Warriors of the Eternal Sun: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

It's a little late for that.

          

Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun

United States

Westwood Associates (developer); SEGA (publisher)

Released 1992 for SEGA Genesis
Date Started: 18 June 2023

Date Finished: 12 July 2023

Total Hours: 20

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

         

Summary:

        

The only Dungeons & Dragons title released for the Sega Genesis, Warriors was developed by the same studio that had previously created Eye of the Beholder for PCs. The game re-uses a lot of mechanics and assets from Beholder, though most of them are simplified for the nature of console play. It's still a reasonably fun game, set in the Mystara campaign setting. The player controls four characters of the standard basic D&D race and class options. They're servants of a Duke Barrik, dealing with the ramifications of the duke's castle having been teleported wholesale into the "Hollow World" interior of Mystara, where the central sun never sets. The unique part of the game is the two combat systems, one for indoors, one for outdoors, though neither completely satisfying. It's a bit too easy to exploit the indoor combat system, and other aspects of the game (economy, equipment, role-playing options) are limited. But if Warriors isn't as good as the best PC D&D titles of the era, neither does it do anything terribly wrong. It offers reasonable entertainment for a reasonable length of time.

     

****

     

This session began with me cursing my past self for ending the last session in the middle of a jungle instead of taking time to go back to town. That journey alone takes about half an hour. 

   

When we got back, the town was in worse shape than we left it. NPCs said things like: "Stay away from me! I know you just want to hurt me!"; "This is all your fault!"; "Get out of town you lousy bums!" Even the shopkeepers were rude.

     

This is the city's cleric.

     

Fortunately (given what happened next) we visited the shops before visiting the duke. We bought +2 leather for the thief, a +2 mace for the cleric, and a +2 dagger for the mage. I salivated over the +2 plate mail and a Wand of Fireballs, but they were too expensive.

    

I'd rather have too little money than the opposite.

    

In the throne room, Marmillian was claiming that we had gone back in time to the "ancient civilizations of the Azcans and the Oltecs." Merciful Mictlāntēcutli, I thought "Azcan" was lazy. Whether "Olmec" removes the t from "Toltec," changes the m in "Olmec" or crams together "Olmec" and "Aztec," it's still pretty lame. Are there Olcans in this setting, too? Azmecs? Inctecs? Maycans?

 

In any event, Marmillian was also clearly going insane. The Duke was worse. He was furious at us: "I will not tolerate this incompetence any longer! You will walk through the flames and find the caverns of which I have been told or you will perish in the attempt! The next time I see your faces, they will be before an army or on the end of a pole! Guards! Take them away!"

      

I still prefer him to Lord British.

            

This was followed by the guards literally escorting us out of the city and barring our way back in. This whole episode was later presented as the baron not being in his right mind, but he's not wrong. We have failed in our missions to find allies. I'm just not sure why he thinks he needs them.

    

The next step of the game was clear: walk through the lava on top of the northwest plateau and apparently find some more caves. The Rings of Fire Resistance protected us from the effects of the lava. We fought fire giants, fire elementals, salamanders, and hellhounds as we explored the plateau.

       

The first creature in the penultimate dungeon.

     

Unfortunately, the rings didn't (or didn't always) protect from the breath of the red dragon that we found lurking on top of the plateau, nor the one that guarded the first room in the cave we entered. Both dragons were curious. I spent some time wandering back and forth between them, trying to grind a little, so I got used to their tactics. Nine rounds out of ten, they would choose a physical attack, which was damaging but survivable. If we got unlucky, though, they'd breath a fireball and kill two or three of us. Very rarely, we would make some kind of saving throw and only take minimal damage from the fireball, but otherwise, the game might as well have been set to auto-reload every time a dragon formed an image of a fireball in his head.

   

I saw the dragons as a grinding opportunity not only because they delivered about 2,500 experience points but because the outdoor one dropped nearly 2,000 gold. This turned out to be a spectacular waste of time because, as we'll see, gold had no more use in this game from the moment I got kicked out of the castle.

    

The outdoor dragon wastes his time on a physical attack.

      

I didn't spend too long at my grinding attempts. Although the experience rewards were high, so were the experience points I needed for the next level. I calculated I'd have to kill about 50 of them to level everyone up. After a while, I moved forward.

   

I noticed another interesting thing while fighting the red dragon in the caverns, though. He started some distance away from the party, and I could nail him with a couple volleys of missile weapons or spells before he reached the party. Sometimes, he'd dodge out of the way, and after about 20 seconds, the interface would register that we had hit something. I didn't realize until this dungeon that missile weapons could damage enemies off-screen. They do in most games, so I don't know why it didn't occur to me. In this case, the missiles were hitting a group of hellhounds about 15 spaces away. For the rest of the game, every time I found myself facing down a long corridor, I fired off a salvo just to see if I hit anything. If so, I kept firing until I heard the sound indicating an enemy kill. I don't even know what I was killing some of the time.

         

Registering hits for shots I fired a few minutes ago.

