Hero's Quest: Bring the Child from Out the Band

I need a haircut.

Day 8

I thought it was time to see about this Baba Yaga person (1). I mean, I know I'm not a fighter, but it struck me that if I could . . . you know . . . just kill her, maybe everything would just sort-of fix itself. She lived in the west side of the valley in a house propped on chicken legs and sealed off by a gate with skeletons embedded in it.

The gate was spiky at the top, with some kind of poison slime, so I couldn't climb it. Fortunately, the skull on the front gate turned out to be extremely bribe-able. All he wanted was a glowing gem to serve as his eyes, like all the other skulls. At it happened, I had one (from the giant). The skull gratefully took it and gave me the rhyme to make the hut sit down (2).

When I yelled "Hut of brown, now sit down!" the hut squatted, and I (somewhat stupidly, but after the ogre I was feeling bold) wandered in the front door.

Don't you want to talk first?

Predictably, Baba Yaga appeared in a puff of smoke, froze me with a spell, and turned me into a frog.

Erasmus and I need to have a chat.

The only way I could get her to let me go was to agree to get some mandrake from the cemetery for her.  I won't bore you with the details of this expedition; I forgot to retain any imagery of it anyway. Suffice to say is that I bought an "undead unguent" from the healer and used it to go to the cemetery at midnight without dying, picked the mandrake, and brought it back to Baba Yaga, who turned me into a frog again before realizing that she'd need me in human form to get her mandrake. After turning  me back, she booted me out the door, and I wandered away, wondering what I had really accomplished from the entire episode, other than achieving some sense of a higher cosmic "score."

I redeemed the rest of the night by finding and killing a troll and a cheetaur, thus collecting the last of the ingredients the healer was looking for (3).

Day 9

Well, there was no point in putting it off any more. I needed to free the child from the band, and that meant storming the brigands. The front door seemed awfully dangerous, but I was out of other options. I stocked up on healing and vigor potions and headed south (4).
 

I haven't otherwise shown the inventory screen much.

 
The bandit fortress was at the end of a deep valley. When I arrived, I found--just as before--eight archers arrayed on the rocks, plus a group of three bandits guarding the end of the valley, with collapsed logs blocking the path in front of them.

Stealth was useless. Clutching a healing potion in my hand, I sprinted for the fallen logs and climbed over them, while the archers rained arrows down around me. Thankfully, they were lousy shots.

They needed to join the thieves' guild and play Dag-Nab-It.

On the other side of the logs, I squared off against the three bandits with spears. Dumbly, they came at me one at a time, and although it was difficult, I was able to fell them, thanks to all the practice and exercise I got the other day.

Past them, I found the front gates of the fortress, guarded by a minotaur. By now, my blood was boiling so hot that it didn't even occur to me to try to sneak past him. I chugged a healing potion, leaped at him with my dagger in hand, and won!

Oh, yeah.

But there was no obvious way to get into the fortress. The gate was too slick to climb, and the embankments too steep. In desperation, I threw myself at the gate, and to my astonishment, it opened (5)!

Tell no one of this.

In the first room, I had to navigate past some concealed traps and over a tripwire. No issues for a master thief like me (6)!

What would have happened if there had been issues for a master thief like me.

In the next room, a dining hall, I had to act fast. Man, it was crazy. First, I locked the door I came in, trapping a group of bandits outside. Then I blocked the east entry with a chair. Three bandit thugs charged in the west door, but I shoved a candelabra in their path, and as they went around the other side of the table, I jumped up on it, grabbed the rope to the chandelier, bowled them over, and dropped the chandelier on their heads (7)! Flush with the thrill of success, I bolted into the next room.

There, I at last encountered Yorick, the baron's jester, Elsa's friend, and the "warlock" of legend. He began by taunting and threatening me, but once I mentioned Elsa's name, he changed his tune. He seemed relieved that I was there to help. He related that Elsa didn't remember who she was, and that she planned to move the brigands out of the valley once the snows cleared, which would reduce the chances that she'd ever be disenchanted.

Oh. Yeah. About Toro...

He told me that he'd prepare the escape for me and took off, forgetting to let me know how to navigate through his crazy maze of a room, where every mistep could send me spinning to my doom. I gingerly walked across the planks, going in some openings only to emerge on the other side, opening doors that led to blank walls, before I finally got out (8).

In the room beyond, I at last came face-to-face with the brigand leader, and my, what a face!

She was lithe and stylish and fierce and roguish, and from the moment I saw her, all I wanted to do was join her band and be her bandit king. Or even her bandit consort. But the sword in her hand suggested that she wouldn't give me that option, so I hurled the dispel potion at her...

...and she turned into...a woman. A pretty woman, sure. But just a woman.

