Leave our heritage unlooted for now and seal it up.
In the meantime…sixteen upgrades is nice, but could be nicer. Theoretically, we could blow it on weapons and training, dedicate Alice to the most convenient deity, then try to rush the Isle Perilous right now, I think. That being said, it would be smart to have as many options as possible against the Four Swords and whatever else we’d face.
I think now is the time to decide how we want to dedicate Alice to a deity - that’s an inevitable step on the critical path, as otherwise she might be crushed by divine magic the moment she set foot on the Isle Perilous.
There are a lot of god options, but I think three stand out as having some kind of support already:
- Farflame: unclear if Alice will get anything from him. Most dedications just require picking a new outfit. Likely low cost, completely unknown and potentially zero benefit. EganBW has supported this choice.
- Lorghan the Trickster: will probably offer us ways to interfere with our opponents, maybe even highly specialised moves usable against the four swords. Given the spheres, a dedication will likely involve criminality, sharp dealing or subterfuge, which is our usual approach anyway. Note that Dev hasn’t spoken about this directly, so this isn’t entirely certain, but involves some informed guesswork. Medium cost, medium benefit. I think that this would be a fine choice.
- Unknown deity that gave us the chaos knuckles: some unknown benefit all but guaranteed. Potentially an unusual degree of support as the god appears obscure and possibly neglected, so could be unusually generous, and we’ve already done them a service. We have no idea what the deity is though, so we don’t know what the dedication will require, and we’ll have to travel back to the altar to find out. High to very high cost, unpredictable but possibly very high benefit. Syvarris has expressed some support for this idea, and I like it too.
Those are the main options I’ve seen people put forward, but feel free to make other suggestions, I can edit them in even. I do think we’ve put off Alice’s dedication long enough… it must be quite strange wandering around as an unaligned paladin. What do people think?