I’m the high-voltage Messiah. The Electric Christ. The AC/DC God. I’ve died and returned from the Wheel and now I roam the Living Lands with a book in my left hand and a gun in my right, the resurrected emissary of a forgotten god, and the one person this entire world was built to serve. My pistol ripples with blue streaks of electricity that I fire directly into the head of any dreamthrall or zaurip who crosses my path, and the words in my book invoke a deadly lightning storm, localized entirely upon wherever I set my gaze. I’m living on the end of a lightning bolt, bringing electric death to all who wish me ill, and I like doing it. This is what it’s like to prowl the Living Lands with Avowed’s coolest build: a book, a gun, and a billion watts of electricity at my control.
It took me a little while to land on this potent combination. Avowed lets you equip two different builds at all times, easily swapping between the two with a button press. For the first half of my first playthrough I primarily stuck with an old classic: a mace and a shield. One’s good for thwacking, the other for blocking and parrying, and together they’ll get you far in this game. It remained my melee build of choice until the end. For my other hand I initially went with a build that fit my court augur character’s magical inclinations; I equipped a spellbook that let me cast four different elementally-charged spells, and clutched a wand with my right hand. Honestly, I assumed I had to use a wand alongside the grimoire; surely a wand was necessary to channel and direct whatever spell I wanted to cast. I stuck with these two kits for a dozen hours or more, defaulting to the mace and only occasionally swapping over to the spellbook when I wanted to hurl a fireball at my enemies or freeze a metal grate. The only time I ever used the wand was by accident.
Avowed’s the kind of game where you’re constantly picking up new weapons. You’ll find them on the bodies of dead enemies, propped up on racks in friendly cities, hidden inside treasure chests, and sometimes even just laying on the ground. At any given moment I was carrying around too many weapons, and using almost none of them. It’s also crucial to upgrade these weapons and armor, and that’s what eventually made me realize I didn’t have to chain that spellbook to a wand. If I had to upgrade each one separately then surely I didn’t need the wand to use the book. And then I realized that since the wand was controlled by an entirely different button than the book, they clearly weren’t tied together—something I’m embarrassed I didn’t think about earlier. Since the wand was, frankly, neither useful nor fun to use, I decided to play around with this weapon slot. I was still happy with my melee-focused build, and wanted to stick with a ranged weapon for my other one, so a handgun was the best option. I had picked up a dozen or more pistols throughout my adventures at this point, breaking most of them down for their component parts, but I did have one legendary gun in my stash, plucked from the corpse of a smuggler I had collected a bounty on early in the game. I highlighted that in my inventory, hit the equip button, and sure enough I was now holding both that and the spellbook at the same time.
Yes, it immediately looked cool as hell. And wandering a wild frontier with a gun and a holy book feels like something out of a western or an old country song. It also felt right for my character. No matter what choices you make during character creation, the hero in Avowed has a religious connotation; they’re a “godlike,” a fungus-ridden enigma who’s supposed to be in close, personal contact with the god they represent but who, in this case, has been curiously godless for most of their life. If you were born and bred to serve a god who has left you on ignore your whole life, couldn’t you see yourself filling that void with a gun that spits lightning?
Of course I hadn’t achieved maximum voltage and acquired that lightning gun yet. I honestly don’t remember when or how I got my hands on that one. But from the first time I shot an angry mushroom in the cap and saw it involuntarily quake as blue volts whipped through it I knew I had found my calling. I had already upgraded to a better book with stronger spells, one of which called forth a lightning storm that spits blue bolts at any monster unlucky enough to find themselves beneath it. And so my strategy was set: every encounter from that point on started with a sneak attack lightning storm, followed by me wreaking godlike justice upon them with my electrical sidearm.
