Lands of Lore: Enemy Mine

A beast that elicited more of a WTF than an LOL.

     

This is the penultimate week of classes at the University of Chester (not to be confused with the actual university of that name in Pennsylvania), always a very busy time, and three nights this week, I've managed to fall asleep in my office chair with Lands of Lore on the screen in front of me. Some evenings more than once. But each of those nights, I've eventually woken up and continued playing until too late, so the game does have a kind of grip on me.

 

As this session began, my team wandered into the Urbish Mines. We were out again in minutes. The upper level of the mine consisted of a long corridor connecting Opinwood with Upper Opinwood. There was one door. Behind that door was a slug creature called a  Lahrkon, which is not in the manual. It had a tremor attack that damaged both health and magic and wrenched our weapons from our hands. This was fine because even when held, the weapons seemed to do no damage to the creature. Neither did any of our spells. 

     

I was so sure this was the solution to one of our riddles that I held up the flask to it but I got nothing.

           

Conrad and Baccata fled out the other side of the mine, expecting to find the solution to the beast in Upper Opinwood. What they found instead were a lot of giant hornets, plus walking-dead enemies called molders. The hornets were particularly copious, respawning at four "nest" locations and choking my backpaths. "Freeze" took care of them, but it was almost impossible to find anywhere to rest and restore spell points. 

   

The hornets' nests had honey, though--I just had to hold an empty flask up to the nest. I know this is a fictional world, but I must point out that hornets in the real world do not produce honey. 

   

The two enemies in this area.

       

As we reached a northern part of Upper Opinwood, Scotia suddenly alit on the path in front of us, transformed into an old crone, threatened us, and erected a magical barrier to keep us from progressing any further in that direction. Unfortunately, "that direction," as she intimated, holds the very tower on which we must put together the elixir. 

 

Scotia is one of the few RPG bosses who can follow through on her threats.

    

I have to admire how well the game makes you feel like you're part of an ongoing narrative. Most games establish the enemy in the backstory but then leave him passive until you show up to kill him. Lore perhaps goes too far in the opposite direction, making you feel as if you're losing ground with every dungeon you complete. The main quest has followed this evolution:

  

• Find the Ruby of Truth to counter Scotia's Nether Mask and kill Scotia.
• Find the elixir to heal King Richard, and then (presumably) kill Scotia.
• Find the four ingredients for the elixir, make the elixir, find the four keys needed to lower the magical barrier around King Richard's body, find King Richard, then apply the elixir, then kill Scotia.
• Find the four ingredients for the elixir, find some way to lower the barrier blocking access to the tower where we have to make the elixir, make the elixir, find the four keys needed to lower the magical barrier around King Richard's body, find king Richard, then apply the elixir, then kill Scotia.

   

The next evolution of this type of system is to give the player some kind of agency in whether, how, and when these plot developments occur. Even modern games don't do a particularly good job of that.

 

Scotia seals off part of the forest.

     

I mapped the rest of the area. There were several tree stump treasure chests that delivered various weapons, armor, silver crowns, and other upgrades. One of them was a jade necklace that increased one character's thief level by 1; another was a green skull that turned out to be important. I had already found a green skull in "lower" Opinwood. An exit from the far western side of Upper Opinwood connected with the Gorkha Swamp, making this entire area a square.

   

I didn't find anything that explicitly dealt with the Lahrkon, so I returned to the mines and tried again with the usual weapons and spells. When they failed, I fear I had to Google for a hint. It turns out that the skulls are usable items that cast an acid spell, although for some reason they deplete your mana bar in the casting (other usable magic items don't do that). I should have thought to try them, but I assumed they were either junk to weigh down pressure plates (like all the other bones and skulls in the game) or solutions to some kind of puzzle. It took about six uses of the skulls to kill the creature. I had to run outside and rest to restore mana in between.

     

The skull's acid finally dissolves the giant slug.

