DDO: Mad Tea Party

Mad Tea Party is another fantastic Ravenloft quest that shows off much of Dungeons and Dragons Online’s strengths: its storytelling chops, quest choices, non-standard settings, humorous writing, cool places to explore, and devilish puzzles. It was another one of those evenings where I didn’t care that much that the quest was going long because I was totally involved in it.

This one has an odd setup: A local lady is throwing a tea party and has invited the town’s baron to attend. The twist is that the two are fundamentally enemies (she is pro-Stahd, he anti-Stahd) but both are pretty awful human beings. As the quest and party progresses, you get the choice to betray one, the other, or both. I’m the harbinger of chaos and doom, so I decided to bring down the whole shebang.

I think that objectively, the lady is the worse of the two. She’s a literal devil worshiper, for starters, and has a house of horrors if you are daring enough to poke through it. You know the type: well-preserved corpses lying in rooms for no reason, skulls in chests, secret underground cult clubhouses.

Oh and she’s squirreling away a girl who thinks that she’s an angry cat. That’s my daughter, most days.

I think that this is the first DDO quest where I actually fought devils. You don’t see devils in a lot of MMOs, come to think of it. Demons, yes, but devils? Not as much. They’re pretty creepy looking, especially their teeth.

The Baron is more of a raging jerk than anything else. He locks up anyone who mocks or protests him, and his main enforcer has an arm that’s covered by these purple tumors for some reason. Oh, and he has a wizard son who keeps exploding the help while allegedly trying to teleport them out of a teleport-locked country.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I was that I couldn’t do anything with this mirror. My Use Magical Device skill was too low. But man! I wanted to!

Pity for your FACE, you mean. In the end, it was a lot of killing back and forth. I do appreciate that the quest seemed to offer branching choices, but I suspect that most players are going to be like me and just wipe out everyone in both manors.

It was cool to see the peasants cheering the demise of the Baron, but the dungeon master introduced an ominous note by saying that with a power vacuum in the town, there’s an opening for a strong leader to swoop in. Gee, wonder who that might be?