Champions of Krynn: We'll Keep on Fighting 'Til the End

This feels pretty epic for a first game in a series.

The city of Sanction ended up comprising three full map areas with multiple sub-areas. It was quite plot heavy and provided more magical treasure than the entire game so far.

Sanction had been fully taken over by Myrtani's forces, and the streets were crawling with mercenaries and minotaurs. A notice posted near the entrance advertised openings for "soldiers to wage the battle against the Solamnic usurpers of Krynnn" (this should have been the title of the game). I tangled with numerous minotaurs--they were hardy but not deadly; the battles were long rather than dangerous--before I learned I could get them to go away by parlaying "nice."

They seemed to arrange themselves perfectly for "Fireball."

The city had a training hall, a general store, and a magic shop that sold Wands of Magic Missile for 14,000 gold pieces. I liquidated some gems and jewels to buy a couple for my rear characters so that they'd have guaranteed-hit missile weapons. I've declined to complain about the horribly inflated economy in this game--it would just be redundant after my comments in Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds--but it says something that I happily paid the price instead of taking five minutes to go to Jelek and get them for less than 50% of what Sanction was charging. I wish the damned magic shops in this game would sell Wands of Fireball or Ice Storm (or, for that matter, Girdles of Giant Strength) instead. Those would be worth grinding for, though I guess they would probably unbalance the game.

I caught a couple of thieves trying to pick my pocket, and from them I learned that the evil troops were headquartered in the southwest corner. The headquarters was easy to find. When I arrived, the game told me that the party consisted of a "Dark Elf surrounded by fighters." I didn't realize that Dark Elves were part of the Dragonlance universe.

I hope that's not supposed to be the Dark Elf.

This was the first hint that I had somehow been playing into Myrtani's hands. Later journal entries suggested that Myrtani deliberately led the party on a wild goose chase after the Dragonlance so that they'd ignore Sir Lebaum's building of an undead army. That trope annoys me. Just once, I want to play a game where every time I defeat the evil villain's forces, he screams his rage at the sky and curses his luck that such an adept group of adventurers have decided to oppose him. I want his underlings to tell me that thanks to my ultra-effective questing, he's had to change all his plans and scale back his ambitions.

Anyway, after I defeated the evil troops, I chased the sounds of screams and found minotaurs dragging a woman into their barracks. I defeated all of them and learned from her that someone named "Laurana" sent her to check out the evil growing in Sanction. She said that dead bodies were being taken en masse to the nearby Temple of Duerghast and said I'd need to go through the tunnels of the Shadowpeople to get there.

(That one paragraph had me on the Dragonlance Wiki for a while, sorting out all of the related lore. Laurana turnes out to be Laurana Kanan, a Qualinesti elf, Hero of the Lance, and wife of Tanis Half-Elven. "Shadowpeople" are another name for the Shilo-Thahn, telepathic apelike creatures who live below Sanction and tried to stop the corruption of dragon eggs during the War of the Lance.)

She gave me a magic amulet that led me through a portal to the Temple of Huerzyd, a crumbling, dusty ruin beneath the city. Cutting through a few Draconian patrols, I made my way to some caverns, where a conclave of Shadowpeople contacted me mentally and told me that I could find the Dragonlance in the Temple of Duerghast, at the far end of the caves.

The mobats were pretty easy.

It was from the Shadowpeople that I first heard the term "death knight" and realized that's what Sir Lebaum was. I've been using phrases like "some kind of undead fallen knight" to describe him. I guess I should have put two and two together earlier, given that the second game is called Death Knights of Krynn.

The Temple of Duerghast was fun. First, I got the Dragonlance after a surprisingly easy battle against a handful of Draconians.

After all the trouble I went through on the last map, I figured the battle for the lance would involve more than eight Draconians.

Then, Skyla from Jelek showed up again, and I got to kill him.

He wasn't so smug a few minutes later.

Then I got to use my new Dragonlance on a couple of blue dragons guarding a cache of copper dragon eggs. To dragons, the lance does as much damage as the current hit points of the wielder, so I gave it to my first knight, Midsummer, who has 80 of them.

I was just complaining in the last post about the dragons being too small. They got bigger just in time for me to get a weapon that kills them in one hit.

The culmination of the map was my confrontation with Sir Lebaum, the death knight. He was no pushover, capable of casting a fireball in a way that wasn't a "spell," so it couldn't be disrupted ahead of time. He gated in other undead and terrified everyone around him. Nonetheless, the fear didn't seem to affect me much, and his summoned undead fell easily to my clerics' turning. After all the build-up, I thought the battle with him was fairly abrupt and short.

You'd think that being an evil undead death knight would strip him of the "Sir" honorific.

 
The good armies showed up right after the battle, and gold dragons engaged red dragons in the sky. I had to fight a couple on the ground, too. At the end, the red dragons went buzzing back to their home base at Kernen, and the gold dragons asked me to jump aboard their backs and ride in pursuit. As we sped towards the enemy, we were joined by yet another Hero of the Lance, Tasslehoff Burrfoot.

When we reached the enemy base, it turned out to be a series of "flying citadels." The dragons landed on one of them long enough to let me off.

It feels like this is the end game area, especially since all of my characters are just one level from their maximums. I have to go on a long trip starting on Thursday, so I'm hoping to wrap this up before then. We'll see.