Talk:Marek and Lothander/@comment-68.104.97.45-20180918045232/@comment-90.246.228.125-20191123052621

Lothander is lying, or telling only half-truths (as becomes evident from his fake antidote)... If the player is inquisitive enough, they can establish that it's actually Lothander who poisons their party, not Marek; Marek just delivers the warning, as he says. Now, Lothander may only be doing Marek's bidding because of the geas, just like he says, but the fact remains -- the party doesn't start to feel poisoned after rest until Lothander talks to them at the central square; that is when and where Lothander poisons the party.

Thus, if you blast both Marek and Lothander (or even just Lothander alone) before Lothander gets a chance to talk to your party at the central square -- that's problem solved. Obviously you miss all the nice XP for the quest, just get the XP and loot for the kills. It was this way in vanilla TotSC, and it's the same way in BG:EE... double-checked. But perhaps it was different (more broken/less intuitive) in the earlier editions of the game.

Luckily, even if the player decides to play along with this plot, they still have the option to blast that snake before he can get away, after obtaining Marek's location! (For the Boots of Speed and extra 4000 XP on top.)

More to the point though, yes -- video games of that age were unkind to the player... any small mistake, or something the player didn't pay attention to, could result in game over or being thoroughly stuck. Not like modern games, which babysit the player through each and every step.