Might & Magic II: On the Main Quest

This is what happens when you try to jump steps in the main quest.

    

When I last wrote, I was about to visit Dawn's Mist Bog Cavern. But it looks like I can't get the Elemental Orb from her place yet anyway, so I retreated and started cleaning up other bits of the map and leftover dungeons. Here are a few final discoveries:

• I mentioned in an earlier post that there are "message posts" all over the world's surface that give you nonce strings of letters and punctuation. I've found two colors of messages: green and yellow--specifically 4 green signposts and 9 yellow ones. A clue in a dungeon told me how to interleave the characters on the green messages, and they produce the following:

For each individual to become true, see the jury which resides at Mount Fairview. Travel in groups of appropriate class. A robber can aid all others with their task.

Oh, dear. Leaving aside the abysmal meter, the substitution of assonance for real rhymes, and the poor grammar in the final sentence, the real problem with this message is I already knew this! Hell, all of my characters but one already have their promotions! MM1 did this to me, too. These messages are useless. I don't have the interleave code for the yellow yet (I hope I didn't miss it somewhere), and I can't figure it out just by looking at it, but I hope it tells me something better than this.

• One of my unsolved mysteries was on Map C3, where a voice kept asking for a password. I later realized the password must be "DRUIDS," since letters on the rocks in the surrounding area spelled this word. Sometimes I wonder how I ever finish a CRPG. Anyway, in the dungeon, aside from a bunch of traps, I found some cans of spinach that permanently increased my strength. I also solved a quest for the head druid, but all it got me was the Divine Intervention spell, which I already had.

This is one password that ought to have special characters.

• In the dungeon of Castle Hillstone, I found a magic pool that, when I drank it, turned all my characters male--permanently. This is not good because there are some creatures that males can't damage. I was trying to figure out how to reverse this when the game solved it for me by having my party slaughtered by warbots (yes, hostile robots are among the monsters you face). When I returned, I didn't drink from the pool again, but I did find a magic well that accepted my gold in exchange for experience. There was one of these in MM1, too. I love this. Now I have an excuse to keep getting rich.

It is hard to imagine real-life adventurers doing this.

• In a volcano named gemmaker, I found a lot of gems, and not a single combat.

• I finished the quests for Lord Slayer and Lord Wood. At the highest levels, Slayer wanted me to kill a bunch of monsters around the various maps, and by the time he gave me the quest, I'd already done it. Similarly, Wood wanted me to recover three antique swords, and I already had them in my possession. Easy experience.

There are still a few quests open that I can't figure out or finish right now. There's a location on map B2 where a sign promises a circus, but the circus is never there. A guy on another map wants a cupie doll, and I suspect I need to get it at the circus. A dungeon full of dragons is too tough even for my high-level characters. Finally, I still haven't figured out the name of the guardian pegasus, and I have no idea how to find it. On to Queen Lamanda. She wouldn't speak to me until I dismissed my ninja hireling--the only character not to get his + yet. After dismissing him, she gave me what amounts to the game's main quest (I think). I took a look at the backstory in the game manual again. In the mid-ninth century, King Kalohn went to battle the dragon created by Acwalandar, the water lord. Kalohn had previously used the Orb of Elements to defeat and imprison the elemental lords, but apparently by the time he had to face the dragon, the Orb wasn't at full power. I'm guessing I need to retrieve it from Dawn's cavern and bring it back to Kalohn. But first I thought I'd just pop over and see if I could help him defeat the dragon, Orb or no. I used Lord Peabody's time machine to go back a century. I trudged around the Quagmire of Doom until I found the location of the battle. Alas, I was too late:

"If only you had the Elemental Orb of Talons," the game continued.

     

I then got slaughtered by the "Mega Dragon" (none of my attacks or magic could damage him) so clearly I need the Orb. From a message in Vulcania, I know I need the four elemental talons before I can get the Orb, so I headed for the first elemental plane: Air. I wandered around for a while, killing elementals, before I found the talon I needed, but I was missing something: Okay. Searching through my notes again, I see that I forgot a message from the Tundara dungeon: "The four discs are needed to get the corresponding talons." Messages scattered about other dungeons tell me that the four discs are in various locations in Castle Xabran, which is in...well, I can't find it on my maps. Ah, but here's a message from a cave in Map E3: "Mystic Castle Xabran, holder of secrets, lies unknown in the 9th century at C2 at 14,8." Thank god I took good notes. Returning to Lord Peabody's machine, I travel again to the 800s (I wonder if there's any point traveling to the earlier eras), and I find Castle Xabran at the given location (it's just a pile of ruins in modern times). Aside from the four discs (which I found quite easily), Xabran had an interesting "hall of spells," which told the locations of all of the spells in the game that you need to "find." How someone from the ninth century knew where spells would be found in the tenth, I have no idea. I also found the interleave codes for the yellow and red messages, which I started finding in the elemental planes (before, I thought there were just yellow and green messages), and a list of all the locations where I can find hirelings (again, in the next century!).

Acquiring the fire disc.

      

I was wondering how I was going to get out of the ninth century, but as soon as I left Xabran, for some reason I was back in my own time. That was convenient. Armed with the four discs, I made my way to the four elemental planes, slaying each of the elemental lords (I'm not even sure this was necessary)... ...and recovering the talons... This took several hours, so I'm wrapping up here for the night. Tomorrow, armed with the four talons, the todilor, the fluxer, the radicon, and the capitor, I need to storm Dawn's Mist Bog and get that Elemental Orb. It's feeling like the next posting might be a "Won!" posting!