     

Beyond the Lahrkon was a stairway down to the rest of the Urbish Mines. The first level held the mine's offices, and it was full of desks with miscellaneous papers and notes and amusingly modern-looking file cabinets. Tool inventories and monthly quota sheets hung on the walls, along with signs that said things like: "Notice: Only one meal per day! No exceptions for dwarves!"; "Sickness is no excuse! No work, no pay!"; and "Thomgogs do NOT get double pay!" In other words, the developers did a modest amount of world-building, which is always nice to see. One of the desks had a "Fireball" scroll.

   

Searching one of the desks on the mines' office level.

      

Monsters were these giant lobsters crawling along the ceiling. I was surprised that, like the Lahrkon, it is not mentioned in the manual. Neither were some of the other monsters I faced later in the mines. I had been gauging my progress through the game by the number of monsters I'd encountered, and before I had entered the mines, I had figured I was about 50% through the game because I'd met 50% of the monsters in the manual. Now I don't have any idea.

We found a clerk working in one of the offices. He said that everyone else had fled the mines a year ago "when the monsters invaded the mine," but he'd been trapped by the Lahrkon. We said we were looking for "a friend who may be in the mines," which was news to me. I don't remember anything specific that told us to enter the mines except that they were literally the only place to go. Searching my past entries, I realized that King Richard's knight Paulson had vowed to clear the Urbish Mines of monsters, and that, in fact, the Urbish Mines are where Scotia had found the Nether Mask in the first place.

      

Nice to see a man with priorities.

     

We picked up a mining pick and a helmet on the clerk's screen. By the time we finished with the first level, we were way overloaded with equipment, so I took the time to wander two maps back to Gorkha Swamp to sell a bunch of stuff. I made a full circuit through Upper Opinwood, Gorkha Swamp, and Opinwood, and there were a few places in which I got swarmed with hornets. I also had to reload once when I was killed by a pentrog. While in Gorkha Swamp, I paid the hermit for the last clue, which turned out to be to collect the swamp water itself.

    

At this point, I have all of the clues and 50% of the reagents.

    

There were four more mine levels to explore, but narrating in linear order would be boring, as there was so much backtracking. I think I spent as much time in the mines as in the entire game so far.

      

Little giggling weirdos attacked on the lower levels.

     

There were several types of new and old enemies. There were little worms that attacked fast but didn't do much damage. Iron grazers are small, round enemies who spit acid and destroy armor, so you have to (annoyingly) strip the moment you hear them. The easiest new enemy type were these small giggling things (again not in the manual) that sound annoying but weren't difficult to kill. The hardest were "avian worms," flying flatworms with toothed heads at both ends that respawned so fast I got completely stuck in a few areas because I couldn't kill them fast enough to get past them.

      

Flying worms overwhelm me.

       

Somewhere in the middle were "lightning jellyfish" who usually weren't very hard but occasionally managed to zap us for 50% of our hit points.

        

Electric jellyfish.

    

Finally, we met some tough rock creatures that were the source of the blood we needed for the elixir. At first, I tried holding up an empty vial to the blood splatter the creature left when it died. That didn't work. Neither did holding up the vial to a living monster. Eventually, however, one of them dropped a "bloodstone," which is clearly what I need. That's three out of four reagents.  

         

Rock beasts.

     

Puzzles were equally hard. There were a lot of keys to find and doors to open, pressure plates to weigh down, buttons to push, illusory walls to pass through, teleporters to activate, walls to attack with picks, and pits to both use and avoid. Several puzzles used wheels, including one that required me to interleave three messages to determine what order to spin the wheels.

       

A pile of rocks I must use a pick on.

  

One corridor dead-ended in a square that, as the game told me, was full of gas. I had to intuit that the way to progress was to cast a "Fireball" down the corridor, making the gas (and, thus, the nearby wall) explode.

       

Hitching a ride on a mining cart.

    

There were a couple of fun puzzle setpieces. One involved a mining cart that would take us in three different directions depending on what levers we had pulled. Another involved a water pump way back on the first level. We had to find a gear to repair it and coal to fuel it before it would pump out the water blocking a key stairway.

