokers (and what a bunch of them). You can randomly encounter enemies of similar difficulty in this region. I don't know why the game continues to pretend goblins aren't totally irrelevant.



On the other hand, maybe they're not totally irrelevant, since the battle boosted Edward to 21. We get a sneak peek of another song Edward won't learn.



Nearby (check the minimap), we find another witch house.

Hey, Cunavarn wanted us to kill this witch, right?
Right... on what grounds was that, again?
Who cares? They're paying.

The first witch had a very similar demon vanguard. We get a second-tier imp in this group, but it's just second verse, same as the first: fireballs. We're a lot stronger now than we were then, so we put them down without issue.



Well, looks like she's not home. We'd better come back later.
No, wait. There's a secret door over there.
Are you sure? I think she probably doesn't want visitors right now. And I can still remember the birds

The switches are behind the candlesticks. This is how Lords of Xulima hides doors when it wants you to find them.



"Hey, light your torch before you take screenshots, you dummy!"

Right, fine, but the important thing in this screenshot is the lever in the middle of the screen. There's a whole bunch of levers in this house, and we need to switch all of them to open all of the secret doors.

Also pictured: a very stingy gold chest.



If you are so wise and powerful, then tell me, what do you know about me?



This is the only vaguely interesting piece of dialogue Arwinzel has.



Arwinzel has a pretty pathetic health total for this stage of the game.



She does use The Birds (pictured, except I failed to capture any actual birds), but she doesn't last long enough for our party to bleed out, making her a much easier opponent than her younger sister. This is probably because we were underleveled for that fight.



As a parting gift, she gives us a positively amazing shield that is ten times too heavy for anyone I'd give it to.

We'll hang on to it until well after it becomes obsolete, naturally.



Wrapping up Karraga for now, we find another riddle imp, who's guarding some very nice shoes.



We report our success in "Arwinzel's Head" (unnecessarily gruesome quest name) and find that we've also killed enough Yotums to fulfill that quest.



Are you serious? That's highway robbery!
It's a living.
How long until you can do this?
Not for a few more levels. Just suck it up and pay the nice lady.

What you can't see here is that Gaulen is suffering from multiple crippling diseases at the same time, which is why he's so expensive to heal.

Well, that concludes our business in the great white northwest. Where to now?
Didn't the Cunavarnians mention a burned-down town to the east?
Oh, yes! "You can still smell the charred remains of our neighbors when the east wind blows," they said. It sounds delightful.

NEXT TIME ON LET'S PLAY LORDS OF XULIMA: SEQUENCE BREAK?

OLOXPS COUNT: 16 (mushrooms, locks and traps, cereal plants, encounter clearing, herald of Golot, bard songs, Golot's blessing, mausoleum keys, the arena, minions before bosses, riddle imps, Odendro drops, DLC, well of souls, Cursed Hounds, treasure chests)

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES:

• The arena in Sorrentia has ever more monsters to kill.
• Cunavarn's quests still want us to find the thing and find the dead person.
• Velaskar's quests still want us to exterminate monsters, collect the loot, find the person, find the dead person, and collect the other loot.

It's hard to tell from the map, but, if memory serves, you either walked by that dead person or came close enough to doing so to throw a rock at him. I only remember this because I missed him the first time around and only found him recently upon revisiting the zone much later.

I am super curious what this is referring to. If you're going to do what I think you're going to do:

• That's skipping a huge chunk of the game.
• Ow

No, dead guy's in the Great White North, not the Great White Northwest. The only point in going there right now would be to check that quest off our list, and the rewards don't really warrant that.

Can confirm.

Well now I'm really looking forward to the next update.

He's really not, though. Unless you're playing a different game than I am, he's not in Geldra, but rather in Karraga, almost directly east of the shrine (Taliet's, I think?), along the treeline separating the tundra from the forest. I picked him up on my way there to get the perma-blessing. You came within spitting distance of him.

I'll have to take another look. I was pretty sure one of the dead guys was in Frozen Deathland.

