“I’ll Conceal/Stealth and check it out. Did you see any mobs in the area, Dan?”
“No, sir! But I didn’t get much further than this before I stopped. Anything like this could be a trouble spot. I thought better of bringing 20 mobs to you guys.”
“When did he start using his brain? This is getting scary,” I heard Jason whisper behind me, answered by Wayne’s giggles.
I quickly dismounted and unsummoned my horse and made my way into the forest that bordered the small road we were on. Once in the woods, I brought my Blacksuit up and ran toward the outpost.
In Resurgence, the foliage could affect the movement speed of players. We didn’t encounter it much in the areas around Port Town or around the Keep. Those areas were heavily traveled by players and did not have a chance to become “wild.” But out here, off a secluded road, I noted my movement was cut down to 75 percent of normal. Not a problem with my Blacksuit, but it would make running away from any mobs more difficult, especially since I doubted their movement speeds would be penalized in kind.
Once I entered the outpost, I realized my earlier assumptions were correct, and I saw what looked to me like a small saw mill. The small waterway was moving swiftly through the mill, and the area seemed to be only mildly under kempt. It looked to be a fully functional mill, just with no people.
I traveled further into the outpost. A number of the buildings had windows, and I decided to look inside one as I passed by. Turns out the outpost wasn’t empty at all. There were a number of residents within the first building I investigated, and they all looked to be cowering in fear. I checked out the other two buildings with windows and saw a similar scene. These people were afraid of something.
I ran along the road, back to my companions, and told them what I had uncovered. After discussing it for several moments, we decided to ride into the outpost at a slow gait so as not to freak out the residents. I smelled a quest, after all.
The road widened gradually as we approached the outpost. We could have gone through it and continued on our way, but there didn’t seem to be any way around it with horses. One would need to take to the forest. With the road widening, we spread out and arrived at the open entrance to the outpost four abreast.
A small fence identified the borders of the outpost. We stopped just inside that fence line. Now in full sight of anyone that may be looking, we held our hands out, away from our weapons. “Is there anywhere here that a traveler can restock on supplies?”
We were met without answer. I waited a few more seconds before calling out again, “We have no ill will toward the residents here. We are only looking to restock our supplies and continue our journey northward.”
Several seconds later, a man rounded the corner of one of the buildings and walked toward us. He stopped a good distance away from our group and asked, “What business could you have up there? Better to head back the way you came. There is nothing worth traveling up there for.”
“It’s a personal matter, sir. We would like to ensure we have enough supplies for our journey and the appropriate supplies for the environment.”
The man, who had the single name of Geller, continued to look at us for another several seconds before responding. “It may be we can help you, although we may need your help as well.”
*
The residents came out of the buildings, and they were all men. I learned that this outpost was part of a larger network of mills along the offshoots that fed the Danning River. The men at the outpost worked in rotations, spending two weeks at a mill before going back to their village.
The trouble at Trasdor Mill, which I learned was the name of our current location, began three days prior. The current team arrived for their two-week rotation and were set upon by creatures on the second night of their stay. None of them could say what attacked, but the unknown assailant, or assailants, had killed one of the men savagely. According to Geller, the dead man’s chest had been ripped apart, with wicked-looking claw marks indicating some kind of savage beast.
“And there was howling!” Another of the mill men added.
“Yes, there was howling as well. Scared us all something fierce. We aren’t the type to scare easy, either.”
These were men that worked hard, and their physiques showed it. I wouldn’t want to go one-on-one with any of them in a fist fight.
“So here’s the deal. You boys are traveling to the Northern Reaches, but you will freeze before you get anywhere near whatever your goal is. You need traveling cloaks for sure.
“You help us with this problem, and we will make sure you have the cloaks. And I will throw in a Standard Map of the North as well.”
All of the mill men were staring at us with anxious looks. Wayne would have helped them regardless, because that is how he liked to play the game. I was torn between riding back to the Keep to get what we needed gear-wise and accepting the quest. Dan and Jason looked indifferent.
“What are you waiting for, Alex? Say the words.”
“Honestly, I’m wondering if we shouldn’t just go back to Kich’s Keep and get the gear. Who knows how long this could take? And we still aren’t sure we are even on the right road to get us where we want to go. We can’t take every quest, Wayne.”
“That map could help us quite a bit though, Alex.” When Jason was slogging through his AltCon Cartography quest, he did the absolute bare minimum to complete his tasks. Jason had no desire to be a map maker. He had learned, though, that Maps came in five different qualities: Incomprehensible, Poor, Standard, Excellent, and Perfect. A map could save us a tremendous amount of time, and so I had to agree with Wayne. The map did make this worth it.
“Fine. We will help with your problem.”
As had happened numerous times before, our bodies were surrounded with the glow of a quest. Our habit now was to always review the quest to see what restrictions it may have and if there was a timer. We would not soon forget thinking we were ready to tackle a quest, only to find out it required eight players and not four.
