Serpent Isle: Dying in My Sleep

 

A frequent scene this outing.

       

When we last closed, I was in the fortress of Serpent's Fang, trying to find four magic orbs, which will somehow help me find the Silver Seed, which will somehow restore Balance to the world. I found one orb last session, and as this one starts, I head out to find more. Of the three locations that Surok told me about--Aram Dol's Lair, the Maze, and the Abandoned Outpost--I still have the latter two to do. I head west and open the door there, go down a short hallway, and take some stairs down.

     

The Abandoned Outpost

    

Any dungeon could theoretically be called a "maze," but after a few minutes in this one, I doubt that it's the Maze. It doesn't seem very mazelike. That leaves the Abandoned Outpost. Surok told me that nine months ago, Commander Ardiniss took a company of soldiers to the outpost to clear it of Chaos agents and set up traps and puzzles. He never returned.

   

There are traps and puzzles, all right. I "solve" a couple by sheer luck and don't solve a couple at all. In the order that I encounter them:

   

• I find a secret door by pressing against the wall as I walk. At the end of the hallway is a room with a dead body and a lever. A scroll on the body talks about a well being dry and being able to climb down it.

• I find the well. When I click on it, the Avatar just says, "Maybe I can climb down?" I never find anything to help me do that.

      

What are you waiting for, then?

    

• The lever in the aforementioned room opens a door to another secret passage. It ends in a large room. When I enter, magic barriers seal the doorways and poison traps erupt in the middle. There are three buttons on the surrounding walls. I press them in a random order and the barriers and traps disappear.

• I come to a roomful of corpses. They have a few treasures, a key, and a map of the dungeon. The key opens the first of three barred doors. I can't figure out anything to open the next one. No key works; picks don't work. As I turn to leave, I accidentally walk the wrong way and walk through the door. The next two doors are illusory, it turns out.

        

If I hadn't stumbled, you'd be getting a ranting entry and a request for help right now.

        

• The rooms beyond the doors have a lot of chests, including some with "Unlock Magic" and "Translation" scrolls in case the player hasn't picked those up by now. There's a chest full of gold nuggets, which I don't even bother with at this point. Those troll-looking dudes--wildmen, I think--appear in some of the rooms. Others have automatons, giant spiders, and giant scorpions.

• I come to a torture room. There are a couple bodies behind locked doors that open to picks. One of them has a scroll that says he blocked the passage beneath the outpost with doors that won't open "ere this key is used," but he doesn't have a key.

     

I apparently thought I needed "Protection" for this room.

    

• The torture room has a couple of iron maidens in it. I remember that funny things happened when you clicked on iron maidens in one of the previous Ultimas. I try it here, and it turns out it conceals a secret staircase downward. Dumb luck. The room at the bottom of the stairs has tables full of powder kegs. I have no room for these, so I leave them alone.

• A door opens to "Unlock Magic." The room beyond has four "pulsating objects." I can't figure out anything to do with them.

     

Elaborate a bit, maybe?

      

• There's another goddamned key hidden under a rock. Fortunately for me, the game has trained me by now to move everything around.

• A corridor blocked by rubble has a stairway beyond. I'm 100% sure--I would have bet $10,000 on it--that what the game wants me to do is haul up the powder kegs and use them to clear the rubble. This takes me longer than it should because I first drop my weapons and backpack to clear some room and then discover that you can't just carry powder kegs in your hands; you have to put them in a backpack. So I have to spend a bunch of time manually dragging items out of my backpack until I have the space and weight. After all that, exploding the powder kegs on the rubble does precisely nothing. I try "Explosion" and still do nothing. I never solve this one, if indeed there's anything to solve. Maybe the stairway is just cosmetic.
  

    

This looks cool and accomplished nothing.

      

• The room next to the "pulsating objects" has a dais with a blue flame on it. Magic barriers pop up to block a staircase when I enter the room. A plaque on the wall says "SACRIFICE BY FULMINATION." I soon figure out that when you place an object on the dais, there's a little puff of smoke. I figure it wants me to sacrifice a certain thing. But I try a bunch of things and can't figure out what. Eventually, frustrated, I try just casting "Dispel Field" on the fields, and it works. 

     

This is probably cheating.

