I didn’t spend quite as much time in The Witcher today, but that didn’t stop Geralt from meeting a near-non-stop stream of women in this section…

I finished off the last couple minor quests in Vizima, prepared some potions, and headed out to the tower in the swamp. It wasn’t a dungeon like I expected though, so all I had to do was go in to the single room, get the book, and leave.

At this point I finally confronted Azar Javed, told him I knew about his disguise and so on, and a fight ensued. Unfortunately it didn’t last long since he and the professor fled in one of those cliche “next time you won’t be so lucky” sequences. Sigh. Thus ended chapter 2.

At the start of the next chapter, I was warned that I wouldn’t be able to maintain neutrality and would have to choose sides eventually. I immediately met Triss again, her having rescued me from the swamp, and she was already wearing a negligee for some reason…

She immediately tasked me with placing some sensors around Vizima, including the Trade Quarter I can now access, in order to track down a magical anomaly. The teleporters I could now use made it easy to get around, and the anomaly turned out to be the little boy Alvin I’d been running into since the start. She wanted me to retrieve him from the hospital and bring him to her before he lost control of his powers, but on the way to the hospital, Shani confronted me and told me not to trust her and to bring him to her instead. Choosing sides indeed…

Upon arriving at the hospital he had actually been kidnapped, but wasn’t being held too far away and the kidnappers were easily beaten. I then had Dandelion take him to Shani’s place. I went there afterwards and Shani was very pleased, and I was rewarded with another card.

And then I went and restored to before the hospital, did it all over again, and sent him to Triss instead. I just wanted to see what Shani’s reward was (save #216, for my own reference), and don’t want to piss off a powerful sorceress like Triss. Triss also had her own affectionate reward, though I thought Shani’s card was cuter. Ah well.

I then went to a “posh reception” at a nearby inn, where Dandelion was upset because he’d left his lute at a nearby merchant’s when he was kicked out for teaching the merchant’s daughter “music lessons”. I agreed to retrieve the lute for him, which wound up with me getting into a drunken fistfight with the merchant when he caught me sneaking in, and then I seduced his daughter when I went upstairs, for another card. She admitted that she and Dandelion really had actually been doing music lessons — the bard had merely forgotten to tell me that they were doing them in the nude…

Back at the party, I went upstairs and talked to various aristocrats and talked about politics and such with Thaler primarily, but the centerpiece of the banquet was the Princess Adda, whom Geralt had previously saved from a curse (the sequence shown in the intro video, actually). She’s apparently been behaving a bit oddly and wanted catoblepas meat, which Triss was able to summon for me. The suitably-impressed princess then took me into a nearby room and another card was added to the collection.

The merchant Leuuvarden was at the party and tasked me with helping destroy Salamandra camps in the slums and swamps. There was also someone there supposedly under a vow of silence, but I beat him at a drinking game and made him swear. In exchange for my silence, he gave me a ring that would get me in at half-price at the local brothel.

Upon leaving the inn, there was a confrontation between Thaler and some blowhard Count who had also been at the party, with the Count claiming that he had royal orders dismissing Thaler from his position and Thaler claiming they were forged. I sided with Thaler on this one and the groups dispersed, but then I was attacked by Salamandra.

After defeating them, I was off to the brothel, where I recognized a blue-eyed girl as the sister of one of the knights at the inn. I spent the night with her, for another card, but noticed fang marks on her neck in the process. I told the knight, and then confronted the Lady of the Night who led the brothel about it, and she admitted that they were all vampires, but that the sister was there of her own free will. I had to choose whether to let them be or not, a choice made easier by the fact that four vampires at once can kick my ass easily if I were to say no. The three girls were rather appreciative of my support and I gained another card, albeit a rather disturbing one (vampires in their true form aren’t quite as…pretty). That made the knight and his troops appear and attack, but there doesn’t seem to be any other consequence to it (it hasn’t made me enemies with the rest of the Order, at least).

I finally headed back to see if Triss was back home from the party yet, and I was finally rewarded for rescuing the boy with her second card. Damn, that’s a lot of cards. Afterwards, Dandelion and Zoltan took me drinking, where we talked and commiserated about our women troubles and settling down.

Next up I figured I’d get working on those Salamandra bases, so first I went to the sewers, where the key from a dealer in the slums let me into their base. Since I figured out the right password, it was a nice leisurely stroll right into the heart of their base — until I grabbed the incriminating documents and they all went hostile simultaneously. The group stance made short work of them though. Their leader was nearby and also easily beaten. A key found there let me get into a new section of the sewers, where I found elven ruins with another teleporter node, so I’m guessing I’ll be coming back here again.

With one base out of the way, it’ll be off to the swamp next to deal with the other…

I continue to have annoying crash problems, though. Upon starting Chapter 3, it would crash every time I tried to enter the Trade Quarters. I copied the saves back to the Vista partition, and it worked when I loaded it there, but now I’m back to randomly crashing on various attempts to quicksave and change zones. Random crashes are still better than consistent crashes that prevent you from ever entering an area, though.