      

Just like my furnace at three o'clock in the morning.

       

The mines culminated in an encounter with Paulson. He'd set up a little office in the lower mines and was reading a book when we found him. He joined the party and brought his "key" to unsealing the spell around Richard, as well as something called "Vaelan's Cube." He also led us to a stash of equipment that he'd hidden nearby. Finally, I had three party members again.

     

What are you even doing? I thought you came here to clear this place of monsters!

      

Paulsen joined the party at fighter Level 5, rogue Level 2, and mage Level 3. At this point, Conrad and Baccata were both at fighter Level 5, rogue Level 2, and mage Level 4. The mines hadn't been difficult enough that I felt I needed to spend any time "grinding," but I did want to spend some time answering a few questions:

  

• Does throwing daggers increase rogue skills even though they're listed as "melee" weapons, or do I need to throw weapons that are explicitly throwing weapons, like stars?

• If throwing weapons don't cause a visible blood splatter on enemies, are they doing anything? Do they increase skill even if they don't cause damage?

• Do missile weapons increase rogue skills even if you're adjacent to the enemies when you use them?

   

I went back to lower Opinwood to test these questions on orcs and pentrogs. It turns out that non-"missile" weapons do increase rogue skills, but only when they do damage. Meanwhile, I'd been neglecting a pretty powerful crossbow called "Valkyrie" because its "might" score is low and I wasn't sure it worked in melee range, something I could have tested a long time ago.

       

Good exercise.

    

One thing that annoys me is not knowing how much damage my weapons actually do. I've been assuming that their value is tied to the "might" score that they provide, but clearly that's not the case for missile weapons, and I'm not sure that some of the other weapons don't have special abilities not accounted for in that score. I don't know why Dungeon Master-style games are always so obtuse about giving you information about your equipment. This is doubly true about the few magic items that I've found, the uses of which I've had to guess or be told in the comments.

   

We went back to the barrier in Upper Opinwood. Paulson didn't have anything to say about it, but I assumed Vaelan's Cube would be the solution, and I was right. After a few uses, both the barrier and the cube were gone. Later, a monster dropped a second Vaelan's Cube.

      

The barrier warps and dissolves.

     

We fought through more giant hornets and exited Upper Opinwood to a new map, Yvel Woods. There, we met a new foe--giant, armored creatures that I would call "orcs," but they have piglike faces and this game has made it clear that its orcs are more ape-like. There were several versions of the creature, differentiated by color (this is true of most of the enemies, but as we've discussed, I'm so unattuned to color that I often don't notice or don't differentiate even after I do notice). An easy variety of these foes lulled me into a false sense of security, which was broken when they started slashing away half my hit points in one blow. I got completely trapped by the bastards several times and had to load much earlier saves. They were completely immune to blunt weapons and barely responded to most spells.

        

Damn these bastards.

      

In the northwest, they were so thick I couldn't get through them. I had to keep retreating to rest, during which time they easily replenished their numbers. A sensible player would have explored in a different direction or lowered the difficulty level, but I spent about two and a half hours stubbornly trying to clear the damned things, retreating, resting, and trying again. My characters all gained at least one level in each of their classes during this process. I was swapping the crossbow among them, and a couple of them gained two rogue levels.

   

I finally broke through the pack only to find that what they were guarding was the bridge to Castle Cimmeria, Scotia's headquarters, and they immediately demolished it as we approached. Thus, except for the grinding, the experience was largely a waste of time. I turned around, kept exploring, and found my way to the white tower where presumably we have to make the elixir. I still haven't found "Mother Earth," though.

     

Maybe they'll rebuild it by the time that we're actually ready to go there.

       

Aside from the frustration of the last couple of hours--which I suppose I can't really blame the game for--it was a fun and challenging session. I've mostly made peace with its linearity. The only way it could really go wrong at this point is to drag on. Another 8 hours would be acceptable, another 5 just about perfect. I'll know by next time.

   

Time so far: 18 hours