It's been a while since my last post on Thronebreaker. I haven't played it in almost two weeks now. It's been a busy few weeks and I've been playing some other games as well. Resident Evil Village came out and that game is just amazing. I haven't gotten far but I have five days off work starting tomorrow so my plan is to pour some time into it then. I've also been playing some Left 4 Dead 2 with 
Last time I played i left off at the very end of chapter 3. I jumped in yesterday to finish it off. This chapter was great. The snowy mountains was a nice change from the foresty and swampy landscapes of the earlier chapters. Mahakam is a place we've heard a lot about in the other Witcher games so it was cool to finally get to experience it in a way. I want to summarize and reflect a bit on the key points from the chapter.
The plot
The plot of chapter 3 is quite simple. We're here to get help from the Dwarves to take back our crown. Pretty much the exact same plot as chapter 2. The difference here though is that we're not running around the map looking for the help. We meet the leader of the Dwarves pretty much straight away. He tells us to sod off with our human squabbles, like a Dwarf would. From then on we traverse the map doing different kind of deeds to gain the favor of the Dwarves.
This happens mostly by ridding the lands of monsters as well as helping out with different kinds of tasks. This does involve a lot of decision making. In most of these scenarios we have to make some kind of choice that will either be good for us and make the Dwarves angry, or vice versa. I pretty much made every choice available to me that would piss off the Dwarves. Because why not?
Black Raylas Betrayal
There's a lot of key moments to this chapter but I can't mention them all. I'm gonna point out a chosen few and the first one involves Black Rayla whom I mentioned in my last post as one of my favorite new characters and battle card.
Black Rayla escorted us to the Mahakam mountains by order of her king. Since she hadn't been given any orders as to what to do after escorting us here we were given a choice. Do we send her back to Demavend or do we keep her around? I chose to keep her around. Raylas card is so awesome I didn't want to lose it from my deck. I did however have a bad feeling about it, seeing as every choice you make in the game eventually leads to something bad.
It didn't take long for this choice to be regrettable. We came across a settlement who was awaiting the return of some younglings. They had left Mahakam to try and live in human civilization. All Dwarves must go through this. They have a set number of days to decide if they want to stay with the humans, leaving Mahakam behind forever, or return to the mountains. Much like how the Amish do it in our world.
It was the last day before they were meant to return and the Dwarves were restless and worried. We volunteered to go look for them. We found them, but only because they ambushed us as Scoia'tael. Damn kids had joined the squirrels. We beat them up and imprisoned them to transport them home.
On the way however Black Rayla snuck into their caravan and slit all their throats. Defenseless and with their hands bound. As was made clear in chapter 2 she absolutely hates the Scoia'tael. God damn it. I had no choice but to expell her. She left and we lost her cards. The Dwarves were sad and we didn't tell them what happened. This just sucked.
The Dragons Hoard
The Dwarves has a dragon flying about. They have a thing going that if the Dwarves bring her food she doesn't eat them. Great stuff. As we traverse the vale we come across the settlement of the Dwarf clan that supplies the dragon with food. They're being attacked by the dragon and we're given the choice to intervene of leave it be. I intervene.
We fight and weaken the dragon so that she flies off to her lair. The Dwarves then task us to go finish her off for good now that she's weakened. I don't really want to do it but I make the choice to accept the task. There is a wee bit of meta gaming behind this choice. Choices we make that seem bad often has good consequences and vice verse. I'm gaming the game at this point.
As we arrive at her lair and go in we end up in conversation with the dragon. Yes, dragons talk in this universe and I knew this from watching the Witcher on Netflix. It's what I was hoping would happen. She tells us the Dwarves poisoned the food they brought her so her attack was in retaliation to that.
We talked to her for a bit and made the common decision that it was best for her to leave the mountain. In return for not killing her we were given parts of her dragon hoard. Big win! I left the cave 5000 gold richer and headed back to reprimand the Dwarves. They didn't like it so they yelled loud words. Bo-f***ing-ho.
Witcher Wiki (I forgot to take screenshots from this section.)
The culmination
When I got to he end of the chapter I was sure there was no way the Dwarves would help me. Every choice I made pretty much pissed them off. Nonetheless the chapter had an happy ending. As we were talking to the Dwarven leader some Scoia'tael attacked us. We killed them and defended the king so he forgave us and ended up helping us after all. This felt a little cheap to me. It's like the choices I made didn't really matter on the outcome but instead just affected the dialogue. Oh well.
As we celebrated our union with a grand feast someone knocked on our door. An Nilfgaardian convoy lead ny none other than our usurping son. He pretty much just came to be an asshole and we spent most of the conversation reprimanding him.
After that the queen decided it was time to invade our own land and take back the crown. Our councilors advised us not to, and instead told us it would be better to take out some strategic points from our enemy. We hesitantly agreed and set off for some swamp region I've never heard off before. Turns out the asshole betrayer lord Caldwell rules that land now. We get to take some revenge after all. And so chapter 4 starts.
All pictures in this post are screenshots taken by me unless sourced otherwise.