Revisiting: The Return of Werdna: The Fourth Wizardry Scenario (1987)

 

       

The Return of Werdna: The Fourth Wizardry Scenario

United States

Sir-Tech (developer and publisher)

Released 1987 for Apple II; 1988 for PC-88, PC-98, and DOS; 1989 for FM-7 and Sharp X1

Date Started: 23 May 2022

      

In sharp contrast to a lot of things I do in life, I rarely look back on my CRPG coverage with regret. My style has evolved over time, of course, and there are probably no games from the early period that I would cover in exactly the same way, but there are also not very many that I look back on and think, "Wow, you screwed that up." But there are three games that do make me say that. The first is The Bard's Tale II, which was destined for a bad review anyway, but not for the reasons that I gave. I should have given it a chance to disappoint me with its actual failures rather than yell at it over something that I just didn't understand. The second is Dungeon Master; I simply didn't understand its sub-genre well enough when I played it. That's true of any landmark game I play for the first time, but it stings more with Dungeon Master since I grew so much fonder of it later on. The last is, of course, The Return of Werdna.

     

Any deliberately challenging game requires patience. When I played Werdna in 2010, I hadn't yet settled on my now-common approach of alternating two games at a time. If a game threw up a wall, I either had to surmount it or quit. These days, I just need to let things cool off for a few days before re-engaging. I'm not going to quit without winning it this time.

    

Despite the ad, I'm not aware that a Tandy 1000 version of the game existed.

      

Twelve years ago, upon abandoning the game, I saw some spoilers about upcoming levels and puzzles. I don't have the faintest memory of them today. I barely remember the parts I actually played. Thus, this experience will be almost new. I toyed with making it completely new by playing the Apple II version, but the AppleWin emulator makes save states too easy and tempting. By playing the DOS version, I keep myself honest.

   

Werdna is the last Wizardry game to hold to the idea that what we've been playing since 1981 have not been sequels to the first Wizardry, but rather the 1980s version of DLCs. The second and third scenarios even required the original Wizardry to run. Development started shortly after Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983). Wizardry co-creator Andrew Greenberg had checked out by this time, and his partner Robert Woodhead had decamped for Japan. Development responsibilities were thus given to Roe R. Adams III, who had built a solid reputation as a reviewer, playtester, and manual writer for both Sir-Tech and Origin. Adams was already famous as the first person to have won Sierra's nigh-impossible Time Zone (1982), and in Jimmy Maher's words, "he wanted to write a Wizardry for people just as hardcore as he was." Development took a famously long time; Sir-Tech originally announced it for the 1984 holiday season, and yet it wasn't actually in stores until 1987.

      

Werdna is still nursing a grudge.

     

Gamers' reactions at the time were identical to my reaction in 2010: they couldn't believe that after so many years, they were getting the same wireframe graphics. Unlike perhaps many other gamers, however, I've come to regret that initial reaction. As I've said before and will undoubtedly say again, graphics don't excite me until they get good enough to truly immerse me, and that is well past the age of the simple textures that we got in The Bard's Tale or Might and Magic. Until then, at least the black corridors and white lines of Wizardry don't try to fool you into thinking they're anything but abstractions. They even establish a certain foreboding atmosphere. Here, although I doubt that was the intention, they also serve the purpose of highlighting the mechanical changes that make Werdna so different from the rest of the series.

     

My map of Level 10.

     

The plot of the game is encapsulated in Sir-Tech's ads: "You're Werdna. You're alive. You want revenge." Adams's well-written backstory portrays Werdna as a sorcerer absolutely obsessed with an ancient amulet that was left behind when a demented mage opened a portal to another dimension, allowing a group of gods to cross through and visit destruction on the world. Something then drove the gods back through the portal. The amulet was found the next day, hanging around the neck of a statue. No one knew if the gods had left it behind deliberately or accidentally, or if it had somehow been involved in sending the gods home. Werdna spent years researching how to acquire the artifact safely, then finally mounted his expedition--only to find that King Trebor had snatched the artifact only hours earlier. Werdna ambushed Trebor in his throne room with a paralysis spell, stole the amulet, and retreated to his 10-level dungeon beneath Trebor's castle. The events of the first Wizardry followed, and this is how Werdna describes the final encounter:

      

I was entertaining a vampire lord and several of his liegemen when the door to my study was kicked open and in burst a wide-eyed team of adventurers bent on my destruction. I was too far away from the amulet to reach it in time, and my pentagram for summoning monster allies was on the other side of the room. I quickly gathered up my energy and began to cast the awesome TILTOWAIT spell, while my guests rushed forward to my defense. Just as I unleashed the hellish fireball, I saw the vampire lord dissolved by a ZILWAN spell! So they had a high mage also. What! They still stood! That's one very tough team. Another TILTOWAIT should finish them, though. Before I could cast it, the leader of the team stepped in under my outstretched arms and delivered a critical hit to me. As my consciousness faded, I heard one of his men say, "Hawkwind, I have the amulet. Trebor will be pleased" . . . Then darkness claimed me and I slept as unto death.

        

It's almost flattering to be this feared.

        

As the game begins, I awaken on a stone slab on the 10th level of the dungeon, determined to climb my way to the surface. I'm pretty weak. Werdna starts at Level 0 with 1 hit point, no equipment, and no spells. All his attributes are 8. There's a "keys" statistic that indicates how many keypresses you have to finish the game before you lose by default. The number--one million--seems to be generous, but you have to keep in mind that every keypress counts, even invalid ones or uses of the SPACE bar to speed up messages in combat. When you cast a spell and type the spell name, every letter in the name of the spell counts against you.

            

Fortunately, Werdna won't be handling most of the combats himself. Every level has a pentagram that serves several purposes. First, it's the only way to level up--there's no experience and traditional leveling in this game. The moment I step into the pentagram in the first room, all of Werdna's statistics go up by 1, his hit points go up by 9, he rises to Level 1, and he gets 9 Level 1 mage spell slots.

               

The second thing the Pentagram does is to allow Werdna to summon groups of allies. The Level 1 pentagram lets me summon three groups from among the following: bubbly slimes, creeping coins, dinks, fuzzballs, Garian raiders, gas clouds, kobolds, Level 1 mages, Level 1 priests, orcs, skeletons, and zombies. Each set of allies has various strengths and weaknesses, and I start taking note of them right away. For my first group, I summon mages, priests, and Garian raiders.

          

I still want to know what "Garian" means.

     

Visiting the pentagram saves the game, but it also restocks all of the monsters on the level, so you want to do it sparingly. You can actually save anywhere (for the first time in Wizardry history), but with the same penalty. 

 

The first major challenge of this difficult game is finding the way out of the 2 x 2 room that you start in. There's a secret door, but you need to reveal secret doors with the Level 1 priest spell MILWA or you can't use them. Werdna doesn't have Level 1 priest spells to start, so the only way out is to summon Level 1 priests as one of your ally groups. However, summoned allies don't cast spells except in combat, so you then have to wander around until you find a combat and then hope one of the priests chooses to cast MILWA during the combat (you can't control what they cast).

    

Is this just really bad spelling?

   

My first combat is with a fighter named Blue Sonja. This is an obvious play on "Red Sonja," but it might not be Sir-Tech's play. Apparently, Sir-Tech asked players of the original Wizardry to send their character disks to the company so they could use the characters to stock the halls of Werdna; thus, many of the adventurers I will encounter actually defeated Werdna back on their home systems.

   

In combat, you thus only get to specify Werdna's actions. I just attack for this combat--one enemy isn't enough to worry me. Sure enough, my summoned allies make short work of him and one of the clerics does cast MILWA. 

At the end of the combat, I have a chance to loot Blue Sonja's corpse, but here's another way that the game sticks it to you. Werdna is a mage and thus bound by a mage's equipment restrictions. He can't swing a sword or wear armor, so almost all the equipment you find during the game is wasted. Enemies do occasionally have items a mage can use, including potions.

