Unless otherwise stated all missions are in 'Normal' mode. This is largely to bypass the 'Thou Shalt Not Murder' commandment found in higher difficulty levels.
Knock out one of the guards, and if you are so inclined, drop his body into the river from which you emerged. Check back later and he will have magically transformed into a corpse.
For fun, you might consider knocking out one of the peasants on the first floor and throwing their body down the stairs. This will result in a low moan and the aforementioned transformation. I wouldn't save afterwards, though, unless you're playing the 'Sutek The Destroyer' way.The next step should be to eliminate all resistance. Go through each floor killing all the swordsmen. This is made easier by utilising the pool. You see, when you're in the water, no-one can see you. You can, therefore, smite the guards with your sword and jump back into the water before they can retalliate. If you emerge the opposite side of the pool, it will help tremendously.
The pool also has that tremendous ability to conceal OTHER things, like corpses.
Not that you should be putting ALL your victims in the pool, since leaving one
or two of them in plain sight on the patrol routes is a surefire way to
drive the survivors into a frenzy, which makes for a good deal of excitement.
And of course, you don't have to be dead to be allowed into the pool.
Other things, such as vases, plates, bottles of drink and anything else
which you can't stuff into your sack and sell later can also go into
the pool.
Man, I'd love to be watching when Lord Bafford comes home.
You can use a variation on the pool technique by duking it out in Lord Bafford's bath, which can provide a lot of fun. Especially as you can only start to attack by jumping first (Garrett won't fight in water!).
When you're done, loot the place bare.
The most important room is of course, the throne room, which contains the sceptre, but you don't actually want to go in there until everything else that isn't nailed down has been crammed into your happy-bag.
There are a few different ways to approach the throne room.
The first, is Deus-Ex style. Knock on the door and ask to be let in using
your sword. When the guard opens it, deal with him and slip through.
Alternatively, you can open the door more quietly by some other means.
Once inside, alert the guards to your presence using the gongs provided for
that purpose.
Then, as the guards move to slay you, pick up the Sceptre and vanish with a
swirl of your cloak.
IDM: Shouldn't you be hiding those dead guards? JPM: I don't know. What does "hiding" mean? IDM: It's when you take their hides as a trophy.
Unfortunately you can't elyctrocute yourself (or the Zombies).
Sulk voice: I guess I'll have to save the world then.
Try not to kill Hammerites where it can be avoided, since they are, after all, only fascist loonies. Knock them out instead. There will come times when avoidance is impossible, and, like a mad dog, the hammerite will have to slain as humanely as possible. Besides, we'll need their help later.
If you aren't constrained by anything as human as morality, you can go totally
berserk and wipe out the entire prison complex, which I did the first time
around, before I knew better.
If this interests you, a useful approach is to use the freight elevator.
Unfortunately you can't actually squash the Hammerites beneath it as was
done in System Shock 2 with the protocol 'droids, but you can lure them
up to the lift, and then stand on it, rendering yourself invisible.
You can then lash out at the Hammerites and throw the bodies down the
lift-shaft into a heap before going to find some more.
The sensors are jammed and the vat keeps on pouring the gurgling molten steel forever. Do this for all three of them.
Kill or otherwise incapacitate the High Priest. Leave the altar boy alone, he can't harm you. Instead let him follow you around, yelling threats and obscenities at you. If he becomes a nuisance, club him.
Take out prison wings 1-3 first. Free all the prisoners, who stumble and babble. Be patient when they get in your way, and remember that you used to be a prisoner too, once, before you left the asylum.
Now go directly to Felix' map which is in the guardroom. Once this be done, go to wing 4 and turn everyone else loose.
Cutty will stay put, but try to make sure the heretic opposite (the loony with the fireballs) doesn't try to murder him.
Go into the cell and shut the door behind you. The hammerites will try to slay you but they can't open the cage. They will however, still try to pummel you through the jail door, with some success.
And suddenly, with the situation at its most bleak, with Garrett imprisoned
and the only way out blocked by a horde of murderous hammerites determined
to smash his skull, Garrett wishes himself out of the jail cell and escapes.
As if by magic.
*And for those of you who live in Neath.. I'm very sorry to hear that.
Try to time it so that you can leap off the tower and the mission ends before your body splatters everywhere.
If anyone has been able to jump in front of Farkus and take the bullet for him, I'd really like to hear from you!You don't really need my help to make this one a fun mission.
If you have time, go outside after the place is entirely yours and the guards are all dead.
Outside there are various street patrols and so on, who are only too
happy to fight.
