The first time through the game, up until I got into the Grymforge, everything was pretty normal. But here things start to break majorly and I can’t even figure out why or if it’s just a random bug that not everyone would experience.

I get the quest to kill the duergar from the myconids, find their little camp with the boats, fight then all and return to the myconids. I am then tasked with killing the True Soul Nere at their encampment across the water. At the same time, I have a quest to rescue the Deep Gnomes the duergar are using as slaves. All good. I take the boat across, push the dude who shows up on the trip and kill all the duergar again. We arrive, and it’s like nothing happened. I’m talking to everyone pretending to be friends and looking around the place before planning how to fight everything. I haven’t left the boat area yet, talking to all I see and everyone keeps saying Nere is trapped and needs rescuing. But then I go up the stairs leaving the docks, go left until I enter a room with lava and see Nere, dead. Not trapped. Not even like 10 feet from the duergar telling me he needs help. I turn around to go back and maybe tell someone but all the NPCs are now gone. The whole dungeon is now empty except for some animated armor and all the mini bosses around the actual forge.

I figured this has to do with me killing all the duergar before even arriving at the main camp someone, but now I have arrived here on an entirely new guy, having not killed a single duergar yet, and the same damn thing happens. Even weirder, despite him no longer being harassed, Shitstick still warns me about the cursed lands when I attempt to enter the elevator for the first time. The quest to rescue the Deep Gnomes is stuck with a marker that leads to absolutely nothing. The only gnomes I have found in the place was one who threatened to blow us all up and the dead ones being kicked into the water right near the boat’s arrival point.

What is up with this? Has anyone else had this problem at all? What is supposed to happen here? Like, can I actually talk to Nere, alive, and not simply through Speak with Dead? It feels like it’s skipping over an entire quest the moment I arrive and just triggering the end point.

The other is that for some reason, everyone is acting like Lae’zel killed Shadowhart and that Shadowhart is absent from the party; despite that never happening and the cutscenes being made even funnier because she’s just standing there in the background while people say she’s dead.