       

The dungeon that kicked off with the red dragon was three levels. It was annoying because the doors transitioning to new levels looked like regular doors, so several times I lost my progress on a level (it resets when you leave) with no warning. When that happened, I started taking advantage of the opportunity to race back to the exit (I had to fight or evade the dragon every time) so that I could save. In the long run, this turned out to be a good thing.

   

The first two levels had gargoyles, fire giants, hellhounds, zombies, giant ants, fire beetles, rock statues, trolls, ogres, and giant scorpions. Most of them were in rooms, so I developed a habit of bursting in, assessing the situation, backing out, and then figuring out the best approach, including spells. I found that if the room was bigger than 2 x 2, the mage's "Entangle" was a great resource. It would hold the enemy in place while I backed off and shot arrows and stones at it. I found "Lightning Bolt" at some point, but I never got comfortable using it; there was always too great a danger that it would bounce back. "Fireball" was the usual life saver, and the great thing about it in this game is that it continues past enemies after damaging them and continues damaging anyone else along the path. "Ice Storm" also proved very useful when I found it.

       

A large force of trolls.

    

Between this dungeon and the next, I found higher-level spells, including "Cloudkill," "Death Spell," "Anti-Magic Shell," "Stone to Flesh," and "Disintegrate," but I never achieved the levels necessary to learn them. All my characters ended the game at Level 8 or 9. Level 9 requires between 160,000 and 300,000 experience points (for the characters I had), depending on class. The highest level in the game for my characters would have been Level 14, which requires between 700,000 and 1 million experience points. I can't imagine doing that much grinding. Is there an obvious place that I overlooked? It is spectacularly unnecessary--though part of me is sorry that I didn't get to experience higher-level spells.

    

Speaking of spells, the interface for spellcasting is one of the worst aspects of the game. You have to assign them individually to one of the two attack buttons. Once they've been cast, you have to go back and re-assign your weapon or another spell. It's annoying enough that I often didn't cast spells even when they would have been useful just because I didn't want to have to go into the menu twice and make the selections. Spells should have been called via a different command. If I had to play the game again, I'd play with two clerics and two fighters (cleric spells are important, but mostly for in-camp healing).

     

Giant scorpions were a bit of a problem because they poison characters, but fortunately poison isn't equivalent to instant death here the way it is in the Gold Box games, and by now I had several potions of "Cure Poison" and the cleric's "Neutralize Poison" spell.

      

Level 3 is where I ran into trouble. I opened a door and ran into a pack of wights. Before I could blink, they had swiped two levels off my fighter. There are many things I'll suck up and deal with in an RPG, but level draining isn't one of them. I reloaded from outside the dungeon and lost about 30 minutes of progress. I re-entered and hustled to the room, this time with my cleric's "Turn Undead" ready. I opened the door and blasted them with it. I wasn't sure it would work at her level, but it did, killing all of them instantly.

       

Destroying some undead.

       

I moved on to the next room, opened the door, and immediately got level-drained by two wraiths. Hearing what she did upstairs at that moment, I think Irene nearly called the police.

   

I decided to use the doomed party to map the area and learn what I'd face in each room so that, after a reload, I could make an informed attempt to get through it. The level has lots of level drainers--wraiths, wight, specters, and a "shadow"; I'm not sure if the latter was a level-drainer or not because it died so quickly. The good news, I discovered, is that most of these enemies guarded fairly useless treasure. To get to the one place that I absolutely had to go on this level, I just had to get through a room of non-level-draining ghouls.

     

There's a path from the stairs (DWN) to the special encounter (highlighted) that avoids almost all the undead.

        

The place I had to go, which I cleared on my third attempt at the level, was a small room containing an Oltec merchant. She offered an alliance with my people "in exchange for opening this new trade route." I'm not sure what that meant, exactly, since the only thing I "opened" was the way to a one-room cell, and that route respawned with monsters the moment I left. But I took the win.

     

The Oltecs look a bit Greek.

       

In the excitement of finally completing the duke's quest, I nearly missed the error tone that indicated there was something on the floor but my inventory was full, so I couldn't grab it. I discarded something and picked up the object, which was a medallion. It turned out that I needed this later. I played a lot of the game without my headphones on, so I'm very lucky this wasn't one of those times.

     

Excited to tell the duke the news--and perhaps even win the game--I hustled back to the castle. A sense of dread overtook me when I didn't see any guards or NPCs at the entrance. The shops were trashed, their tables broken. The well was wrecked and leaking water into the courtyard. There was no one to be found, anywhere, even on the duke's throne.

      

That's not really how wells work.

        

Fortunately, Marmillian was still in his tower. "The duke beat me and left me for dead," he said. He went on to say that the people went insane, trashed the castle, and fled into the forest. "I was wrong about time travel," he said. "We are inside a huge zoo that houses lost civilizations of our previous world." This particular valley has an ancient evil called the Burrower living beneath it. "It drives all life forms crazy." It hadn't affected us because we kept traveling outside the valley.

