Demon's Winter: Won!

More than I enjoyed your font and color choices.

Well, if there were any towns that survived the breaking of the Shard of Spring, I couldn't find them. (Question: when the Shard of Spring is destroyed, why does it automatically become winter? Why not autumn?) Even Pirate's Cove, which was inside a dungeon, was destroyed. This meant no more leveling for my characters, even though they probably could have gone up another one or two. Fortunately, the dwarf dungeon survived, and I took my 40,000 gold pieces there and enchanted the hell out of my weapons and armor. Nothing else to do with money. With no towns to repair my ship, I fled from every combat and still barely made it.

My ranger is a little less useless.

Oh, and thank the Ancient One for hunting! Without that skill, my characters would have starved to death, with nowhere to buy food. In fact, all of this seems to make the game too hard. Have I just overlooked the one surviving town?

With nothing left to do, I headed for Malifon's volcanic isle. The island had a volcanic center, where Malifon lived, and three long "arms" sticking out from it.

From Andrew Schultz's map.

True to what the Ancient One had told me, walking around on the island produced a constant drain on my health. But I had to tough it out, travel to each of the three glyphs at the end of the arms, and cast the "uncurse" spell to open the bore.


Then came an annoying 20-30 minutes when I had to wait out the day/night cycle about six times so I could sleep, heal, and regain magic points for the end. I kept getting attacked during this period, which set me back a bit. Even when fleeing ship combats, enemies sometimes got a lucky shot, and I ended the game with my ship at 2 health.


Into the Dark Chapel I went and immediately encountered some wind dragons. This would be a good time to mention that late in the game I discovered a "reorder" option that allowed me to choose a better starting battle formation. It didn't fix the problem by which the characters were always facing the wrong way, but it did provide greater maneuverability at the initial stages of each combat.

It pays to read the game manual ahead of time.

I used the mirror taken from cathedral on a circle of light, and for reasons I don't fully understand, I was transported back in time 10 thousand years (before Shard of Spring, even!).

The creators got a lot of mileage out of this.

The game gave me another rune puzzle. A priest asked for a password that finished a sequence beginning "power, spirit, divinity..." Around the room were four sets of runes. I could figure out from the number of letters which runes represented which words and translating from those runes, I determined that the answer was VOID. This opened a passage to the center of the volcano.

Nothing like wandering around lava.

The volcano was a maze, but not a particularly difficult one. I just kept following a right-most path. There were random fights throughout, all producing heaps of experience and gold that I couldn't use. Finally, I came to a bridge where I took on two great dragons and a demon lord:

Attacking a great dragon with your hands...how awesome is that?

I next came to a Hall of Illusions where I traveled through pieces of previous dungeons in the game. There was one battle, possibly random, with elementals, but nothing overly difficult. Sensing the end was near, I started recording and found, to my surprise, it was very near. In fact, I went one step too far the first time and had an interesting death, then reloaded and won the game.

It turns out there are three endings:

1. You go too far in your wanderings, enter Malifon's chambers, and have your life snuffed out.


2. You cast the imprison spell before going into the chambers and choose, when the Ancient One offers, to become immortal, guiding Ymros for eternity ("until, in the distant future, the volcano begins to rumble").


3. You cast imprison but choose to remain mortal. The game then tells you a bit about what happens to your characters: Mathemas (paladin) becomes king of Ymros; Grendel (barbarian) spends the rest of his life fighting monsters and becomes a legend; Constans (monk) just wanders off into the mountains; Triamour (ranger) rebuilds the city of Woodhaven and retires; Clinschor (wizard) starts the quest to construct a new Shard of Spring.


I rather imagined that the end would reverse the damage Malifon caused, but nope, Ymros remains locked in winter with most of its towns destroyed and all its gods dead. What was the point of going back in time?

I must say, the ending feels a tad anticlimactic. I thought there would be one final, large battle before using the "imprison" spell, but I guess the demon lord and dragons were supposed to be the ultimate fight. My characters were in pretty good shape at the end, so apparently I was complaining needlessly earlier about the inability to level up before the endgame.

A GIMLET tomorrow and then on to a series of somewhat questionable CRPGs. By the way, if you were wondering what happened to The Bard's Tale III or BattleTech, I kicked them down later on the 1988 list. They'll come back.