Chapter 1: Flotsam
A Rough Landing
After the cutscenes end, you begin the chapter on Vernon Roche’s boat. Search the boat before you leave (ignore the NPC complaints) to turn up a quilted leather. Leap onto shore and search immediately nearby to find a circle of life. Search the area near the boat to find the diagram of the witcher’s silver sword in a chest. There’s also going to be random loot in the various crates and barrels nearby. Follow Triss and Roche and listen to their dialogue. You can take time to loot herbs from the sides of the path as you go. When you hear the sound of a flute, you meet Iorveth and trigger the next plot point.
During the cutscene, you can make a timed decision while in conversation with Iorveth. None of the decisions you make here can really change the way the quest plays out. Eventually, Geralt announces that he knows Iorveth has archers hidden in the bushes and Iorveth orders them to attack. During a cutscene, Triss casts a shielding spell. After the cutscene ends, Roche begins carrying her down the forest path. Follow Roche and be sure to stay within Triss’s orange energy shield. If you step outside of the shield, you’re vulnerable to attack by archers. After this sequence, you get the useful Cover attribute.
To finish this quest, you just need to protect Roche and Triss from Scoia’tael attackers while they slowly move toward the town. You shouldn’t find this difficult provided you don’t step outside of the shield. The Scoia’tael have to draw their swords and fight at melee range if they come inside the energy shield. They’re lightly armored and you can easily defeat them with simple light attack combos. If you found a rake or shovel during the Prologue, its knockdown and stun effects can be very useful here.You’ll pass by an area where a circle of strength is located, but it’s not worth your time to try and activate it. Once you draw close enough to Flotsam that you hear guards shouting about Scoia’tael attacks, you’ve essentially finished the quest. After one more cutscene at the town gates, you’ll be ready to move on.
Before you begin the next main quest, though, you may want to backtrack instead of following Triss and Roche into town. If you go back, you can pick up the loot dropped from the various Scoia’tael you defeated. Note that it’s not worth doing this if you’re getting close to your encumbrance limit, since Scoia’tael consistently drop swords of the Blue Mountains upon defeat. A half dozen of those can easily overload Geralt if you went nuts gathering loot in the previous chapter or if you don’t have Strong Back.
By The Gods-Stringing Up Sods
It’s possible to begin exploring Flotsam at this point, but you can’t really do anything in the town square until you take care of this quest. So for now, just head directly toward the town square. The townsfolk are psyched up about a public hanging that’s about to take place.
Once you arrive, Geralt discovers that his old friends Zoltan and Dandelion are on the platform. As a further complication, Dandelion turns out to be the agent that Roche sailed to the Flotsam area to meet in the first place. Your goal is to find a way to save them. There’s no real way to do that save by taking out the executioner in a fistfight. There are two ways to approach that goal.
The first and most straightforward way is to have Geralt approach the scaffold and begin a conversation with one of the guards. If you pick the lower option at any point in the dialogue tree, Geralt decides to just wade in and beat the living hell out of the two guards. You enter the fistfighting mini-game and will have to defeat both of the guards at the base of the scaffold, followed by the executioner. Roche may soften up the second guard for you before that fight begins.
If you pick the upper options in the dialogue tree consistently, you can rally the crowd behind Geralt. Margot the prostitute begins insulting the guard, eventually enraging him so much that he attacks Geralt. If you defeat this guard in a fistfight, the second guard is defeated automatically by the angry mob. Geralt can then scale the scaffold automatically to begin battling the executioner.
There’s also a sneakier way to complete this mission. After the first cutscene in the sequence, head toward the inn instead of approaching the guard.To the left of the inn, a door leads to the harbor area. Pass through this door. On the other side, a guard stands off to Geralt’s right. You want to distract him.
Head down to a dock that’s just below the one the guard stands on. Approach some barrels off to Geralt’s right. Drawing near to them should give you a prompt to use Aard on the barrels by tapping the interaction button. Do this. The noise created by the barrels exploding distracts the guard on the upper dock. Head up to the upper dock yourself and wait for the guard to descend to the lower dock.
Now you can walk down the section of the upper dock that the guard was blocking previously. This leads to a door that opens onto the town square, on the right side of the inn. From this door approach the scaffold from behind. Once you’re close enough, you get a prompt to climb up onto the scaffold. This automatically triggers a fistfight with the executioner but lets you bypass fistfighting the two guards entirely.
Note that you usually can’t get behind the scaffold without distracting the guard on the docks. If you try, you will probably trigger the same conversation that happens when you approach the guards directly. Even if you somehow manage it, climbing up onto the scaffold without distracting the guard on the docks causes the fistfight sequence with the two guards to begin automatically.
