Torment: Tides of Numenera – Learning Tidal Affinity

Ditching the traditional good and evil alignments, Torment: Tides of Numenera instead utilizes a more expansive system covering broader concepts. Rather than turning you lawful or chaotic, your actions and words as the Last Castoff will shift your dominant Tide to varying colors from the selfless actions of Gold to the power-hungry Silver or the logical Blue, and so on.

More than just window dressing that describes the nature of your character, whatever Tide is dominant has effects on future dialog options and changes how NPCs react to the Last Castoff.

In various conversations you may have also seen a grayed-out segment referencing the Tidal Affinity Skill, which isn’t available for any class to choose at character creation. These options appear all throughout the game from nearly the beginning, so its a good idea to earn Tidal Affinity sooner rather than later.

In order to utilize this special skill, you first have to meet another Castoff of the Changing God and convince her to teach you how to control the Tides.

Beloved Slave Quest

Available immediately after leaving the Reef Of Fallen Worlds, you’ll need to initiate the Beloved Slave quest in order to learn Tidal Affinity. To kick off this quest line, head over to the eastern side of Circus Minor where you find the sculptor.

Tol Maguur’s Location

Just beyond the sculptor’s tent you will find the slaver Tol Maguur. How she interacts with you depends on previous dialog options — she will mock you and Persuasion attempts will become more difficult if you’ve gone around claiming to be the Changing God up till this point.

Follow the dialog options until you can agree to help Tol Maguur find someone who is missing, which starts the Beloved Slave quest line. Leave the conversation and head to Circus Minor’s eastern exit to access the Cliff’s Edge area.

Travel to the northeastern side of Cliff’s Edge where you will see a collapsed house near a large staircase. Interact with the center of the house to open a dialog segment where a girl named Rhin will crawl out of the rubble and three thugs will approach.

Locating Rhin

After asking Rhin (or the thugs) what’s happening, you have four options for helping her escape the slavers:

• Intellect / Persuasion check
• Intellect / Intimidation check
• Intellect / Deception check
• Defeating the thugs in combat

When the thugs are sent packing, take each dialog option to ask Rhin about the specifics of how she ended up in the abandoned house, then tell her to come with you for safety.

We’re not quite done yet as the quest isn’t actually over — next return to Tol Maguur in Circus Minor, which will understandably get Rhin quite upset. There are two main options to take here that will result in learning Tidal Affinity:

• Give Rhin back
• Convince Tol Maguur to relinquish Rhin

The first option will anger the rest of the party and prevent Rhin from joining as a companion, but you will still learn the Skill you need. The second option either requires passing an Intellect / Persuasion check or defeating Tol Maguur in combat.

Either way, the Last Castoff will gain Tidal Affinity at Rank 1, which now opens up all those grayed-out dialog options.

 Using Persusasion

There’s a location nearby where you can immediately put this new Skill to work. If you failed to convince the cult of the Changing God that you are more than a Castoff, you can now use Tidal Affinity to change their minds — with no chance of failure.

Not only does this unlock the This Is My Cult achievement, but also allows you to sleep for free by talking to Mimeon instead of paying the usual absurdly high 70 shin fee.

 Damn right I’m the Changing God, now bow before me!

More Torment: Tides Of Numenera Guides

Now that you’ve got this necessary skill, it’s time to go recruit all the other companions and complete the rest of the Sagus Cliffs quests! If you need help with some of those quest lines, be sure to check out:

• Fifth Eye Tavern / Eyes Of The Adversary walkthrough
• Beleazar and the Beast quest guide
• Beginner’s guide to Numenera
• Class and character creation guide
• Complete Torment achievements list