Oooo! Varant truely is bountious! I earned my 50000g for whatsit in Trelis really quickly, all those Hashashin swords ad up, lol!
I've meandered down south, and have come across a really huge ruin + temple, it's on your booklet map, Al Shedine, or similar. Nearby is an orge infested (x4) ruin, where you can dig, yes dig, for treasure at some of the grave markers! I had never realised this as possible! Mwahaha, i shall now try out every grave marker i come across!
The temple and ruins have various nomads and wizards around, follow the dry canal to find the important people, and to get one of the quests for the temple, the other quest can be obtained by clicking on the temple door! It's part of Mora Sul quests.
So you need 5 keys, Lester has the 2nd, he's in the orc camp, the 1st is with the important nomad types, they also give you a map of the area, which points vaguely to the rest of the keys. You will also find various artifacts on you sojourn around the ruins, 3 scolar scrolls, 5 healing temple urn things, 7 damn can't remember their name ,10 warrior atatues, _ tablet of the priests, _ guardians of the dead urn things. Don't know who wants them yet, but i'm assuming they are going to help lift the curse once you open the temple.
Foes around the ruins:
Sandcrawlers
Dark Snappers
Lizards
Fire lizards
Skeletons
Zombies
Mummies
Temple Guardians, yes plural!
Gargoyles
They do try to swamp you so take Lester with you, he serves as a handy distraction, and is better at that job than Diago.
There are stone tablets lying around the place, and you will also be given some by Lester and the wizards. Large stone monolith things are also around so watch out for them.
By now you should be getting some cool stuff out of Metal Chests, there are several around here, have recently got a couple of one-of-a-kind weapons out of them, but they aren't as good as the ones I'm using so i'll be selling them!
Basically the only way to stop yourself getting lost is to constantly work out which direction you just came from, and thoroughly explore little pockets of the ruins at a time. I tend to follow an outside wall and stick with it, then have a wiz round the interior walls. Has started to make me a bit dizzy so I'm taking a break, and can start fresh of mind later.
I came to Al Shedim directly from the eastern middle oasis, the one with the fellow who stole some magic ore balnks, he's only got 2 on him, his accompliss has the other, he's supposed to have gone to Mora Sul.
The most useful thing you can do is actually not in the game, it's in the booklet. The Game World Map is very much like the map for the Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, as it displays important places and features that your in game map doesn't. get a good photcopier, and enlarge the map to fill a sheet of A4. It makes everything much more visible, and I've written on mine. For instance the Nomad base near Braga shows on the map as a village, but the entrance can be tricky to find, (tho the wizard did show you the way!) so I've drawn the route.
Palm trees are oasis, small blue rectancles are temples, and lttle tents are nomad villages.
The map does help in other regions, but not much, tho it does clearly show a tower in Nordmar which I'm assuming is Xartas' tower. Handy.
The Al Shedim ruin wizards let me know about 5 interesting artifacts, which i have two of already, the ring and the amulet. The robe of Adinos is in the nearby temple, hence your desparate attempts to open the bugger! the other 2 items are supposed to be in the other temples, however you get told the ring is in nordmar. I got it from the Demon in Gotha, as Gorn dropped it. Oh, he said the wizards in Nordmar gave it to him! That's okay then!
So Adinos artifacts:
Ring: Gotha from the Demon
Amulet: Trelis for 50,000g
Robe: Al Shedim Temple.
I'm guessing there'll be a shield and a staff as the other 2.
The only temple i haven't investigated are:
Directly south of Mora Sul
Oh. is hat one near Ishtar? or does someone in Ben Sala have an artifact, i've killed the dude in the temple there, but haven't done much else.
Course it could be in Bakaresh, I do have permission to enter the temple, and have received a kill the nomads quest, but i obviously haven't done that yet, ad i want to maximise exp.
Which reminds me, the take the slave to Lago quest gives you 5000 exp if, once you're there, you talk to the emaciated slave and tell him to bugger off.
Oh, it also took me a while to work out what people in Lago mean when they refer to the coast: when looking for bloodflies and lurkers, face the sea then look up and right. you can get up there from near the mine. There's loads of bloodflies, but they didn't seem to want to leave the grassy bit, so you can run away in peace, collect yourself and turn around with out fear of a chase. The lurker tend to leap off rocks at you, in a heavily forested area, and can be annoying.
