The Black Gate: All Too Soon

The party at the game's final battle--but not really.

            

I start this session wanting to finish my virtue-ordered tour of Britannia's cities, but feeling rather like I need, for role-playing reasons, to visit Buccaneer's Den now that I know that "Hook" lives there. Certainly, that's what Spark would want me to do. I have reservations about how the game is going to go after that, but for now I decide to continue the organic role-playing to which I committed when I refused to join the Fellowship and thus do things in the standard order.

   

The party has just exited the Dungeon Wrong and needs to get back to Britain. I use this excuse to play around a bit with Lord British's moonstone. In Ultima VI, you could put the moonstone in any of 24 positions, with the destination determined by the distance and direction from the Avatar at the center. The "outer ring" of these positions, starting two squares to the northwest of the Avatar, would take the party to each of the towns followed by their shrines, in the standard order of virtues. So two spaces northwest went to Moonglow; one space northwest and one space north went to the Shrine of Honesty; two spaces north went to Britain; one space north and one space northeast went to the Shrine of Compassion; and so on. The "inner ring"--just one space from the Avatar--went to gargoyle locations. The single space immediately east and west of the Avatar were null points, going nowhere.

    

The Black Gate offers a similar but simpler approach. Since the game is no longer tiled, distance doesn't matter, only direction. There are thus only eight destinations: the towns in standard "virtue order," starting in the northwest and moving clockwise. Northwest goes to Moonglow; north to Britain; northeast to Jhelom; east to Yew; southeast to Minoc; south to Trinsic; southwest to Skara Brae; and west to . . . well, you would think New Magincia. But it doesn't. West also takes you to Skara Brae. I'm not sure if that's a bug or something else.

              

The Avatar heads for Skara Brae.

        

After all, the moongates are being a bit wonky, and it hasn't been fixed with my restoration of the "ether." Something else is wrong. Occasionally, when you use the Orb of Moons, you just bonk yourself into the gate and fall down, and the gate disappears. This also happens with regular moongates, which despite their names no longer come and go with the phases of the moon. They're just always there. They take you in a cycle that's roughly the same as the order above, except the one in Trinsic goes to New Magincia and the one in New Magincia goes to Skara Brae. 

     

None of this helps us get to The Den, so we ride the Orb of Moons to Britain and thence to our magic carpet. It turns out, by the way, that the magic carpet is the best place to feed everyone. With all the party members spread out and organized into individual seats, it's much easier to give food to the right person.

   

Buccaneer's Den is just a short trip across the bay from Britain, and it amuses me that in Ultima IV the city was treated like a rumor that you needed special clues to find. Britannia might be technically bigger now, but it sure feels smaller. As we come in for a landing by the docks, we pass by a casino and Spark says, "Let's win some gold!" I guess he's not as dedicated to role-playing as I am.

           

On this island, people work at night and sleep during the day.

           

It's mid-evening when we arrive. We toss a few unoccupied houses, finding nothing, before coming to the first place of note: The Fallen Virgin inn and tavern. A pirate named Mole espouses the virtues of the Fellowship, but upon further questioning, he admits he misses his old mates, particularly a pirate named Blacktooth, and that the Fellowship is "more crooked than the pirates [he] used to sail with." Later, when I meet Blacktooth, I mention what Mole said, and the two pirates reconcile.

An old pirate wench named Mandy runs the place. She's heard of Hook and knows he lives on the island, but not where. She reveals that Hook is a suspect in the murder of a thief named Duncan, who stole money from the House of Games, The Baths, and the Fellowship hall. His body was found mutilated and dismembered in an old house 

            

Dupre has apparently been representing his hobby as his profession.

           

Next up: The House of Baths. The manager sits at the front door and collects the entrance fee of 300 gold pieces. I check funds with Iolo, and we have 498. Since we can't afford to leave any stone unturned, we pay. The manager makes some noise about Spark but ultimately agrees to let him in. 

             

Quick thinking, kid.

          

The Baths turns out to be a combination of a community bath in the style of Greece or Rome and a house of prostitution. There are three hosts/masseuses/prostitutes: Martine, a girl who just calls herself Wench, and a man named Roberto. They all have basically the same dialogue. They claim to love working there. They'll join you in a swim, give you a massage, just talk, or retire with you to a private room. Each one of them reveals the same rumor during conversation: that the major buildings of Buccaneer's Den, including The Baths, are connected via mountain passes. 

