Dark Queen of Krynn: Love and Prophet

The nature of the game is about to change significantly, it seems.

       

When I last wrote, I had just started exploring a lighthouse, hoping to find a sage named Fastillion, who might be able to give me some advice on my quest. The lighthouse was fun. Each of its 13 levels (eleven up, two down) was only 8 x 8, but with the corners carved out so that the levels were roughly diamond-shaped and only used 40 total squares. Every level had a "poorly-concealed pit" in the same location, and stumbling into it always sent the party tumbling down to a sludge heap on the bottom level. The first time, I had to fight an epic battle with greater otyughs, purple worms, and giant spiders the moment I stood up from the fall. I think it would have been funny (if eventually annoying) if the party had to fight the same battle every time it fell, but that's not how they programmed it. Nonetheless, they did find another way to really stick it to the player.

    

Complicating navigation were pairs of teleporters on almost every level. I eventually found a device that shut these down. Each level also had various monster encounters--umber hulks, hydras, gorgons, beholders, and iron golems. (The encounter texts seemed to be suggesting that the tan beholders and brown beholders were having some kind of conflict, to which they had enlisted the gorgons.) Beholders are tough even at my levels. They always start each combat firing "Disintegrate," "Stone to Flesh," "Death," and "Cause Serious Wounds" from their eyestalks before then casting a spell like "Fear" or "Slow." Even with high saving throws, the dice roll the wrong way often enough to make them dangerous. They're immune to most magic, and the only way to kill them is to pound away in melee combat, ideally hastened. However, ever since beholders were introduced to the Gold Box in Curse of the Azure Bonds (1989), they've had one major weakness: if you run up to them and run away, giving them a free attack at your fleeing back, they won't use their eyestalk attacks during the same round. SSI had three years and half a dozen games to fix this if it was an error, so by now I have to regard it as a legitimate tactic. After all, it requires me to sacrifice a couple dozen hit points, whereas reloading every time a character is "disintegrated" doesn't really require me to sacrifice anything but time.

         

This battle didn't work out for the party. One character has been incinerated, another is dead, another is stone, and my strongest character has just succumbed to the "Fear" spell.

       

The eighth level up featured an epic battle with a ton of fire elementals who utterly surrounded the party. I wasn't prepared for it, and for probably the first time in a Gold Box game, I cast "Resist Fire" on each character, one by one, after the battle had already started. After that, the clerics had to keep up with healing while the fighters killed the monsters, with a little help from the mages' "Ice Storm" and "Cone of Cold."

         

I'm surprised I survived this.

        

On Level 10, we had a similarly epic battle with iron golems. Note that resistance to "Fireball" and other mass-damage spells is becoming a theme. The worst you can do with iron golems is cast "Lightning Bolt" at them, which has the same effect as a "Slow" spell. This is the first Gold Box game in which I routinely use buffing and healing spells during combat because the combat lasts long enough to bother. This is mostly a good thing, but it might be that there are just a few too many of these combats. This particular map ended before I got sick of it.

           

I forgot to screen shot the golems, so here are some hydras. They look pretty good.

          

Level 10's stairs led to Level 11, but only to a single room with a false door. I stumbled about for a while, trying to figure out how to get to the rest of the level, before I discovered an encounter on Level 9 that I'd previously missed. I found an elf woman dying under a toppled statue. She gave me an incoherent message for Fastillion before noting that something "must be under the porch!"

    

The lighthouse's first square makes a point of saying that you're on the front porch. As for "under" it, on the first basement level, I had no idea because I hadn't been mapping. As I recently said to a commenter, you rarely need to map Gold Box games because the levels are so small and you almost never have to visit them a second time. If I had mapped the first basement level, I would have found a secret door leading to a one-square room below the "porch" square on Level 1. As it was, I returned to it by taking a dive down the trash chute and climbing up to the first basement. The one-square room had a teleporter that took me to the main area of Level 11. Unless the teleporter doesn't appear until you visit the elf woman, that means all the effort exploring the rest of the levels is wasted (except for the experience, of course). I suppose it would be hard to stumble upon it accidentally, though, because it's an "extra" square that otherwise doesn't fit the pattern of the levels.

   

Fastillion was a gnomish wizard who had filled his tower with monsters less because of malice and more out of a desire not to be disturbed. ("There weren't supposed to be evil things in my tower. The gorgons were supposed to keep them out. I bet they were working with the beholders, weren't they? I really should get around to training them.") When we got his attention, he related that there is evil stirring in the land of Thenol, probably caused by someone named Trandamere, who wants to conquer all of Taladas. I thought the name seemed familiar, but I couldn't find it anywhere in my previous screen shots.

       

This is going to be my new greeting for students who visit during office hours.

            

The wizard suggested two courses of action. The first was to get help from the "Hulderfolk" east of Trilloman, but he warned that "the price is high." Second, he suggested consulting the Oracle of Tengur in the Tombs of Kristophan. He gave us two keys, one rusted, one golden, one of which would get us into the tomb. There was no reverse teleporter, so we had to take another dive down the trash pit to get out of the tower.

