<<-- Introduction | <-- Trollmire 1 | Norgos' Lair -->
Here we are on the wilderness map. The wilderness map has a fog of war on it, so after we move away from a spot, it'll appear dimmed, and we won't know if any monster parties are hiding there.
We're standing on the Trollmire entrance. To the west, the cyan > is another dungeon -- Kor'Pul. To the southwest, we can just barely see the white * representing the town of Derth. We're going to Derth first.
Press > like it says....
Derth, city of... well... not very much actually. But we're not going to explore the whole city either. We are only level 1, and the first time we enter any particular shop, that shop's inventory will be generated -- using our character's level as an input. So if we open all the stores right now, they're all going to be stuck with level 1 equipment. We don't want that.
But there are two places we do want to go right now.
The brown * is the alchemist, who's going to give us a quest. The red 9 is the gem store. We don't want to buy anything in the gem store -- we want to sell that iron dagger there. The gem store is one of the stores whose inventory we don't care about, so the fact that we're opening it at level 1 doesn't hurt us. We just need some place to sell stuff, and any store will do (they all buy everything). So we'll sell stuff there.
The alchemist quest has three choices. All of them are good, but the first two are the best for Fighters. I'm going to take the first one.
Pressing j lets us see our quest journal. The ingredients that we need to gather for the elixir are randomly chosen each game, so let's see... the ice ant stinger is likely to be found in the Old Forest. The mummified bone can be found in the Elven Ruins, which is an extremely dangerous place. The faerlhing, however, is something that we're not likely to find anywhere that is currently accessible. We could potentially find the fang in the drops from an adventurer party, but most likely we simply won't be getting this elixir until much later in the game.
Also, adventurer parties are quite dangerous, as they match our level and they outnumber us 2 or 3 to 1. If we see one of those any time soon, it would be wise to get away.
In the gem store, we can sell our stuff, or buy gems. There's absolutely no reason we'd want to buy a gem right now. We do, however, want to sell that iron dagger. If we had any other useless (to us) stuff, we'd sell that here as well. We'd only hold on to stuff we may potentially use in the future (like that iron plate armour), or stuff that is valuable but light (like rings, amulets, runes, infusions and gems). That spinel falls into the latter category. We'll keep that for now.
We sell the dagger for 0.30 gold, and then we're done here.
Our purse is currently up to 13.35 gold -- just a little more than we started with. That's not enough to buy anything really good, or even anything that's pretty good, really. So there's definitely no incentive to open another store yet.
At this point, we could either grab more alchemist quests, or we could simply head over to the first zone we actually want to do (Norgos' Lair). The chance of finding an alchemist ingredient in Norgos' Lair is really, really small -- and the ones you can find there (bear paw mainly) can show up just about anywhere. So, let's just head over to Norgos' Lair.
Through the twisty path in the trees, we can see two more dungeons, and another town. The town is Shatur, home of the Thaloren elves. The green > is Norgos' Lair, and the cyan > is the Heart of the Gloom. Norgos' Lair is where we're going next.
There are a few reasons for this, and for our departure from the Trollmire. First, as a Cornac, we can find escort quests in the Trollmire -- but not in Norgos' Lair. We want to find escort quests when we're stronger and better able to keep the escortees out of danger. They are especially stupid (intentionally), and it will take quite an effort to keep them alive.
Second, the boss (Norgos) is one of the easiest bosses to beat. He's much easier than Bill the troll for sure (although Prox the troll is much weaker than Bill).
Third, the annoying layout of the Trollmire, and the hunt for lore, doesn't happen in the Lair. It's just clearings, with narrow corridors between them, and monsters.