I did think that was a really poorly designed 'quest progression' because I didn't even enter the castle, I merely approached it. Bit of a shame, cause that did put a dampener on my runthrough of the game.
But anyway, I've been mostly doing exploration of the dungeons that are hidden on the first plains that we're dropped into, as well as running around unlocking maps and areas. After making sure which areas I shouldn't go to, I was spending a lot of my gameplay time just running around, exploring and clearing minor dungeons.
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Jar Innards
We'll start off with a dungeon 'attached' to the Belurat Tower Settlement, the Belurat Gaol. The relatively expansive dungeon is filled with a lot of Living Jars, seemingly being created and being venerated. Massive altars and actual Living Jar enemies are there... but this time, some of the jars pop up to reveal these things. The Jar Innards! Dialogue with the cheerful Alexander and Jar-Bairn from the base game have already clued us into the fact that the Living Jars actually do contain the amalgamated flesh and presumably souls of the people stuffed into them... and of course, the DLC gives us a nice showcase of what they look like.
The Jar Innards are Resident Evil-esque masses of tumorous flesh, and you can make up a lot of flesh-blobs and faces into it. There does seem to be a 'core' body in the middle of the tumourous blob, with a primary pair of legs that shamble around, and a primary pair of hands that hang uselessly. Is this what Godrick and Godfrey's "grafting" was based on? Item descriptions found around the dungeon note that there's some sick ritualistic deal to the creation of the jars, noting that this is the 'cycle of death and rebirth', and that 'they might be reborn int sainthood'. However, the actual ghosts found in the place are begging to not be stuffed into a jar. With the jars themselves seemingly utilized in the main game's Erdtree worship, it is eerie to see the more brutal insides of the Living Jars.
And the way these things fight are also quite pathetic. they just lunge at you and more likely than not flop onto the ground. They do like to hide under thick armoured jars, which tend to take a hit to break before you actually start to damage the monster beneath. It's cute, in a Zelda enemy kind of way. A bit less cute, however, is the Jar Innard's grab attack, where it extends a massive tentacle of sinew, flesh and bone to grab you and pull it into it, at which point it starts pounding at you with its many claws.
Demi-Human Swordsmaster Onze
The boss of the Belurat Gaol is the surprising Demi-Human called Onze. He's a unique model and a swordsmaster, and he fights by literally disappearing, teleporting around and then unleashing giant glowing blades. The fandom has taken to comparing him to a design based on Master Yoda, albeit more hostile, and I do agree. Onze apparently had once devoted himself to the 'star-lined sword', but imprisoned himself willingly within the gaol because of some terrifying truth he learned. Okay.
The boss of the Belurat Gaol is the surprising Demi-Human called Onze. He's a unique model and a swordsmaster, and he fights by literally disappearing, teleporting around and then unleashing giant glowing blades. The fandom has taken to comparing him to a design based on Master Yoda, albeit more hostile, and I do agree. Onze apparently had once devoted himself to the 'star-lined sword', but imprisoned himself willingly within the gaol because of some terrifying truth he learned. Okay.
Greater Potentate
Found in a location called the Bonny Village where are 'potentates'. The strange term has been used before as a term of respect for Jar-Bairn, the Living Jar living in Jarburg, a rank given to our buddy Diallos. The Potentates were implied to simply be guardians of the Living Jars, and the term is an archaic word for monarch. In Bonny Village, we find out that the Greater Potentate near-naked chubby Hornsent men with gigantic cleaver knives, and the implication is that they go around killing a people called the 'shamans' and stuffing them into Living Jars.
The only time we've heard of the word 'shaman' in the game refers to the spellcasters of the Ancestral Follower people, although I don't think the two are specifically linked here. The shamans' flesh, it seems, 'melds well' with others. {erhaps the 'main' body of the Jar Innards are these 'shamans'? Why are they chopping people up and making them into Living Jars? Regardless, the visual image is... is a rather creepy one, looking wild and honestly quite psychotic.
Black Knight Garrew / Black Knight Edredd
We've got a couple of named Black Knights. Garrew serves as the boss of the Fog Rift Fort. I don't find the Black Knights anywhere as cool as the Tree Sentinels or Crucible Knights, but Garrew is a bit more notable because he uses some crucible spells... which I find odd because as a minion of Messmer, isn't he supposed to oppose the Crucible? In addition to some spells we have seen, Garrew has a hilarious one where he manifests a cartoony set of lips on his chest, and a chameleon or frog tongue zips out and pulls us towards him so he can bash us with his hammer. That came so out of nowhere and most certainly not what I expected from a big burly knight guy!
Black Knight Edredd serves as the boss of the Fort of Reprimand, which appears to be a torture-haven. Unlike the other Black Knights, he wields a twinblade which makes him surprisingly fast. He also uses crucible spells, although the 'wings' variant that we have already seen multiple times from the Crucible Knights.
Putrescent Slime
In the 'base' Elden Ring, the slimes have mostly been skeletal or blood, and tied to either places where a lot of people die or the Mohgwyn Dynasty. However, the slime model has been reskinned for some fungus-themed slime enemies in the base game... and purple, putrescent slime-lumps here.
