ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Apparently it's possible to trigger the lost merchant quest when on Arena mode in b24. It can only happen on the very first turn, and it's a very small chance, but it just happened to my skeletal Corruptor. I saw the arena, I saw the high score list, and I chose a pair of iron boots of disengagement, and when I closed that box the lost merchant quest box popped up. Being adventurous, I said yes, and now my character is in the unknown tunnels. I have no orb of scrying, but I do have the 12 hotkey linked to it anyway (it's grayed out). My guess is that the game places the character on the worldmap at birth, and that placement can trigger the lost merchant quest.

Still working on a way to abuse this before it's fixed.

I'm not at all sure of what you are talking about. Which arena?

I mean The Arena: Challenge of the Master. I followed these steps.

1. Start a new game.
2. Select The Arena: Challenge of the Master.
3. Choose a difficulty, race, and class. I used roguelike skeletal corruptor.
4. Decide whether you want to play with 60 waves or 30 waves (I chose 60, though I never make it to wave 20).
5. Select an item to take with you into the arena.
6. Exit the level up screens. I usually exit without spending any points.
7. Close the box saying "Welcome to ToME, as you walk forward you hear increasingly loud cheers coming from outside".
8. Get your character registered.

Right there, before I could take a step, the lost merchant quest popped up on my game. It's only ever happened once, so of course I chose to "Enter tunnels". I have the saved game if anyone's interested.

That happened once when I started a normal game as an undead. But only once. Haven't been able to reproduce, log didn't show anything useful. "Hello, Mr. Necromancer! I think I'll crawl down this tunnel you left in my summoning circle." And yeah, the game does place you on the worldmap at birth, s'why you get the worldmap music playing for a bit, and sometimes will see the worldmap for a split-second before being shoved in your start dungeon.

Huh, I always thought the lost merchant quest couldn't appear until Level 5.

Maybe there's something there now that can allow it to offer the quest if you don't yet have a level? Something like that?

The quest can happen at level 1 now.

Ahh... hmm. Maybe make a hidden spot on the worldmap for where the arena, infinite dungeon, and blighted ruins are, to stop that from happening? Don't think I've ever seen lost merchy or melinda boxes pop up when I was on a dungeon/city tile on the worldmap.

I think there's a more serious long-term issue if such quests are leaking across campaigns. I'm sure DarkGod will have a wholly appropriate fix though.

It's jsut that wilderness is created no matter what and thus the plaeyr placed on it, with very bad luck it can trigger the quest, I'll fix it