PREVIOUSLY ON LET'S PLAY LORDS OF XULIMA: KILLED WITCH #2

AND NOW



We rejoin our heroes as they venture east of Cunavarn. This group of ogre lookalikes (but they're ulrogs, not actually ogres) kept us from venturing further this direction last time we had a mind to, but they're no obstacle now.



The people of Cunavarn told us that Ovengel was the one responsible for leveling the town here.
One of the four princes. Who's ready to storm a castle?
I don't know. I have a real bad feeling about this.



What was that?



OW MY ENTIRE LIFE
I'll concede that we may need to send this plan back to the drawing board for a bit.

And so our heroes bravely exit Ovengel's domain.



Thief-types populate the roads here. I don't remember if we've seen the third-tier Bandit. He's tricky mainly because he stands a chance of making off with one of your items due to his relatively high health.



Rosa gains a level and will gain access to another ability I won't bother teaching her next time. ALSO PICTURED: Look, JBear, I'm learning Dispel! I'll make a point of showcasing any instances of me actually casting it.



Oh, that does it! No one takes our precious god-artifacts and gets away with it.
Ovengel can turn us into paste from a mile away. I think this round goes to him.
That's true, but how will we ever get the key he holds?



Check it out. There's a back path to Ovengel's castle.
Yes. We literally have to detour through hell to get there.
Everything's got to be a complaint with you, doesn't it?
It reminds me of the underworld back home.
An area I very pointedly avoided.



Wow! They weren't exaggerating about this place.

This guy was wearing some nice clothes when he was burned to a crisp.
Uh... is this really appropriate?
Don't be such a wet noodle. This is no different from when we raided Eblan.
Wait, what?



Darn! The rest of the stock here is entirely decorative.



Ooh, gimme!
Changed your tune, huh? I see how it is.



Someone in Cunavarn was looking for this.
Make sure the quest rewards are better than the amulet's resale value.
Edge!



We can see the tip of a witch house from the south end of Scorchville (pop: 0), but we can't access it from here -- it seems that we'll have to pass through hell for that, too.

Or... or...



Lords of Xulima is great at letting you know when you're doing a stupid thing, but it also doesn't stop you from doing a stupid thing. Let's do a stupid thing.

You might have noticed Rosa being the sole survivor of the last Ovengel Death Ray. (This is a little misleading -- the party wasn't at full health.) Conveniently, Rosa has the means to recover her health.



We made it to Ovengel's castle! ...Guys?

You can save your game in Ovengel's lawn, and he fires off his death cannon at regular intervals. You'd have to go out of your way to do it, but you could put your game in an unwinnable state here.



Are you talking to Gaulen? He's, um, indisposed at the moment. Hold up. I'll get him for you.

Ovengel's castle is totally empty, but I should still probably revive the rest of the party, right?



Okay, that doesn't sound too



Oh, Ovengel! You really had me going there.



Translation: this will not be a good time.

Nice place he's got here.



Does this loot seem... suspiciously high-level?
Gift horse, Edward.

I'm sure it's nothing. Good to see the game finally rewarding us for our efforts in a way that will definitely not come back to bite us shortly.



What the

Okay, rewind. Remember the fire-spitting statue in the last update? This is its cousin, the Four-Directional Zap Pedestal. Every N steps, where N varies by FDZP, it fires off a bolt of lightning extending indefinitely in four directions.



I already found both of them. You don't have to pass through the FDZP areas to get to them.



In more suspicious generosity, we get a weapon upgrade for Edge. It's very similar to his current weapon, but his current weapon was already very good.



The castle is sort of divided into three zones. This one on the left is the easiest. There's one north of here that's a bit harder, and the one on the far right is full of FDZPs and also contains two keys.



Here's a FDZP in better lighting. As you walk around, they display the number of steps left until they discharge. This is a little fiddly: they count down as you move from one tile to another, but movement is more granular than that, so you can dance around within your tile without triggering the countdown. This would work better in a game with tile-based movement.



