Dungeon Master II: Outdoor Neophytes IV

 

Cletus has come a long way in a short time.

           

I had left my first entry just after discovering the shops outside the "Hall" of Champions. I figured out how they worked, but I didn't really sell or buy anything. I just noted their locations and what types of things they traded. In clockwise order, the armor shop was followed by a clothing store, a tavern, and a weapons shop.

  

A fountain outside yielded coins but didn't let me drink from it. I was annoyed, but then a couple steps away from that, in the tavern, was a wall fountain that offered free water. The tavern also had a little niche in which I found a key. This fit into an obelisk and opened a door to the east of the shops--the only way out of this area.

It was in the next area that things broke down a bit. I encountered more blobs, plus those giant worms that reliably produced meat in Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back. Around the same time, I remembered that in the Dungeon Master series, a full magic bar is simply wasted character development potential. Since I had enemies to practice on, and party members who needed healing, I decided to start experimenting with spells. I hadn't found any spell scrolls yet, but I knew that I could determine some combinations by just playing with the runes. Also, some of the potions I'd found gave clues as to the necessary runes.

         

Giant worms and their food form a never-ending cycle of character development and restoration.

       

Skullkeep's spell system (like its predecessors') works by stringing together up to four runes, one each from a set of six. The first set of runes represents the power of the spell, and I think that any of them can be used with any other valid combination. The second set represents the governing element--earth, water, wind, fire, dark, or light. The third set is the "form" of the spell, which is a little hard to interpret, and the fourth is the "alignment," here a mix of moral alignments and character classes (fighter, wizard, ninja, priest, good, evil).

   

The manual gives all the runes names (recall the FUL YA forge in Chaos Strikes Back, which meant "fire earth"), but you never see them in the game, only the spells' glyphs. Further, when you're casting a spell, a little icon appears above the spell's glyph to remind you of the rune's associated property. Because of this, I took notes based on what the pictures depicted rather than the runes' formal names.

       

The dimensions of spellcasting.

     

Since the first set of runes just controls the power of the spell, you don't really have to think about those. That leaves 6 + (6 x 6) + (6 x 6 x 6) = 258 potential combinations of the others. I don't know how many valid ones there are, but I verified that each of the runes in the "elemental" set by itself (i.e., with nothing else but a power rune) casts a valid spell except for ZO, the rune for darkness or negative material. The others are:

   

• Earth (YA): Makes a stamina potion.
• Water (VI): Makes a healing potion.
• Wind (OH): I don't know. It casts something, though.
• Fire (FUL):Casts a light spell.
• Light (DES): Shoots some kind of missile.

I'm frankly surprised the last two aren't reversed. You'd think light would cast light and anything invoking a missile would use fire. In any event, while I was experimenting, I remembered that in the previous Dungeon Master games, there was a fireball spell that I used a lot because it just required you to click the rune directly underneath FUL, which is IR and has something to do with flying. I tried it here and it worked fine. It feels like cheating a bit to use it already, but the manual does encourage experimentation, and I imagine I would have gotten here by logic. I don't know if all the spells in this game are exactly the same as in the first one; if so, that would give a player with a lot of Dungeon Master memory a significant early-game advantage. Since that one fireball spell was the only one I really remembered, I'm starting from scratch.

     

Preparing to cast a "Light" spell. It gets rainy and dark a lot in this game.

      

The one-rune spells gave me what I needed for now--light, healing, and most importantly, the ability to improve both priest and wizard levels. Anything that makes a potion requires an empty potion flask--I had to drink one of my existing healing potions--and helps to increase priest ability. All other spells increase wizard ability.

   

In my first entry, I had said that I had intended to make each character a specialist, but I remembered a couple of things after that. First, leveling not only improves your abilities in those classes, but it also improves your related attributes. Second, I really enjoy the process of identifying who has the lowest values in what classes and working to improve them. Thus, instead of keeping the characters as specialists, I swapped their positions and equipment liberally throughout this session to help them level up in their worst skills. 

        

Leveling progress so far.

          

After I'd practiced for a while on blobs and worms, I continued to follow the map in a clockwise direction. I found a ladder down, some dead bats (why?), and some mana flowers growing on bushes. There was an area full of monsters that looked like a combination of a triceratops and a bull, but they didn't seem interested in us. In fact, so far all of the monsters in the game have been curiously resistant to committing themselves in combat. The blobs and worms didn't so much attack us as take a swipe at us when they happened to wander into an adjacent square. The bullceratopses weren't hostile at all, so we left them alone. There was some evidence that an unfortunate hunter had been killed hunting them; his bow, arrows, and quiver were scattered across the area. I like it when items are found organically like this.

     

This looks like something you don't mess with lightly.

       

The next area was full of whirling tornadoes that occasionally tossed rocks at us, blasting us for significant damage. I'm not sure if these were in a previous Dungeon Master game or if I'm remembering the equally-annoying tornadoes from Might and Magic VI. I don't know whether the tornadoes here are enemies or natural phenomena. If they're enemies, they must require special weapons to defeat, as they didn't seem to respond to any of my attacks or my fireballs.