    

Our only hope, he said, was to destroy the Burrower. To reach it, we would have to travel through the Caverns of the Evil Elves. He gave us detailed directions, but I was sure I remembered the right place from having discovered it earlier. He gave us a scroll to read when we encountered the Burrower. "It will summon the immortal Ka who will destroy the beast." I'm curious how he figured out all this stuff, and acquired this scroll, while he was insane.

     

I wonder if that's what they call themselves.

      

Let me pause to note the ramifications of these events. From the moment you get kicked out of the castle, about two-thirds of the way through the game, you can no longer spend any of your money, get any equipment upgrades that you don't find, or get healing and resurrection--except by hiking all the way to the lizardmen's swamp or the jungle and using the magic pools. It would have been nice if opening the Oltec trade route had stationed a merchant wagon somewhere on the map or some other replacement for the lost city. The game keeps giving you gold rewards even after it knows they won't do any good. If you plan to grind in this game, I guess you want to do it before you go to the lava caves; after that, you lose your chance to buy weapons, armor, and spells tied to your higher levels. I wonder how high the weapons go. If I grinded all the way to Level 14, would the store sell +4 swords?

    

We walked the long way around the valley to the cavern, fighting a number of combats along the way. The medallion let us pass the location where a voice had previously said, "These passages have been sealed by the ancients!" Another message warned: "You now enter the realm of the Dark Elves!" Why does every setting have to have dark elves?

           

They could have avoided a lot of death with a toll plaza set up here.

      

The ensuing dungeon was three levels--a dirt cavern, a stone city, and another dirt cavern. A player prepared with maps could reach the endgame in about five minutes. I explored the entirety of all three levels, which did nothing for me since I found no new valuable items and gained no new levels. 

      

A warrior and a wizard.

       

The first level was a mix of dark elves--warriors, lieutenants, captains, magic-users, and wizards--and animal monsters such as basilisks, rock pythons, cave bears, tiger beetles, gelatinous cubes, giant bats, stone giants, and a new monster for me: a kind of dragon called a "flapsail" (at first, I thought it was a regular dragon whose name was "Flapsail"). I was naturally worried most about the basilisks, having no way to heal petrification, but there were only a couple of them and I was able to outmaneuver them and kill them quickly. 

    

A Malazan character's origin story.

        

Level 2 was a large, sprawling dark elf city with combats in almost every room. Most of them were laughably easy, but occasionally a wizard was able to pull off a "Fireball." I had to reload once from outside the caverns--stupidly deciding to run through the first level again, for the experience that it turned out I didn't need. (At this point, I didn't know the end was nigh.) I made a lot of use of my "fire blindly down the hallway" strategy.

         

Easily the largest map of the game.

    

The city had a kind of "pyramid" in the northeast corner that took me up to a single room, which took me to the final level: a sprawling cavern full of large, open rooms and long hallways. The enemies were pretty scary, including efreet, chimeras, and at least one medusa and one vampire. I was worried about getting killed and having to do the whole dungeon again. But the open nature of the level gave me plenty of room for all the tricks I'd learned, and I got through it without even getting seriously injured, mostly by hitting enemies from afar with missile weapons and spells. 

       

I don't know what that is down there, and if I'm lucky, I won't have to find out.

         

When I was about halfway through the dungeon, I saw an enemy down a corridor. I fired a dozen shots at it, and none of them connected. Curious, I inched forward. The foe was the Burrower--a large, one-eyed, tentacled creature. When I reached a step away, the game took over.

       

They probably call him that because he burrows.

     

"You use the scroll to summon Ka!" it said. "Ka" turned out to be--wait for it--a Tyrannosaurus. Cue the absolutely cheesiest endgame "cinematic" in RPG history. (You can watch it here.) It featured pictures of the dinosaur and the Burrower floating around the screen and colliding together to indicate their battle. It ended with Ka's foot on the Burrower's ruined body.

      

Quality movie-making here.

        

Ka was an intelligent Tyrannosaurus, apparently, because he spoke to me. He congratulated us, said that he'd healed the minds of our people, and "told them of our achievements."

      

I'm picturing a Tyrannosaurus wandering into town, saying, "Hey, guys, I wanted to tell you about . . . where are you going?"

         

This transitioned to a much better endgame sequence (reminiscent of Questron), showing the party marching triumphantly through the gates of the castle, past clapping guards and cheering townsfolk, and into the duke's chambers, where the duke apologized and, as a reward, made us the "leaders of your guilds." I didn't even know we had guilds. "We will rule this land together and try to make peace with our neighbors," he said. The game ended with the credits rolling over a bucolic scene of the Eternal Sun shining over a peaceful valley.

      

Greeted as we come into town.

The throngs continue to cheer as we approach the throne.

      

And thus the game ends without any explanation for why the duke's castle got teleported here in the first place. I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

     

This looks claustrophobic.

