Lands of Lore: Alien Logic

Conrad tries to be reasonable. It didn't work out.

        

We open with a bit of a mystery. I had closed the last session with Scotia appearing in the forest, disguised as Dawn, trying to trick us into giving her Dawn's key. She turned into a dinosaur when I refused her. I was having trouble defeating her, so I just decided to wrap it up and figure it out next time. "Next time" turned out to be two weeks later. When I reloaded my last save, the party was in the city of Yvel. I went out into the forest and couldn't find Scotia anywhere. Does she only show up sometimes? Did I defeat her and not remember? I spent the rest of the game worried that I wouldn't be able to win because of something I was supposed to get at that battle. Fortunately, it wasn't a problem, but the last few hours were angstier than usual.

  

I couldn't figure out anything else to do, so I returned to the chamberlain's little headquarters at the north end of Yvel. As I arrived, Geron shouted that "Yvel must not fall!" and said the city's fate was in my hands. I had just come through the entire city, so that it was in any danger was news to me.

       

        

Nonetheless, as I started circling the city again, I encountered parties of giant orcs and armored figures called "cabal warriors." They were a little easier than the ones I'd killed in the forest, or else I was just feeling the effects of my leveling up. I slowly made my way around the city, resting in buildings when necessary, and cleared out the orcs. Eventually, Conrad said that he could hear the "retreat horns" and thus "the battle has been won!"

    

Someone should have told the 200 orcs that were still crawling around the city after this.

     

We returned to Geron's building only to find it abandoned. He'd left a note on the door that someone had stolen his key during the attack. "I suspect the thief sought refuge in the Catwalk Caverns!" he wrote, adding that, "A passage may exist near Bruno's Lodge." I wasted a bunch of time looking for a passage "near" the tavern when it turns out that the passage is in the tavern, behind a door that had been closed before.

    

I always wondered where that door went in the show.

     

The caverns were full of cabal warriors. The manual says that they "continue fighting after death," but fortunately that doesn't seem to be true. 

 

Cabal warriors . . .

     

I had only been in the caverns a short time before I walked into a room in which a group of Scotia's generals was meeting around a table. The leader, in gold armor, introduced himself as Frendor. His associate, "First Envoy of the Dark Path," was named Mylek. Victor, the king's blacksmith, had apparently joined the enemies.

   

. . . and the cabal.

      

Frendor suggested that we had passed a test. "Join us now and we shall rule eternal," Mylek said. Victor even chimed in: "Dark Army too powerful to beat." The game didn't even give me the chance, though. All three characters rejected the offer, expressing allegiance to Richard.

"Then you shall die!" Frendor snarled, and the game took us out of the cut scene and into combat. Frendor was the only unique enemy in the ensuing battle. I'm not sure if the other two cabal warriors were supposed to be Mylek and Victor or if they fled. Frendor was quite hard to hit, and he used a deadly long-bladed claw. But there was a pillar in the room, so I just did the trick where I backpedaled around it, attacking when he came into range and not giving him a chance to turn and strike me. He didn't last long.

   

He was a little too easy to kill. Perhaps he was just someone posing as Frendor--a "Frendor faux," if you will.

     

Frendor had Geron's key, a statuette (which opened a nearby wall), and a gauntlet. When I tried to wear it, it didn't erupt into long claws like it did for Frendor, but it did cast the "Hand of Fate" spell, which slaps some enemies back a square. I didn't find this very useful at the time. However, the gauntlet was also the key to opening several doors on this level.

     

How do people get around if they're not Frendor?

   

Throughout the rest of the level, I faced extremely weird and annoying enemies that presented as small balls of electricity--so small that I could barely see them, let alone discern their exact position. They made a buzzing sound when they were near. If they got close, they were capable of sapping a character's entire mana bar with a single hit, after which they did damage to his health. They were completely immune to normal weapons. The only thing that seemed to damage them was the "Spark" spell, which of course I could only cast if they didn't neutralize my magical ability first. I ended up fleeing and sleeping a lot on the level.

       

Believe it or not, there is an enemy in front of me.

