Burned Book of Law is a quest item in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.
Description
The binding of this tome reeks of smoke. What few pages remain are crinkled and black. Based on the few chapter headers that survived the fire damage, this might have been a book of antiquated laws. Now it's nothing more than a charred relic of authority.
Acquisition
- Upon leaving Neketaka for the first time, a mysterious figure will deliver a book to the player.
Usage
The following points are taken directly from the patch notes, though additions that do not relate to this item have been omitted:
- The player may open and interact with the book at any time. Doing so initiates a conversation with Woedica through our Scripted Interaction interface.
- She and the Watcher can discuss the motives of the gods, the mechanics of reincarnation, and why the Watcher and factions matter on a grander scale than the player might otherwise assume.
- Woedica responds to a number of player choices, world events, and quest states. This means that the book can be consulted a number of times in a given playthrough to unlock new conversation branches.
- Woedica responds to players who empowered her in PoE1 and Steel Garrote / Priest of Woedica players.
Bugs
- Woedica's VO can only be heard if the player opens the book on the world map due to "technical limitations".
Behind the scenes
- Also known as "The Book of Woedica", as mentioned in patch notes.
- The book, along with some other additions/changes to god dialogue, was added to the game in patch 5.0.0[1] to address some narrative issues which "could have been presented better or required some clarification". In the patch notes, narrative designer Paul Kirsc gives comment on the additions:
After Deadfire's launch and public reception, leadership and the writing team closely scrutinized some of the narrative issues which could have presented better or required some clarification. We distilled the most prevalent issues down to a couple of core factors: a lack of clarity regarding the metaphysics of Eora, and missing connectivity between Deadfire's "god plot" and "faction plot," for lack of a better term.
Shortly before launching The Forgotten Sanctum, those of us still attached to the project had some availability to address these concerns. A handful of developers pooled their efforts to execute on a plan that seeks to address these story problems through modestly-scoped, unobtrusive changes to the core game experience. What follows behind the Spoiler gate is a broad outline of the solutions we pursued. We hope you enjoy them. Thanks for reading, and thanks for playing!