2021 July

The next part in the Relomia series came out this week. For those who don’t know, Relomia is the emissary of Sliske who has suddenly become a sort of rival for us as adventurers, and is doing a number of things to try to discredit us and take our glory. Such measures include messing with our identity and proactively trying to humiliate us. Which, as a concept, is pretty hilarious given all the other intense types of quests we’ve had to go through. We are currently questing a war against the Elder Gods, have fought pirates, ninjas, zombies, and dragons, chilled with Gods, beat up other Gods, and are currently fist-bumping a dragonkin to help save an entire freakin’ planet outside our own.

So, the fact that we have a jealous fangirl trying to hog the glory about us retrieving the bloomin’ Silverlight is just hilarious in comparison. And that’s great; I love it when quests utilize the scale of things to invoke a sort of parody with the idea of questing itself.

Which brings us to this quest. After being messed with a couple of times, we decided we’re actually going on the offense with Relomia. Of course, we could kill her in this epic battle to annihilate her, but the way things have been playing out, we’re actually starting to get to know her a little more. She’s a fangirl and wants our fame because it was just how she grew up. Little to no self-confidence and all sorts of jealousy against those who flaunt their power and status (Ozan…). So, instead, we’re going to give her a win to help give her a taste of true fame.

By creating a quest of our own to send her through!

Those of you who remember Philipe’s quest, it saw us enter a dungeon with Xenia and outfit the place with traps and guards and a final boss for our aspiring young adventurer to go through. Such things were… improvised at best, and there were multiple times where things were either broken or bypassed in rather hilarious ways because of our character’s inability to actually stage a quest of their own.

This time, and spoiler alert, was no different. In fact, it was even worse,

We had Death himself give Relomia the task of retrieving a stolen artifact from a bunch of bad guys, infiltrating a fortress and using stealth to sneak past them in an epic heist quest. … of course, I say fortress, but I mean the forest right behind Death’s hourglass, and I say bad guys, but I mean scarecrows. And I say stolen, but the sword’s actually placed literally within double-surge distance. It’s… it’s just comical how ridiculous this quest is.

And as per the formula, things go… actually pretty well, all things considered. Relomia realizes they are scarecrows right off the bat, but satisfies herself by obliterating them. We get to the artifact, but then to our surprise, Closure takes control of us and plays out that we the adventurer were the thieves the whole time, and we are pitted against Relomia in a battle. Which, and this was a stroke of brilliance, we were meant to lose and realized it on the spot because A: we were stripped of our equipment and food to begin, and B: death makes a note to say that it’s a “safe” quest, meaning we are allowed to die, even though we knew there were no enemies actually involved.

Does it work? … we actually don’t know. Relomia states that it actually made her feel better, but… well, a few other things happened during the quest that may come back to plague us later. She hit us with a new wand of hers, which she hinted may have done more than knocked us back after we were momentarily mind-controlled, only to discover it was Closure’s doing instead of hers. It’s definitely not concluded the questline, but it feels like we’re taking a step in the right direction. In the next one, we might end up doing an actual quest alongside her.

So, let’s talk about this for a second. Why on Earth did this quest happen?

I mean, first off; the quest creation aspect of this particular quest itself. It was nice of our character to go for such a gesture, but we had options available. Much, much better options. Rather than three scarecrows and an iron sword in a forest, we could’ve done so many other things. We could’ve taken her to God Wars (bit of irony fighting Gregorovic with her), gone Dungeoneering with her, escorted her to Burntmeat so they could exchange tips for trolling everybody. Could’ve even paired her up with Philipe and had the two of them go off exploring.

Second off, examining our current relationship with the character Relomia. She’s not a signature hero or anything; she’s pretty much been played out as a sort of side-note character in the main questline. Sliske’s Endgame sort of ended with an interesting relationship between our character and Relomia. Supposedly she was originally ‘saved’ by Sliske, which caused her to pledge allegiance and become his emissary, and it hints that this hasn’t changed even after delivering the news of his demise via the Staff of Armadyl. By all accounts, we’ve kinda fused with Sliske (the light and dark masks in the Elder Gods quests hint at this), which she has no doubt realized, and thus one would imagine that we are now her greatest ally. However, during this questline, it’s sort of establishing that Sliske’s control over her had been thwarted and she’s acting on her own devices, which is pretty much against us. Doesn’t make much sense.

Third, the whole point of this quest series is playing around with Runescape’s questing past; older quest lines keep on getting brought up to the point that we are literally reliving them in slightly altered formats and interacting with long-past pivotal characters. For example, we actually interact with Elvarg post-quest and help her out. Bit of a mind-blow there. For such a type of blast-from-the-past, it’s rather odd that it’s focusing on a relatively recent character like Relomia and not somebody like Hans, or Merlin, or even Ernest (the former chicken). Ernest especially, because he’s an adventuring type who gets himself into trouble; he’d be perfect for that role because of his screw-up and resulting jealousy of us coupled with the fact that despite him starring in a quest, we really don’t get much context off of him, leaving him as a familiar blank slate that could be molded into such a role.

So despite all this, why are we doing all these weird call-back quests with Relomia, who really shouldn’t even be a bad guy to us?

We don’t know yet. And that’s the whole point. This quest is all build-up to something that’s going to happen later on in the Elder Gods series. This mini-quest series is a secondary form of hype that is tying these old quests together a bit and making the entire thing feel like an enormous build-up. That the entire game of Runescape was building up to this point, and we are about to enter the climactic center of the world’s storyline.

This mini-series is advertising that Runescape’s story is gradually coming to a close.

Pretty surprising, isn’t it? I mean, this is kinda what everything’s been building up to. We’re saving the world, all the quests and the Gods and everything is all coming together and duking it out. There will be death, and Gods will be taken down, and when the dust settles, what will remain? Naturally, us; we’ve got all those stats and bank riches. No way that we don’t survive the events that follow. But what about everything else? Would Lumbridge still be a castle town? Would we still have the Runescape Gods? Will cannons still be a viable method for agroing Dark Beasts? The possibilities are endless!

Does this mean the end of Runescape as a game? No, of course not; that’d just be silly. Where one story ends, another will begin.

Until next time,

Cheers, cannoneers!