I loaded up The Witcher and headed back to the Reverend’s village, but got sidetracked by a nearby fishing village, where I met an old dwarven friend and saved him from some racists. After getting back on track and finding the Reverend, it led, of course, to finding more quests.

I first headed to the crypt at the NE corner of the map and fought some ghouls in there. They killed me quickly if I tried to fight three at a time, but one or two was doable if I triggered them carefully. Killing all of them completed a couple of quests, and I learned the Igni sign in there so I can now cast a fire field in front of me.

I headed back to turn in the quests and ran across some Salamandra bandits on the bridge, and beat the stuffing out of them to save the very NPCs I was on my way to meet anyway, and turned in the quests right after, netting me a fair bit of cash.

After that I lit the fire temple shrines around the village roads, and along the way I saved Vesna the barmaid from some bandits. She let me escort her home, which was along the way I needed to go anyway, but it was tougher than expected because it was nighttime and numerous barghests would pop out and attack, and she kept jumping into the battle and getting killed. I eventually got her home though, and she told me to meet up with her later at the old mill…

At this point I decided to go do the last of the Reverend’s quests and help a guy named Odo, but doing so turned out to advance the clock fairly late, and apparently too late to still meet up with Vesna, so I had to reload from an old save, wasting about half an hour of play. I killed some time by meditating to spend talent points and mix some potions, and then met up with her at dusk, and she gave me a rather noisy ‘tour’ of the mill, leading to the collection of another card.

Unfortunately, upon trying to save after that, the game crashed again for the second time this night, so I’ll have to redo all the steps from the reload up to Vesna again. Ugh. I think I might try installing it under XP and seeing if it’s any more stable there, in case it’s Vista that’s causing the trouble.