So is there any advantage to taking out the executioner in a particular way? Well, successfully distracting the guard on the docks is worth 150 bonus XP, while just beating up the guards doesn’t reward you with anything in particular. It also takes longer than just beating up the executioner, who is a poorer fighter than either of the two guards. Finally, fighting all three guards increases your chances of losing one of the fistfights, which causes Geralt and his friends to die automatically in a cutscene. Overall, it’s best to resolve this quest the sneaky way.
After you’ve rescued Zoltan and Dandelion, follow them into the local inn. You should find them sitting on the upper level with Triss. Strike up a conversation with the three of them and ask whatever questions interest you. At the end of the conversation, you complete the quest. Another main quest triggers automatically, and Triss heads out into the Flotsam harbor.
The Town Guard
When Geralt uses a sign, he automatically draws his sword. At this point in the game, that’s basically harmless. You won’t be able to resolve this quest through combat, so any attempts to attack NPCs will be unsuccessful anyway. After you’ve completed this quest, though, you probably want to sheathe Geralt’s sword as quickly as you can if you have to draw it while in Flotsam’s town square.
Usually, if you linger in the town square too long with your sword drawn, you attract hostile attention from the guards. If you keep your sword out long enough, around seven of them swarm in to attack you. It’s actually possible to win a battle with the massed guards, and if you do, you can then walk around the Flotsam town square with your sword out as much as you like. It may seem impossible to defeat the town guard at first, but there’s actually a very easy way to do it: Just make sure you pick the fight while Triss or Roche is nearby.
Triss and Roche always fight on Geralt’s side if they’re in the area when combat starts. They’re also very powerful compared to a typical enemy at this point in the game. If you can get Triss or Roche to join Geralt in the fight, then you can simply take out the lightly armored town guards by rolling around, using light attacks, and keeping Quen up for defense. The NPCs will divert the guards’ attention but shouldn’t be in any danger of dying.
It’s even possible to defeat the guards without getting one of your NPC allies to join you, even if you’re still using Geralt’s starting equipment. Just keep Quen up, roll around to make sure you don’t get surrounded, and use light attacks to keep isolated guards locked up in hit-stun. Make sure you don’t let the guards carrying pikes get within striking range of you while you’re attacking someone else. Basically, if you could beat Aryan La Valette and his men in the Prologue, you can probably waste the Flotsam town guard.
There’s no reason to actually do this, though. You get very little experience for defeating the town guards (only about 5 XP per guard) despite how long it takes to kill them. You don’t get any cool item drops. The only in-game acknowledgment you get is a cutscene where the guards demand a fine of 200 orens. If you refuse to pay, you automatically die in the ensuing cutscene. Really, it’s easier for everyone if you just remember to sheathe your sword when you’re in town. Even when traveling through areas outside the town square, walking around with your sword drawn upsets NPCs. This doesn’t make it impossible to progress through the game, but the screaming gets a bit annoying after a while.
The Kayran
It’s time to go join Triss on the docks. You can proceed directly from the inn to the Flotsam harbor area by exiting through the rear door. Head toward point 60, The Kayran (Quest), on the Flotsam map in the guide. It shouldn’t be far out on the main dock. Walk past Triss when you get there and strike up a conversation with the gathered peasants. This is your introduction to the sorceress Sile de Tansarville.
The belligerent peasant is going to try to pick a fight with you if you ignore him or if you attempt to intimidate him and fail. The fight is basically a fistfighting mini-game and you should have absolutely no problems winning these by now. Once the peasant goes down, Louis Merse appears to offer Geralt a chance at killing the big tentacled monster menacing Flotsam’s waterfront, the kayran. We’ll come back to the task of killing the kayran later.
For now, it’s enough that we know Geralt has to kill one. Head to Lobinden now, so you can talk to Cedric and make him available as both merchant and craftsman. After the cutscene at the town gate ends, follow Triss up to Cedric’s observation tower. Talk to Cedric. All of the conversation options are at least interesting, but you want to make sure you ask about the kayran and witchers’ work, and tell him that you hunt monsters. If you’re interested in lore, be sure to ask him about Moril.
After you’re finished talking to Cedric, Triss teleports away. You’ll meet up with her later. For now, head back into town. You’ve got a few other things to do before you’re ready to start adventuring in the woods.
Flotsam
Once you’ve completed the initial part of The Kayran , you can begin exploring Flotsam, the game’s first town. Although finishing By the Gods triggers another main quest, Indecent Proposal , this guide recommends taking a break from questing right now so you can get your bearings. Flotsam is not meant to be an especially large city, but it’s the first really enormous explorable environment you see in this game.
You can score tons of random loot, including some very rare items, by exploring each building you can enter and scanning everywhere with your medallion. You can also stock up on many herbs that grow wild within the city’s walls. Flotsam is broken up into districts, just as real medieval towns were, so we’ll go over the various interesting things you can see and do in Flotsam by going through the town district by district. Note that while you explore, you may trigger some quests or advance some of the chapter’s major quests a little automatically. Don’t worry about this for now; you won’t be able to do anything to screw yourself out of something you might want to do later on.