Been playing some more.

Some notable events:

Got a second companion. Just what I needed, as some of the battles were getting rather difficult and time-consuming. It’s Dak’kon, a lawful neutral fighter/mage. Still an incomplete party (three out of six), but I have my eyes set on two others, Annah and a pyromaniac wizard currently trapped in a prison of fire. Those are characters I’ve met who I have reason to believe are potential companions, but I have yet to figure out exactly how to make them so. Probably not supposed to be possible at this point.

I ended up in Lady of Pain’s maze. It’s a sudden and unexpected event that would have been rather confusing if I hadn’t had it all explained to me earlier by some characters I talked to. Apparently the maze is a prison of sorts, for people crossing her in some way. And in fact, I knew I had crossed her, so I expected to end up there. Didn’t know anything about the maze itself though, was surprised to find in it one of my journals I had been looking for.

I’ve explored all currently accessible surface areas and probably found most side-quests, and completed most of them. They’re somewhat hit and miss in terms of inherent interest. Some of the people I interact with give me interesting information about the alien world and its opaque underpinnings, and the people living there, and some characters you meet are interesting in their own right, their situation, their fate, their backstories, and in a few cases I was seemingly helped along my own main quest, by learning things about myself from previous incarnations, sometimes by having long forgotten but potentially important memories triggered. But all too often the side-quests have been little more than a grind to get resources and experience points. But I do need those resources and that experience, and I don’t know in advance where additional benefit resides.

Not only am I now fully ready to get on with the main quest, going further into the catacombs below the buried village looking for Pharod’s bronze sphere — I know of nowhere else to go and I got nothing else to do.