     

This is just one big middle finger to a mage.

       

The rest of Level 10 isn't that hard to navigate. The level is organized as a series of concentric boxes, each with one or two secret doors that take me to the next ring. Stepping through three of these doors gives me a warning followed by a combat with a "guardian" apparently tasked with keeping Werdna in the dungeon.

      

A warning before meeting a guardian.

       

The harder combats are when we encounter an entire party of enemies, as I do in the third room. This is the time for mass damage spells, and all I have is KATINO ("Sleep"), which hardly ever works.

     

Between fixed and random combats, I encounter enemies every five or six steps--sometimes individual, sometimes entire parties. Names go by: Growler, a good fighter; Brightblade, a good samurai; Borehimhere, a neutral fighter; Alannon, a good bishop; Ironbar, a good fighter; Capsin, a good bishop; Darkforce, an evil bishop; Pig-I-Iggy, a good priest. It annoys me a bit that I don't get experience from any of these many battles.

     

Taking on a party of do-gooders.

      

I have to return frequently to the summoning pentagram. Slowly, I learn the monsters' strengths and weaknesses. Creeping coins seem like a good choice. They have a breath attack that reliably damages enemies for at least one point, and they can summon more of themselves. Gas clouds cast some useful mage spells, as do (of course) mages. Dinks and fuzzballs are useless. Orcs, kobolds, and skeletons seem roughly interchangeable, but zombies seem better than all of them, as they have a paralysis attack.

 

Unfortunately, the game has something worse than regular enemies. The ghost of Lord Trebor wanders the levels looking for Werdna. You get several warning messages before it happens, but if he gets into your space, you die instantly. There's no defense; the only way to avoid it is to keep moving. Even worse, Trebor advances in real time, not in turns based on your own movement. Trebor doesn't manage to get me on this level--it's too open--but I'm sure he'll be a problem later on. 

      

My name is spelt with stars between the letters, not ellipses!

        

I finally break through the fourth door and into the corridor that rings the entire level. "I am the guardian of the pyramid of entrapment," the final guardian intones, so I guess from the shape of this level, we're supposed to get the idea of a pyramid slowly tapering off towards the top. The guardian is the toughest of the lot, and he finishes off my priests with a MOLITO (mass damage) spell, but we still manage to kill him. He drops a black candle and a jeweled amulet, the latter of which casts DUMAPIC when I use it. This tells me that I've mapped the entire level upside down. Fortunately, it's not a complicated level to redraw.

      

Knowing your precise position is vital in this game.

     

One step beyond the guardian is the ladder to Level 9, but the corridor continues all the way around the pyramid. I figure I have to explore it. Fortunately, I don't encounter any enemies all the way to the end and back. At the end, I find a "Bloodstone." I vaguely remember finding stones in this game and having to protect them from thieves.

    

I return and head up the stairs to Level 9. "The Catacombs--where the dead live again!" a message announces at the beginning.

       

That's the opposite of what "catacombs" are supposed to be.

      

Since the level has just spawned, I don't see any harm in taking a save. The corridor I'm in is a long north-south hallway with two-square rooms branching off of both sides every 10 feet. It's not until the seventh room on the left that I find the summoning pentagram; fortunately, I only fight one combat along the way.

       

Monsters available on Level 9.

     

The pentagram offers an entirely new selection of monsters; I decide to try witches, poltergeists, and Level 3 priests. Werdna is promoted to Level 2. His hit points go up to 20, his attributes to 10, and he gets 9 second-level mage spell slots. I used about 3,500 of my million moves on the first level, which I suppose isn't so bad. 

    

The character as I begin Level 9.

       

This is a slow-going game, which means it's going to be a slow-going series of entries. I probably won't try to cover more than a single level per session. As you comment, please remember that I want to play this one completely blind. Err on the side of using ROT-13 for spoilers and try not to say anything at all about levels I haven't already explored.

    

Time so far: 3 hours