I switched from buying an eighth of weed every week to a quarter every two weeks. The reduced tolerance is worth it (you go to space the first day vs. just being high if you buy every week) but damn the dry periods between bags can be annoying. Only one day until my THCa bud comes – it’s already in transit. THCa is like THC; it turns into THC when ignited but is federally legal and can be mailed. I just hope it’s not banned next month with hemp-derived THC: if I can’t get it mailed I’ll have to buy the real stuff until next July, when sales are legalized in VA (weed has been legal for six years but there’s been no legal way to acquire it since the previous, Republican governor stonewalled attempts to legalize that even though it was inevitable, empowering the black market and leading no doubt to homicides in drug deals gone wrong – Glen Youngkin has blood on his hands.)

I’m on the surface now and I’m just exploring and getting quests and… exploring. Avernum 3 is certainly more ambitious than the first two but there’s a severe lack of dungeons (so far), leaving most of your time exploring, looking around towns, and killing slimes, and the regular gameplay isn’t engaging enough in Spiderweb games to carry it without dungeons and the puzzles in them, actually my favorite part of the first two games. I just started really getting quests in earnest but have yet to complete any on the surface; hopefully the game will get picking up soon. Just overworld-and-towns is getting monotonous.

Confusingly, there’s a town called Delis and a town called Delan. Thankfully they’re not far apart so you won’t end up on the other side of the continent if you go to the wrong one. I tell you, I was worrying over nothing: a lot of these towns never could have existed and you wouldn’t have known the difference.

As far as I can tell, the day/night cycle makes no difference – the same townspeople do the same thing whether it’s day or night, you just can’t see as far outside, or maybe I came ti town too early in the evening. There are vestiges of the Exile games kept into Avernum: you can sleep in inns even though you recover HP and MP when walking into towns and there are food stores, from when you needed to eat in Exile (er, you did, didn’t you?). Either that or it’s a way to recover HP in dungeons without burning MP or potions if you don’t have the First Aid skill yet, which I don’t.

I accidentally wandered into a drake’s lair with a null bug and like five fire lizards and just quit rather than waiting to die since I was about to put the game down anyway. In half an hour this radio show is going off and I’ll play again – I’m bolt-awake right now with insomnia so it would be a good thing to do. Hopefully I’ll get started on some quests already. The game isn’t as immediately gripping as the first two and I’m finding myself getting my fill after a 30-40 minute session.

Does strength increase damage with ranged weapons as well as melee? or is it all dexterity?