You can spend hours, even days, getting lost in the gigantic city map
and annihilating all resistance.
As you emerge from the guardroom, you should see a hole in the corridor.
Throw the body down the hole and jump up and down so the guards hear you.
Wander around, nicking things and looking for the Sword.
Our careful hiding of the dead guards in plain sight will have driven
the survivors into a frenzy of hatred, which makes them do unpredictable things.
If you're really good, you should be able to get at least some of the guards killed
off by the house's own internal defence systems.
The upper levels of the house are really, really cool, involving
optical illusions, rooms upside-down and sideways, Escherisms and
rooms that hang in space.
It's a shame the Thief engine doesn't seem to support portal mechanics or they
could have done some serious pan-dimensional work, with two rooms occupying the same space, or
rooms that are bigger on the inside.
Go to the edge of the lost city. This is quite easy. You may find a few spiders. If you shoot a gas arrow between them, they all roll onto their backs and wave their legs in the air in perfect sync.
Go to the clifftop where you get to see the Talisman of fire, and Garrett says "So this is the Lost City? It ain't lost no more..".
Normally this is either a tantalising glimpse of the city, or a novel way to commit suicide by jumping off the cliff. By the judicious use of drugs, however, we can turn it into something else.. a major hoodwink.
Fire a rope arrow at the wooden joist on the above-left of the window containing the Talisman. You'll probably have to centre the joist on the lower third of your bow-sight, since it's quite a distance away.
If not, go around to another side and get in using another rope arrow. (You should be able to retrieve at least one of the rope arrows by leaning out of the appropriate window).
Hell, yeah! We've been in the Lost City for like, 30 seconds, and we've already got one of the talismans!
Of course, there is a price to be paid for mugging the game in said
manner.. the drawbridge you are supposed to use to get back hasn't
been opened so you can't get back that way.
However, I managed to screw that bit when I was playing the game the
first time, anyway, so I know what to do.
Make sure you've grabbed all the loot from the fire-tower, this should include a health potion.
Find this:
Take one of the health potions later and you'll be fine.
Now, make your way to a room nearby which contains two fireballs, and is plated with little blue gems in the walls. Slay the two fireballs and put the gems into your swag bag. Then go back out, and find the way to the water talisman. This is actually the cave to the left of the gem room (on the way in).
On exiting the tomb, however, it starts to look less good, as you are confronted by things that look and walk very much like Ming's Annihilatons from 'Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe'.
You can drive the Hammerites into a killing rage before you've even set foot within the temple, by shoving the unconscious body through the bars of the portcullis so the guards can see it. The problem now is that you're on the wrong side of the portcullis, right? Wrong.
Take out the scroll and read the Litany. Someone somewhere, will shout
'Open the gates!' for no obvious reason and you can enter.
This even works if the Hammerites are raging for your blood, and it
also works if you dump the fallen Hammerite far, far away and then read
the scroll outside the gate. It's like a kind of door-opening spell. Be aware that it only works once, though.
In fact, the only sure-fire way to banjax the mission is to kill the sentry (I tried shooting him with arrows from a distance). Of course, if you manage to lock yourself outside again, you're utterly screwed.
In Umberto Eco's novel, 'The Name of the Rose', it is widely recognised that novices are pretty unruly, always sneaking into the kitchen at midnight to steal cheese (An enterprise which Adso excelled in at Melk), trading romantic works and porn, and so on. The monks tended to expect a certain amount of this behaviour, novices being young, although it was certainly not encouraged.
So, I tried the traditional boyhood prank of hitting the doorbell and running away..
Shoot an arrow or two through this slit and the High Priest will go to meet the Builder in person. If playing in 'passive resistance' mode, a gas arrow is great for this.
You can then take his body and dump it somewhere. Placing it on the patrol routes is a fine way to 'leave the straight and narrow', as I put it. Alternatively, if you place him behind the dressing screen, no-one will know that he's dead (unless he screamed too loudly) and you'll still be a good little Novice.
If you want to remain undetected, water arrows are great for tidying up any blood he may have lost while trying to escape.
Brother Inquisitor lives in the cellar. He's asleep. If you go anywhere near him, he'll wake up and do his best to make your life (and death) a misery. Of course, if you have a spare gas arrow, you can make his life a misery too.
In part of an insane experiment to build a bridge to the Talismans while
playing in expert mode, I stashed a lot of crates down in the Talisman
room.
I threw them around for a bit before finding out how easily they break.