      

I took a look at the hint guide, and I see that I missed several side dungeons, including a hidden one in the castle cemetery that would have provided a shortcut to the final dungeon. The guide answered my question about equipment. +3 items become available at higher levels, but that's as high as it goes. You can also apparently buy Rings of Regeneration and Rings of Protection after crossing some level threshold. The cleric doesn't get "Raise Dead" in this game; her only sixth-level spell is "Cureall," which removes the effects of just about everything. 

       

I also watched a couple of speedruns, with players winning the game in less than half an hour, most of that spent walking back to the castle from the various far-flung dungeons. When you know where you're going, the game is relatively quick. However, the speedrun characters seemed to do a lot more damage in combat than my characters; I'm not sure what the players may have done to rig that. They also took far less damage from the traps in the Azcan pyramid than I did.

    

I realized something while watching it. For interior combats, it really doesn't matter how many party members you have. Action always cycles to the next character, with no cooldown, so a single character is as effective as four. In fact, a single fighter is arguably more effective than a party of four characters, some of whom are inevitably weaker. If I had to play the game over again, I might try it with a single fighter and a single cleric (letting the other two die early and keeping them dead). They'd get all the experience and would level up faster.

        

Long entry, but I don't want to spend a separate one on the GIMLET, so here it goes:

   

• 5 points for the game world. The backstory, though not successfully resolved, is at least original. The setting, though silly, is at least unusual. I like the way the plot advances, with the castle denizens devolving over time.

• 3 points for character creation and development. Games with more advanced character systems are starting to ruin Dungeons & Dragons for me. I know that leveling gets more interesting in later editions with perks and feats and weapon specializations and such, but in this edition, you don't change much unless you're a spellcaster, and spellcasting is a minor part of this particular game. I suspect an agile Level 1 party could win this game if they found the right gear quickly. [Ed. Maybe not. I forgot about the Azcan pyramid and the need for a high hit point total to survive the traps. I also meant to mention here that the thief seems terribly under-utilized, but note Rujasu's comment below about the "backstab" ability.]

    

I didn't realize "CHKSUM" was a D&D statistic.

    

• 4 points for NPC interaction. I was on the fence between 3 and 4 here and decided to be generous. There's no interactivity, but you do learn about the world from NPCs and their evolution over the game is amusing.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. You get the usual D&D menagerie, which itself is varied enough, but the monster variances are less interesting here than in more tactical titles. There aren't really any non-combat encounters or puzzles. [Ed. As commenter Mat Stephenson notes below, one improvement of this game over Eye of the Beholder is that you face more than two enemy types per level. I didn't think this was quite enough to adjust the score, but it's still worth noting as one of the few things that didn't degrade from Beholder.]

     

This was the last combat of the game. The developers really didn't understand what a "hydra" is.

    

• 4 points for magic and combat. You get two combat systems here, one adapted from Eye of the Beholder and one more reminiscent of Dark Sun. Both are simplified and thus less interesting and less tactical. The small selection of spells adds some interest.

• 3 points for equipment. The selection is more limited here than in most D&D titles, and it's almost all generic. I don't like tying its availability to your level.

         

Encumbrance was a problem throughout the game.

       

• 4 points for the economy. It's great for just over half the game; you're always trying to save up for the next equipment bump. Then the plot makes it useless for the second half.

• 3 points for quests. You have a clear, linear main quest with no options. There are no "side quests," but there are at least some optional dungeons. 

• 4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Graphics are adequate; sound effects are a bit sparse; movement and attacks work fine with the console controller, but the menu is a bit cumbersome.

• 5 points for gameplay. It has some mild non-linearity (in exploration if not in plot), mild replayability, moderate difficulty, and it's only too long by a couple of hours.

       

That gives us a final score of 39, a respectable showing. In many ways, it's an average game, but it's at least average across the board. Most PC D&D games are exceptional in one or two areas and completely fall apart in a few others. This one gives you a nice, even, perfectly pleasant experience throughout.

    

I don't know what magazine back in the day was the go-to for Genesis players, but MobyGames directed me to the May 1992 Electronic Gaming Monthly, which offered four different quick takes on each reviewed game from four different guys. Warriors got two 7/10s and two 4/10s. The two low-scorers admitted in their paragraphs that they just don't like RPGs. The two 7s noted that despite its name, the game is unlikely to please hardcore D&D fans, with which I would agree, but that it offered some enjoyable if not spectacular gameplay. The June 1992 GamePro similarly found the game a mixed bag. The reviewer praised the interface, graphics, and quest but criticized the "one-dimensional" storyline and NPC interaction and the simplified combat and lack of role-playing. The reviewer said that he looked forward to the next D&D title for the Genesis. There were, alas, no more.

       

"The DUNGEONS & DRAGONS game"? Wouldn't anyone who played the game just say "Dungeons & Dragons"?

