Common Pitfalls of the Poison Quest The downside of making a computer game that lets the characters do pretty much whatever they want to is that you run the risk of the player(s) being more imaginative than the programmers: If the player thinks of a solution that should work in real life, but the programmer has failed to account for the possibility of the player trying that course of action, the quest will break . . . and it's the player who suffers for it, at least in this case, because even though your plan may have made perfect sense, you're still gonna die for it. Click & drag through the invisible text in order to read it. Mistake #1: Marek poisoned you, so pre-emptively killing Marek should solve the problem before it starts. WRONG! Lothander is the one who initiates conversation and tells you that you've been poisoned, and it's in this dialogue that the "PartyPoisoned" variables are set, and therefore, technically it's Lothander who actually causes you to become poisoned. If you kill Marek but not Lothander, the quest will still begin and you'll still get poisoned, but because you left Marek's corpse bleeding in an alley somewhere, the quest can never finish, and you will die. Mistake #2: Marek poisoned you! That bastard! He must die! KILL HIM RRRAAAAAGGHHHHH!!!! WRONG! No matter how much Marek deserves to be chunked into itty-bitty pieces with an ultra-lethal Backstab, if you attack him before speaking to him you'll break the quest, because it's his dialog file that contains the command to set the PartyCured variable to 1, thus saving your life. Even though he drops a fancy Antidote, drinking it actually does nothing to prevent your party's scripted deaths, even though it's perfectly natural to think that it would do so—especially since Lothander told you that it would.