Two Worlds Pacifist Run - The Final Confrontation

Having gathered the Relic Frame and all four elemental stone crystals needed to re-assemble the relic and perform the dubious rite to summon Aziraal's tomb for Gandohar and Reist, the time has finally come to reach the conclusion of our Two Worlds I pacifist run. (Note that proceeding from here will cause some changes that might make it impossible to finish some other side quests, so it's probably best to postpone this step until you're ready to win the game.)

After you bring the relic and all four elemental crystals to Gandohar, a cut-scene will take place at the furnace in Quidnar, in which the hero and Kira clash with Gandohar and Reist, who both intend to resurrect Aziraal, and force Kira to become a host for this extradimensional entity to inhabit in the earthly sphere.

Of course, that won't do at all, so it's time to chase after them and see just how non-violently we can foil their monstrous plans:

As soon as you find yourself back on your feet, you'll meet a paladin who will reveal more interesting plot details, and will notice that the sky is aflame with bars of fire forming a sinister pentacle between the five ancient towers that have been corrupted by necromantic energy...

It turns out that Reist and Gandohar are using these to form a magical barrier over the ancient ruins of Oswaroh Castle, where they aim to complete the final stage of the dark ceremony. Stopping this will require the protagonist to go and dispatch one of the "Pentagram Keepers" at the tops of one of the towers.

At this point we were admittedly expecting that the game design might throw a little obligatory conflict our way. However, while this was true, the end results worked out much better than we expected...

You will only have to choose one of these demonic minions to interrupt the rite. You can also still sneak into the towers pretty easily without harming anything else by using sneak mode, creep up the stairs, and then step onto the teleportation pentacle to be transported to the top of the tower.

These huge towers provide amazing view over the whole realm, but if the Pentagram Keeper sees you when you teleport in, you might be a bit busy to admire the view, since you might need to stay alive by running away from him as he swings a giant magic sword and launches magical projectiles at you.

Dealing with this individual was fairly difficult since we'd deliberately "handicapped" ourselves by loading all our attribute and skill points into a decidedly non-combat oriented build, but even without backtracking to visit a Soulpatcher, we finally succeeded in making the miscreant collapse by using spells and summoning creatures.

The miscreant we were forced to dispatch is promptly brought back to life by the Air Magic spell "Resurrection"

Then we discovered the first of three pleasant surprises during the epic conclusion: After banishing that nasty pentagram out of the sky, we were quickly able to cast "Resurrection" on the slain Keeper and bring him back to life as a friendly ally, entirely free of his former criminal inclinations...

After pausing for some pacifist challenge promotional photo ops featuring the friendly resurrected Keeper and the hero surrounded by a luminous aura caused by the "Strength of God" spell, we left the tower and headed for the sinister ruins of Oswaroh castle for the final confrontation...

TACTICAL ASIDES:
We noticed even some combat-oriented players remark about the high difficulty of dealing with the bosses of Two Worlds I in a non-pacifist run, but our non-combat protagonist (who some might even describe as "wimpy" or "fragile") undoubtedly would've had quite a bit of trouble with the last two bosses, if not for some special tactics:
Before going to the final confrontation, it might be worth dropping by some merchants of the realm and picking up as many "Holding Traps" as possible, because you'll probably then be able to deal with the last two villains pretty easily if you use these.
Also, if you'd just as soon make your own player character tougher than he was earlier in the run: No matter what kind of allocation of skill and attribute points you applied earlier, all you need to do to rebuild your character now is go find one of the blue-robed wizards named "Soul Patchers," who can "regress" you at a cost of around 500 gold to randomly un-allocate five attribute points and five skill points, enabling you to plug them back into wherever you want (if you're not already sitting on a surplus). And if you maximized your reputation with the Merchants Guild to optimize your profit margins, it should also be fairly easy to find more treasure in caves or orc or bandit camps all over the realm, just in case you're short of gold.
While looting enemy treasure hoards, you'll also inevitably have picked up an array of various different types of magic gemstones, many of which can be used to imbue weapons with special damage. Noting we had over thirty purple gems that added "spirit damage," we dropped those onto a large awkward trident-like melee weapon we'd purchased from a merchant, and found this was effective even after our other best weapons proved next to useless. (Even if you're outraged over this discussion of how to use weapons on a pacifist run, by the way, I'll bet you can guess which level 15 Air Magic spell we ended up using on both the final bosses.)
Finally, there's alchemy and herbalism, which lets you guzzle or chomp down a huge array of potions and herbs to add temporary buffs to your character's attribute scores, even if your character is normally a bit of a wuss in combat situations, like ours was.

