Perils of Ice Mountain
Hey, another free-to-play quest! You know, I faintly remember being an F2P player; I played that way for several years before eventually needling my parents into buying membership, and I would have done unspeakable things for new F2P quests. Then they just up and made a bunch of members quests available to free players one day in 2017. Pah.
Anyway, we begin this quest by talking to Lakki, a delivery dwarf who seems to have lost a crate. No problem, we are the Hero of Tales, and we can track that down. I wasn't quite sure initially what I was meant to be doing, because my cat chose a very inopportune moment to flop down onto my mouse hand and I accidentally clicked out of the dialogue, but I eventually got back on track (no wiki this time, honest!) and found the missing crate in some bushes just northeast of Falador. Being the curious sort, I naturally looked inside.
...oh no. This isn't going to go well, is it? I go up to the Dwarven Mine entrance to locate Drorkar, and sure enough...
Oh dear. I do not feel good about this at all. Pleasingly you can raise these concerns to Drorkar, but he reacts about how you'd expect:
Annoyingly the only way to proceed with the quest is to hand over the egg, so that's what I do. Seems like the more heroic move would be to stop playing, but whatever. In response, Drorkar hands me a latter to talk to Brother Bordiss, in the Edgeville Monastery. I naturally try to read it, but the game has gotten wise to my tricks: it's in a dwarvish language I can't read. Okay, off to the Monastery.
Bordiss reads the letter and breaks his vow of silence (much to the dismay of his compaion, Brother Althric), but we don't learn much except that Bordiss and Drorkar are old rivals, and Drorkar has one-upped Bordiss. Before I can press further, Brother Althric's rosebushes wither and die before our eyes. What on Gielinor could have caused that?
Oh no, I have a bad feeling about this quest. Apparently I can revive the roses with some compost and water, so I head off to a Farming shop to get a bucket of compost and a watering can (Twoie hasn't done much Farming training), and soon got that sorted. But before we can celebrate, a random gnome parachutes in, asks directions to Ice Mountain, and runs off.
Alright, so this quest is moving at an absolute breakneck pace. I find the gnome on top of Ice Mountain, where he's trying to catch baby icefiends. Why? Because it's getting too hot for them on Ice Mountain, so he's going to relocate some to a more northern island so they don't go extinct.
Oh dear. I have a really bad feeling about this quest.
I capture four baby icefiends for the gnome professor, and he teleports away right as the ground starts shaking. Avalanche! Focused on the northern bit of the mountain, apparently, so I go check and find that the Oracle's tent has been destroyed!
Since the tent is apparently the source of her power, I have to repair it. The game tells me that I need two planks and two nails, so I recover those items and rebuild the tent. Overcome with gratitude, the Oracle repays me by unloading this heavy reveal on me:
....oh no. I was right to be worried. It's a global warming allegory. This is going to suck. Climate change allegories are very, very, very hard to do in fiction without feeling excruciating, and this isn't one of the better ones, but I'll save the explanation for my rant at the end.
So, obviously this is related to Drorkar's dragon power station, so I go have a word with him about shutting it down. He is...not receptive.
In fairness to him, I did just say that a random woman living on top of a mountain told me she had a vision of destruction; I have no way of verifying that she actually can see the future, that she didn't make up the story, or that the power station is in fact the cause of the catastrophe. I'm not exactly presenting the most compelling evidence. But it's moot anyway, because Drorkar doesn't own the machine and can't shut it down even if he wanted to, only Nurmof (the pickaxe shop owner) can do that.
So I descend into the Dwarven Mine and confront Nurmof. Apparently Bordiss had a suggestion for an "alternative energy" station, which he was going to present to Nurmof alongside Drorkar's dragon suggestion, but Bordiss never turned up for the meeting and never presented his proposal. All we know is that it wouldn't have required baby dragons, which Nurmof is actually feeling quite amenable to at the moment:
*sigh*. Look, I really want to get to my rant, and the quest is mostly over, so can I just speed through it? What's that, you're just a rhetorical device and can't actually respond to me? I can do anything I want with my own platform? Very good points, quick summary it is!
- Back to Bordiss. He says he locked his plans in a chest and misplaced the key after going drinking with Drorkar. Not suspicious at all
- Pickpocket Drorkar for the key. Obviously he had it on him, and didn't immediately destroy the thing that could ruin him
- Bordiss already told me where the chest was, so we go open it and recover the plans. A windmill is inolved
- Show them to Nurmof, who approves them, and we change the power station to use a renewable resource, with no emissions, over Drorkar's protestations
Ice Mountain (and Gielinor) is saved, quest complete
Right, so what annoys me about this environmental message? Let me say off the bat that I believe in climate change. If you disagree, you might want to tune out here; you're probably not going to like the rest of this post.
Despite believing in it, and that it's important, I find that environmental messages in fiction are almost always dreadful. Partly this is because there are some very bad tropes that tend to get used in these kinds of stories, and I'll talk more about them in a second, but another part is that fiction, especially popular mass-market fiction, needs to end. If you're writing a movie or video game, unless you're working in certain niche genres (Romero never needed to solve zombies), you need to resolve your conflicts in a way that's satisfying to the audience, and audiences don't like ambiguity (exhibit A: the million-and-one thinkpieces about how Inception really ended). But that's nearly impossible to do with something like climate change, because we've been trying for a good long while with little success.
