Mottle's Love Shack
Go pay a visit to Mottle in her little house just outside of town. If you’re interested in starting the dialogue tree that leads to the romantic encounter, say “Tempt?” at the first branch. To take Mottle up on her offer, say “All right” at the next branch. If you say “That’s not necessary,” Mottle takes it well, but you don’t get the encounter and she never offers it again.
If you do take Mottle up on her offer, then talk to her after the scene plays out. She gives you the key to the Tunnel of the Founders. It opens the door just off to the right of her. Pass through it to reach an inaccessible area just beyond that overlooks the Old Quarry. In this small area you can activate a circle of vigor and pick some herbs. Off to the right, you can head down a small path that takes you quickly down to the area just before the entrances to the Old Quarry and the Dwarven Catacombs.
This is a very useful shortcut in terms of saving time this chapter, so it’s worth making Mottle happy for a night just to get access to it. Although you can’t open the locked door nearby, take note of it. It leads into the secret tunnels beneath Vergen, which you’ll visit later on.
The Old Gate
To get to the Old Gate, take the right-hand stairwell up above the Mahakam Gate, at the southwestern end of Rhundurin Square. The Old Gate leads to the Outskirts of Vergen, where the Scoia’tael have set up their headquarters. You can enter the headquarters to have interesting optional conversations with Iorveth at different points in the chapter, and to see what he looks like beneath that bandana of his. You can also have an interesting conversation with an elf named Gittan and listen to an elven storyteller spin tall tales about Saskia the Dragonslayer. You can get some good random loot out of the Scoia’tael headquarters and another building to the south. There are also a couple of weapons racks you can raid.
A tunnel at the north end of the Outskirts leads out into the wilderness. Finishing certain quests requires leaving Vergen through this tunnel rather than the main Mahakam Gate. If a quest description instructs you to leave through the Old Gate, it’s referring to this tunnel.
Weapon Racks
Vergen is absolutely stuffed with useful loot, most of which we’ve tried to label on the maps if it’s going to appear in every game. The weapons racks dotted throughout Vergen’s outdoor areas are not exactly useful, but you can use them to obtain big piles of additional weapons that you can immediately turn around and sell. Each weapons rack you find in Vergen contains a dwarven hammer, a hammer, an elven messer, an elven sword, a small blackjack, a dwarven axe, an axe, and a hatchet. That’s 38 pounds of loot you can sell for a quick 54 orens. Note that weapons racks you find indoors are going to behave more typically, offering a randomized selection of weapons as loot.
Felix Favela
This fellow sits in Rhundurin Square, usually near where Spark does business. If you opted to side with Iorveth before you fought Letho in Chapter 1, Felix remembers that you ran around saving nonhumans from the rioting humans. He insists on giving you an axe as thanks for your efforts.
The Town Guard
Just like Flotsam, Vergen has a town guard that gets pretty crotchety if you run around the areas near the Cauldron and Rhundurin Square with your sword drawn. As with the Flotsam town guard, it is perfectly possible to defeat them all. While you can’t use NPCs to cheese the town guards as easily as you can in Flotsam, your upgraded equipment and skills should make killing the guards even easier, especially on lower difficulty levels. The guards here carry crossbows, though, so don’t start killing guards without good cover available. Of course, as with the Flotsam town guard, it’s really not worth your while in any way to actually do this. If you kill all the guards, then sometime later a cutscene occurs where a 400 oren fine is demanded from you. If you refuse to pay, then you die automatically in a cutscene.