THE FINAL CONFRONTATION AT THE ANCIENT CASTLE
After sneaking through the sinister dark ruins of the castle at Oswaroh past packs of nazguul-like death knights, you'll find the entrance to the impressive castle and spot Reist Tungard standing outside guarding the entrance.

Reist won't be too crazy about the idea of letting you into the castle on friendly terms, and will demonstrate this by transforming into a twenty-foot tall red demon, causing his name to be changed to the undeniably fitting "Demonic Reist."

Uh-oh!

Demonic Reist will then chase you around trying to smash and stomp you to a pulp. Fortunately, like nearly every other enemy you'll encounter, even Demonic Reist is so much slower than the Two Worlds protagonist that it's very easy to outrun him. How to actually get past him, however, was another matter...

Several more untoward incidents occurred at this point: We got a large pack of extremely evil-looking undead knights on our tail while running away from Reist, so we cast Chaos Rage on them to make them go attack Demonic Reist instead, which they did...
After running away and hiding, and then going to spy on the goings-on in sneak mode, we watched Reist pummel them all into silent heaps, and then stamp back to the Castle gates in a surly manner...
In our version of the game the Freezing Wave spell didn't work on Reist at all, but fortunately the holding traps did: Once we set those and then lured Reist out to walk over one of them, the traps would very effectively ensnare him and cause him to stand stock still for the trap's full duration, giving you ample opportunity to "give him back some of his own" in one way or another.
We then hit on the idea of setting traps around the dead knights, luring Reist back there again, and then casting "Resurrection" on the dead knights to make them hop up and give him a taste of his own medicine.

The trapping scheme worked, but unfortunately the resurrected dead knights didn't seem to do the slightest bit of damage to Reist...

In the end, the awkward solutions of either using explosive elemental traps or simply trapping and then prodding Demonic Reist with our spirit-gem imbued trident-like pole weapon eventually caused him to give up the fight and fall flat on his face...

After taking a curious look at him for a little while from a lower vantage point (where he was a lot easier to see than when towering 20 feet over our heads and trying to stomp us), we decided to cast Resurrection on him as well...

We found to our satisfaction that even "Demonic Reist" can be brought back to full health with the Resurrection spell, and that he was "mostly" friendly to us at this point, like every other resurrected creature always had been so far.
However, our Resurrection success photo-ops blew a fuse when resurrected Demonic Reist suddenly lumbered several feet ahead of us and (with his back turned) performed another giant stomping action with one leg....

Uh-oh...

Even though the hero was a good distance away from the stamping foot, the crushing impact of the stomp still caused enough residual damage to immediately one-shot our hero, causing him to collapse on the ground with his trident sticking into the air in an undignified manner for several moments, before he was teleported away and revived at a nearby Maliel Goddess Shrine...

We reloaded our latest save file and tried again, apparently confirming that resurrected Reist hadn't slain our hero intentionally, but that keeping one's distance from him was essential for survival.
Reist also turned out to be more than willing to lend a hand in the final confrontation, but was less effective than we'd hoped (in fact, doing no visible damage to the last boss whatsoever), and he also ended up stomping us and our summoned creatures often enough that we decided the benefits of bringing him along were outweighed by the costs.

We consequently ended up leaving resurrected Reist outside the gates, and confronting the final villain on our own:

GANDOHAR
Gandohar is inside the courtyard of the ancient Castle, where he has set up a giant glowing pentagram between a number of demonic statues. He'll engage you in a talk and explain some interesting metaphysical theories he has concerning why he thinks his actions are justifiable...