The FDZPs make for an interesting puzzle in theory, but there's a big problem with them in practice: they only count down when you're within a certain range of them. This means you can cause the pedestals to get out of sync with each other, meaning there are situations where you have no choice but to take the hit.



Ovengel comes off a bit Juliet here.



The keys in the right side of the castle are on the extreme north and south. This is the southern key.



And the northern one. Check our life totals: we had to take a hit on the way out of the southern chamber. That's how much one shot does on the intermediate difficulty. You can actually tank a few of these hits on Filthy Casual mode, but we're clearly not surviving a second hit here. The FDZP damage is mitigated by your electric resistance, so you could largely trivialize these puzzles by kitting someone in full resist gear. The Elemental Resistance spell is not usable outside of battle, unfortunately.



Ovengel killed his janitor before he finished cleaning up the other corpses.



I'm about 90% sure this is misdirection.



Ovengel killed his janitor after he finished cleaning the throne room. This would make a great logic puzzle, but they don't follow through on it.

Ready for a plot dump?

Ovengel would normally be the last of the four princes. Kudos to the devs for changing the dialog to accommodate our stupid thing we're doing here.



The torched village was called Nagira. Did I mention that? No? One of the NPCs probably did.



To be fair to the princes, takebacks on your immortality guarantee are really poor form.



"Your words are as empty as your soul!"



So. Bad news about Ovengel.

Ovengel gets so many turns! How does Ovengel get so many turns? I don't know! What happens if you try to play Lords of Xulima without stacking your Speed stat? Do the enemies just eventually get ten turns to your one? I don't know! What I do know is that Ovengel is just entirely unbeatable for our party.

If only the game had given us some indication that this would be the case!



We've reached "Cursed Hound" rank, by the way.



Determined not to make this a total bust, our intrepid adventurers decide to leave the castle via the rear entrance. You know, the one that leads to hell. Ovengel gets in a parting shot.



You can't actually fall off the cliff.



AROO and all that. The Lords of Xulima editor reveals that the hounds' progression is tied to your party level, by the way, and their appearance is based on the number of steps you have taken. Hounds don't appear in towns, so you can get out of hounds free by warping to town before you would encounter them.



A little further down the trail is this magnificent beast. ("Use your torches before you screenshot!" What, do you think torches grow on trees or something?)



The Ruby Wyvern here is as unbeatable as Ovengel to our fledgling party. It's significantly slower, but it actually does a bit more damage. Ovengel is definitely harder than the Wyvern, but the difference is academic when it takes either of them two attacks to kill our entire front line.



So this sequence break attempt was a total bust. The good news is that we got more for completing the amulet quest than we would've for fencing it.

NEXT TIME ON LET'S PLAY LORDS OF XULIMA: THE HALL OF HEROES

OLOXPS COUNT: 16 (mushrooms, locks and traps, cereal plants, encounter clearing, herald of Golot, bard songs, Golot's blessing, mausoleum keys, the arena, minions before bosses, riddle imps, Odendro drops, DLC, well of souls, Cursed Hounds, treasure chests)

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES:

• The arena in Sorrentia has ever more monsters to kill.
• Cunavarn's quests still want us to find the dead person.
• Velaskar's quests still want us to exterminate monsters, collect the loot, find the person, find the dead person, and collect the other loot.

For some reason I thought those things to the left and right of Ovengel's throne were giant speakers and was like "Wow. He has one hell of a sound system." But then I realized they were just banners.

That's cool, but, to be clear, you'll want rank 2. Rank 1 is single-target, while rank two hits the entire party for only 5 more PP.

I actually found the ruins of Nagira to be pretty poignant. I mean, this isn't that kind of game, but I thought it was really effective how all of the usual trappings of the in-game towns were there. Like, you could tell which corpse was the innkeeper, and which was the merchant, and picture yourself questing there if you'd come sooner.

I mean, a single travel crystal could save you even then, and I usually travel with several, so you'd have to work extra hard at it.