She remembered who she was immediately and raced home to her father. I liked her better with a sword in her hand and an attitude on her face. I hope the dispel potion didn't take away the skill she's accumulated over the last 10 years. Maybe she'll become a hero like me!

The what must be returned to who now?

Elsa and Yorick used some magic amulet to return to the castle, leaving me in a room full of treasure! Sure, bandits were beating down the door, but...treasure! Excruciatingly, all I could do was search her desk and run for the exit (9).

The next few hours were a confusing whirlwind. I returned to Baron von Spielburg's castle, where everyone was assembled (10), and the baron named me Hero of the Realm!

Before I knew what was happening, Abdulla and the Katta couple whisked me off on Abdulla's magic carpet to Shapeir!

"But what about Baba Yaga!" I screamed, as the valley of Spielburg faded in the distance. I guess Erasmus or someone will have to deal with her.

The valley really was enclosed on all sides by mountains.

Notes and Comments

1. Baba Yaga. As Corey Cole mentioned in a comment, they adapted her from Slavic folklore, including the hut on chicken legs. I've been a lover of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" for years, but somehow I never connected the ninth movement to Baba Yaga until I read her Wikipedia page. (If you want to hear the movement, click here.)

2. Baba Yaga's Hut. I'm condensing for the sake of the narrative. I originally visited Baba Yaga's hut before I freed the Baronet, but I didn't know the rhyme and it didn't occur to me to just ask the skull for it. I returned later and tried everything--CLIMB FENCE, SMASH GATE, KILL SKULL, THROW DAGGER AT HUT--before I thought to type ASK ABOUT RHYME.

3. Cheetaur. Man, was the cheetaur tough. The only way I defeated it was to ESCAPE in the middle of combat, quickly quaff a healing potion, and then go back into combat again.

Not my most heroic moment.

4. Bandit fortress. At this point, I begin making a lot of mistakes, culminating in ending the game with a less-that-perfect score. I'll cover those mistakes in detail in the next posting, but the first one is that there's a secret door to the bandit fortress that I missed.

5. The front gate. I'm looking forward to reading a walkthrough at the end, because I otherwise have no idea how I was supposed to get through the gate. The way I did it seems too comical to be real.

6. Trap room. There were a lot of issues for a non-master player like me. It took me four tries to get through the room. You have to not walk on the rug, then walk on the right platform over the pit, then JUMP over a tripwire on the other side. Technically, by carefully examining all of the objects in your path, you can intuit what to do, which distinguishes this room from the next one.

7. Dining hall. This was a very odd sequence. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to get through it is by trial-and-error and lots of death. You have to do each of the steps that I related, in order, and at just the right time. What makes this particularly jarring is that there really aren't any other timed action sequences in the game. (There are a few other places where you have to do one action with a time limit, but it's usually obvious what you have to do.) It's like the game suddenly changes the rules for this one room. I guess that because it's only one room, I can find it forgivable, but it would be very frustrating to a player trying to limit his saved games.

One of the many ways you can die in this room. The death notices usually give you a hint about what you did wrong.

8. Yorick's room. I was furious with this room when I first played it, because it was all-too-easy to step on a trap and find yourself rolling along the right-hand walkway--endlessly.

You roll along, drop off the end, and come back through the door at the beginning again.

After swearing and re-loading multiple times, I realized you could just type STAND or STOP while rolling, and you'd stop. After that, it was just experimentation. You have to go through one opening, come out by the chain, pull the chain, go to the left door, open it and get out of the way before it comes crashing down, then open the second door beyond it.

9. Elsa's desk. Here is where I made the second big mistake. I knew from 'Enry the 'Ermit, Erasmus, and even Yorick that I needed a magic mirror to defeat Baba Yaga. I figured I needed to bring it to her hut and use it to bounce her frog-turning spell back at her. But when I left the bandit's fortress, I was immediately taken to the end game, with no opportunity to return to Baba Yaga. In the next posting, I'll describe why.

10. Endgame cut scene. I think they really did assemble all the NPCs in the game on this screen. There are even a few I can't place. Are some of them supposed to be icons of the game's developers? Unfortunately, in the EGA version, the quality of the graphics aren't good enough to see a lot of detail (especially for a colorblind player). But you can definitely see Toro the Minotaur standing in the back, even though I thought I killed him.

So I missed dealing with Baba Yaga and only got 397/500 points. A lesser CRPG addict would have reloaded a save game at this point and messed around a little more until he figured it out. But not me. Instead, I completely started over from the beginning, this time being careful to explore each screen more thoroughly. In my next posting, an abbreviated version of how my second PC managed to achieve almost--but not quite--all 500 points.