            

The making of Warriors was covered last year in the British magazine Retro Gamer. The author interviewed Louis Castle, Westwood co-founder and Warriors lead designer, which makes it all the more disappointing to me that the article elides a lot of key points. For instance, we learn that the idea of creating a D&D title for the Genesis originated with Sega itself, who initially approached Strategic Simulations. This makes sense, as SSI had the license from TSR to produce D&D titles for both computer and console. "Westwood's history with the Eye of the Beholder series made us a natural fit," Castle is quoted as saying, without explaining how and why SSI passed the offer to Westwood without even requiring that their name be mentioned in the credits. Maybe they just did them a favor. It's also not entirely clear whose idea it was to set the game in Mystara, but it seems to have been Castle's. The article mentions the porting of the combat system from Beholder but not the other assets. Then we get this utterly mysterious paragraph:

      

"We used a proven combat model for the dungeons," explains Louis. "But the outside world was a bit more difficult because we wanted a massive open world--with a party of characters following behind the leader, often resulting in less than ideal unit placement when ambushed." Consequently, Louis's team experimented with a timed turn-based style for the external environments, similar to the dungeon combat. However, player frustration, increased by the distinctly laborious need to reposition characters on the fly, led to the final format of third-person turn-based combat for outside, first-person real time inside the game's many dungeons and caves.

       

I can't tell what's different between the "final format" here and the original format that left players frustrated. Certainly, in the final game, the outdoor combat is turn-based, requires positioning of characters, and often starts in a non-ideal configuration. I would have also liked to know if there was any Ultima VI influence on the outdoor exploration and how the outdoor combat system ended up so much like Dark Sun's even though the latter game came a year later from a different (if related) developer.

    

In any event, the article concludes that the game faced mixed reviews but sold reasonably well. There were vague plans for a sequel, but Westwood was acquired by Virgin the same year and got busy with other games, so nothing ever materialized.

    

Playing very long games like Serpent Isle and Ambermoon often gets tedious even if they're good, so Warriors has been a nice, contrasting diversion. I'll probably be looking for another one as those games drag on. I've never emulated a TurboGrafx game, so Griffon might be just the thing.

****

Ed. I'm keeping the text below so that anyone reading the comments isn't confused, but the problem is solved. Thank you!

Looking for help from anyone who's ever emulated a Thomson T08 or T09. I downloaded the DCMOTO emulator and figured it out. Downloaded Les Chevaliers de l'An Mil from this location (the only one I could find). Figured out how to type the commands . . .

    

LOAD "0: AN MIL.BAS"

RUN

. . . in the emulator. I get a "bad disk" message. I don't know whether to take this seriously or whether there's some emulator setting that I've missed. It doesn't help that the emulator menus and instructions are in French, and I have some conversational French, not technical French. If you have an idea, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll move it to the "Missing & Mysteries" list after a few days.

   

Further information: The site I linked has three versions: FD, SD, and EXE. The EXE version, even if I was willing to run it, wants a user name and password to download. The FD version is the one I tried. I can't figure out how to even reference the SD drive in Thomson's BASIC.

Serpent Isle: Dying in My Sleep

 

A frequent scene this outing.

       

When we last closed, I was in the fortress of Serpent's Fang, trying to find four magic orbs, which will somehow help me find the Silver Seed, which will somehow restore Balance to the world. I found one orb last session, and as this one starts, I head out to find more. Of the three locations that Surok told me about--Aram Dol's Lair, the Maze, and the Abandoned Outpost--I still have the latter two to do. I head west and open the door there, go down a short hallway, and take some stairs down.

     

The Abandoned Outpost

    

Any dungeon could theoretically be called a "maze," but after a few minutes in this one, I doubt that it's the Maze. It doesn't seem very mazelike. That leaves the Abandoned Outpost. Surok told me that nine months ago, Commander Ardiniss took a company of soldiers to the outpost to clear it of Chaos agents and set up traps and puzzles. He never returned.

   

There are traps and puzzles, all right. I "solve" a couple by sheer luck and don't solve a couple at all. In the order that I encounter them:

   

• I find a secret door by pressing against the wall as I walk. At the end of the hallway is a room with a dead body and a lever. A scroll on the body talks about a well being dry and being able to climb down it.

• I find the well. When I click on it, the Avatar just says, "Maybe I can climb down?" I never find anything to help me do that.

      

What are you waiting for, then?

    

• The lever in the aforementioned room opens a door to another secret passage. It ends in a large room. When I enter, magic barriers seal the doorways and poison traps erupt in the middle. There are three buttons on the surrounding walls. I press them in a random order and the barriers and traps disappear.

• I come to a roomful of corpses. They have a few treasures, a key, and a map of the dungeon. The key opens the first of three barred doors. I can't figure out anything to open the next one. No key works; picks don't work. As I turn to leave, I accidentally walk the wrong way and walk through the door. The next two doors are illusory, it turns out.

        

If I hadn't stumbled, you'd be getting a ranting entry and a request for help right now.

        

• The rooms beyond the doors have a lot of chests, including some with "Unlock Magic" and "Translation" scrolls in case the player hasn't picked those up by now. There's a chest full of gold nuggets, which I don't even bother with at this point. Those troll-looking dudes--wildmen, I think--appear in some of the rooms. Others have automatons, giant spiders, and giant scorpions.

