Help me Jailbreak! (Chateau Irenicus)
Heindrich
Member, Moderator Posts: 2,959
For roleplay reasons, ideally I'd like to break out of Chateau Irenicus without using Jaheira or Minsc, but I don't think it's possible given other constraints I've placed on myself. But who knows, we have amazing powergamers here, perhaps one of you can suggest something I've overlooked.
The challenge:
Charname is a lv8 Kensai with 68 hp, but he will dual-class into Mage as soon as the game begins... so basically he's gonna be useless for the jailbreak as he does not even have any spells memorized and can no longer swing a sword. I suppose he could use scrolls and wands we come across... but I don't remember an abundance of those. No resting is allowed inside the dungeon. Game difficulty is Core Rules. No mods installed.
I suppose there are two levels of difficulty for solutions you can suggest:
A ) Just Charname and Imoen (and Yoshimo when he shows up).
B ) Charname, Imoen and either Minsc OR Jaheira.
Thanks in advance!
I'm mostly just curious to see what powergamers can come up with. It's not a huge deal if I have to use Minsc and Jah to escape, I'd just prefer to not have to concoct some excuse for them leaving the party later, so I'd prefer to imagine that they weren't even there.
The challenge:
Charname is a lv8 Kensai with 68 hp, but he will dual-class into Mage as soon as the game begins... so basically he's gonna be useless for the jailbreak as he does not even have any spells memorized and can no longer swing a sword. I suppose he could use scrolls and wands we come across... but I don't remember an abundance of those. No resting is allowed inside the dungeon. Game difficulty is Core Rules. No mods installed.
I suppose there are two levels of difficulty for solutions you can suggest:
A ) Just Charname and Imoen (and Yoshimo when he shows up).
B ) Charname, Imoen and either Minsc OR Jaheira.
Thanks in advance!
I'm mostly just curious to see what powergamers can come up with. It's not a huge deal if I have to use Minsc and Jah to escape, I'd just prefer to not have to concoct some excuse for them leaving the party later, so I'd prefer to imagine that they weren't even there.
4
Comments
You don't have to fight everything in the dungeon. You can tell Aataqah you have no time to speak with him, and you'll have to fight neither the gibberlings nor the ogre mage. But you will have to kill a small number of goblins to get the Sewage Golem activated, and to walk through the halls connecting to the Otyugh room. You need to fight a couple of extra Mephits if you want the +1 staff, though, and I believe you'll also have to weather a trap.
You can maneuver around some of the traps in the room with the Portal Key, but you'll still get hit by two of them, one of which poisons you. That could take out a whole lot of HP, but you'll just have to tough it out, unless one of your innates is Slow Poison.
The big challenge you won't be able to escape is the Mephit Room, which features one or two Radiant Mephits who can knock you unconscious. Considering your lousy combat stats, your best shot at taking down the Mephit Portals is to use the single scroll of Monster Summoning I that you can find in the first dungeon. But the summons won't always target the Mephit Portals, so you'll have to keep a close watch over them to make sure they're not just wasting their time whomping on the Mephits themselves.
Failing that, you might use invisibility. I believe there is one scroll of Invisibility in the dungeon, hopefully in the first half (but I think it actually comes after the Mephit Portal room, and is therefore moot). If you can cast Invisibility, then the Mephit Portal room will be quite simple. Just go out into the room, attract the attention of all four Mephits, and lead them back into the room with the portal. Once they're all in, cast Invisibility via the scroll, run into the Mephit Portal room, and close the door behind you. You can now break down the Mephit Portals without the Mephits attacking you at all.
If you want to fight anything more than that, you'll need wands and scrolls, but I don't recommend using the wands, as they're more valuable if recharged at a store, particularly the Wand of Paralyzation. As for the scrolls, your options are quite limited. There are precious few offensive scrolls in the area, notably a scroll of Flame Arrow in the Sewage Golem room just west of Aataqah and a scroll of Fireball in the Ellesime clone room. I believe there's also at least a chance of finding another Fireball scroll in a barrel next to the portal in the first area, close to the room with the Amulet of Metaspell Influence.