In the 'base' Elden Ring, the slimes have mostly been skeletal or blood, and tied to either places where a lot of people die or the Mohgwyn Dynasty. However, the slime model has been reskinned for some fungus-themed slime enemies in the base game... and purple, putrescent slime-lumps here.
The 'putrescence' is only found in a dungeon on the south side of the Lands of Shadow called the Stone Coffin Fissure, mostly filled with gravebirds, souped-up abnormal stone clusters and these slimes. The slimes, drop unique 'Congealed Putrescence' that apparently 'oozes from stone coffins', and are created from the tainted remains of the impure flesh within the coffins, or something. It's only found around the Fissure, and presumably have something to do with the unnatural death in this location... or with St. Trina herself -- I don't have the full story on her yet, but she's essentially a fragment of the demigod Miquella who was cast off and sealed within this location.
Anyway, in conjunction with the 'death doesn't really work properly' themes of the game, apparently improperly-interred flesh will manifest into these 'putrescence'. Without the proper burial rites of the Erdtree Burial practiced in the Lands Between, or even the deathflame/ghostflame of the Deathbirds, apparently this is what happens to dead bodies!
Putrescent Knight
The Stone Coffin Fissure dungeon is a eerie one, with giant coffin-boat structures jammed into the side of the massive chasm, purple flowers growing everywhere, and eventually leading to a strange part with a lot of animals seemingly kneeling in reverence, while the only way for you to proceed is to jump on a 'leap of faith' a long way down to fall onto an even deeper subterranean location where this thing awaits to fight you.
The Putrescent Knight is, at first glance, 'just' a knight. It's a humanoid figure riding a horse, with a ridiculously large crescent-shaped blade it swings around. But the more you look at it, the more wrong it looks. But then there are some things that are a bit odd. For one, the horse is eyeless, and its lower body dissolves into a trail of goop that merges with the arena it's running in.
The rider is even weirder. The head is the most obvious, having a snake-like neck and ending in a orb with two glowing eyes and no mouth. That alone sets it apart from the legions of samey 'knight in full armour' enemies we've already had in this game. The rest of his body seems to be made up of an oversized ribcage, and there's one too many joints in his weird arms. Some people have posited that the Putrescent Knight seems to have a horse's ribcage, which... I'm not qualified enough to make comparisons of, but I could see the idea of the horse's skeleton bursting out of a muscle-and-skin bag, terminating at where the eyes cut off from the face for some reason? That's weird. The rider and horse do separate from each other a couple of times, so they aren't actually connected... but who knows how an ooze-skeleton creature is supposed to 'naturally' act?
The Putrescent Knight itself is an unsettling fight, though. It may be a skeleton, but it's a weird goopy skeleton -- which means that its joints don't work like a normal human, allowing it to have some dizzyingly weird combos. In addition, the Putrescent Knight is able to summon giant globs and waves of this putrescent material. In its ultimate move that it does when it goes below half-health, the horse expands into a gigantic glob and spews goop everywhere. I do like this guy, and it's a bit of a surprise to find him at the end of the dungeon.
St. Trina
After defeating the Putrescent Knight, you get to meet St. Trina herself, the being that has apparently been purifying the putrescence... who is a strange sleeping woman whose body has mutated into a plant. There is a bit of a silhouette where the flowing petals are shaped to look like a woman in a dress, but the actual head and arms of St. Trina is located where one would find the chest in a regular human. She's depicted as slumbering and from all of the hints from the base Elden Ring game, we know that St. Trina is a being associated with sleep and dreaming. This DLC confirms that St. Trina is a cast-off part of the kindly demigod Miquella, and sealed within this location. It tracks with a lot of the 'gods sometimes have multiple personas' theme we see in the original game, with Marika/Radagon being two beings and personalities in a single body, and Miquella's own twin Malenia having split off at least five 'offshoots' that are implied to previously been part of her.
St. Trina herself is not exactly an enemy, but just a strange immobile figure that we can 'imbibe' the nectar from. Said nectar gives us eternal sleep... i.e. it instantly kills us. Except do that enough times, and St. Trina will start speaking to us in the moments between death and resurrection, asking our aid to stop Miquella's ascension to godhood for his own sake.
Thiollier
...all this is a bit of an intro to this character, Thiollier. Technically a character that I'm supposed to have some interaction with before, Thiollier sits a bit separate from all the other charmed adherents of Miquella, and is a sickly man in a mask that's obsessed with poisons. He is also extremely fanatical about Miquella, having made the pilgrimage down to the Stone Coffin Fissure's depths after we cleared out the Putrescent Knight. But St. Trina doesn't speak to him, and only us. And when we try to share those words with him, he gets so jealous that St. Trina is picking favourites, and attacks us. He fights with poison perfume bottles, and I think most of the new NPCs in the DLC fights with one of the new weapon types... but it's not really anything new since the Perfumer enemies have been using those weapons before; it was just inaccessible to the player. Thiollier is an interesting character concept, but I find Thiollier probably one of the least interesting of the NPCs introduced in Shadows of the Erdtree. Admittedly, I did miss out on a chunk of his earlier dialogue, but I didn't feel sorry at all kicking his butt.
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