    

• Downstairs, there's a corridor with three alcoves, each of which has a pressure plate. The corridor leads to a room swarming with automatons. The only way out is through a short corridor with a "sleep" field. I assume there's a way to use the pressure plates (and nearby switch) to turn off the sleep field. I don't find it. I try it in every order and try weighing them down. Nothing. I eventually kill the automatons, put the emulator in "warp" mode, and make my way through the field slowly, gaining a couple of inches every time I wake up.

• On the other side is a room with the orb I came for.

• On the way back, the automatons have respawned. They kill me while I sleep. Fortunately, that just expedites my trip back to the fortress.

 

You may wonder why I didn't just wait for them to come to me. The Fiend has the answer later on.

       

• However, I head back to the outpost because Surok told me that it would be a cool thing if I brought back Ardiniss's body. I drag several bodies back to the healer, including the one I think is probably Ardiniss (the one with the map and key), but Surok never acknowledges that I've done what he asked.

     

Where do you want 'em?

    

So I know there's stuff in the Abandoned Outpost that I didn't find, but not everything in Aram-Dol's lair was necessary, so I hope those areas are similarly optional.

       

What do you call this door?

       

The Fiend's Lair

After satisfying myself that there's nothing new at Serpent's Fang, I head east from the stronghold, again through a security door. (I spend a few minutes on Google trying to find the right name for a door that has horizontal and vertical bars that you can see through, and the best I come up with is "security door," so I guess that's what it's going to be.) On the other side, in a dirt corridor, I find the bodies of some automatons. Their murderer appears to be a naga, who starts sniping at me with a bow and soon regrets it. Then one of her sisters manages to kill me when a sleep/poison trap pops out of nowhere and puts me in a slumber while she fills me full of holes. This is getting to be a pattern.

     

Little do I know that the nagas are respawning off-screen.

    

I return and eventually find a stairway down to the next level. Thus commences a maze of corridors and rooms occupying a couple of levels, with multiple stairways up and down. I assume it's The Maze at first, but I eventually learn that it's the Fiend's Lair. I explore by following the right wall--specifically, as this game has conditioned me, pressing against the right wall. That turns out to be a good practice because this dungeon has several secret doors. It takes quite a while but I think we can handle this quickly:

    

• Acid slugs.
• Mongbats.
• Giant Scorpions.
• Trolls.
• Four trapped golden chests with nothing in them.
• A corpse of a man named Selioshor. He has a diary on him that details the traps to come. This could be helpful, but I stumble into most of them anyway. It's the diary that tells me we're in the Fiend's Lair.

      

A diary provides hints about avoiding the traps.

    

• Wildmen.
• A large room in which red and blue flames erupt from the floor. A dead body in the corner holds the Golden Orb.

     

Done already!

      

• Gazers.
• Slimes.
• Trapped in a room by an energy field which I have to "Dispel." If you wonder how people escape if they don't have the spell, the answer is: they read the diary, which warns you about this room.

      

I read the diary and still got trapped.

    

• Automatons. The axe I picked up last time is awesome, by the way. Most things are dying in one hit, sometimes two.
• Barely-visible caltrops. The diary warned me about these, too, but you can't really go around them.
• Stone harpies that come to life. They cause my second death in the dungeon. And third. They kill me in two hits, no matter what I do for spells or strategies. I eventually just don't get near them, and they don't activate. I note I'm getting low on reagents--only about a dozen "Great Heal" spells left. 

    

See if you can spot the caltrops.

      

• Headless.
• Saw blades coming out of the ground.

    

I love that the first saw blade's victim is a headless, who shouldn't have been affected anyway.

      

• Gouts of fire coming out of the ground.
• More automatons and stone harpies.
• A little maze with stone walls and explosions.

     

"Maze" is probably the wrong term.

      

• A double door for which I don't have the key. I'm in the process of cursing out the game when I discover that the door can be picked.

    

Beyond the door is a large, messy room full of debris and corpses. A man is standing in the middle of it, talking to himself. I speak to him. "Do not expect to stay long," he says, "for I am getting rather hungry and it has been months since I have eaten the flesh of a human." He introduces himself as "Chaos Unrestrained," but acknowledges that those in the keep call him "The Fiend." In a long diatribe in which he calls me a "fool" innumerable times, he relates that he used to be a wizard named Shal. I'm not sure I fully understand this part, but I think what happened was that his powers were destined to drive him mad, but as part of the bargain, the serpent held the madness at bay for a year. During that year, Shal created a magic ring that takes the place of reagents, so that a spellcaster need not have any reagents to cast whatever spell he wants. Anticipating his madness, Shal then gave the ring to an automaton and told him to hide it. Now that he's insane, the Fiend is obsessed with reclaiming the ring.