Then I decided to annoy Brother Inquisitor. Taking four crates
I sneaked as close as I could, and then proceeded to smash them all open
by throwing them around with extreme violence.
The Inquisitor was duly annoyed, yelling "what is going on out there!?!"
and coming to investigate. He then recieved a gas arrow in the belly, and was
lain outside his room to annoy the patrol (who was duly annoyed too).
Judging from the patrol's lack of reaction, stealing empty crates from the storeroom and smashing them violently against the walls is evidently what Hammerite novices are expected to do instead of trading porn or stealing cheese.
It is interesting to note that when hit with a cudgel the Hammerites will sometimes say "Receive thy E!", suggesting that Ecstasy usage is endemic among Hammerite Novices.
Look for Brother Muriel, who I first thought was part of the cathedral automation (like the Test-masters in Eye of the Beholder II). Do what he wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
It's an interesting aside that despite their faults, the Hammers are fantastic engineers. The cathedral has been abandoned for half a century but the energy systems are still functioning perfectly and it requires only a reset of the fusebox to bring the entire cathedral back to working order.
A fun thing to get hold of is the Book of Common Prayer. When you use this, Garrett will recite the Prayer for the Dead. Do this when you enter combat with the undead, and Garrett will keep on praying - an amusing contrast to the violence and carnage.
It is also worth noting that like a bird, Garrett has two sets of vocal tracts and can both scream and pray at the same time. Even more interesting, he keeps on praying after he dies.
Once you've lain Brother Mureus in clay, and optionally the other dead dudes, you'll get the Bomb.
Set up us the bomb as per usual, only stand right next to it. Detonate the bomb and you'll become dead-alive.
So, Garrett is now lying on his side and full of 'H'. Unlike the Quake marine, who just lies there drooling with a vacant expression on his face, occasionally able to bounce up and down on the spot or fire his gun, Garrett can still scoot around on his side, and even steal gold!.
Garrett is also dying and the game will end if you leave it too long. Fortunately he has technically won the mission, so if you make him slither out through the gate as soon as he's dead, you'll hear the Eye talk to you and the mission should end successfully before the blackness claims him completely.
DANCED WE AWAY, AND FED THE SAD STRINGSIE MAN-FOOL TO THEIR DEVOURINGS FOR OUR THANKS. |
Now it's time to go back to the Hammerites, cap in hand and apologise for
all that stuff you stole and all those High Priests you murdered.
Perhaps the loss of your eye and the fact that you're now a certified Novice
will help a little.
The hammer temple is littered with corpses, upturned furniture, broken walls and shattered glass. In other words, nothing has changed since my last (and extremely violent) visit.
If you manage to find the raft-thing, DO NOT throw the lever unless you
have the High Priest.
I made that mistake, and then when I dragged the high priest to the dock, the raft was gone.
(I foolishly tried to swim back and thereby drowned the High Priest).
For extra fun, try to complete the mission without killing any of the monkeypeople.
My 'Rune' trick is quite appropriate.. just bumble around, and as long as you don't actually die, you'll find your way in by error and trial.
In the final chamber, we come across the Woodsie, who is activating a septagram, point by point. Each point requires a seriously cool incantation, so stay hidden and listen to each one.
For kicks, climb up onto the cliff which you're SUPPOSED to use. Just as the Woodsie is coming, hurl yourself off the cliff with minimal health so that your brains splatter all over his feet. "Garrett!! Lives you still?" Not anymore. It's also fun to note, that like Garrett, the Woodsie also has the ability to say several things at once, and will quite happily shout at you whilst simultaneously carrying on with the incantation. Finally, if you have a fire arrow and 3-4 shields of health, you can fire it point-blank at the nearest wall and Garrett will give two or three simultaneous death-screams.When all seven points are activated, the Woodsie will activate the Eye. As soon as he does this, rush out into the centre of the room, and swap the (now activated) Eye for the fake one.
The Woodsie will of course, say "Garrett! My thiefsie fool.. lives you still?"
before he himself stops living.
He'll probably manage to curse you before (or sometimes after) he dies,
but by quaffing health potions regularly you should be able to keep
Garrett alive until the ritual is over and the mission is won.
Then the Hammerites reanimate Garrett's broken corpse, and fit him with a mechanical
eye.
This is cool, and it means that Garrett has depth perception again,
but he's not going to be much of a thief with the motors in the eye clicking
and whirring all the time he's trying to stay hidden.
But it has to be said that it's a better solution than the one used by the Mayor
of Perdido Street Station, aka 'The Eye-Spy Killer'.
Made with Microsoft Edit and Midnight Commander!