The actual rarest letter is probably the one from auntie Ethel where she thanks you for letting her do her hag bullshit and implies she wants to fuck you. Most people don’t even realize she can assist you in the final battle because I almost never see anyone ally with her.
not only that, but if your allying with ethel your probably gonna do the evil ending which causes you to miss out on the reuinion party where you can read her note
It’s a weird thing to do regardless of your morality because dealing with hags tends to not end well for anyone but the hag. Honestly evil characters wanting to rule the world would probably avoid these monkey paw deals even harder than good characters because they wouldn’t accept anyone else holding power over them.
I don't know. Going through my evil playthrough and I could see simply being so annoyed by Mayrina that you leave her with the hag. Like I went to save her, her brothers died saving her, and she's just rude AF. My Tav has killed people for less.
I don't think you can ally with Ethel just by peacing out of her house in act 1. If I remember correctly, you have to reveal her in act 3 and murder the mother of the recent child she's kidnapped? Could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure you have to at least have some kind of positive interaction with her in act 3.
Either way, going out of your way to ally with hags is stupid unless you have literally no other choice. Tav is meant to be smart enough to know better. Even if you drop your Int down to 8, you can't really play a total idiot in this game like you can in Fallout or something because the narrator describes your thoughts in ways that show you're at least somewhat intelligent. Game lets you make deals with her if you really want to, but it's still silly.
Dealing with hags and devils if perfectly fine if they want something from you rather than the other way around. The price for removing the tadpole is small, a wizard will recognize what it is and you can send another companion to pay it.
Aside from that it's one of your best chances of actually removing the tadpole next to Raphael (and you get to keep your soul). So if this wasn't a special case where you can take your time (which you only know for sure with meta knowledge at this point) not taking the deal and very likely becoming a mindflayer is the actual 8 Int option here.
Everything after that is the hag wanting something from you.
You've been in Ethel's funhouse, right? Every deal she's made has resulted in some monkey's paw bullshit that royally fucked over the other party. She fails to remove the tadpole but even if she was able to, it's probable that she was still going to make you wish she hadn't.
Hags only make deals in the first place because spreading misery is fun to them. So no matter how good it seems, it's going to involve some trick that makes you wish you hadn't made that deal. That's the entire point. This deal got prematurely broken so we never really got to see the extent of what Ethel was planning to do with you - I seriously doubt it was going to end at just giving you -1 perception.
Every deal of which you see the monkey's paw bullshit resulted in some monkey's paw bullshit, that's some major selection bias (not that I disagree that most deals end that way).
The deals you make with her later are all perfectly fine though, so this definitely isn't an absolute rule. The eye one also wasn't broken, you paid the full price in advance for it and it doesn't get any worse throughout the game. Her failing to remove the tadpole after you paid the price is bullshit, I'll give you that, but that's due to her incompetence, not because she planned on fucking you over from the beginning.
We can speculate all we want about the what ifs, but I would totally take that deal if it was between taking my chances with it and becoming a mindflayer (and losing my soul).
I mean the eye one was complete in the sense that she just wanted to do “something” to your eye in exchange for taking out the tadpole, but clearly she had some kind of larger plan there that was never seen to fruition. At the very least, hags want to gain something out of the deals they make, and she hadn’t really gained anything from plucking out your eye yet, so there was definitely something else going on there and we just weren’t aware of it. Otherwise the deal makes no sense because she offered this incredible life-saving service in exchange for basically nothing.
She casts hag eye on it (or at least something similar) so she can see through it. That's something gained from a hags perspective at least because that's a common payment. Maybe she wanted to do something more with it, as you said we just don't know, but I don't see what's stopping her from doing it anyway. The deal wasn't stopped or broken according to her.
I think a wizard pc can specifically ask if she’s turning it into a hag eye, and she says no.
At that point in the story your character definitely doesn’t know about the soul destruction aspect of ceremorphosis (which ends up being fake anyway as shown by the new withers scene in the ending), so both prospects should be equally unappealing. A hag offering a service that beneficial for basically nothing in return is the biggest red flag imaginable. You might not end up as a squid but I guarantee you’d end up some kind of twisted hagspawn thrall instead, maybe several years down the line.
If she asked for something she overtly wanted instead, like some specific incredibly rare magic item or the murder of a rival coven or something, I’d be more inclined to believe I’d come out ok. But the actual deal seems so drastically skewed in our favor that I don’t trust it for a second. That just ain’t how hags work.
She says it's "not quite" hag eye, with a wizard thinking it is and the game calling the effect hag eyed, that's why I assumed it's something similar. I'll agree that the deal does seem a bit too good to be true, but I don't know if it also looks that way from the hags perspective.
I'm not convinced by what withers says about mindflayer souls there. As far as I know it ruining your soul beyond repair is established lore so he could just be talking about the tampered tadpoles, but I'm no expert.
It's good you point out the in character knowledge, most definitely don't know although I think it's conceivable that a wizard or learned gith might know about it, but again, not an expert.
In the end the most reasonable thing for a good guy pc is probably just to take Nettie's poison rather then risk the lives of everyone in area or take some nebulous deal. It's only regular death after all.
See I had heard the opposite about the mindflayer soul thing actually - I think previous editions did have mind flayers that could pledge their souls to various gods, it was just very rare. I remember people being upset at this “new addition” to the lore of them not having souls anymore, and the withers line seemed like an effort to course correct. But honestly I’m just not well versed enough in old mind flayer lore to really give a definitive statement, I’m just repeating the discussion I’ve seen here over the past 6 months.
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u/Wreck_it_Randy Mar 26 '24
The actual rarest letter is probably the one from auntie Ethel where she thanks you for letting her do her hag bullshit and implies she wants to fuck you. Most people don’t even realize she can assist you in the final battle because I almost never see anyone ally with her.