I'm going to presume that you forgot this, but there's totally a travel portal a stone's throw to the east of Ovengel's front door. You must have barely missed scrolling it onscreen when you fled south. Activating it would have made return trips a lot less painful.

!!

I mean, it doesn't really matter, since we'll be taking the back road next time we come back this way, but that still stings.

Also, I want this thread to know:
JBear has put more hours into Lords of Xulima on a single play than I have on a single play plus half an LP. He should probably be the one running the show, but you're stuck with me.

Translation: JBear is very slow.
Pfft. Counterpoint:
I could never bust out gems like that. As I'm sure everyone else would agree, this LP couldn't possibly be in better hands.

PREVIOUSLY ON LET'S PLAY LORDS OF XULIMA: DIED

AND NOW



So, that town full of dead people--
Its name was Nagira.
Right. So, Scorchville was a total bust, but I've got a better idea.



The Hall of Heroes?
The Hall of Heroes! It sounds like a great place.



Hmm... Cecil, darling.
Yes?
There's nothing here but a bunch of statues.
Yes. Soak in the culture!
I'm bored.



What is this garbage? "Felicitas" is not the herald of Raznet.



One of the four titans. I hope we can talk him into giving us his key, because I really don't want to fight that thing.

There's a lot of icky, fluffy lore-stuff packed into the statues, and I think some of it is even relevant to the puzzle at hand. The statues collectively tell the story of the Great War between the ogres and humans (not to be confused with the Orcs & Humans war, crafted in an entirely different universe). If that's the sort of thing that interests you, check out the rest of the statue collection in the links above. My personal favorite is the guy who sold the souls of his entire regiment to Yul in exchange for the power of necromancy. A true hero! The last one I potholed up there, Karihar, will become relevant much later in the game.

Anyway, this entire area is a puzzle, as I mentioned, and it revolves around setting the light at the base of each statue to the correct color (one of red, green, or yellow).



...And that should solve the puzzle.
Excellent work!

The solution to the Hall of Heroes is to look up the Hall of Heroes guide in the Steam guides section.

The actual solution to the Hall of Heroes involves the notes left behind by the dead guy in the dry riverbed. Fortunately, you can bring those up within the game as long as you've read them at some point. Unfortunately, this area has random encounters, and the puzzle is really annoying.

So the true solution to the Hall of Heroes is to look up the Hall of Heroes guide in the Steam guides section.



Oh, a dungeon! Traps and treasure! Now we're talking.

I really like the Tower of Time. It's a teleporter maze, but not that kind of teleporter maze. There's a trick to it, and the puzzle is to figure out how the teleporters work.



It has traps and treasure in equal measure. It does pull a few cheap shots, like teleporters that are surrounded by a trap so that you are forced into the trap. That's very poor form, and it does it more than once, but not much more, and the dungeon is cool enough that I can overlook that.



The first time you enter the tower, you are likely to see this message a lot, accompanied by a moderate amount of damage to your entire party. The teleporters possess the peculiar quality that they are unable to teleport you outside the tower. This is merciful, all things considered.

Here's one of those unavoidable traps.

Take a look at the minimap, and you'll see a pattern emerging. We're in a grid of rooms, each of which has a single teleporter.



One room has a secret door that leads to this treasure chest. I think it's the only secret door in the tower.



A talking skull fairly close to the entrance gives a big clue if you're still stumbling around: the direction from which you enter the teleporter affects your destination. He says that each one is "unique and different," but he's talking about the rooms, not the teleporters.



Check the minimap again. In the four corners of the tower are treasure rooms. We've found the blue and green rooms. The skull is hinting that this tower's artifact is in the red room. That's not a very helpful hint, since it's obvious that that's the case once you find the red room.



This skull has a hint of sorts, but since it's one you've figured out by trial and error at this point, it serves as more of a taunt. That's perfectly within the talking skulls' MO, of course.