That's about it as far as your options go. You won't be able to take down the Mephits in the Air Elemental Plane, not unless you get lucky with your saves, since one of the Mephits can stun you for 6 seconds, repeatedly, and there's a lot of damage coming your way in that room. Ilyich will be a lot of trouble, probably more than it's worth, and would drain resources you could be using for other battles, unless you use a Web or Stinking Cloud scroll (I don't know which, if either, you get in Chateau Irenicus) and maybe charm one of the Duergar. They have a lot of HP and will hit you quite reliably with their bolts.
So, avoid Aataqah, hit the goblins with the staff, run past the Otyugh, take the damage from the traps, and summons some monsters to kill the Mephit Portals. Then run past everything else on to the exit, and maybe talk-block the Assassin so his buddies won't spawn in.
Quite doable, yes. But very few options, if you plan on never resting.
I rolled some excellent stats and dual-classed right after booting out Imoen. I level up right after freeing Jaheira, but my THAC0 is still abysmal.
With correct timing, you can dodge the first two lightning bolts the mephit fires. The Mephit can't do much damage otherwise, but the battle still takes ages. Check out how easy it is for my mage to miss her target.
This does not bode well for the goblins. I walk past the first group (they don't spawn in, thankfully) and confront a Radiant Mephit in the Sewage Golem room. Radiant Mephits can knock me out with Color Spray, so I have to get rid of this guy fast. The Flame Arrow scroll found in the same room works perfectly.
This room also contains several potions in the locked chest, which we can force open. Unfortunately, I get crowded in by the goblins and have to reload. This time, I decide to delay visiting the Sewage Golem until I have the activation stone thingy. So, I walk past the room (the first group of goblins again does not spawn when I first visit that hall) and fetch the activation stone. I still get attacked, as I have no means of avoiding the other group of goblins right outside Rielev's door. I fight just enough to get through.
Then I realize that my ability to get past the next group of goblins is pretty poor, considering I also have to fight a Mephit in close quarters. In the Sewage Golem room, I get blocked in by goblins, and have to reload.
This time, I create a Neutral Evil character to get all the evil innates. They clear up the goblins quite nicely.
I slay the Mephit, this time a Mineral Mephit, and save the Flame Arrow scroll. And after visiting Rielev, I only have to slay a couple goblins to avoid getting blocked in.
Right about here, I remembered that I forgot to activate the Sewage Golem.
There's a small army of goblins chasing me, offscreen. I have to reload again.
This time, I go visit Rielev first. I close the door behind me and wait, causing the goblins to wander around, as they are seeking a new way to my room. This prevents them from clustering up at the door, and allows me to escape to the Sewage Golem room.
Notice all the goblins away from the door. Shutting the door on them screwed with their pathfinding and ensured a safe getaway.
I did the same in the Sewage Golem room. On the way to the room, the other group of goblins spotted me and tried to give chase, but I shut the door on them. Once the Mephit was gone, I activated the golem and followed it outside.
I ended up with a clear path to the Otyugh room. I only had to kill one goblin, in the hallway next to the Otyugh room, to get past.
Unfortunately, the Otyugh was directly in the way. I could have tried killing it at range, since it can't leave the room and a staff has greater reach than the Otyugh itself, but that would have taken ages, and allowed the other goblins to catch up with me. Instead, I cast Horror on the Otyugh, grabbed an Oil of Speed from one of the chests, and escaped to the next hall, shutting the door behind me to make sure the goblins could not box me in later.
There are some nasty traps in the room with the Portal Key. But you can avoid the first batch by slipping between them. I show the trapped areas with CTRL-4 here.
The upper-right rectangle and trapezoid are triggers for the alarm and for Imoen's dialogue, not traps. I can slip past the others by walking towards the green chair directly south of my mage.
I still get hit by the spike trap and the poison trap protecting the Portal Key, but I have enough potions to survive. There's also a scroll of Monster Summoning in the western bookcase, which thankfully is not trapped.
I head north to the portal and find no goblins are there. Even if there were, I could just walk around them and step through the portal without them following after. Before I go, I drink an Oil of Speed and grab a scroll of Fireball from one of the barrels in this room.
I enter the Mephit room and linger just long enough to get them all to attack me. I then retreat into the previous room. Once my blindness wears off, I confirm that all the Mephits are in the same room.
With my boosted movement rate, I'm just fast enough to run into the Mephit Portal room and shut the door behind me.
I can now destroy the Mephit Portals without fear of opposition. I also nab a second scroll of Fireball from the clone room.
I help an Assassin kill a Mephit, only to struggle against another Mephit nearby. I lose a Vampiric Touch spell in the process.
