Beauty and the beast

Beauty and the beast

(#d)

[client]

Such great beauty is a sin...My girl friend is being followed by her ex-lover and needs an escort. If you safely bring her to [location], I'll give you [###] gold pieces and ores. Please, protect her from the beast.

Requirements

When you accept this type of quest, a random NPC will join your party. You have to bring the NPC to the location specified in the quest description. You may get ambushed by packs of monsters; if you do, you must defeat them all before continuing, or your client will be assassinated. Once you escort the client, she will leave the party and the reward will be dropped under your character. If you fail the quest, you will lose fame and 10 karma.

Tips

The ambushes for which killing all the monsters is mandatory produce a different alert message in the message log -- "You are attacked by assassins. You must protect your client." Standard ambushes ("Ambush! (Distance from town..."), which occur whether or not you are escorting a client in this type of quest, do not require you to kill any monsters before you leave the vicinity.

This type of quest potentially can be one of the most dangerous. Oftentimes wildly out-of-depth monsters are produced than the difficulty rating on the bounty board would seem to suggest; be sure you are a capable fighter before you take one of these. Additionally, the escort target may be absurdly low-level compared to the rating and the enemy assassin group; keeping a rod of teleport on hand to zap the client hopefully away from danger before engaging the monsters would be a very good idea.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible to complete this type of quest without encountering any monsters. It is simply a matter of distance and chance; for example, you have roughly even odds whether or not you will encounter any assassin ambushes at all if you run one of these quests from Palmia to Yowyn. In turn, you can be ambushed by assassin groups multiple times, which may happen if the distance between the two towns is long.

It is a very wise idea to bring as many pets as you can. Since the client will most likely be weaker than the assassins; typically to the point they can be one shot killed, even if you are strong enough to brush aside the whole assassin party alone, you probably don't have the speed to do so before at least one of them hits your client and you're rewarded with failure and a massive -10 karma hit. With extra guys, it minimizes the chance the client will be targeted as well as means that your pets can also pull their weight in the monster disposal department. While avoiding these quests can be tempting from bad experiences, with a skillful party - especially ones with ranger pets - you can do these with a worthwhile success rate.