Might & Magic II: Mazes and Monsters

I'm sensing a lot of sexual tension here.

            

Lots of dungeon crawling today. I explored castle basements, caves, ruins, and dungeons. They were filled with monsters and mysterious messages that I need to solve the game's various puzzles and quests. 

           

A primary point of dungeon exploration is to get clues like this.

           

All of the castles have two dungeon levels below them, none seeming to have anything to do with the castles themselves. Inexplicably, most of them offered the ability to travel via portals to the others. 

          

          

A lot of the dungeons feature areas in which certain races and classes are banned, for no reason (it seems) but to make things a little more difficult. Generally when I encounter these, I cast "Lloyd's Beacon" to mark the location, "Town Portal" to one of the towns, remove the unwanted character or characters at an inn, and "Lloyd's Beacon" back to the original location. It doesn't add much to the game experience except time. 

             

In this example, I found an artifact only usable by humans, ironically.

 

In the Castle Pinehurst dungeon, I found this wizard, who offered every spell in the game for 2 million gold. I had almost all of them by then, and knew where to get the rest, but I also had plenty of gold. It still seemed like a bit of a cheat. 

          

         

Interspersed with the dungeon explorations, I started to do the character-specific quests one-by-one. At my level, they haven't been terribly hard. The most difficult part has been getting to and from them. Since each character must go alone (or accompanied by a robber), I don't have my full complement of traveling spells. But between roads and NPCs (who I can dismiss once I find the location), it hasn't been crushingly difficult.

        

Mistress Quickly earns her plus.

         

Of the character quests I've finished so far, the sorcerer quest was by far the most difficult, but also the most fun. I had to navigate two castles (good and evil) full of word puzzles. The evil castle, for instance, began with a message that said "All that are even are less but odd. All that are odd become more odd." The first room had two doors, marked #1 and #2, with a message that said "It's not one," meaning that it's 2. But since "all that are even are less but odd," I really want Door #1. Similarly, the next room had four doors with the notation that "it is one." But since "all that are odd become more odd," I really want Door #3. Fun stuff.

                   

After navigating my way through these doors, I encountered the evil wizard Ybmug in a stasis field with two sets of codes on the walls on either side of him. I couldn't figure out which ones to enter at first, but searching my notes I found a message from the Vulcania dungeons: "To unlock the frozen secrets of Evil, try Right 46 and Left 23." A lot harder than just killing things, which is all the other characters had to do. My cleric got her + by restoring Corak's soul to his body. I rather thought that when this happened, he might give me some hints as to the main quest, or otherwise tell me anything about CRON, Sheltem, and so on. But he just thanked me, gave me some useless advice about where to find the encasement spells (I already have all of them), and disappeared. In some dungeon, I finally encountered a Dagger Jaw, got that reward from Lord Slayer, and was given a third quest to slay a Fire Faery.

                

Finally, in my explorations, I encountered one enemy so bafflingly evil, it's hard to believe it actually exists: the Phase Spirit. They are utterly immune to melee damage, and a single one can drain every character's hit points to 0 in a single attack. Unless the sorcerer or cleric can kill them all in the first round, there is effectively no way to win against them.

         

Somewhere along the line, my "Turn Undead" spell stopped working completely. It fails every time, for both my priest and my paladin. Their alignments haven't slipped, and I otherwise can't figure out what could be causing it. Other spells seem to work fine. Any ideas?

          

One dungeon I've yet to explore is Dawn's Mist Bog Cavern. I know where it is. It seems a lot of things are riding on this dungeon. My ninja needs to kill Dawn to get his plus; some guy named Murray wants me to kill her; I need to free a couple of NPCs; and per the message above, the Elemental Orb is there. My guess is I'll go there next.