    

The rest of the level was a maze of teleporters, spinners, one-way doors, secret doors, and secret one-way doors. The corridors had the effect of repeatedly funneling me to a room with two locked doors and two keyholes, so I had to find the two keys during my explorations. 

   

One notable area had some kind of item-replicator. It was offline when I found it. Three nearby corridors dead-ended in squares with electrical nodes on both walls. I eventually realized that what I needed to do was use the gauntlet to force the little electric wisps down the corridors, where they would get trapped between the nodes and thus charge the device. Unfortunately, I killed the damned things before I realized I needed them. I kept returning to the area throughout the level, and one wisp did respawn once, allowing me to confirm my theory, but I was never able to get the other two. Fortunately, it was unnecessary, but I can imagine it would have been useful to create copies of some powerful items.

     

A partial map of the area.

   

As it happened, I was overflowing with inventory at the time, so I'm not sure I would have welcomed yet another item, even a powerful one. Part of the problem was the same issue we all have with all RPGs--I was hoarding potentially-useful equipment for some hypothetical final battle where I "really needed them." These included about eight "Bannon's Reserve" potions, which fully replenish magic, a Wand of Death, and a handful of "Guardians"--globes that you can use once to summon a phantom sword that immediately kills or nearly-kills any enemy. I also had four magic playing cards, each of which cast a different spell, although at the time I wasn't sure that they weren't quest items.

    

I kept finding new weapons and armor, and I continue to simply evaluate them by their effects on my offense and defense statistics. I had to discard most of the others, even though I thought some of them had special abilities. I mostly gave up on missile weapons and throwing weapons; it just became too annoying to pick up the latter, and my thief skills were hardly increasing.

    

On this level, I found the sixth (and, as it turned out, last) spell: "Mist of Doom." The spell does the same thing as a Wand of Death, casting a mass-damage spell that causes specters to erupt from the ground and damage multiple enemies. The animation for this is perhaps the best animation we've had in RPG history up to this point. 

    

Despite my hyperbole, I forgot to take a video of the animation. Here it is in progress, though.

      

"Mist of Doom" helped a little in subsequent areas, but I never got to the point that I was able to cast it at Level 3, let alone the highest levels. I'm not sure I even ever made it to Level 4 with "Fireball." I wonder, does starting the game with the defined "mage" character make a huge difference? If not, I'm not sure how you really play the game as a mage. (This is also an issue I'm having with Ultima Underworld II.) The spells simply deplete your mana too fast. If you wanted to try to kill most of your enemies with spells, you'd have to spend an awful lot of time resting--which I feel I already did anyway. Moreover, I think you'd either have to try to play all the characters as mages or all (as I did) primarily as fighters. Since all characters refresh at the same rate as one character when you rest, it would be a waste of time to do all that resting just to replenish a single character.

    

I finally found the two keys to the final doors and exited the area. What followed was a relatively senseless diversion in a game that was already a bit too long. It didn't even make sense thematically. The final chamber had two creatures, a giant tentacled snail with a single eye (Xeobs) and a blue bearded face with a huge exposed brain (Knowles). (Some of my commenters have suggested that these creatures are aliens, but I don't think there was anything in the game that suggested that. They're not much weirder than the regular monsters you face in some areas. But I agree that it doesn't make sense that they are where they are.) They both said that their people had selected Conrad as their champion, and they both offered untold riches should we choose to fight for their side. Conrad naturally objected that he didn't have any reason to choose either side.

      

My general rule is: when someone forces you to choose something, choose against the person who's forcing you to choose. In this case, that's both of them.

     

My inclination was opposite: kill all of them. Unfortunately, I didn't have that option. I had to pick one of the two by going through a particular teleporter. I decided that the Knowles were slightly more obnoxious than the Xeobs, plus I once knew a guy whose last name was Knowles that I didn't like.

    

The teleporter took me to a new level titled simply "Dungeons." It was full of Knowles, horribly annoying foes. Their attacks could destroy my armor, so I had to take that off early (after reloading the first time). They also had a "tremor" attack that caused my characters to drop all their weapons. After lots of frustration and some experimentation, I settled in with a system of trying to kill them with weapons if they attacked individually and using "Mist of Doom" when they were collective. I could only cast three of those spells, so I retreated through secret doors to rest (enemies don't follow through secret doors) when my mana or health was down.