• I come to a torture room. There are a couple bodies behind locked doors that open to picks. One of them has a scroll that says he blocked the passage beneath the outpost with doors that won't open "ere this key is used," but he doesn't have a key.

     

I apparently thought I needed "Protection" for this room.

    

• The torture room has a couple of iron maidens in it. I remember that funny things happened when you clicked on iron maidens in one of the previous Ultimas. I try it here, and it turns out it conceals a secret staircase downward. Dumb luck. The room at the bottom of the stairs has tables full of powder kegs. I have no room for these, so I leave them alone.

• A door opens to "Unlock Magic." The room beyond has four "pulsating objects." I can't figure out anything to do with them.

     

Elaborate a bit, maybe?

      

• There's another goddamned key hidden under a rock. Fortunately for me, the game has trained me by now to move everything around.

• A corridor blocked by rubble has a stairway beyond. I'm 100% sure--I would have bet $10,000 on it--that what the game wants me to do is haul up the powder kegs and use them to clear the rubble. This takes me longer than it should because I first drop my weapons and backpack to clear some room and then discover that you can't just carry powder kegs in your hands; you have to put them in a backpack. So I have to spend a bunch of time manually dragging items out of my backpack until I have the space and weight. After all that, exploding the powder kegs on the rubble does precisely nothing. I try "Explosion" and still do nothing. I never solve this one, if indeed there's anything to solve. Maybe the stairway is just cosmetic.
  

    

This looks cool and accomplished nothing.

      

• The room next to the "pulsating objects" has a dais with a blue flame on it. Magic barriers pop up to block a staircase when I enter the room. A plaque on the wall says "SACRIFICE BY FULMINATION." I soon figure out that when you place an object on the dais, there's a little puff of smoke. I figure it wants me to sacrifice a certain thing. But I try a bunch of things and can't figure out what. Eventually, frustrated, I try just casting "Dispel Field" on the fields, and it works. 

     

This is probably cheating.

    

• Downstairs, there's a corridor with three alcoves, each of which has a pressure plate. The corridor leads to a room swarming with automatons. The only way out is through a short corridor with a "sleep" field. I assume there's a way to use the pressure plates (and nearby switch) to turn off the sleep field. I don't find it. I try it in every order and try weighing them down. Nothing. I eventually kill the automatons, put the emulator in "warp" mode, and make my way through the field slowly, gaining a couple of inches every time I wake up.

• On the other side is a room with the orb I came for.

• On the way back, the automatons have respawned. They kill me while I sleep. Fortunately, that just expedites my trip back to the fortress.

 

You may wonder why I didn't just wait for them to come to me. The Fiend has the answer later on.

       

• However, I head back to the outpost because Surok told me that it would be a cool thing if I brought back Ardiniss's body. I drag several bodies back to the healer, including the one I think is probably Ardiniss (the one with the map and key), but Surok never acknowledges that I've done what he asked.

     

Where do you want 'em?

    

So I know there's stuff in the Abandoned Outpost that I didn't find, but not everything in Aram-Dol's lair was necessary, so I hope those areas are similarly optional.

       

What do you call this door?

       

The Fiend's Lair

After satisfying myself that there's nothing new at Serpent's Fang, I head east from the stronghold, again through a security door. (I spend a few minutes on Google trying to find the right name for a door that has horizontal and vertical bars that you can see through, and the best I come up with is "security door," so I guess that's what it's going to be.) On the other side, in a dirt corridor, I find the bodies of some automatons. Their murderer appears to be a naga, who starts sniping at me with a bow and soon regrets it. Then one of her sisters manages to kill me when a sleep/poison trap pops out of nowhere and puts me in a slumber while she fills me full of holes. This is getting to be a pattern.

     

Little do I know that the nagas are respawning off-screen.

    

I return and eventually find a stairway down to the next level. Thus commences a maze of corridors and rooms occupying a couple of levels, with multiple stairways up and down. I assume it's The Maze at first, but I eventually learn that it's the Fiend's Lair. I explore by following the right wall--specifically, as this game has conditioned me, pressing against the right wall. That turns out to be a good practice because this dungeon has several secret doors. It takes quite a while but I think we can handle this quickly:

    

• Acid slugs.
• Mongbats.
• Giant Scorpions.
• Trolls.
• Four trapped golden chests with nothing in them.
• A corpse of a man named Selioshor. He has a diary on him that details the traps to come. This could be helpful, but I stumble into most of them anyway. It's the diary that tells me we're in the Fiend's Lair.

      

A diary provides hints about avoiding the traps.

    

• Wildmen.
• A large room in which red and blue flames erupt from the floor. A dead body in the corner holds the Golden Orb.

     

Done already!

      

• Gazers.
• Slimes.
• Trapped in a room by an energy field which I have to "Dispel." If you wonder how people escape if they don't have the spell, the answer is: they read the diary, which warns you about this room.

      

I read the diary and still got trapped.