     

Shal's last name is Roget.

       

He offers me my life if I'll return the ring to him. I say no, and a couple seconds later, I'm dead from his "Fireball" and "Sword Strike" spells. I reload, confidently equip Magebane, go through the whole thing again, and attack him. The problem is, I can't seem to hit him, and he kills me again. I reload and try again, this time casting "Conjure" (it gives me a wolf) and "Protection" first. Neither spell does anything at all. On a fourth reload, I manage to hit him with Magebane, which makes him lose his magic, which causes him to attack me with his sword and kill me in two hits. In short, the Fiend is far harder for me than Aram-Dol. 

      

That's right, you bastard.

      

On maybe the sixth reload, I manage to hit him again, and then just cast "Great Heal" after every one of his blows, and I finally manage to kill him. He has nothing interesting on his corpse, and there's nothing interesting in his room, so I'm not even sure that it was necessary to kill him.

   

Not long after this battle, I find myself back at the dungeon's entrance, having made the entire circuit without seeing this magic ring. However, I have a pretty good idea where it is. Earlier, I was silently complaining about an area that seemed like it should have had something in it--to get to it, I had to take a staircase and find a secret door. But behind the secret door was just a pile of rubble. I remember some automatons in the area, and I think maybe I just didn't search the body of one of them. It turns out I was right about the area, but wrong about the specific location. It's buried in a pile of rubble, and I have to move some of the stones first.

     

I wonder how many items I've missed by not moving rubble.

      

It does what the Fiend said it would do. When I wear it and open my spellbook, all spells show an "infinity" symbol. This seems incredibly overpowered, especially if a player does the expansion early in the game. (Although note that the caster is still limited by his available mana.) Does it have a limited number of castings? Or a chance that it will disappear after each casting? I guess we'll see. For now, I can save myself about 12 pounds by leaving my reagent bag behind.

      

And I can finally figure out what "Erstam's Surprise" is without wasting reagents.

       

The Maze

There are only three doors outside the stronghold, but I have another orb left to find. I start looking around again, and I soon realize there are two doors on the west side of the fortress, not just one. The second is next to a dead tree. As I approach, an ugly woman named Drusilla gates in and offers three hints: keep track of what rooms I've passed through because I'll have to visit them more than once; sometimes I'll have to turn around to find my way; and "once ye have found yer path, that section of the maze shall remain clear ta ye forever more." She also tells me I'll have to enter alone (no problem there) and hints that she follows someone called The Guide.

        

Yeah, you can stop with the flirting immediately, thanks.

       

In the first room, all my stuff--literally all of it--disappears. All right, I'll play along, but I'm not saving over my previous game.

    

The Maze turns out to be a series of square rooms arranged in grids of 6 x 6 on four levels. The goal on each level is to reach a teleporter in one of the 36 squares. Every time you cross through the doorway from one room to another, the entrances and exits are reconfigured. Usually, the door you entered closes behind you, but not always, and if you go back through it, it might give you new options in the previous room.

    

If you find the teleporter, all doors are opened on the level permanently.

Sometimes you end up in a room with no exits at all. Fortunately, there's a handy blue flame in the corner of each room that you can walk into to kill yourself and resurrect back at the keep. (This is particularly cruel given that most people who enter the Maze won't get handy resurrections back in the keep.)  That gets old fast, and I end up reloading from safe save points.

       

This guy preferred starvation to death by fire.

             

With no inventory to mark passages I've already tried, I manually map it. It's time-consuming but not hard. Most of the time, the door closes behind you on the way through, so going back isn't an option. Most of the time, there's only one way to go. When there's more than one way, including going back, I note the possibilities. When I hit a dead end, I reload and backtrack to the most recent possibility.

       

My completed maps of the first three levels, and the fourth in progress. Asterisks indicate multiple directions.

      

The first two levels have nothing interesting, and they go quickly. The third has a couple of corpses of guards, and I loot some equipment in case I'm going to face any combat.

