Ok. This is too addictive. And I'm only playing in adventure mode so far. One down and one to go.
First character: Human "start now!" character, who seemed to have no real skills or equipment. As I try to learn the movement system, I encounter a couple of lions, who eat me up, and I get to watch the gory bits fly around the screen before I die.
Second character: Dwarf axe warrior who accidentally gets classed as a wrestler because he has equal wrestling skills to weapon skills, so they decide he doesn't need any weapons... hopefully he got some compensating advantage. Starts by a nice dwarf fortress with lots of dwarves wandering around, a couple of which are bored enough to join me. It's hard to tell at first but later they turn out to be girl dwarves... maybe that's why they were the only ones willing to join my male dwarf wrestler. Well, he can dream. There's another town to the north, so finding not much else to do in the dwarf town, we head out for there and have to do battle with a small pack of wolves. We win, but I notice that one of my friends has a crossbow, and doesn't seem to know how to retrieve her shot bolts. And I don't see a way to give them back to her. Or any way to tell them to do or not do anything.
We wander to the human town, where they have some things for sale, but now I need to learn how currency works here... apparently they have a concept of value, ownership, and debt, but no coins, and I have no coins and nothing they want to trade for. Except the mayor, who wants someone named Skullcollector killed in the nearby ruins. I interest a human pikeman (who laters turns out to be a female pikeman... unless the game just has a bug in the combat narrator calling all friends female), and the four of us set off to the ruins.
Zombies and skeletons live there, the place is littered with junk jewelry, and there are two extremely tall towers. We climb both of them cleaning them out but never find Skullcollector, though we found a couple of well-armed and named other undead warriors and killed them. And lots of jewelry. I got a morningstar and shield off of one of the named/armed skeletons, so I'm not just trying to judo my way through everything. My dwarf seems to be left-handed though. The crossbow dwarf woman eventually ran out of bolts and started beating things up as a brawler, and did ok but was suddenly killed by a lucky skeleton. Then hunting around for Skullcollector, the human pike(wo)man fell behind and got ambushed and beat up, but I got back just in time to splatter the zombie. That was the cue to leave with as much loot as _I_ could carry (is there a way to get others to carry loot for you? Or to retrieve ammo or equipment?), and pike(wo)man healed up on the way back to town (only two map squares).
Back in town, I try to trade my backpack stuffed with loot for improved equipment... and am almost entirely daunted by the trading interface, which is weird. Apparently 50 value shown on the table is equivalent so maybe 700* in debt units, or something. Was very tough to figure out, but I managed to give him a bunch of used equipment for 650* in debt, then he wouldn't sell me a 50? new shield until I offered a few pieces of jewelry as well.
My main mystery now though is how do I get more food and drink? Is there a way to fill a waterskin at a river? Or to buy food and drink?
Anyway, too dang addictive!
PvK