           

Dozens of young gay early 1990s gamers shuffle back to the closet for a few years.

            

I decline their more intimate services for several reasons, the most pressing being that I'm with six companions. Equally important is that their scripted speeches leave me unconvinced that they're willing servants, and I might have something going on with Nastassia, and I'm just not that attracted to the idea of prostitution in the first place. Plus, we have a quest to solve, and the prostitutes have given us a major clue. 

              

Fun fact: This NPC's portrait was based on a woman who won an ORIGIN "immortality" contest. I hope she didn't mind that her character was named "Wench."

          

At the back wall of the facility, I find a secret door. It's triggered from the other side, but that's no problem with:

           

Telekinesis (ORT POR YLEM, "Magical Movement of Matter"), Level 2. Trips remote switches and levers. Very useful in situations like this, although probably never necessary--there's almost always a way around to the other side with more conventional means.

     

The back room has a lot of gold and a full set of armor. There's another secret door leading to the mountain cave, but it also won't open from this side, and I can't see a lever on the other side to reach. We're intrigued by this secret network of passages, though, and we're not likely to let it go.

            

It's tempting, but I don't loot anything.

         

In the far west of the village, we find the Fellowship hall, run by a man named Danag. He claims to be in charge in Abraham's absence. He says the Fellowship is to credit for turning Buccaneer's Den from a pirate hideout to a respectable, tax-paying business place. He says he does not know anyone named Hook.

        

Ah, yes, prostitution and gambling. Surely, the Fellowship makes the world a better place.

       

The back of the Fellowship hall also leads to the mountain caves, and this time I can see the lever. Soon we are exploring a network of earthen caves that create a long "C" shape around the entirety of the island. North and east we travel to a locked door. Spark picks it. We soon find ourselves in a large chamber full of torture devices--racks, cages, iron maidens, guillotines, chains, thumbscrews.

           

The stocks don't make a lot of sense. Those are instruments of public humiliation, not "torture" as such.

         

A troll named Grod stands guard outside two prison cells and talks about how much he delights in torturing the prisoners. The first prisoner is none other than Sullivan the Trickster, who has been scamming inns and taverns for years by calling himself the Avatar. It was his shenanigans that led to the trouble in Jhelom. He is quite open about his past. Apparently, he's in jail now for stealing from the Fellowship. Despite the theft, he's clearly a member of the inner circle, as he confides to us--for the first time in the game--an explicit relationship between the Fellowship and the Guardian. He believes the Fellowship leaders are in error, and the Guardian will simply kill all of them when he gets to Britannia. 

             

I don't think Sullivan is a true believer.

         

Anton is in jail for spying. A sage named Alagner (New Magincia) sent him to learn about the Fellowship, and he was apparently caught. The situation leaves us in a conundrum. Grod hasn't shown violence to us, so we'd have to murder him outright to justify getting rid of him and freeing Sullivan and Anton. I'm not sure Sullivan deserves to be freed anyway, and we haven't found Hook yet, so perhaps it's not a good idea to so thoroughly tip off the Fellowship to our discoveries. I decide to think on it while exploring the rest of the island.

              

This business where NPCs react negatively to "JOB" is getting tiresome. Don't make it my only dialogue option and then make me feel stupid for asking it.

          

Trying to take the corridor east from this room sees us teleported to a small room with a dragon. We kill it. There's a magic helm in its treasure chest, and a Firedoom Staff that we don't take. We ride a similar teleporter out. Further east in the caves are some encounters with giant spiders, headless, and a lich who seems to have his own potion lab. We get some reagents, potions, a little gold, nothing major.

South east of where we entered the caves, on the lower part of the "C," we find a large, multi-roomed lair that seems to belong to the mysterious "Hook." One of the rooms seems to be his bedroom; an adjacent bedroom has gargoyle jewelry and trappings and would seem to belong to his companion Forskis. A chest in Hook's room has a key and several notes, one of which suggests that he's sailed away on the Crown Jewel for the Isle of the Avatar. Another has a "hit list" for enemies of the Fellowship, including Finster (the Britain victim), Christopher (Spark's father), and Duncan, the thief I just recently learned about. Ominously, three more names are checked off: Frederico of Minoc, Tania of Minoc, and Alagner of New Magincia (Anton's master). There are also two unchecked names on the list: Lord British and me.

