| Erika’s Legacy | |
| by Bonnie Gorshe | |
| Measle’s Review | |
After bitter struggle and three computer games of epic proportions, the Exiles finally cut a deal with Empress Prazac and return to the surface to set up a new home in Valorim. Rentar descends to the depths swearing revenge like the final act of Don Giovanni and everyone begins to build life anew. Nonetheless, after the original Exile and two sequels, and Blades of Exile the first question on the mind of any gamer who’s followed the lives of Micah, Erika, X and Asp et al is.... what happens next?
Several scenario designers have continued in the aftermath of the original trilogy but no one succeeds quite as well as Erika’s Legacy by Bonnie Gorshe (BGraceFild@aol.com). Exile’s population has all deserted the depths for literally greener pastures, hordes of beggars roam the once bustling plains, Formello is wasted, Silvar sells Vahnatai trinkets to desperately try to earn a tourist dollar (though there’s nary a tourist in sight), the Nephilim are trying to live in houses as a last ditch attempt to save their race from extinction and the Slithzerakai have gone back to doing what they almost certainly did before the Exiles arrived: belting the living daylights out of each other in a bloody civil war. Meanwhile on the surface, the area just outside the entrance to Exile has the feel of a tacky border town. Many of the ones who remain below the surface are the “other” Exiles. Not political dissidents, but the insane, the criminal and the ones that could never fit into any sort of normal society. (Some of these bear a peculiarly strong resemblance to members of the BoE community).
All sorts of social problems to solve. All sorts of wrongs to right. Too difficult for six adventurers to fix? You betcha.
All the party really feels like doing is getting back some of the money they lost when they were mugged and locked up by bandits and getting into a mysterious looking block of granite that’s perched itself in Silvar for no particular reason. Fixing society’s social ills isn’t even mentioned as a possibility. Let’s leave that one to some Mahatma Gandhiesque figure.
The writing in Erika’s Legacy is extremely clever. It works both within the Exile framework by keeping the same geography and history of the old adventures while at the same time providing a whole new slant with a writing style completely different to Jeff Vogel’s. The world you travel through is one of the most evocative and well thought out of all third party scenarios and all this is done with no additional custom graphics at all.
Once the party does get inside the block, the story becomes a little more run of the mill. A series of quite good, but ultimately unexceptional logic problems, a few tough battles and a lot of wandering round once you’ve received your “prize”. Not that there’s anything wrong with all this, in fact it’s extremely competently done, it’s just that the early part of the scenario is perhaps a little stronger and other people have done these sorts of things a little bit better. The search for a missing person does make a nice change to the stock standard defeat-the-terroriser-of-the-land-and-ruiner-of-the-crops formula though.
I’d give it an 8.5 and a strong recommendation. Go download it.
XOXO Measle