Icewind Dale: EE - Getting Drunk in Icewind Dale

And so the legendary pub crawl begins, in a kind of strange, lexical play-through, I suppose, where I’ll be sampling all of the alcoholic delights of the ten towns. From the crisp and refreshing Arrowflight Ale, to the not so pleasant sounding, Frost Giant Yellow Snow Melt. Of course, much like real life, the Forgotten Realms ascribes to a crude, monetary system, where gold is required before one can really purchase these ‘variety of intoxicants.’ Before I could really start on my journey of excess, the struggle for gold was real, and so my characters were waylaid by a problem in the tavern’s basement. As lowly, drunken sell swords, they were forced to kill beetles for cash – how undignified, I thought. Alas, with money in their pocket, they could continue their drunken revelry, and they did so with great valour.

Next door to ‘The Winter’s Cradle’ is ‘Pomab’s Emporium’ which is obviously the Bargain Booze of computer games. Here, I purchased a bottle of the ‘Local Wine’, adequately described by the game as a “wine made and used by the local residents of Easthaven. The actual ingredients are a mystery, but the liquid contained in the bottle has a slightly fishy smell to it.”

I suppose it wasn’t quite the expensive bottle of Jacob’s Creek I had imagined.

To the south of the town, Old Jed was having a house party. He was “not so good” because “Grisella, the barkeep over at The Winter’s Cradle had cut him off.” Old Jed had a nice little set up though – carpeted floors and a cosy, crackling fire. Really, the only thing he was missing were the torpedo prawns and vol-au-vents. After Jed’s house, we nipped eastwards to the ‘Snowdrift Inn’, although it wasn’t a proper boozer like ‘The Winter’s Cradle.’