ISERNIA QUEST: SAVING SIGURD’S PRIVATES
Developer & Publisher: HippoSoft
Director: Fat “The Patriarchy” Hippo
System: Pathfinder 2e
Music: Basil Poledouris, Yuka Tsujiyoko, Ram Jam, Niko
Genre: dark fantasy, religious drama, screwball comedy
Even with a multitude of server outages, Isernia Quest maintains its status as one of the most exciting MMORPGs from my circle of collaborators and collaborator-adjacent individuals. Using his experience from past projects, Fat Hippo has set his ambitions higher than ever before: not only has he introduced a new, experimental mercenary combat system designed for larger-scale battles, he’s placed this mechanic in the context of a setting rife with dilemmas and profit-centric moral ambiguity. When we’re not fighting, we’re able to discuss the finer points of determinism and human agency, as well as the merits of eliminating manlets from the ecosystem. For my money (which we might soon not have enough of to pay our army), this is the first, only, and perhaps even greatest long-term MMORPG quest line in which I’ve participated thus far. More than 120 hours of story in, its qualities continue to shine in new situations, the latest of which serves as our entry into a larger world of smaller people.
To give a bit of context, our bard has been looking for a slave that, as it turns out, our marimba also knows, and the gang finds out that she is in the Moku Hills. Quickly, there’s a big problem: the Moku Hills are halfling territory, and its denizens are well known to enslave humans who enter their turf without protection from one of the ruling houses. Even worse, we promised Hippo we wouldn’t do the “moss cart on mountain” exploit to avoid setting the flag that indicates we’ve actually entered the Hills. Luckily, one of the halfling houses has recently been removed from the council, and in response, they’ve formed a manlet Viet Cong (a Conglet, one could say) and occupied a mine close to the southern border, fending off three other houses who are looking to acquire it. This has given us the opportunity to introduce ourselves into the situation and look for an employer who, in return for helping them get a hold of those mines, may help us and our army get into the Moku Hills. Of course, as all of this takes place, we have to contend with internal problems such as army loyalty and the ramifications of euthanizing our incapacitated troops.
The greatest compliment I can give to Fat Hippo as a writer and game designer is that he understands that what makes roleplaying interesting is the ability to develop your own relationship with the world in an organic way. As a result, the game is often eager to drop you into a room and let you dick around as long as you possibly can before the next event trigger. This approach has already yielded strong results, but it comes off as particularly welcome here, since we are now getting involved in events with larger ramifications on the setting. We have spent about 10 hours exclusively at a gathering that all three house leaders were attending, and this allowed us to get a strong impression of each group through natural interactions with the occasional tomfoolery in-between. To give you a highlight reel, the event involved the party’s Mirinda supplier and I eating a boatload of cheese as soon as we had realized this was a repeatable action, my failed attempt to softlock the count of Glimburg’s dialog tree by catching AIDS in a previous radiant quest, the gang deciding not to go for one of the houses because they hired a black man, and me helping break up a fight by dropkicking a halfling so hard he clipped through a table.
This is only one example of the narratives that can emerge as a result of this improvisational game design: a few missions later, the bard and I have had a very engrossing discussion on the prophetic qualities of dreams, leading into an almost revelatory dip into the concept of the maps of memory (yes, it cameos in this game!). As it turns out, the game is so disturbingly thorough in its integration of lore into gameplay that the mechanics themselves change in response to the dialog paths we’ve chosen. For just a moment, the bard and I saw the screen covered in white text on black with all sorts of varying values; by peering into the ebb and flow of memory and its effects on the world, we, as players, were able to get a look at the debug menu! I went out of my way to tell Hippo what a daring move that was, and even he seemed surprised once I told him what happened, I’m not sure why.
Now, in addition to looking like idiots in front of more important people, we have also been in battle with those same people, and the mercenary combat mechanics hold up as well as they did with smaller groups. Truth be told, I was concerned about the length battles could take once a lot of units get involved, since Hippo had directly ported over the multiple attack penalty from standard combat even though bonuses are a lot less significant, but this has yet to really become an issue. This means quite a bit, since we’ve had the chance to participate in our largest battle yet just before the latest server outage. After choosing one of the houses as our employers (the magic-centric house with an alchemist grandma as its leader, to be precise), our trials and tribulations led us to a climactic four-way battle: Us and Grandma vs. the fighter house vs. the thot house vs. the Conglet. It wasn’t certain how much Grandma’s troops were going to help: it turned out that the alchemist class is trash, but no one caught on to that because no one ever played alchemist, let alone a quest involving an alchemist NPC. However, in the first turn, one of her wizards must have had its AI reach a singularity by accident, because it made the galaxy brain move of setting an entire fucking forest on fire. Some time later, the thots and the Conglet stormed in, and we mostly held our own in all this chaos until the party roomba got wrecked in one turn by assholes on horses. In any case, the bottom line is that the fight was so exciting, even with so many moving pieces, that we refused to use “autoresolve” and opted to see how the rest of the battle unfolded after we had tactically maneuvered ourselves far away from the action.
I will say, for all the merits of this quest line, that I do miss standard battles a bit. We were certainly not lacking for roleplaying opportunities in-between the mercenary fights, but it’s an inevitability for one aspect of this multi-faceted MMORPG to be neglected in favor of others at a given moment. Some of us are sitting on a lot of money outside of our army funds, and there is only so much beer to buy before stocks run out and we have to wait for them to refresh on Server Maintenance Sunday. I’m not particularly worried, mind you: I’m sure that fights will be on a much smaller scale once we do enter the Moku Hills, unless we feel bold enough to try and sequence skip the unraveling of an entire region. What I do find more worrisome are the poor results of looting as a payment method: the low drop rate makes perfect sense when it’s an addition to already existing rewards, all the more so when considering how valuable runes are in their own right, but it’s very possible we have underestimated how volatile this can be as a source of income. Then again, maybe we should have seen this coming; for supposedly having knowledge of economics, Hippo can’t code it into his game for shit. We’ve tried to get extra funds by trading turnip ale, but the automated calculations for market fluctuations have resulted in so many integer overflows that we’ve had to buy four extra accounts, use them to unit block a bunch of mountain goblins, and constantly beat them up and heal them so as to take advantage of the “unlimited goblin genocide rep” glitch, just to return to our original funds.
Time will ultimately tell how the “Saving Sigurd’s Privates” quest line pans out in its later stages; the meta of Isernia Quest is, for better and worse, greatly subject to change, and thus we, as players, must continue to uncover and abuse the loopholes in the mechanics before Hippo gets another excuse to take the servers down and overhaul the gameplay. (Personally, I don’t miss the days when Morale was a flat DC and bards were broken enough to solo a 0 Diabolist Reputation Abyss-Necropolis run, but that’s just me.) Regardless of the nitty-gritty of the gameplay, the improvisational storytelling alone makes it an essential experience, and I am excited to see just what Hippo meant when he gave our bard a dream where he gets sexually enslaved.
PERSONAL RATING: ****
RECOMMENDATION RATING: ****
LETTERED RATING: Gamma
THE UNDERTALE REMINDER
Unlike Undertale, which explores the consequences of player agency in a way that undermines just about everything that’s halfway passable about the game proper, Isernia Quest makes this element a meaningful part of its gameplay cycle. Furthermore, it’s a lot less judgemental when you commit ethnic cleansing.
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