Day three... ish... of Tales on Steam, and I've somehow managed to hit 21 on a Shalore archmage (Brother Badass!) on normal adventure. He died somewhere in the middle of Dreadfell to a certain acid-scarred dwarf who bore the same initials as my character. I have now resolved to play on exploration mode to learn a bit more about the game; the first thing I learned was that it's important to ensure you actually select exploration mode as opposed to adventure when you start out with the intention of playing an exploration mode character. Rest well, Explorio Cheatymage. Apparently, this is an easy mistake to make off the back of losing a beloved level 21 Archmage to a dwarf who spent an entire turn spewing up on the tower floor before striking the fatal blow. Easy for me, at least.

But hey, live and learn!

Uncle Whippy, Shalore archmage explorer extraordinaire, has now arrived to fill up the gaping holes in my knowledge of Eyal. At the time of writing, he has died more times than any other character so far (infinite lives, see) and not entirely because I was curious about how he'd fare against certain newly-encountered bosses. No, this time I seem to have gone about the early game in a way that's just different enough to throw off my expectations of what I was just becoming used to; Uncle Whippy was last seen tearing across the countryside trying to find a *nice* dungeon after having various pieces of himself handed back to him by a large red dragon somewhere in the Daikara. I could have sworn that volcano wasn't there last time I looked.

Onwards!