“Well that’s something new. We may get through this faster than we thought,” Dan said to the group.
I looked at my quest as well and saw what Dan meant. According to the quest log, this particular task was labeled differently than any other we had encountered. Previously, we were always of a lower level than the mobs we were fighting, so the mark of “Simple” had never been attached to any of our jobs.
“Well that just made the quest awesome. It’s not like we are doing this for experience, anyhow. If we can finish it quickly, it will totally be worth the time.”
“I’ve got a marker on my map, Alex. Let’s head out there and take down whatever beasts did this.”
“Lead the way, Dan,” I said and then looked over at spokesman Geller, “We’ll be back soon. Have everything ready when we return.”
“Be careful. Whatever ripped apart our man’s chest was no easy prey.”
I left the building we were all sitting in and headed toward the guys. “Looks like we’re on foot from here. That marker is right in the middle of the forest.”
“I’ll take point, Alex. When we get closer to the mark, you can do your Invisy thing.”
Without a word needed, our group fell into their natural roles and headed out to the area on our maps.
“Does it seem weird to you guys that we just happened to run into a quest giver that would get us a map and gear we need?”
“Usually I would be the first to agree with you, Allitosis. Our luck—that is to say Alex’s luck—usually flies in the face of reason, but this one makes sense when you think about it.
“If we had ventured off to the north by cutting through the forest, a route that would have been quicker as the bird flies, we would have never received the quest. Instead, we stayed to the main road and then took a smaller but well defined road to head North. I would venture it’s set up that way for this very reason. And dollars to donuts says the cloak we get does nothing but protect from cold. It will have no ot
her stats,” Dan said, finishing with, “And we are having donuts at my party. Just saying the word is making me salivate.”
“Disgusting image, Dan. Thank you.”
“Welcome, Allitosis.”
The rest of the conversation between our group consisted of Dan and Jason arguing on whether you had to say “as the crow flies” or if Dan’s more generic “bird” worked equally as well. Jason won when he rightly identified that not all birds fly, and therefore a more specific bird had to be included. Dan started using “sparrow” just to rile our favorite cleric.
It turned out that Rabid Wolves had attacked the outpost, and they were all Green to my group. Based on our level, I gathered this put them at Level 20. With our Levels, gear, and Skills, we killed all of the Wolves. I wish there was something greater to say, but this was a “simple” quest, after all. The decimation of the Rabid pack took a matter of an hour, and with travel time, we were done and back at the outpost in just over two hours.
“We have killed the Rabid Wolves.”
“Well done! I didn’t think you would be able to after what they did to our friend. As agreed, here are your cloaks and your Map to the North.”
I opened the map, and it was just as I suspected. The major roads and some of the surrounding areas were now laid out in our personal maps, but for the most part, the area to the North was still hidden behind the grey fog. At least we could now see the roads that would take us toward our quest area.
Dan was right about the cloaks as well. Their only buff was “Protection from Environment: Cold.”
It never hurts to try and get as much information out of an NPC as possible, so I asked spokesman Geller if he had seen any other travelers like us in these parts.
“No. There haven’t been any travelers like yourselves in this area for years.”
“Well I imagine you will be seeing many more in the coming weeks who will have need of your cloaks. One more question, have you seen any travelers that are not like us?” The fact that he said “travelers like yourselves” made me think there was more to it.
Turns out I was right. “Not since that Lancaster boy came through here all them years back. He never did return back this way, though. Hope he didn’t die in the ice.”
“Was that Tristan Lancaster?”
“Aye, it was. He came through here on some errand north of here. Stopped to talk with the men that were working here at the time. The Lancaster family is well known in these parts, although we haven’t seen much of them these last few years. Never know where their searches will take them, so they could be anywhere.”
Activating Lady Tessa’s quest likely activated this dialogue as well. Since I knew Jenny and her group couldn’t get Tessa’s quest, I would have to tell them to come through here to get a map and the cold weather gear and—since they already knew about Lady Tessa’s quest—have them use the same words to see what Geller would say. Not that it mattered in the end, but it would sate my curiosity.
I tried to get more information out of Geller, but that was the extent of his information. Keeping to my routine of asking NPCs about unbeatable mobs, I queried Geller on that as well. According to Geller, the only unbeatable mobs he knew of were the ones we just tackled. Another dead end there for the Wanderer’s task.
With nothing more for us to do at the outpost, we saddled back up on our mounts and headed north toward the area that held Lady Tessa’s first quest.
*
The road we traveled took us over a small bridge that spanned the Danning River’s inlet. As we approached the bridge, I wondered if we would encounter a Troll demanding a toll for our passage. The bridge was just a bridge, however, and we traversed it without incident.
The overhanging branches continued to be a problem for Wayne’s height. He was constantly ducking as we made our way along the trail. Other than Wayne’s grumbling, we had no further problems until we cleared the forest and entered the tundra of the north.
