When we returned to the Guild in the morning, it turned out that we’d have to wait a few days to meet the rest of our prospective group. Originally, the mission had been planned to start within a week of our arrival, the clerics busy with preparations, which, in turn, caused the group to head out, partially to scout the area, partially to gain a couple extra EXP. It wasn’t a bad idea, especially if they were Travellers and thus wouldn’t permanently die, even if they were killed. However, in this case, it simply meant we would have to make a decision, sight unseen.

After discussing our options with the Guild-Clerk, who was either still there or had gotten up quite early to meet us, it was decided that we’d do likewise, head out and kill a couple of undead, something the people of Gaber always appreciated and meet up with the other group in three days time. That way, we’d be able to get to know each other, before either declining the mission or setting out together. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the best solution anyone could hope for. To give us a small incentive, he even suggested a relatively simple quest, gathering some strange lichen that grew in a nearby valley, to add some EXP and silver into our pocket. It was rated as Very Easy, meaning it should essentially be trivial for us, and thus it’d be normally not given to a group of our level, instead going to a lower levelled group, so they could get the full benefit of the system-awarded EXP.

With that quest accepted, we decide to do some shopping and relaxing in town for the day, simply to get rid of the accumulated mental fatigue caused by crossing the Dorrian Mountains. While I had the ability to retreat into my Hallow and log out for some time, especially when it wame to visit Mrs. Wu, the others had been in a tense situation for days on end, never quite knowing when an attack would come. Just because the Undead had their patterns and were generally easily dealt with, it didn’t mean they could be completely relied on, necessitating a certain caution.

Given that being in town was somewhat stifling for me, the constant need to shield my presence, always on guard to never let my focus waver for even a brief moment, it was the complete opposite effect for me, not allowing me to relax at all. Thus, I promised the others to return the next day and shifted myself into my Hallow. It took some doing, and quite a bit of focus on both, my own and Lenore’s parts, to get the skull-focus shifted with me but it worked - At least to an extent.

Previously, we hadn’t even tried, if I had moved into my Hallow, the staff had been given to Adra, allowing her to carry the skull so Lenore could provide her devastating magical attacks if needed, but that wasn’t necessary in town. What neither of us had expected was that, upon shifting into her Hallow, the skull changed form, forming into a hood, or maybe helmet, that covered Lenore’s head. The only problem was, the powerful, magical presence of the skull overpowered her ability to see magic, forcing her to suppress that ability or be almost entirely blinded. When Lenore asked Sigmir to take the helmet off her, it returned to its normal form, leaving them with a cursed object to carry around, or hide away in a magical bag and slowly suffer the effect of the curse.

It took another round of shifting around to get the skull back into helmet-form and onto Lenore’s head, leaving both of us just a little annoyed and determined to investigate the artefact we had made more thoroughly at a later date. Maybe even to utilise the Raven’s Shadow to do so, but that would be a bit of a last resort, partially due to the long time between uses of that ability, partially due to the discomfort during that time and, most importantly, due to the way our memories blurred afterwards. It was rather pointless to thoroughly investigate, if you forgot the results immediately afterwards. Our best bet would be to essentially dictate our experience and use the recording of that dictation to get an idea of the findings. But that limited the amount of information transmitted severely, and some concepts were almost impossible to express accurately in words.

Leaving those matters for later, I logged out, returning to the Capsule-Space and checking into the forums. If there were Travellers in the region around the Dorrian Mountains, there might be some information to be found, especially if they were of the rather loud and vocal group that constantly used the Forum. There were a few of those, an overall minority, but they existed. The vast majority of the player-base was generally quiet, keeping their discoveries for themselves, likely only shared in a small, somewhat familiar circle. People they had known from other games, or people they met ingame and got along well with. They might post on the forums for gossip or drama, or if Pantheon Entertainment released some of their highlight-videos, but what they did ingame, was kept quiet. I was one of those many players.

And even amongst the vocal posters, there were two categories, so to say. One were the people who shared everything, looking for adoration and acknowledgement, while the others were part of a larger group, using the information gathered, and likely filtered, by their Group to raise the status and reputation of said group.

Using the search-function, I was able to find a couple threads that mentioned the Dorrian Mountains, and even more that mentioned the Idorra Peninsula. Sadly, there were no threads about Gaber, the small town we currently were at, but that might simply be due to the group’s discretion, a defence against people doing exactly what I was doing.

From there, I started to filter and scan, occasionally pulling up a thread with a promising title and reading through it. There were a couple of interesting things about the undead, especially a description of their respawn-mechanic, that they seemed to return to the place they raised from each day during the witching hour, if they got destroyed. They didn’t necessarily rise up at that moment, but a curious Traveller had diligently studied their behaviour for a couple of days, camping a spawn-point and checking the time it took. I made a note of the name, Tycho, and set up notifications so I would get a message when they posted.

Other threads discussed the best methods for dealing with Undead from range, their slow speed and general stupidity making them easy targets for a variety of magical attacks and even some people who used slings and similar weapons to deliver blunt force from range. None of them seemed to have been able to push the Mountains to the point that they got chased out by magic-immune skeletons, but there was a mention about special, much faster, skeletons that had wiped out a group that had grinded the Undead for too long. The more I read and learned about the region, the more I wanted to dig into it and its secrets, my instinct telling me that there was something interesting there.

That was a general trend on Mundus, that the general overworld seemed to give a good level-speed until you reached around level fifty, after which you needed either special locations like the Dorrian Mountains or you had to find the coveted dungeons to gain more EXP. Alternatively, large-scale military conflict seemed to be a possible way to gain levels, but that had its own problems.

Based on that realisation, and a couple threads I found on the forum, make me guess that Pantheon Entertainment might not have put in a hard level-cap, but had instead limited the ways you could level after a certain point. Unless you sought out those special locations, there’d likely be no way to level past somewhere around level seventy, maybe seventy-five. At those special locations, you could get further, but the locations had limits, either due to their limited nature, like the few dungeons we had discovered or due to special circumstances, like the malevolent intellect I suspected to control the undead in the Dorrian Mountains.

During the beta, that understanding mattered little, but once the game went live, finding and occupying those spots in an efficient manner would be key. It was almost assured that, once the limits became public, large scale Guilds would attempt to monopolise the best spots. How Pantheon would deal with such attempts would be another key-factor to a healthy game and despite my near certainty that the company wouldn’t have overlooked such an obvious problem, I decided to write out my thoughts and submit it, as a good tester should. Hopefully, future trouble could be averted, especially the kind of trouble that might kill the game.

That done, I left the capsule, to take care of my daily necessities and some training.