From the Cocoon 04 - Endure

 I feel like

Go away spoilers

I feel like I'm approaching the End of The Expansion. I was in the zone this morning and beat the sunflower, boar, and snake boss at the end of shadows keep in like an hour after falling at all three daily for like a week. I also got our hotheaded friend in the forest and the very pointed high priest quest stuff. I sided with ansbach and kept hornsent alive for the messmer fight, if that matters, and got freyjas shield.

I haven't beat bayle, and my understanding is the final bosses can be some real doozies.

There's a lot of stuff I'm gonna want to compare to the base game. My thinking was I'll try to organize it by elder god. The problem there is how do you separate any of the others from the Greater Will. Now I'm thinking togo by faction. Any area in the game will have around ten recurring factions with nebulous goals and interactions; demihumans, misbegotten, bats, various demigod forces, and so on. 

In the shadow lands we get the bizzaro, divergent iterations of these. Where the purebloods were elegant and regal, the blood fiends are brutish and primitive. Where Rot was buried, here we find it exalted. 

But then we find, in the shadows of the shadows, vestiges of godwyns forces working to bring about the age of the duskborn. We find that here, too, rennala has been betrayed.

I thought we would get more snake stuff and less omen stuff.

I don't know what's going on with death in the expansion, but it's clearly not working there either, although it's described as being suppressed. If anything, death seems even more unobtainable in the shadow lands. 

Motherhood seems to be the overall theme here. 

Time to finish this up.

-

week later. Beat everything but the last boss. Not everything. Everything in the story and big side quests. Threw sticks at bayle WOOOOOOO. 

The spear we get from the Frenzied forest makes me realize that, even though we often find it among gem collections in the real world, amber is not a stone. The reason I bring that up is the glintstone crowns have hogh vitality, death resistance. Sellen calls it the vitality of the stars or something. Chaos is rendering the amber back down into sap. Rannalas egg may be the mew Nadalia level mystery. Must investigate.