Hello everyone!

When you get to the monastary you need to pass a number of deadly tests to see if you are ready for the underdark; and if you fail them you obviously can`t go. How are these trials any better than what the underdark has to offer? One room has you shredded by clock gears, one of them is being constantly injected with spider poison, and two of them require you to withstand fire. These chambers are more like Mortal Kombat stages than they are like any type of exam.

The monastary itself is strictly against slavery. So I'm guessing that they'd rather have you die a horrible death than be taken into bondage. But that's highly unlikely. The problem with slaves is they need to be fed and housed. The underdark is the most back-stabbiest place in Faerun, unless a particular underdark settlement is really flourishing, none of the underdark races can afford to keep too many slaves. They'd be better off using the space and supplies for standard troops.

Remember the Duergar fortress? Not a lot of room in there. The duergar in that fortress were planning an attack on the monastary, so the few slaves they had weren't going to live long anyway, and whatever end they would've met would probably less painful than being showered in flames or thrown into a shredder.

I also have this suspicion that the chambers themselves are there to artificially extend the time it takes to complete the game. I'm pretty paranoid so there's a good chance that isn't true.

I always thought the monastery area was rather contrived as it was. It wasn't a very good way to extend gameplay either as all you could do if you didn't have a monk was throw your best fighter into the chamber and hope the random number god isn't grumpy.

As for artificially extending game play, that award goes to battle squares. The 8 chambers of Mortal Kombat can't even compare to the 250 1v1 battles of utter tediousness. When I get to these two parts of the game, I just enable the cheat keys and Ctrl-Y the enemies (except for 1 of the chambers).

Thanks for bringing up the battle squares! I didn't pay much attention to them. When I got to that part in my current playthrough I was just like "got my club of disruption, got my demon leather armor...to hell with everything else" and I went on my way.

That place sticks out like a sore thumb. It's purpose is reasonable (I think they said it was some type of training exercise) but it's method is ridiculous. The battle squares will end up killing a lot of good troops. I guess you can argue that it's there to separate the wheat from the chaff, but if you have problematic staff just send them on scouting missions. If they succeed they'll come back with information and even resources. If they fail you got rid of someone who was bothersome.

There are other ways of dealing with that situation but I've been rambling and should probably stop for now.

That's what I did on my first play through too but you miss out on a fair chunk of experience if you do that. There is also a very spiffy short sword you don't want to miss out on either. Also, the ice spear +4 you can get from battle squares is an end game pole arm as all pole arms found/sold between the ice temple and the severed hand are total crap except for the hammer of the lucerene found in the monastery. While that pole arm is definitely a keeper, it's only useful against undead and constructs. Think club of disruption in pole arm form :). You MIGHT find a spear +5 in the severed hand but if you don't, the ice spear is your end game pole arm. Thanks for the heads up on that mod, I'll definitely check it out. Even going through battle squares with the cheat keys is tedious though I can imagine getting all that stuff and once is going to require lots of picking stuff up off the ground ;)