    

• Automatons. The axe I picked up last time is awesome, by the way. Most things are dying in one hit, sometimes two.
• Barely-visible caltrops. The diary warned me about these, too, but you can't really go around them.
• Stone harpies that come to life. They cause my second death in the dungeon. And third. They kill me in two hits, no matter what I do for spells or strategies. I eventually just don't get near them, and they don't activate. I note I'm getting low on reagents--only about a dozen "Great Heal" spells left. 

    

See if you can spot the caltrops.

      

• Headless.
• Saw blades coming out of the ground.

    

I love that the first saw blade's victim is a headless, who shouldn't have been affected anyway.

      

• Gouts of fire coming out of the ground.
• More automatons and stone harpies.
• A little maze with stone walls and explosions.

     

"Maze" is probably the wrong term.

      

• A double door for which I don't have the key. I'm in the process of cursing out the game when I discover that the door can be picked.

    

Beyond the door is a large, messy room full of debris and corpses. A man is standing in the middle of it, talking to himself. I speak to him. "Do not expect to stay long," he says, "for I am getting rather hungry and it has been months since I have eaten the flesh of a human." He introduces himself as "Chaos Unrestrained," but acknowledges that those in the keep call him "The Fiend." In a long diatribe in which he calls me a "fool" innumerable times, he relates that he used to be a wizard named Shal. I'm not sure I fully understand this part, but I think what happened was that his powers were destined to drive him mad, but as part of the bargain, the serpent held the madness at bay for a year. During that year, Shal created a magic ring that takes the place of reagents, so that a spellcaster need not have any reagents to cast whatever spell he wants. Anticipating his madness, Shal then gave the ring to an automaton and told him to hide it. Now that he's insane, the Fiend is obsessed with reclaiming the ring.

     

Shal's last name is Roget.

       

He offers me my life if I'll return the ring to him. I say no, and a couple seconds later, I'm dead from his "Fireball" and "Sword Strike" spells. I reload, confidently equip Magebane, go through the whole thing again, and attack him. The problem is, I can't seem to hit him, and he kills me again. I reload and try again, this time casting "Conjure" (it gives me a wolf) and "Protection" first. Neither spell does anything at all. On a fourth reload, I manage to hit him with Magebane, which makes him lose his magic, which causes him to attack me with his sword and kill me in two hits. In short, the Fiend is far harder for me than Aram-Dol. 

      

That's right, you bastard.

      

On maybe the sixth reload, I manage to hit him again, and then just cast "Great Heal" after every one of his blows, and I finally manage to kill him. He has nothing interesting on his corpse, and there's nothing interesting in his room, so I'm not even sure that it was necessary to kill him.

   

Not long after this battle, I find myself back at the dungeon's entrance, having made the entire circuit without seeing this magic ring. However, I have a pretty good idea where it is. Earlier, I was silently complaining about an area that seemed like it should have had something in it--to get to it, I had to take a staircase and find a secret door. But behind the secret door was just a pile of rubble. I remember some automatons in the area, and I think maybe I just didn't search the body of one of them. It turns out I was right about the area, but wrong about the specific location. It's buried in a pile of rubble, and I have to move some of the stones first.

     

I wonder how many items I've missed by not moving rubble.

      

It does what the Fiend said it would do. When I wear it and open my spellbook, all spells show an "infinity" symbol. This seems incredibly overpowered, especially if a player does the expansion early in the game. (Although note that the caster is still limited by his available mana.) Does it have a limited number of castings? Or a chance that it will disappear after each casting? I guess we'll see. For now, I can save myself about 12 pounds by leaving my reagent bag behind.

      

And I can finally figure out what "Erstam's Surprise" is without wasting reagents.

       

The Maze

There are only three doors outside the stronghold, but I have another orb left to find. I start looking around again, and I soon realize there are two doors on the west side of the fortress, not just one. The second is next to a dead tree. As I approach, an ugly woman named Drusilla gates in and offers three hints: keep track of what rooms I've passed through because you I'll have to visit them more than once; sometimes I'll have to turn around to find my way; and "once ye have found yer path, that section of the maze shall remain clear ta ye forever more." She also tells me I'll have to enter alone (no problem there) and hints that she follows someone called The Guide.

        

Yeah, you can stop with the flirting immediately, thanks.

       

In the first room, all my stuff--literally all of it--disappears. All right, I'll play along, but I'm not saving over my previous game.

    

The Maze turns out to be a series of square rooms arranged in grids of 6 x 6 on four levels. The goal on each level is to reach a teleporter in one of the 36 squares. Every time you cross through the doorway from one room to another, the entrances and exits are reconfigured. Usually, the door you entered closes behind you, but not always, and if you go back through it, it might give you new options in the previous room.

    

If you find the teleporter, all doors are opened on the level permanently.

Sometimes you end up in a room with no exits at all. Fortunately, there's a handy blue flame in the corner of each room that you can walk into to kill yourself and resurrect back at the keep. (This is particularly cruel given that most people who enter the Maze won't get handy resurrections back in the keep.)  That gets old fast, and I end up reloading from safe save points.

