After getting past the really boring chapter, Black Isle decides to throw me into disarray. Chapter 3 is mindblowing in terms of logic. You'll see what I mean.
Leaving the Ice Temple, the party chanced upon a 'wandering village'. In the village, we met a drow. Well, I guess it's about time we came across one, especially since we are adventuring near the Sword Coast North. The drow is actually a merchant with an extremely polite voice-over...the kind of voice that makes you think that he is going to betray you. Oh well, he DOES have some pretty nice items for sale so I let him be. He also tells me that to get to the Eastern Pass, we will need to travel through the Underdark underneath a certain Black Raven Monastery. Yay, Monks got love in this game! Wait...Underdark? That does not sound very fun (I particularly hate dungeons which are caves full of mindless monsters).
Letting the drow be, we had one more problem: The Fell Wood blocks our path to the Black Raven Monastery. The village elder tells us that only she alone knows the way and would like to trade that knowledge with errands. Fair enough, except that this knowledge of hers is only known to her because 'the villagers don't need to know'. Crap, she's definitely one manipulating b****. Anyway, I'm probably going to rant a bit on ever errand she gives. Here goes.
So the first errand is to find out why there are missing children. A 4 hour stroll towards the Fell Wood entrance revealed an extremely suspicious looking circus tent, with an extremely suspicious lady who has an extremely suspicious voice over surrounded by suspicious looking cauldrons and bottles. Gee, I doubt she's the one who kidnapped the children, so we proceeded into the Fell Wood where we met a dryad. The dryad said that the lady in the tent was bringing children in it! Wow. Thanks. So what, we are going to confront her based on some dryad's words? Apparently we are. Obviously the lady denied everything, until a random child popped out from some hole at the corner of her tent. Why couldn't he done that earlier? I wouldn't need to waste my trip into the Fell Wood! Without any room for excuses, the lady blabbed about being freaking powerful and started doing summons into Dimension Doors. She did that a few more times until I give up and threw like Chromatric Orbs and Hold Persons at her direction, which she (hurhur) is apparently not powerful enough to make the save and eventually died.
On to the second errand, which is to appease some wight who apparently got some of his stuff stolen and is haunting the hunting grounds. Expecting a fight (he is haunting after all), we approached the wight. He turns out to be pretty reasonable enough to talk things out, despite his temper. You mean the hunters didn't bother talking to him? Well, I guess, since he's a wight, so I let that slide. The wight then mentioned that his stuff is stolen and wants it back. Since I can only go to 3 places, the thief must've gone into the Fell Wood. We found the corpse and found that the wight's stuff is actually a useless golden cup. Meh, I was hoping for some good stuff and an excuse to kill the wight. We returned the cup to the wight, and he was happy.
The third errand takes the bite. It's probably the most trolling errand ever. The village elder told me to investigate someone's death like we are in some CSI show. Again, we ventured into the Fell Wood and confronted the useless ghost at the entrance (I didn't mention him before because he was useless until now). My party asked "Have you know XXX?" He replied, "Maybe, but you will have to kill Will o' Wisps who are trapping all the spirits of those who died in the Fell Wood from leaving." Gah, okay another guy taking advantage of me. We went ahead, killed the Will o' Wisps (which were annoying as hell due to their spell resistance) and returned to the ghost. We asked again "Have you know XXX?" in which he has the cheek to reply "Nope! Try the gravestone outside!". At this point I'm not sure if the designer for this quest is trolling me or just plain lazy to rectify the nonsense. Sure enough, the gravestone outside the Fell Woods stood the ghost of XXX (I seriously can't remember his name), who was happy to tell us how he got murdered and gave us a worthless spear in thanks (who uses spears in this game?).
The rest of the adventure wasn't as eventful. The village elder told us how to get past the Fell Woods, which resulted in encountering a few treants and an army of trolls. We also encountered a few Wyrms and Dragons which, to be honest, wasn't that hard to fight thanks to how broken Stoneskin is. We went underground a bit afterwards and encountered some nice dark dwarves who want us to kill EVERYTHING in the cave and also the monks in the Monastery. In the cave were hook horrors and umber hulks, but Stoneskin is so powerful, my clerics just wipe them off the face the Faerun.
Of course, how can a chapter end without a boss fight. Well, this one wasn't exactly memorable. I cannot remember the name of the boss but he came with an army of rangers, bears and panthers. Thanks to the godlike Chaos spell, Stoneskin and a bunch of Chromatic Orbs, they were quickly thrown into disarray and my clerics slowly picked them one by one.
Finally, we exited the cave and arrived at Chapter 4. To be honest, the sight of the Monastery makes me a little excited.