      

None of my swings would connect with this foe.

      

Dodging them, I mapped their small area. A group of megaliths framed an interior zone with some kind of stone altar or dais in the center. On it were another magic map--a different color, but it seems to do the same thing--a lightning key, a "clan key piece," and a bag with a FUL bomb in it. I grabbed the stuff and fled the area.

       

Or maybe a capped well?

     

Continuing to map, I found two more down ladders, the obelisk and nearby door that require the lightning key, and the entrance to what must be Skullkeep itself. The entry hall has evenly-spaced pillars and lit braziers. It ends at a locked door. A nearby note reads, "To open the castle door, you must get a key piece from each of the four clans of Skullkeep." I already had one, though I didn't exactly get it from a "clan."

    

The door to Skullkeep.

    

I backed out of Skullkeep. There's a door back in the blob/worm area with no button and no nearby obelisk with a keyhole. There is an obelisk nearby with a couple of symbols on it--a crescent moon and something I can't quite identify. I'm not sure what it's trying to tell me.

     

The symbol on the left looks like two tentacles coming up from a hemispherical stone with a picture of an eagle on it.

    

I went north and opened the lightning area. Some more giant worms appeared, and then this little guy that looks like a dwarf. Like all other creatures, he seemed to have no interest in attacking me unless I was literally standing in his way, but then I noticed my weapons were missing, and I realized he was stealing them from my hands.

       

Lesson learned: Don't try to confront thieves head-on.

      

You'd think that such a thief would at least have the decency to die easily, but no. He hit hard and took a lot of damage himself. It took me over half an hour of chasing him around, plus a couple of reloads, to finally kill him--good thing I'd been leveling those ninja skills--and when he died, he didn't even drop the stuff he had stolen. While I was picking up the couple of coins he had dropped, another one came along, and then a third when he died. I couldn't keep anything in my characters' hands. 

    

This being my fifth or sixth enemy, I guess it's safe to say that the AI I'm experiencing is the norm, not a fluke. By not having enemies pathologically attack the party, the developers made the old "combat waltz" impossible. When you step back and turn, the enemy might wander into the adjacent square, but he equally might move into the diagonal square, or walk away entirely. The only way to get enemies to stand still and fight is to chase them into corners, but that's a bad idea for other reasons, such as low health values for early-level party members. The result is that Skullkeep really puts the "action" in "action RPG." You're either dodging a (temporarily) aggressive enemy or chasing after a (temporarily) fleeing enemy, but you're never standing still.

       

Flowers and mushrooms grow throughout this area.

    

I wouldn't mind so much if I could get used to the interface. The game does a couple of things that are internally consistent but nonetheless keep tripping me up. First, the movement panel buttons are mapped to the 4, 5, 6 and 1, 2, 3 rows on the numberpad; the top row does nothing. Second, the game has the strafe buttons below the turn buttons. Both choices work against muscle memory developed from dozens of other RPGs. I also have trouble remembering that I want to click on the character's hand to attack, not right-click. 

I also have trouble using the mouse and keyboard effectively, as my right hand wants to control movement but can't if it needs to be free for the mouse.

   

I think all these things were probably true in Dungeon Master and Chaos Strikes Back, and I must have eventually gotten used to them, but at least for this session combats were slow-going and involved lots of bashing into bushes and trees (which causes damage), getting lost, and occasionally reloading. Eventually, I discovered that the thieves were taking my things to a particular square and recovered them from there, only to lose a couple of them again when another one of the little bastards spawned. There were even more of them running around the starting area when I returned there. I'll have to just dodge them, I guess.

      

The thief's stash.

     

My party members started to suffer from hunger and thirst, even with all the worm rounds we'd been ingesting, so I made my way back to the stores. I drank my fill at the tavern, bought some loaves of bread, and rested for a while. I was a little worried that I'd be spending all my extra money on food, but it turned out that the tavern keeper was willing to trade the mushrooms and blossoms we'd picked up for food, and I think I saw those respawn in at least one place.

     

The tavern keeper buys a wild-growing mushroom.

    

I also sold some excess daggers to the weapon shop and bought a sword. I kind of like the little animation where the shopkeeper spins the table to give you your item and your change, which you have to pick up, coin by coin. By the end of the game, I might be sick of it, but I think it gives some weight to the economy that doesn't exist in a lot of other games, where gold is an abstract thing, and buying and selling are instantaneous.

   

Back in the world, I still have a lot to explore. I've mapped three ladders down. There's an archway that goes to an area with some wolves, and a door with a moon symbol next to its keyhole. I need to finish mapping the area where I encountered the thieves. There's the door with no obvious means of opening it, and finally, there's Skullkeep itself, for which everything else seems to be a prologue.

Time so far: 5 hours