Trouble with Bertram's quest

I'm on my second CE playthrough and I've run into a bug with Bertram's quest, specifically the part where I have to copy the Asian dude's reports on the CD.

I got the quest while I was still in my old Santa Monica haven, but then I studied and had to feed and consequently I forgot to take the CD from the mailbox. Later (after getting my new haven) I tried to finish the quest by giving Bertram his items, at which point I dsicovered I didnt have the CD. The CD was in the mailbox in Santa Monica, but when I tried to copy the reports the computer had no commands available. This is with CE 1.5.

It seems pretty obvious that the problem was caused by switching havens while I still had items in the old mailbox, so I'll try not to do it again, but in the meantime I'm wondering if there is anything I could enter in the console to complete the quest and get my free skill increases? If all else fails, I'll just use the giftxp command to compensate, but I hate it when unfinished quests are cluttering up my log.

And while I'm at it, I'd like to congratulate Team Camarilla International for making such a great mod. You guys rock.

EDIT: After examining Betram's .dlg and the hackterminal file for the Kue Jin's computer, it seems my problem was actually that I was already too far in the main quest. Apparently you need to do the before going to the museum. I somehow missed the part of the quest that says I need to do it soon.

So I guess if there is any bug, it's that the quest hasn't failed. I managed to complete it by temporarily changing the condition in Bertram's dialogue so he would accept the items if the quest was at stage 2 (which it was).

Dragatus,

Though CE isn't my baby anymore, I thought I'd pop in to say hello and welcome you to the TCI site. As far as I know the quest should've failed once you hit the main quest limit. I'm sure Malkav will take a look at it for you.

Anyways, glad to have you here and I hope you stick around. I'm currently working on TFN 1.1 and Malkav is always coming up with new and exciting things for CE and in the meantime, there are alot of really cool VTM fans here to talk too (when you aren't playing Bloodlines).

Thanks for the warm welcome. I definately intend to stick around for a while.

Well, Masquerade stuff should be done quickly, because if you let it slide for a few nights (=main quest advancement), somebody would have already had taken the info and send it to the Kuei-Jin...
The harm is already done, so Bertram : "well thanks but now it's useless"

I agree it makes sense, I just didn't expect it since none of the other quests in the game are timed like that. I've been conditioned by games to the point where game logic > real logic.

Dragatus wrote:

I agree it makes sense, I just didn't expect it since none of the other quests in the game are timed like that. I've been conditioned by games to the point where game logic > real logic.

The Thin Blood quest fails if you wait too long and Lily dies and the thin bloods leave the beach.

Hi! Welcome to the forum, young blood. Zer0 is right, you must do it before you go to the museum. If I recall right, there should be a mail from Bertram after the museum. And reading this should fail the quest. I'm not quite sure though, if it perhaps got lost somewhere. In the initial mail, Bertram states, that it must be done soon. But of course he can't tell you to do it "before you go to the museum".

And as Claudia already mentioned, this isn't the only quest that fails due to waiting too long. Once you leave Santa Monica, Heather dies, Mercurio doesn't need the morphine any more. If you don't get the "shrunken man" on your visit to the museum, this part of the Pisha quest fails. I don't know how long you can wait, selling the things to Copper. But it must be done before you get the second VV quest.

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I admit I was wrong on the no other quests are timed, I just never noticed because I've always done them in time. And I've loaded and old save and it turns out I did get the second e-mail from Bertram, but it was e-mail #12 so it didn't show up in the inbox and I never noticed it was there.

So no bug, just me having a low Inspection feat.

Though if I might make a suggestion for v1.6, if it's not too much trouble maybe you could make it so that the quest auto-fails as soon as you progress too far in the main quest? Because it's easy to miss the the e-mail if your inbox already has 10+ e-mails in it from before. Yes, I know it says I have so and so unread e-mails, but I for one usually don't pay much attention to that part of the computer screen.