* I enjoyed KotB a lot more than Drakensang River of Time. A very effective tactic is to Trip someone as part of a Ready versus Approach action. Also, Ready versus Approach may have a bug, because sometimes it gave my characters two attacks in a row. This is often not the best position, because to get Flanking bonuses you need to be adjacent to the target, not ten feet away from the enemy.
However, when attacking with a reach weapon, the game will have the character move to the first position from which an attack can be done. * Reach weapons work very well, as well as Ready versus Approach. It can be boring to watch long shooting animations, only to have most attacks miss or fail because of the penalties for shooting in a melee, or for shooting through soft cover, or because the target has Damage Reduction that can't he bypassed by piercing damage, and ranged weapons don't allow adding the strength bonus to damage. * I didn't like to use ranged weapons in KotB. All had strength 18 and Martial Proficiency (Glaive). The party included a Fighter with Improved Trip, a Rogue, a Cleric with the Good and Law domains for crafting, a Cleric with the Sun and Law domains, and a Wizard who's a Conjuration specialist with the banned domains of Necromancy and Abjuration. * All the characters in my party used Glaives, making them very powerful right from level 1. At level 1, the easiest encounters you could get are wilderness random encounters against pirates. This is not a game for D&D 3.5 neophytes. There are no quests or encounters specifically geared for level-1 parties. Similar to the RPG Age of Decadence, KotB can be absolutely brutal to first-level characters. There's a problem of challenge mismatch: you will encounter a Black Dragon and a Spider Queen when your party is very low level and you will battle with Goblins and Kobolds towards the end of the game when your party is high level and these creatures no longer pose any challenge. This will allow you to bypass the 'grinding' part, where you have to look for easy encounters just to level up to level 2, because the game does not have any appropriate challenges for a level-1 party. * Also, use the console command "levelup()" to immediately level-up your characters to level 2. The game will sometimes check multiple skills on the same character, such as Speak Languages, Sense Motive and Diplomacy, so it can be frustrating if you have your skills distributed over several characters. Give all social skills (including languages) to a single character because the game will only check social skills on a single character, the one who is talking. That way you will meet all skill requirements, get all the possible dialogues and complete all of the quests. * For an easier and more pleasant time through KotB, give all your characters all 18 ability scores. Move the 18 to the top of your abilities. Then switch back to roll, the 18 appears as if it was rolled. Click 'roll' then switch to 'point-buy' then increase a score to 18 then drag and drop the 18 to a certain empty spot a few pixels below the initial position. * You can use a trick to get all 18 scores. By the end of the game, you can craft +2 weapons, but by then you won't need them. Enchant Weapon is useful but not great because there are only a few masterwork items in the game and enchanting from masterwork to +1 only gives you a +1 bonus to damage. Craft Wand gives you cheap Wands of Healing, cheap Wands of Identify and any other wand of a spell that you may want to cast several times before resting.
Instead, focus on Craft Wondrous Items, Craft Wand and Martial Proficiency (Glaive).Ĭraft Wondrous Items lets you craft +4 Belts of Strength which are very useful. * In KotB, if you play a party of 4 party members, you will finish the game at level 6, so there's no need to take Metamagic feats or to plan for crafting Holy or Flaming weapons because you won't meet the level requirements for them. On the occasion of the Kickstarter campaign for Knights of the Chalice 2, due to be launched on, I'm posting these notes about KotB.
Years later, I played the final version and I wrote a bunch of notes. I wrote a review of the KotB demo a long time ago. Keep on the Borderlands (KotB) is an adventure module for Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE) created by the Circle of Eight.