       

This guy preferred starvation to death by fire.

             

With no inventory to mark passages I've already tried, I manually map it. It's time-consuming but not hard. Most of the time, the door closes behind you on the way through, so going back isn't an option. Most of the time, there's only one way to go. When there's more than one way, including going back, I note the possibilities. When I hit a dead end, I reload and backtrack to the most recent possibility.

       

My completed maps of the first three levels, and the fourth in progress. Asterisks indicate multiple directions.

      

The first two levels have nothing interesting, and they go quickly. The third has a couple of corpses of guards, and I loot some equipment in case I'm going to face any combat.

    

This turned out to be a waste of time.

    

On the fourth level, I meet some kind of talking cat named Yurel. (I actually don't know that he's a cat; at first, I think he's a fox or rat. But I re-read a book in Serpent's Fang later, and it confirms that a "cat-man" stole the purple orb.) His story is a bit confusing, but it sounds like he was some kind of experiment by someone among the forces of Order, but somehow he found his way to the temple of Tolerance, where they took him in. When the forces of Order sacked his home, they dragged him to Serpent's Fang, from which Yurel escaped into the Maze. Hungry and scared, Yurel just wants to go home. He lets it slip that he has the fourth orb, which he'll trade for a hunk of cheese. I groan. I saw cheese on the bodies on the previous level, but I didn't take any. I reload, grab some cheese, redo the entire conversation, and get the orb. Honestly, the whole encounter is pretty weird. Unless Yurel shows up again and has some kind of point, why couldn't this just be a regular soldier?

     

The forces of chaos had a High Evolutionary.

          

I actually don't find my way out of the fourth level. It's far more complex than the previous levels, with paths doubling and tripling (maybe even quadrupling) back on themselves. I must have screwed something up because all the paths I map seem to lead to dead ends. On one path, I dead-end in a room with a corpse that has a Helm of Light, which seems to keep a "Light" spell going permanently. (I wonder how it compares to the Helm of Courage as armor.) By now, I figure that every dungeon has one orb and one relic, and I've found both, so I just let myself burn to death and show up at the keep again. From previous reloads, I know that my gear is stored in the hollow of the dead tree, so I go retrieve it. 

     

Even though it took over half of this session time, I rather liked the Maze. I don't know why, honestly. In real life, I enjoy puzzles that call knowledge and creativity into play--crosswords and Sporcle quizzes and GeoGuessr. You'd never catch me doing mazes in a book of mazes, not to mention word search puzzles or Sudoku. (If the distinction isn't clear, the latter two examples all have systematic solutions while the former examples don't.) But sometimes in a CRPG, I like a navigation puzzle that has a systematic solution. I recall the many hours I spent mapping the teleporter maze in Crusaders of the Dark Savant and somehow didn't think it was wasted. I do tend to get frustrated easily with such puzzles, though, and when it becomes clear I've made some kind of mistake (like I did here), I'm more likely to toss out the whole thing than to backtrack and try to find it.

      

I have all four orbs! Now what? No one has any new dialogue. I've searched the keep from top to bottom, and there's no obvious place to put the orbs. I re-read all the books in the library and can't find what I'm missing.

Hence, I'm asking for hints as to what to do next, what the artifact was that I missed in the Abandoned Outpost, and which of the puzzles there I need to solve to get it.

   

This was a pretty long session. I really hope the end is swift after I get back from the expansion.

    

Time so far: 83 hours

             

Comments on Level 2 Spells

 

Awaken. Useful in a couple of weird situations: first, if a party member collapses from low hit points, he might not automatically reawaken even when his health gets into positive numbers again. Second, you may want to wake up a sleeping NPC to talk to him. I can't remember if I've met any enemy capable of magically causing sleep, but if so, I've never used the spell in such a situation.

 

Destroy Trap. Theoretically useful, but you have to detect it first, which would mean casting "Detect Trap" on every chest, which is a waste of reagents, since traps often don't damage you at all. 

 

False Coin. You cast it on a coin, and it makes 5 coins. Cast it on a stack of 100, and it makes 500. Is there something I'm missing? Do they disappear after a while? Even if they do, I guess you could cast them right before you buy something. But that would seem to render the economy useless--not that it isn't anyway. I must be missing something.

 

Cold Blast. Blasts the enemy with cold--in the same amount of time in which you could have just hit him for the same amount of damage.

   

Great Light. Absolutely essential if you don't want to lug torches or some other light-casting device around. I wish it lasted longer.

 

Heal. A modest healing spell. Good until you get Level 5's Great Heal.

 

Mass Cure. Cures multiple people of poison at once. It was very useful after I'd walked through the Gorlab Swamp.

 

Protection. The manual says it helps in combat and makes you temporarily immune to the effects of traps. I wish I'd thought to try it when I had a roomful of chests to open. Its effectiveness in combat doesn't seem noticeable to me. My guess is it isn't worth the reagents.