No goblin spawn in the next room. The spawning of these goblins has always been pretty wonky. Even if they were there, I could outrun them and shut the door on them, as before.
One of the Duergar in the next room survives the traps, but is softened up enough for me to take him down in one hit.
Notice the new icon on my portrait: I cast an Armor spell from a scroll I found earlier. It gives me a +4 AC boost and lasts 9 hours.
I fail to talk-block the Assassin on the way out run, and my Oil of Speed wears off soon afterward, but I can still outrun them.
I don't know if they use potions in the vanilla game. I have SCS2 installed, though I uninstalled the component that ups the difficulty of the starting dungeon, since it replaces the goblins with Duergar.
I manage to make an important save at the last moment.
That could have ended the game. But I make it outside!
I have a spare Wand of Cloudkill, Wand of Fire, and Wand of Monster Summoning, and I think either a Wand of Lightning or Wand of Frost. I could only identify one of the wands, but many of the goblins drop Identify scrolls, so it should be possible to go back to the earlier part of the dungeon and slay some goblins with the help of the new resources I've got. Also, if the Otyugh did not get in the way, I could have saved a Horror spell, which means the dungeon should also be doable by a good protagonist (the Flame Arrow scroll could also bring the Otyugh to half HP, so killing it would also be doable). With two Fireball scrolls, a Fireball from the Wand of Fire, a Cloudkill from the Wand of Cloudkill, two summoning spells from a scroll and a wand, a Hold Person scroll, many remaining potions and several unspent innate abilities, not to mention all the dungeon resources I didn't collect (such as a scroll of elemental summoning in the Air Elemental Plane) it should also be possible to complete the djinni and dryad side quests as well, with some luck and reloads.
Definitely doable with an evil character, and almost assuredly doable with a non-evil character.
Alas I doubt I could have pulled it off like you did even if I had Imoen as well because 1) My Charname does not have ideal stats and he has the Good Bhaalspawn powers, and 2) I don't know the game as well as you do so something would have likely gone wrong sooner or later!
In any case I managed to escape without Minsc, and I did so having cleared all enemies inside the dungeon except the Cambion. This may not seem like a big deal to most powergamers and veterans out there, but for me, it was a pretty nice achievement.
In my previous Chateau Irenicus breakouts, having Minsc makes a huge difference, as his hitting power makes short work of goblins and mephits, and I only have to resort to magic for a select few encounters. Without Minsc, every group of goblins required careful planning, and the mephits were pretty painful. It provides a really nice tactical challenge as I had to think about using limited resources, scouting ahead for every battle and trying to find an edge where possible. I was just able to make it out using almost all the potions and scrolls I found in the dungeon. (Unfortunately I couldn't find any Identify scrolls, so I couldn't use any of the wands.) This challenge really made what was a fairly boring and routine dungeon really tense and interesting!
Oh and if you're wondering why I didn't just run past everything... 1) My imperfect memory would mean there is a good chance I run myself into a dead end! 2) I consider closing doors kinda cheesy and generally prefer to avoid metagaming too much*. (Though I appreciate it is necessary for the challenge you attempted.) 3) My roleplay required me to pick up the item from the djinni, which meant I could not avoid the toughest battle in that dungeon (the mephits in the Plane of Air).
*The only metagaming I had to do was recruiting Yoshimo before going into the Plane of Air. Everything else I did in logical order.
The Mephits were pretty bad too... mostly because I noobed it and didn't notice that the majority of that particular pack were the steam and fire varieties that were immune to fire damage, so my opening Fireball didn't do much damage. I would have been better off with just opening with backstabs from Imoen and Yoshimo. In the end a summoned Ogrillon and a hasted Jaheira got the job done.
The Otyugh cost me quite a lot of potions too because it diseased and slowed everyone, forcing me to retreat part-way through the fight.
So yeah, as I said, doing the starting dungeon my way meant that I basically stumbled out with the stash of potions and scrolls I'd normally have. Given Charname is a recently dual-classed mage with literally just 2 starter spells in his spellbook, my early game is gonna be interesting indeed. (I am glad I have Jaheira with me, cos others rescuing Aerie might be pretty difficult and it might be a big challenge just gathering my A team together!)
Enemies get to hit you automatically when you're disabled. That damage builds up very fast, even with tiny Mephit attacks.