Esoteric Ebb: Things I Wish I Knew Before Playing
Tolstad is a bureaucratic nightmare that will absolutely wreck your fragile ego if you do not understand the underlying tabletop rules.
When I rolled up my first Cleric, I made the incredibly arrogant assumption that my years of digital roleplaying experience would carry me straight to the credits. I treated the city of Norvik like a standard fantasy playground where I could pick a few dialogue options, swing a mace, and watch the story unfold. The game immediately humbled me. I spent my first few hours getting verbally destroyed by local politicians and realizing I had built a character who fundamentally could not handle the stress of their own existence.
Esoteric Ebb operates on a deeply modified Dungeons and Dragons ruleset, but it strips away the traditional hero fantasy. You are not the chosen one. You are an underfunded government employee trying to solve a massive explosion before an election ruins the city. The mechanics reflect this gritty reality perfectly. If you want to survive without completely losing your mind, you have to rewire how you look at your character sheet and your inventory. Here are the hard lessons I learned after dozens of failed runs.
Your Stats Are Roommates Who Hate Each Other
The most fascinating aspect of this game is how your attributes manifest as literal voices in your head. In my breakdown of the best starting stats, I touched on how your numbers dictate your political alignment. What I did not fully grasp during my first playthrough was how intensely those stats argue with one another if you mix opposing ideologies.
I was initially terrified of investing heavily into both Charisma and Wisdom. Wisdom pulls you toward empathetic working class socialism. Charisma pulls you toward slick apolitical manipulation. I assumed that maxing out both would break the narrative or leave me paralyzed without a tie breaker skill.
I was completely wrong. Mixing opposed stats actually leads to some of the absolute best writing in the entire game. If you do a pure Intelligence and Wisdom run, your internal arrogant scholar will constantly bicker with your internal empathetic philosopher. The dialogue meshes together beautifully. You do not ruin your playthrough by picking conflicting skills. You just turn your brain into a chaotic debate stage.
The Myth Of The Neutral Run
You might be tempted to spread your points evenly to avoid these internal arguments. Do not do this. If you try to play a perfectly neutral character, you lock yourself out of the best content. The game tracks your ideological leaning. Remaining neutral keeps your options technically open, but it prevents you from accessing the deep highly specialized dialogue branches that only appear when you fully commit to a worldview. Pick a direction and let your internal voices fight it out.
Do Not Ignore The Pre Built Backgrounds
Tabletop veterans usually ignore default character templates. We want to build our avatars from the ground up. In Esoteric Ebb, completely ignoring the pre built Background Focus options is a mathematical mistake that will cost you dearly in the late game.
The Point Buy Economy Is A Trap
The point buy system is rigid. Pushing any single stat past 14 costs double the points, and going past 16 costs triple. Trying to manually buy your way to an 18 is a massive waste of resources. The background bonuses allow you to bypass this brutal economy entirely. By selecting a background that natively boosts your two preferred stats, you can efficiently hit those high numbers without permanently crippling the rest of your sheet. The developer specifically designed these backgrounds to synergize with the game's core political and physical encounters. Rely on them.
Navigation And The Art Of Getting Lost
There is no magical minimap sitting in the corner of your screen to hold your hand. You actually have to learn the layout of the city organically.
The game provides a stylized artistic map inside your journal menu. It does not show your live location. It only shows how the different districts physically connect to one another. At first, I hated this. I spent hours running in circles trying to find specific NPCs in the Lower Lair. Eventually, I realized this is a deliberate design choice that forces you to engage with the environment. You have to remember which back alley connects to the tavern and which sewer grate leads to the roots of the city. Time progression is tied to major actions, so wandering aimlessly looking for a door you forgot about can actually cause you to miss out on timed political events.
Mastering The Behold Mechanic
Because you cannot rely on a map to highlight points of interest, the Behold command becomes your best friend. Whenever you enter a new room, behold every single character and suspicious object. Look at their hidden stat blocks. If you do not memorize who these people are and what motivates them, you will spend half your playtime hopelessly lost in the dark. Beholding an enemy before a fight can even reveal hidden psychological weaknesses that lower the difficulty class of your next attack.
The Brutal Reality Of Deep Storage
In most RPGs, inventory management is just a game of inventory tetris. Here, it is a narrative event. You have a Bag of Holding referred to as Deep Storage. You can toss all your excess junk, weird quest items, and stolen goods in there to keep your immediate inventory clean.
The catch is absolutely hilarious and deeply punishing. If you need a specific item during a critical moment and it is sitting in Deep Storage, you cannot just quietly open a menu and grab it. You have to physically dump the entire contents of the bag onto the floor. You shake out all your hoarded garbage in front of whatever NPC you are talking to. It makes you look like an absolute maniac and ruins whatever tension was building in the room. Keep your essential potions and critical quest items in your active slots.
Shards Apples And Embracing Failure
If you read my beginner survival guide, you know that combat is punishing and magic is scarce. But the true threat in this game is your own ego.
Healing Your Bruised Ego
Your health points represent your mental fortitude and social stamina just as much as your physical blood. You will take damage simply by being embarrassed or losing an argument. To combat this constant social drain, you need to scavenge for apples. They are everywhere. Check trash cans, inspect crates, and steal them from vendors. Shoving a questionable apple into your mouth after a devastating political debate is the only reliable way to keep your health topped off without wasting time on a long rest.
Why You Should Never Save Scum (Except when achievment hunting_
I used to hoard Shards of Jor, the glowing blue gems that grant you a free reroll on a failed check. I saved them exclusively for massive encounters. That is the wrong way to play. The real battles happen in dialogue menus. You should absolutely spend your shards to reroll failed conversational checks that might lock you out of a major clue.
However, when you run out of shards, you have to accept the bad rolls. Failure is baked into the narrative design. Sometimes, failing a trivial dexterity check leads to a hilarious, depressing tangent that opens up a completely new questline. If you reload your save every time a red "Failed" banner pops up on your screen, you are going to ruin the pacing of the story. You also lock yourself out of the weirder hidden trophies if you are chasing every single achievement. Play boldly. Let your stats argue with each other, eat garbage off the floor, and accept the consequences when you inevitably say the wrong thing to the wrong person.