 

Misting the Knowles.

     

The dungeon had two important items. The first was Nathanial's key, found in a niche on the wall. It looked like all the other keys I needed to open Richard's shield, but a) I have no idea what it was doing among these weirdos; and b) I have no idea who "Nathanial" is. If his name has been mentioned before, I can't find it in the screen shots. The best I can figure is that he was the royal herbalist. The second important item was a diamond.

    

I kept making my way through the dungeon, opening chests, fighting with my inventory, committing genocide against Knowles for no reason. I found the headquarters of the Xeobs at one point and had the option to turn my attacks on them, but I didn't.

     

I don't suppose that means you'll fight with me against Scotia?

    

I kept fighting Knowles until I couldn't find any more, then returned to the Xeobs. They rewarded us by advancing everyone a fighter level (bringing them to Levels 8, 8, and 7) and giving us 50 gold, a weapon I don't remember, another Vaelan's Cube, and a key out of this place.

   

The key opened a door that led to a stairway that brought us to the main level of Castle Cimmeria, Scotia's castle. So somehow Scotia allowed those two weird races to live in her basement and wage their private war in the middle of her takeover of the world.

    

Disembodied axes attack in Scotia's ornate halls.

    

Vaelan's Cube was immediately useful, as Castle Cimmeria was swarming with phantom cabal warriors (ah, I get it now). I hadn't known how to use the cube in the White Tower, but I knew how to use it here, and it makes such a difference that most of my complaints about the White Tower have to be dismissed. It not only kills the phantoms; it turns their life essence into mana that can be transferred to a character. You can keep up an unending cycle of enemy damage and self-healing when facing undead foes. The Cube did not, alas, work against disembodied phantom axes, but those responded to physical attacks and "Spark."

    

In an early room, I found Dawn imprisoned in a glass globe. The diamond shattered it and freed her. She said she'd "gather our forces" and zipped off.

   

"Baccata! Go @#$* yourself!"

      

Elsewhere on the level, I found two figurines--cobra and dragon--that turned out to be important. To get to the second level, I had to solve a long puzzle that I want to highlight here. It was probably the most complex puzzle of the game (although, admittedly, there were some optional ones that I never solved). It took place in a 7 x 7 room, as below. As I entered the room, the game stripped away my automap and made the compass go wonky so I could never be sure if it was pointing in the right direction.

Cimmeria's Level 1 puzzle area.

      

The objective was to first get into the southeast corridor, where I found the dragon figurine. I then had to get into the middle-south corridor and its stairway upward. The difficulty is that the room was full of teleporters (both 1* squares bring you to *1), spinners (@), and pits (white circles). There were four pressure plates (black squares) that I had to weigh down; together, they closed the pits on the squares marked in gray.

      

This isn't a bad puzzle. I always think of this kind of puzzle like a maze. You try a variety of paths, many of which lead to dead ends, before you figure out the right sequence. Of course, you have to map to make sure you've stepped on each square and noted the consequences. The teleporter maze in the final dungeon of Crusaders of the Dark Savant is the same type of puzzle. With enough time and a pen and paper, you can figure it out. It's not unsatisfying when you do, but it doesn't call to mind any creativity, or lateral thinking. Something like a riddle or word puzzle is the exact opposite of this.

    

Dungeon Master, in my memory, excelled at a rare type of puzzle--mechanical puzzles that do call into play creativity and lateral thinking. (There is an extent to which I may be conflating Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back.) The closest that Lore ever comes is in that optional puzzle where you force the electric wisps into servitude as power sources, and even that one I think was cribbed from a similar one in Chaos. One of my frequent complaints about Dungeon Master clones is that they never seem to rise above purely mechanical puzzles. Then again, I've thought that so often that perhaps I have a tendency to forget the exceptions.

   

Well, this is getting pretty long, so I'll wrap up here and cover the endgame (with summary and rating) next time. There's definitely some good stuff in these final hours, even if the alien business was a bit unnecessary.

        

Time so far: 30 hours