So the solutions are always unsatisfying, and often kind of childish; no, Captain Planet can't punch the polluters until they're all dead and there's no more pollution. It's more complicated than that.
I've been very negative so far, and will continue to be, but let me take a brief positivity break: I don't really expect mass media to solve climate change. In a lot of ways I'm glad they're discussing the issue at all, and I'm glad Runescape has a quest that shows climate change as a serious threat to the world. The bigger problem I had, which I briefly mentioned earlier, is that there are a lot of shortcuts these stories take which ultimately make the problem tractable in the narrative, but which I think are harmful when trying to understand the real-world parallels. For example?
Let's start with Drorkar himself. He's a clear parody of fossil fuel lobbyists, making such delightful nonsense as "you can trust me to be unbiased about coal because I work for the coal companies." I mostly don't mind that he's an incredibly unsubtle parody, mostly because this is ostensibly a game for children, but there's one conversation you can have with him that I take umbrage with. One of his possible deflections is to blame cows for the increasing temperatures, and your character retorts that this doesn't make any sense. While that may be true in Gielinor, it's very not true on Earth, where cows (and livestock generally) actually are a significant source of carbon emissions mostly because, despite what Twoie claims in the quest, the population of cows actually has been increasing (which is true in Gielinor as well, though not at the time the quest was released, thanks to POF).
On a related subject, it irks me slightly that one coal plant is solely responsible for these climate effects, and removing it instantly sets things right. There are lots of problems with this, so let's have a lightning round:
- In the real world, a single factory doesn't produce enough emissions to have that significant of an effect, which is actually part of the problem. The real issue with climate change is that the impact is diffused over the population in thousands of tiny ways, meaning it's harder to incentivize individuals to take action (if you live in a democratic country, America especially, you might recognize this as the same problem behind "one vote doesn't matter")
- Similarly, because a single factory doesn't make that much difference, getting to the point where carbon emissions had a noticeable large effect on the environment was a slippery slope of escalating investment in fossil fuels. Which means switching away from fossil fuels is actually really hard. I'll come back to this point later
- A focus on industrial pollution ignores the broader societal effects that make cheap energy attractive; in the real world, we're all kind of complicit in global warming even if we don't work for the fossil fuel companies, because we want (and, in many cases, aren't willing to give up) the things fossil fuels allow us to have. To put that point another way: the quest makes the point that using coal to power Nurmof's pickaxe machine is bad, which it is, but it doesn't question why Gielinor wants so many pickaxes in the first place, and whether that desire is unhealthy
- Climate change on the scale we see in this quest doesn't get reversed instantly. In the real world, even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, global temperatures would keep going up because of the effects of the emissions we've already put into the atmosphere. Any readers old enough to remember the hole in the ozone layer will know what I'm talking about
Next, Bordiss' alternative energy plan. The idea of replacing a coal-powered plant with wind power isn't inherently bad, but it annoyed me that Bordiss' plan was presented as being superior in every way, both from an environmental standpoint and just on economics. The reality is that if renewable energy could win on economics alone, we in the real world would have switched already. In reality, there are (or were) severe economic and logistical problems:
- As I mentioned before, we're at the point where a century of infrastructure and industry is dependent on fossil fuels. There's a cost (and not just a financial cost) to changing that
- At least in North America (I don't know how true this is for other parts of the world; pardon my provincialism), the energy grid is set up to expect a constant supply of energy: too much energy overloads the grid, but so does too little energy (this is the reason most energy companies have both "off-peak" and "on-peak" rates, to try and balance the demand on the grid). Fossil fuels are really good at dealing with this, because you can always just add more coal, but many renewable sources (including wind) struggle because they're often tied to external factors; what if it's not windy? You might respond "well, why not just store the energy when it's very windy (or sunny or whatever) and use up that reserve when its not?" to which I would reply that batteries don't scale well; you can make bigger batteries, but they're much, much more expensive. That's part of why electric cars have historically been so expensive
- Generally speaking, alternative energy just isn't as cost-efficient as fossil fuels, which is a big part of why they haven't been adopted more widely. The technical term for this is "grid parity" and while alternatives are reaching (or exceeding) grid party in some parts of the world, they're not there in many others, and in even fewer when this quest was released
All of that being said, there was one thing I liked: Nurmof was completely willing to switch to the cheaper energy provider, and had no particular loyalty to coal. One trope that annoys me a lot, as a former business student, is the tendency to portray businesses and corporations as being actively maliciously evil, which isn't a fair portrayal. The reality is that most businesses are motived by profit, and nothing else. Businesses don't use fossil fuels because they hate the environment, but because they're less expensive, and less money spent on energy means more profit. If alternative energy sources become less expensive than fossil fuels, a rational business would switch in a heartbeat. Admittedly not every business is rational, but the tendency in fiction to portray all businesses as moustache-twirlingly evil grates on me. It's nice to see a more sensible portrayal.
Well, that's my rant. I'll be honest, I've been working on this post for over a week, and I can't be bothered to read back through it to try and come up with some kind of connecting message to wrap it up. Environmental issues in fiction are frequently bullshit, because these are very complex problems without easy solutions. This quest was no exception, but it had a couple of messages I actually liked.
Gameplay-wise, a glorified fetch quest, nothing to write home about, but nothing offensive either. It's a quest that has nothing going on except its message, so the message is how it has to be judged. I give it an E for Effort, and for actually engaging with the problem (in 2008, too!), but a C for execution.