ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So I finally made it to the far east for the second time. Yay. The problems is I went to the Gates of Morning, and Aeryn is no where to be found. http://postimage.org/image/x497d9lyv/

I tried deleting the Gates of Morning part of my saved game and re-entering the town. She's still not there. Is there any way I can go to the four prides? Is there any way I can continue my game?

The only screwy thing I can think that happened up to this point was the messenger in Reknor got killed before he could deliver his message to me.

Was the game started under an older version of ToME and then continued under a newer version?

Were there any Lua errors, particularly in the Far East?

Game was started with v. 1.00. It has never been modified.

No LUA errors were encountered prior to this happening.

Game crash ?

I did have the game crash once or twice in Dreadfell. Never in the far east.

Sorry about the thread necromancy (could this be an alternate way to qualify for the Necromancer class?) but I encountered the exact same problem and was able to find the cause.

When I checked my savegame folder, alongside the zone-town-gates-of-morning.teaz file I had a similarly named, older, zone-town-gates-of-morning.tmp file. When I renamed the .tmp file to .teaz (making a backup of that file first), Aeryn was present on re-entering Gates of Morning and I was able to converse and complete two quests as a result.

Unfortunately since the .tmp file was rather old, it didn't have the Fargate back to the West present so I had to exit the town and restore the previous .teaz file. Aeryn vanished again, but the Fargate was present and I could now continue and, eventually, finish the game.

I had a similar problem previously in Dreadfell where I encountered the Master, defeated him (with difficulty) but when he resurrected, I used the Rod of Recall to leave and recover. Re-entering Dreadfell, I could no longer find the Master. Investigation here found a zone-dreadfell.tmp file and renaming that to .teaz and re-entering brought him back for a second defeat.

I assume that in both these cases, there was a problem in saving the area properly upon exit. This has (very occasionally) recurred but now I check regularly, it's not such an issue. I also make full backups of savegames when entering a new area.

So if anyone encounters seemingly game-breaking plot issues, check for non-empty .tmp files in your savegame folder.