The trees grew sparser as we traveled until there was only a smattering of saplings here and there. The open landscape gave us our first views of the extended north land, and it was a hostile environment, to be certain. The ground was craggy, with jutting shale fragments in one area, only to be replaced with boulders and smaller rocks in another. We were starting to see pockets of ice and snow this far north, although the southern regions of the tundra where we were had mostly dry ground. The quest marker on our maps had us continuing north, though.
Due to the openness of the environment, we could see for quite a distance. The area that housed our quest looked to be largely icy in its makeup. And of course, plenty of mobs stood between us and our desired location.
Dan began to count off several Blue mobs that he could see from his vantage point at the head of our small horse train. As we had seen previously, these were predominantly wildlife in nature, though this far north we were seeing a variety that we had not encountered before. Dan called out a pack of Snow Leopards and Snow Lynxes. They appeared to be traveling in groups of three to four. Dan believed he could see more mobs farther along our desired route, but he couldn’t get an accurate gauge on their levels.
Dan scoped out the area, looking for the best way to pull, while we found a spot that looked like a safe area to fight. Dan planned to pull the mobs we could see for now, and then we would move up and continue our journey. Move and fight. Move and fight.
It took a lot longer before Dan felt comfortable pulling the Snow mobs, as their patterns for moving were different than that of the forest mobs we had encountered before. For starters, they moved as a pack, very rarely separating from each other. Gary could probably pull one or two with his Play Dead Skill. Dan didn’t think he could avoid pulling three at the same time, and I really didn’t like that we would step into this fight with no knowledge of the mobs. Or that our bind point was back in the city. But as any gamer will tell you, it’s hard to pass up an opportunity to get experience and play new content. There was never any doubt we were going to try these mobs.
“Well, that didn’t work. Three Snow Leopards incoming.”
“Keep trying whatever you can think of. In the meantime, kite one and we will deal with the other two.”
Wayne grabbed aggro on two of the Snow Leopards while Dan and Broham ran the third around the small area. Wayne and Jason were talking about the new regeneration that came with the Troll leggings and how it would affect Jason’s healing.
“With these lower level mobs, I think we will save a good bit of mana. They aren’t hitting all that hard, so I’m guessing they are only one level above us. They definitely hit fast, though.”
“They would tear us up in a pack. That’s why they travel in groups. Just the two on you, no problem. But if there were four, we would probably be looking at our bind points,” Jason commented.
I waited the usual amount of time and began adding my damage to the fight. The Snow Leopards were going down fast. Or maybe it just seemed that way after the marathon exchanges we had with the Trolls and their insane regeneration.
After a short while, the Snow Leopards were dead, including the one Dan was kiting. I was happy, to say the least, that we could take the mobs in this region and continue on our way. I hoped that it was a good indication of our potential to handle the boss from Lady Tessa’s quest as well.
The rest of the day followed this same routine. We fought our way forward toward the area that housed our quest. Over the course of several hours, we fought more Leopards and Lynxes as well as a small pack of Wolverines.
Those little buggers tore through us like mad. They also had a huge resistance to Dan’s Snare and would not be kited. Jason went through 3/4 of his mana just trying to keep Wayne alive from the five mobs that swarmed him. Dan and Broham tackled the sixth without kiting. The only person who didn’t take any damage was yours truly, as I kept myself low on the aggro table. Even Jason took quite a beating as he was healing Wayne and Dan, taking aggro away on a couple of occasions.
It took
us the entire day to grind through the area and arrive at the beginning of the quest. In front of us stood a crevice running through the sheer ice wall that covered the northern area from east to west. Without our quest indicator, it would have been very difficult to find this spot, let alone the crack in the wall.
We stayed just outside of the crevice for a good 15 minutes and did not see any mobs that wandered near our spot. I figured this was as good a place as any to log off for the night.
Another bright spot, we had achieved Level 23 while we were grinding through the mobs on the way to the quest area and we made sure to allocate our 5 points to our Stats before we called it a night. The next day would find us in yet another dungeon and another new experience in Resurgence.
October 25th, 2043
No one was going to make the same mistake as last time. Before any of my friends would get within 30 meters of the crevice, I was being pushed forward and told to scout out the area. Like the good Rogue that I am, I engaged my Conceal/Stealth and made my way into the crack in the ice. As was my routine, I quickly donned my Blacksuit as well and wound my way through the ice toward the dungeon. Based on my experiences so far in Resurgence, I was fairly certain I would start seeing some sort of tunnels soon.
And as I turned the next corner, I was reminded that I knew very little about this game.
Before me was a massive courtyard. The courtyard was around 100 meters long and 50 meters wide. It was devoid of life but had the feel of the walking gardens one might find in the tourist spots of Paris. Where one might find a garden of some sort, I was looking at beautiful and intricate ice sculptures. They were set up along a path, each with its own viewing area. From where I was, I could see the first sculpture was in the image of the very Snow Lynxes we had killed the day before.
Restoration: The Rise of Resurgence: Book II Page 17