    

Several amusing options for the long fall.

       

We left the lighthouse back to the open map and consulted our options. I had a rebellious desire to strike out in my own direction, but Kristophan was just across the strait from the lighthouse (a friendly boatman offered to transport us), and I needed a city's services, so I decided to go there first.

         

The overworld map.

       

The Kristophan map started us in front of a hut where an old hag was crying. She introduced herself as Eshalla and said she had once been a beautiful woman, but a minotaur lord had ordered a wizard to turn her into a hag over a minor offense. She claimed that a kiss from a handsome man would lift the curse. I made Dutch kiss her. (I'm curious what happens if you select a female character, but I forgot to reload and see.) The game went on at length about how repulsive the experience was for the knight, and moreover it didn't work. She asked to try again. This happened a couple more times, until it seemed like the old woman was playing a cruel prank on us, but at last the kiss took, and she did transform into a beautiful young woman. 

         

I wonder what happens if all your characters have single-digit charisma.

         

She gave us a Cloak of Displacement for our efforts, plus a brief make-out session for Dutch, along with a promise to see us again. This is the second time we've had a "romance" in a Gold Box game (the first being Treasures of the Savage Frontier from the same year). Eventually, I'll have to do a special topic entry on RPG romances. Suffice for now to say that I generally feel about romances some of the same things I feel about nudity. If it's organic and mature, I don't mind, but slight variances in writing and presentation will suddenly make me feel like I'm being invited to participate in a creepy three-way with the author. I'm more likely to trip that particular threshold if the game has an identifiable, individual author rather than a faceless team.

      

Get a room!

         

It's a bit different in this sort of game, however, because I regard all of the characters somewhat impersonally. Contrast the Eshalla episode with the Avatar's brief fling with Nastassia in Ultima VII. Although both are multi-character games, Ultima VII is structured so that you identify primarily with one character, while the Gold Box makes you feel more like you're a coach for a team. When describing the Avatar's actions with Nastassia, I used the first person (e.g., "she kissed me") whereas it wouldn't occur to me to do the same with Dutch. I sometimes use "we" or "us" or even "I" when describing actions in Gold Box games, but only when talking about the entire party. None of its individual members are "me." Reading about Dutch and Eshalla may feel slightly voyeuristic but it doesn't run the same danger of crossing the line to "creepy."

      

Minotaurs are the ruling class in the city of Kristophan.

        

Back to Kristophan. The large city is ruled by minotaurs and populated in part by a human underclass. Slave class, to some degree. Humans and minotaurs have their own zones and establishments. Repeatedly, I wandered into the wrong facility and was ordered to leave. The entire west side of the city was full of minotaur government buildings I couldn't enter. Meanwhile, street encounters invited the party to lose its cool and probably start a conflict with the minotaurs. I resisted for the time being, mostly because I'd given a bunch of steel to the bank early in the visit and didn't want to lose access to it. Here we see a microcosm of how economics prevents wars.

         

I wanted to attack, but instead I just distracted him by shouting. At least he stopped beating the slave.

        

The usual services were present, and I leveled up a couple of times, sold my excess stuff, and so forth. I've yet to find a place selling magic equipment--the store here just had the usual standard set of gear--but at least the city offered a bank for excess steel. Squirrel got Level 9 mage spells for the first time, and I memorized "Monster Summoning." There were numerous battles with thieves in the east side of the city; although high-level, they have no spell immunities and I was thus able to unleash my pent-up "Hold Person," "Fireball," "Charm," and similar spell inventories.

         

Anyone who needs a regular, non-magical weapon at this point is in serious trouble.

        

Eshalla appeared at one point to give us a helm +3 and demand another kiss from Dutch, then disappeared just as fast. In one random house, the family invited us for tea and talked about the recent theft of The Book of Amrocar from the library. When I inquired about it at the library (the minotaur librarian thought we were there to take out the trash), the librarian clammed up and threw us out. However, a human approached and said that another librarian named Bovinus had stolen the book, killing several guards in his escape, only to be found dead in an alley with the book missing. The book supposedly contains maps and information about some place called Blackwater Glade. This is one of those things that the game clearly expects us to care about but that in real life, the party would probably ignore.

       

The librarian doth protest too much.

       

We found a fortune-teller, but he indicated that he was guided by the Oracle of Tengur rather than being the Oracle himself. The Oracle in fact died a long time ago--he had aided a minotaur named Eragas the Brutish in the original conquest of the area from the original human kings--but his spirit is said to be somewhere still in the city walls. The fortune-teller's own attempt at augury was laughable; he said conflicting things and predicted that no one would ever raise a hand to Midsummer again.

         

Either way, Midsummer is confused.