Oh hey! Here's the guy Velaskar wanted us to find. How he got in here, we'll never know, but he goes and spoils the entire puzzle. If he learned how the teleporters work, why didn't he just leave?

Anyway, yes, when you step onto a teleporter, you end up in the room to your right, based on the direction you were facing. We can forgive poor Balog, since you've probably figured it out by the time you find him.



As is the pattern, we find a not-a-beholder guarding the tower's artifact. Will Rosa's Dispel save us from his insanity-inducing gaze?



No, because Rosa was affected by the gaze, too. But the Sentinel still goes down without too much fuss.



Awesome, a permatorch!

...is what I'd like this artifact to be, but it's just a key to fit a convoluted lock. Gaulen records this momentous occasion, but it's largely a repeat of the existing text.

Having stripped the tower of its valuables, I crack a travel crystal to head back to Velaskar.



I'm not so vigilant keeping Rosa's equipment current, but here's an upgrade with a relevant enchantment, so I spring on it.



We report our success in finding Balog. I don't think Balog actually appears in town after being rescued, but I could be wrong -- I don't pay especially close attention to the NPCs. I know the kid you rescue from the first witch does show up at his house afterwards, so the engine certainly supports it.

Now that we have the Light of Alnaet, we can finally explore the area east of Nabros. (If you've forgotten, Nabros is the area east of Velegarn, the starting town. It's also home to the first prince, may he rest in Numbria.)



The region of Nasmura is home to large groups of goblins and their friends.



We even run into some actual ogres. This is the first time we've fought any since that one in Velegarn, I think.



"Hey, light a torch!"

I did light a torch! This is just the entire screen going black.



Why? Because this Yul statue is just so gosh-darn repulsive!



If you don't have the Light of Alnaet, you get teleported back a few steps, and this path is impassable.



See what you have done? Yul tempts you with power, but he will not support you in the end.
Thus saith Yul: "I will test the faith of my people."

1 PP is total garbage.



And now: more enemies that we haven't fought since Baby's First Dungeon.

Further down the road...



Gasp, a town! No one in this town is too happy to live here, but at least the town is such a hole that the Impious Princes didn't even bother sacking it. That still leaves the question of why anyone built a town in a swamp in the first place, but that question will have to go unanswered.



We were almost out of Cunavarn quests. Rasmura is hooking us up here:

• Eliminate the hounds
• Get the incredibly valuable loot
• Kill the monsters
• Kill the witch
• Find the person

"The Emrald Wyverns" (sic) is a fool's errand in the truest sense of the phrase. They want some number of Emerald Wyvern Eggs, which of course drop from Emerald Wyverns (an enemy similar to but less threatening than the Ruby Wyvern that killed us so dead last time). The problem isn't the Wyverns themselves but the eggs: each one raises a stat permanently. This is the kind of situation where you might expect me to tell you that optimal Lords of Xulima play sucks, but in this case, I'm on board with it; this quest can go straight to the dumpster as far as I'm concerned.



Hey, remember how Edge got a marginal weapon upgrade in Ovengel's castle? Wow is this a way better sword. 50% more damage? 67% more bleed? Sign me right up. Infallible is not exactly the bee's knees as enchantments go, but I can't complain about this.

Edward contributes to the party here, by the way: the base price for this piece of work is 6000 gold, but his Mercantilism skill has knocked it down to 4620. That's not an incredible value for the skill point investment, but it adds up. We sell for more than usual, too, and at max Mercantilism, the sale and purchase prices are equal, which turns the merchant into a lending library of murder weapons.



Our tour of the town's various loot-bearing features turns up this ring. I like to hold onto any jewelry with Absolute Protection, since they weigh next to nothing and they promise substantial protection once we decide to go all in on them.



Wilster the Innkeeper did not get his MBA. It is not clear how he stays in business: on top of Rasmura not exactly being the #1 tourist spot in Xulima, he also talks down the area and his services at every opportunity (his line about his reed beer is cut off here, but it's not flattering), and he named his inn The Venomous Fang. That's a very strange name for an Inn.