He will also offer you a chance to join his cause at this point, claiming you'll be able to live in splendor alongside Kira as she becomes the living host of Aziraal, enjoying immunities to common vexations like old age and death...

As keen as we were to avoid conflict, however, the overall proposal still didn't sound like a very good idea to us, since we suspected Gandohar's long-term plans to resurrect the extra dimensional orcish deity weren't compatible with most of our pacifist run scruples.
More or less as expected, Gandohar chastised us for our poor decision, and then started running around chucking fireballs and trying to kill us with a large sword.
(As a side note: We also looked up what would happen if you sided with Gandohar just in case there was a surprise nonviolent ending, but that dubious choice would have reportedly caused five righteous paladins to teleport in and try to kill you for your iniquity— so it looks like we did the best we could in retrospect.)

Exactly what type of defenses Reist and Gandohar both had remained fairly mysterious, but——just as swarms of death knights seemed unable to inflict any damage points on Reist——even the resurrected Reist himself seemed totally unable to inflict damage on Gandohar, even when he performed his devastating jump-and-smash attacks that had so easily dispatched swarms of death knights, along with everything else in his path.
The good news was that Gandohar was also easy to immobilize using holding traps, and also did some entertaining calisthenics while prodding at the traps with his sword— unlike Demonic Reist, who just stood stock-still each time he found himself ensnared...

However formidable he may be, Gandohar is still susceptible to getting his foot caught in simple snare traps...

After several sessions of prodding at Gandohar with the big red trident imbued with 30 purple spirit gems, the arch villain finally gave up the battle and fell on the ground. Before criticizing us for incurring any "kills" however, we were pleased to discover that casting the Resurrection spell on Gandohar at this point worked so quickly that he had barely even hit the ground before he was surrounded in healing white light and back on his feet in full health:

After being revived, Gandohar had just enough time (a few seconds) to swagger off toward the pentagram— possibly to go and start a kinder and gentler life.

Resurrected Gandohar walks away several seconds before the ending sequence triggers...

The ending sequence then began to play, and our pacifist challenge run through Two Worlds I came to an end, seemingly with a happy ending for the hero and his sister Kira, as they rode through a forest on horseback, disappearing into the light of a golden sunset.

In summary of the "pacifist challenge":
The excellent programming and design of Two Worlds I only forced us to bump off a handful of entities out of the many hundreds of potential "kills" combat-oriented players might have wracked up— but then it elevated its pacifist run status to even higher levels by giving us the level 15 Air Magic spell "Resurrection," enabling us to revive every single dispatched enemy in the game, including the last two "boss" villains.
Better still was the ability to use this same spell to resurrect every single inhabitant of the city of Ashos, after they were all killed off by a linear scripted plot event that caused the city to be sacked by orc invaders.

Quantifying the unavoidable combat encounters and "enemy dispatches" (+ solutions thanks to the most excellent Resurrection spell):

- Two killer groms at the very beginning (which we dispatched indirectly using snare traps as they chased us around trying to kill us, and then resurrected them both later on after placing flowers in the temple in honor of the dead).

- A handful of undead ghouls in a cemetery near Windbreak Village (or alternately a camp of orcs for the same mandatory goal of getting inside the King's Tomb), all of whom are optionally revivable.

- One "Pentagram Keeper" who was facilitating the villains' demonic misuse of the ancient towers, but whom we immediately resurrected free of criminal inclinations.

And finally, the two arch-villains:

- "Demonic Reist" (who we resurrected to help us out against his dark master) and Gandohar, who we resurrected so quickly that he was practically on his feet again before he even hit the ground...

We also were able to go on a healing and resurrection spree all over other parts of the realm, reviving various other creatures who had slain each other for no good reason, such as bandits, groms, ogres, varns, and wolves who had clashed with each other while chasing us around trying to kill us. (Just make sure any such creatures have enough personal space before you resurrect them, because if there are foes nearby, the friendly resurrected creatures might start fighting with the other ones again.)

The end of Two Worlds I. We look forward to finding out how a pacifist run through Two Worlds II holds up on some future occasion...