         

Hook's office and bedroom on the north and Forskis's room to the south. There's an inaccessible room that has a dead alligator in it for some reason.

         

A cave leading north from Hook's lair goes to a steel door leading to the House of Games, but it's locked and no amount of picking seems to solve that. We loop back around to the Fellowship entrance, reluctantly kill Grod (there's no "Pickpocket" spell and you can't loot enemies while they're asleep, so I can't think of a non-lethal option) and use his keys to free Sullivan and Anton. Sullivan immediately announces he will return to his former ways, but I guess that's his choice.

The House of Games is run by Mister Gordy. He says it was started several years ago with funding from an "anonymous party"--clearly the Fellowship. Buccaneer's Den is outside the jurisdiction of the Britannian Tax Council, which makes the casino extremely profitable. Gordy employs a croupier named Smithy and a guard named Sintag.

           

Your backers are the Fellowship. You literally have a secret back passage that links to their hall.

        

There are three games in the casino: Virtue Roulette, Rat Race, and Triples. What's cool about all of them is that you actually put your gold on your selections instead of playing through a menu. Even today, it's rare to find a game with such a finely-configured interface. Virtual Roulette is just eight colors. If you select the right one, you get paid 7:1, meaning you make back 0.875 for every gold piece you bet. Rat Race has three rats running different lanes, and you bet on one or more lanes. It pays 3:1 for a 25% chance, making the return a miserable 0.75 for every gold piece bet.

          

The Avatar bets on honesty.

         

But I found a bug in Triples that I've never seen discussed before. To play the game, you roll three wheels, each with numbers 1-3 on them. Different combinations pay out at different rates if you bet on them. For instance, any sum of 4 or any sum of 8, both of which have a probability of 11.11%, pay 8:1. Your expected return on this choice is 0.889 for every gold piece spent. Combinations of 5 and 7 have the same odds but for some reason pay differently, so that your expected return on 5 is 0.889 for 1 but for 7 is 0.667 for 1.

    

The rarest combinations are 1-1-1, 2-2-2, and 3-3-3. You can also bet on "any 6." Here's where it gets interesting. The combinations 1-1-1 and 2-2-2 both pay back 27:1. Since each has a 1/27 chance, those are even odds. But the combination 3-3-3 only pays back 7:1, making your expected long-term payout a measly 0.26 to 1. Why? Because some programmer accidentally switched the odds of 3-3-3 with the odds for "any 6." "Any 6" (which includes 1-1-1, 2-2-2, and 3-3-3 but not 3-1-2 or any combination thereof) pays 27:1 but with 3/27 odds. That's a return of 3:1 over the long haul. Crazy. I exploited it to earn about 1,000 gold pieces but decided not to completely ruin the game. Also, we have places to be. (FYI, I'm aware that the odds of some of these games improve if you're wearing a Fellowship medallion, but that means wearing a Fellowship medallion.)

          

The Avatar has 5 gold pieces on every possible outcome so he can tell what different results pay.

           

I could chase Hook to the Isle of the Avatar, but for all I know that note is years old. More alarming to me is the list of victims, two in Minoc, one in New Magincia. Yes, technically they're already checked off, but who knows what a pirate assassin's hit list annotations mean? If there's any chance I can warn them, I should take it.

          

Hook's "hit list."

        

Minoc has more victims, but New Magincia is just across a strait from Buccaneer's Den. After some hesitation, I head there first. The water quickly gives way to pasture and sheep. We land in a big block of grass and soon find our way to the road, and then the tavern, called the Modest Damsel. It is midnight when we wander in, and there's only one patron: a shipwright named Russell. He says we're the first visitors to New Magincia in years, save a group of shipwrecked sailors. Russell says that their ship, made by someone in Minoc named Owen, was not well-constructed. Lacking any money, the three sailors remained marooned on New Magincia.

      

Like most towns, the island has only a few permanent residents. Boris runs the Modest Damsel; he's married to Magenta, the mayor, who insists that the town basically runs itself. Sam sells flowers at the south end of town. He used to be a nobleman, but he retreated from the world to run his greenhouse and study botany, and he's very content with life. Henry is a peddler. Katrina, my old companion, is still a shepherd; she volunteers to join the party but I politely decline. Her ward is a gormless girl named Constance whose job is to carry water to people from the well.

