Banquet for Fools Beginner Guide: How to Survive Invamona
The locals will tell you to stick to the roads, but they forget to mention the roads are crawling with things that want to wear your skin as a coat.
I completely understand the frustration of booting up an old school roleplaying game, walking ten feet out of the starting town, and getting immediately flattened by a roaming pack of angry goblins. You roll into Forten Lazure with a squad of level one guards, and the local witch casually asks you to clear out a haunted mausoleum. You walk inside and promptly get your teeth kicked in by fifteen heavily armed grave robbers. It is a brutal, humiliating welcome to the island of Invamona.
Banquet for Fools does not hold your hand. It drops you into a hostile sandbox with complex math running under the hood and expects you to figure it out through trial and error. If you are tired of loading your quicksaves because your frontline fighter got melted by a stray spell, it is time to fundamentally change how you approach this game.
Building a Squad That Actually Works
Good teams can barely scrape by in a fight. Great teams completely control the battlefield. You control four guards, and if they do not compliment each other perfectly, you are going to bleed out in a ditch.
The Golden Rules of Character Creation
Do not try to make four jack of all trades characters. You need highly specialized tools. Every guard needs a primary weapon skill and the attributes to back it up. If you give a character a heavy two handed axe but ignore their Strength and Hit Chance, they are just going to swing at the air until they die.
You need one dedicated lockpicker and sneaker. You need someone with a massive Bartering skill to handle all your shopping, ideally dripping in Glamour boosting jewelry. You absolutely need a Pagan caster to exploit the magic system, and you need someone who can break heavy armor.
The Math Behind the Murder
Combat plays out in real time with a pause function. You cannot just click on an enemy and wait for them to die. You have to actively manage the math.
The most important concept to grasp is Severity. When your guard attacks, the game rolls your Hit Chance against the target's Evasion. The wider the gap between your accuracy and their ability to dodge, the more Severity damage is added to your strike. This is why knocking enemies down is the most broken mechanic in the game. When you use the Kick or Charge technique to put an enemy on the dirt, their Evasion drops to absolute zero. If your entire squad focuses on a prone target, you will multiply your damage output exponentially.
Navigating the Forten Lazure Filter
Your first few hours in the starting town will dictate the pace of your entire playthrough. If you leave the gates completely broke and undergeared, you are going to have a miserable time.
Rob Your Employers Blind
The second you gain control of your party, take your designated lockpicker downstairs into the barracks. Go into stealth mode and quietly pick every single chest in the room. This provides a massive injection of early game loot that you desperately need.
Next, head to the local tavern. Go upstairs and look for three grave robbers having a meeting. You can knock them out in a relatively easy fight and turn them in to the local guards for a hefty bounty. Take all that stolen wealth and bounty money straight to the trader. Buy proper armor for your frontline fighters immediately. Do not worry about fancy weapons yet. If you cannot survive three hits, a sharp sword is useless.
Dealing With the Paranormal
Eventually, you will need to head to the Lachovinian tomb in the northwest to complete a quest for Valentina the witch. Do not go there at level one. Spend some time exploring the immediate southern wilderness, gaining a level or two, and buying better gear.
When you are finally ready for the tomb, you must prepare for ghosts. Ghosts apply a nasty curse that reduces your maximum health for hours. You need to equip Incense Globes to your belts. These items emit an aura that causes ghosts to panic and flee, giving you the breathing room you need to navigate the crypt.
When you reach the massive room packed with fifteen grave robbers, do not charge into the middle like a hero. Skirt the edges, pull small groups into the hallways, and focus entirely on their archers and casters first. If the bandit leader completes her chant and buffs her entire crew with an evasion circle, you need to use your Kick and Charge techniques immediately to ground them and strip their defensive bonuses.
Mastering Magic and Music
Swinging a piece of metal is great, but manipulating the environment is how you break the game wide open. Magic is deeply tied to the exploration of the island. You craft spells at specific Vol trees by grinding up gemstones with a mortar and pestle.
The Three Schools
If you hate accidentally killing your own team, specialize in Fauna. It focuses on area of effect damage and features a fragile but highly lethal bee summon, and completely ignores friendly fire. Spores gives you the absolute best crowd control options to lock down massive groups. Vines is arguably the most essential for utility.
You need to buy the Vine Rug spell as soon as humanly possible. It allows you to create literal bridges over water and gaps, granting access to hidden caves, rare loot, and quest targets like the White Greva hiding in the southern cave.
Minions and Melodies
If you find yourself constantly outnumbered, you need to invest in Binding or Instruments. Binding lets you use Charm Bells to tame wounded wildlife. Having a pet monster soak up damage while your archer fires from the backline completely changes the flow of combat.
Music acts as passive magic. A heavily armored frontline fighter with a flute will automatically trigger healing and buffing songs simply by dodging or taking hits during their normal attack routine. It costs no action points and provides massive sustain during long, grueling encounters.
Take your time. Pause the game constantly during fights to reassess your positioning and queue up your Rally attacks. Repair your weapons at the stonesmith before their durability drops and ruins your damage output. Invamona is a miserable, hostile rock, but with the right preparation, you can absolutely conquer it.