    

This turned out to be a waste of time.

    

On the fourth level, I meet some kind of talking cat named Yurel. (I actually don't know that he's a cat; at first, I think he's a fox or rat. But I re-read a book in Serpent's Fang later, and it confirms that a "cat-man" stole the purple orb.) His story is a bit confusing, but it sounds like he was some kind of experiment by someone among the forces of Order, but somehow he found his way to the temple of Tolerance, where they took him in. When the forces of Order sacked his home, they dragged him to Serpent's Fang, from which Yurel escaped into the Maze. Hungry and scared, Yurel just wants to go home. He lets it slip that he has the fourth orb, which he'll trade for a hunk of cheese. I groan. I saw cheese on the bodies on the previous level, but I didn't take any. I reload, grab some cheese, redo the entire conversation, and get the orb. Honestly, the whole encounter is pretty weird. Unless Yurel shows up again and has some kind of point, why couldn't this just be a regular soldier?

     

The forces of chaos had a High Evolutionary.

          

I actually don't find my way out of the fourth level. It's far more complex than the previous levels, with paths doubling and tripling (maybe even quadrupling) back on themselves. I must have screwed something up because all the paths I map seem to lead to dead ends. On one path, I dead-end in a room with a corpse that has a Helm of Light, which seems to keep a "Light" spell going permanently. (I wonder how it compares to the Helm of Courage as armor.) By now, I figure that every dungeon has one orb and one relic, and I've found both, so I just let myself burn to death and show up at the keep again. From previous reloads, I know that my gear is stored in the hollow of the dead tree, so I go retrieve it. 

     

Even though it took over half of this session time, I rather liked the Maze. I don't know why, honestly. In real life, I enjoy puzzles that call knowledge and creativity into play--crosswords and Sporcle quizzes and GeoGuessr. You'd never catch me doing mazes in a book of mazes, not to mention word search puzzles or Sudoku. (If the distinction isn't clear, the latter two examples all have systematic solutions while the former examples don't.) But sometimes in a CRPG, I like a navigation puzzle that has a systematic solution. I recall the many hours I spent mapping the teleporter maze in Crusaders of the Dark Savant and somehow didn't think it was wasted. I do tend to get frustrated easily with such puzzles, though, and when it becomes clear I've made some kind of mistake (like I did here), I'm more likely to toss out the whole thing than to backtrack and try to find it.

      

I have all four orbs! Now what? No one has any new dialogue. I've searched the keep from top to bottom, and there's no obvious place to put the orbs. I re-read all the books in the library and can't find what I'm missing.

Hence, I'm asking for hints as to what to do next, what the artifact was that I missed in the Abandoned Outpost, and which of the puzzles there I need to solve to get it.

   

This was a pretty long session. I really hope the end is swift after I get back from the expansion.

    

Time so far: 83 hours

             

Comments on Level 2 Spells

 

Awaken. Useful in a couple of weird situations: first, if a party member collapses from low hit points, he might not automatically reawaken even when his health gets into positive numbers again. Second, you may want to wake up a sleeping NPC to talk to him. I can't remember if I've met any enemy capable of magically causing sleep, but if so, I've never used the spell in such a situation.

 

Destroy Trap. Theoretically useful, but you have to detect it first, which would mean casting "Detect Trap" on every chest, which is a waste of reagents, since traps often don't damage you at all. 

 

False Coin. You cast it on a coin, and it makes 5 coins. Cast it on a stack of 100, and it makes 500. Is there something I'm missing? Do they disappear after a while? Even if they do, I guess you could cast them right before you buy something. But that would seem to render the economy useless--not that it isn't anyway. I must be missing something.

 

Cold Blast. Blasts the enemy with cold--in the same amount of time in which you could have just hit him for the same amount of damage.

   

Great Light. Absolutely essential if you don't want to lug torches or some other light-casting device around. I wish it lasted longer.

 

Heal. A modest healing spell. Good until you get Level 5's Great Heal.

 

Mass Cure. Cures multiple people of poison at once. It was very useful after I'd walked through the Gorlab Swamp.

 

Protection. The manual says it helps in combat and makes you temporarily immune to the effects of traps. I wish I'd thought to try it when I had a roomful of chests to open. Its effectiveness in combat doesn't seem noticeable to me. My guess is it isn't worth the reagents.