           

I'm not sure if we knew before now that Katrina is from Earth as well.

           

Alagner lives on the north end of the island and has a large, locked workshop there. I'm happy to find him alive. The game doesn't give me any dialogue related to Anton, but Alagner--who believes it is his destiny to know everything in the universe--does confess that he believes the Fellowship is "cunning and two-faced," and that he has a plan to obtain proof of their duplicity. I'm unable to get into his workshop and the game gives me no option to warn him about his impending assassination, so I reluctantly leave.

           

Something tells me that notebook is going to turn out to have been a bad idea.

         

The other major drama on the island concerns a missing locket. Katrina gave it to Henry; Henry promised it to Constance, with whom he is desperately in love. But he lost it somewhere, and Constance has repudiated him as a liar. She has cast her eyes to Robin, the leader of the shipwrecked sailors, who keeps promising to take her away from this little town and show her the world. I want to tell Henry to just let her go, that any woman who would renounce him over a piece of jewelry isn't worth his time, but it's not like he has a lot of other prospects.

           

As shallow as she is daft.

        

The three sailors are immediate suspects in the theft of the locket. Robin is a professional gambler, and his two companions, Battles and Leavett, are basically henchmen. Robin admits immediately to having stolen the locket, hoping to use it to buy passage off the island, but he in turn also lost it. After some investigation, I find that Boris found it in the tavern and put it in a secret compartment behind the bar. A carouser and womanizer, he intended to give it to Constance himself. Unfortunately, Magenta found it and assumed her husband had bought it for her. When she hears that it was stolen, she rips it off her neck and gives it to me. None of these people are getting the Rune of Humility, let me tell you.

         

Oh, honey.

         

Meanwhile, I've done a rather stupid thing and paid 600 gold pieces for a ship. Robin previously had a dialogue option where he asked whether I had a ship that could get him and his colleagues off the island. Now, I can say yes, get rid of them, and leave the town in a better place. When I return to him with the news, he boasts that he intends to take Constance with him and sell her to the House of Baths in Buccaneer's Den (suggesting that the other "workers" might be trafficked as well). He and his companions then attack the party and of course are slaughtered instantly.

         

Leaving the tavern.

Five minutes earlier.

        

I return the locket to Henry. I try to get some value out of the ship by eating the food in its hold, but my companions react with horror when I "steal" the food from my own ship. This frigging game and food ownership. The word "humility" never came up once in any NPC dialogue, but I figure it's best embodied by Sam the florist, and I leave the Rune of Humility for him in his bedside table.

          

Friends are like flowers in the garden of life.

             

The Shrine of Humility is on the Isle of the Avatar. I'm staying away from it to avoid a game-breaking bug, but I figured why not do a quick "hypothetical" visit (i.e., a visit and then a reload). The shrine is in good shape, just barren. No demons guarding it or anything.

           

The Shrine of Humility looks appropriately humble.

        

Hostile pirates have set up a little fortress and village in the middle of the island. We fly south over it, as I decide to check out the old Shrine of the Codex. As we approach, some jackass in my party says, "The Shrine of Humility!" Soon after, the voice of the Guardian cackles for about 45 seconds in my head, presumably because of something he's done to the shrine, but perhaps because of the idiot in my party who still has his shrines mixed up after four games. 

          

Instead of the Codex, a scroll at the shrine explains what happened to the Codex.

        

There's a dungeon entrance west of the shrine, with a locked door that Hook's key opens. We decide, "screw it--let's see how far we can get." The answer is: we can get all the way to the end of the game and kill the Fellowship cabal. But without certain objects, we cannot do the last task. I thought about writing it up and playing from here, having technically avenged Spark's father, but I suspect it will cause problems later in the game. It does cause an immediate inconsistency: if I use the Orb of Moons to leave the final chamber, Batlin is back in the Fellowship branch in Britain as if nothing ever happened. I'd be willing to bet that my killing Hook doesn't stop him from carrying out some other murders later in the game, either. It's too bad that this otherwise excellent game doesn't anticipate some alternate player choices and account for them.

           

It was tough to reload after this satisfying combat.

          

Anyway, the Avatar snaps out of his reverie on New Magincia. He's feeling good that Alagner isn't dead. Clearly an "X" on Hook's hit list doesn't necessarily mean the deed was done. This bodes well for the two individuals in Minoc, whom we shall visit next.

     

Time so far: 57 hours