        

We also found the entrance to the Tombs, but we couldn't find a way through the door. We got a lead when we visited the human tavern and met a thief named Selias, who offered to show us the way in. He asked how much we would pay, and it's a measure of the insanity of the economy that the options were 20, 40, and 60 steel pieces, as if there's fundamentally any difference between those choices when your party has 50,000 of them. I should also mention that Selias is a Level 28 thief, twice the level of my best character, although in all that character development he didn't manage to collect even a single piece of magical equipment. Still, you have to wonder what kind of god-level character hires himself out for 60 steel pieces.

        

You couldn't have learned elocution somewhere in 28 levels?

         

Just as we enlisted Selias, blue and red dragons started dive-bombing the town, perhaps because of our presence in it. Selias recommended that we run north to the tombs. Here, the game pulls a cruel trick. It has its own idea about the shortest path to the tomb, and if you stick to it, you miss the dragon attacks. Otherwise, you take either lightning damage or fire damage every step on the way there. (A map would have helped, I admit.) This damage is accompanied by images of lighting and fireballs in the main game window. There's no way to engage the dragons; they're flying.

          

Animations of lightning bolts and fire accompany each dragon attack.

      

We reached the Tombs, and Selias used some technique to get it open. The Tombs ultimately turned out to be a multi-sectioned area interconnected by teleporters and secret doors, and here I finally had to break down and make maps. The initial area had the city's thieves' guild, but we wiped them out in a massive combat. The rest of the Tombs had a lot of battles with undead, including specters, wraiths, mummies, ghasts, and vampires. I have three characters capable of turning, if not destroying, most of these. We also faced a few "death dragons," which are basically skeletal dragons that hit really hard, but I have two dragonlances at this point.

          

I remember when fighting one vampire was hard.

        

The ultimate goal was to find "pieces of the Oracle," each of which offered a different prophecy and suggestion. These were strewn on different levels amidst various encounters, including an insane lich named Lord Destries who fancied himself a kind of "ringmaster." There was also an episode where I had to bring a heart-shaped key to the ghost of a knight. He and his beloved had been cursed to lurk on opposite sides of a locked door for stealing bread from a minotaur. The key reunited them and ended the curse.

      

When I fought him, he "turned" in one round.

           

This was sweet.

         

The hardest battle was on a level where we were ambushed by a vampire lord. He attacked with numerous vampire mages, vampire clerics, vampires, and specters in three clusters. For some stubborn reason, I insisted on not only winning the battle but winning it without any of my characters getting drained, which meant winning it without any of them getting hit by physical attacks. (None of the vampires responded to "Turn" even though others had in the same area.) Although I know how to use the "Restoration" spell and have plenty of them, I can't shake the fact that a drained character is somehow tainted and will never be right again. My insanity meant that I had to fight the battle four times. I also had to do things like avoid attacking the mages and clerics until I knew I could kill them in one round, since once attacked, a spellcaster cannot cast that round and thus resorts to a physical attack.

         

The vampire is funny, but ultimately wrong.

       

The Oracle clues were:

     

• "The bright key opens the door to the crypt. Within you will find some words you should heed. Then find the Book that Amrocar wrote. Within its pages, words you must read." The "bright key" bit referred to the choice between the golden key and rusty key that Fastillion gave us, and it proved useful in the same dungeon. You've already heard about the Book of Amrocar. 

• "A dragon you'll meet, more mighty than all. To stop his rampage, seek help from three friends: the black robed the winged ones, and also the small." I'll probably know who these allies are when I find them.

• "Find the realm where Tremor is lord. Choose the right present to add to his hoard." That one, I'm not sure about yet.

        

The Oracle should know that "prophesy" is the verb; "prophecy" is the noun.

         

There were also a number of treasure chests, including several that turned into mimics. The game resolved all the mimic combats automatically, without requiring the party to actually fight them. I left the dungeon with a lot of new gems and jewels, a second Girdle of Giant Strength, some Eyes of Petrification, which I will probably sell for arrows when I finally find such a shop, and a mysterious circlet that shows up in the special party inventory instead of the regular inventory.

     

I toyed with showing the minotaurs exactly what I thought of their heavy-handed rule, but in a second tour of the city, I wasn't able to find any opportunities to provoke a fight. Every time I wandered into a place I shouldn't be, the game just scripted my retreat instead of offering me the option. I guess it probably wouldn't have been a good idea anyway.

    

A few miscellaneous notes:

    

• The game has given multiple options in a few encounters, recalling the best times in Pool of Radiance. But while I haven't reloaded a lot to test out this theory, I suspect that most of the encounter options lead to the same outcome.

 

I suspect you get the same story and journal entry here no matter what.

        

• I had a battle with black puddings. I don't remember fighting them in a previous CRPG. Man, are they a pain. Immune to everything except fire. I thought magic weapons were supposed to damage them, but they sure don't work here.

      

Fortunately, I'm not short on fire.

       

This session really didn't take that long despite all the text. I probably over-wrote to obscure my limited playing time this week. Next time, I'll pick a random place on the world map and see what happens.

    

Time so far: 14 hours