Loremaster: Death is Cheap

A typical day with Loremaster.

     

I bumbled around a bit more with my fighter character and got nowhere except to lose a bunch of levels from dying in combat. I fiddled around with Myth (the default character) for a while, trying some things that I'll talk about a bit later. 

    

I created a new mage character called Chester, who starts at Level 20 (compared to the default character, Myth, at Level 57). I began by going to Butterman, the general store owner, and buying some leather armor. Mages cannot cast spells with anything in their hands, so there's no point arming one with a weapon. I exhausted Butterman's dialogue options like last time.

       

A new character begins.

      

I then returned to the castle and exhausted dialogue options with King Yelraf (or Emperor Yelraf; the game is inconsistent) and Queen Tei. I discovered that there's more to the castle than the entrance where Yelraf and Tei stand. But "more" doesn't mean "worthwhile": one door takes you to a Daliesque nightmare that includes piles of food you can't pick up for some reason; the other takes you to a garden that has at least three "Sleep" traps, which put you to sleep for literal minutes real-time. There are traps all over this game. As far as I can tell, they're undetectable and unavoidable, and they make little sense. Who puts a fire trap in the middle of a field?

     

The game let me wake up after about four minutes.

      

I headed for Francis and Gerald, passing by a number of monsters on the way. Almost every screen in this game that doesn't have an NPC has a monster--beasties, basilisks, slimes, spiders, wraiths, manticores, dragons. They seem to be curiously non-hostile at the beginning of the game, or at least around the castle area.  

   

I also found a screen with a bunch of chests. An illusory wall let me in. I tried OPEN CHEST a number of times, but the game just kept saying, "You are talking to yourself!" I assumed it thought I was using CHEST as an abbreviation for "Chester," so I switched to Myth to get him to open the chest and just drop the items on the ground. But the game said the same thing when he tried to open the chest. 

   

I tried a few other options, but nothing worked. I figured I could at least take the item on the ground that the game identified as a GOLDRING. (I've learned through practice that the game doesn't recognize spaces in item names or other keywords.) But even when I was standing right on top of it, the game insisted that it "could not be taken!" 

      

What. The. Hell.

      

Moving on, I re-converse with Francis. To recap, his major pieces of intelligence are that to defeat Gaiasbane, I'll need a special weapon from the caverns below, guarded by a banshee called Banesthrall. Francis has also recently lost his Grail; he suspects it was stolen by a fire elemental who also lives in the caverns. He thinks that the Loremaster will have to go through three trials, one of which will earn him a holy book (HOLYBOOK). Francis trains me 4 points in cleric abilities. 

          

NPCs keep giving me these number sequence puzzles.

      

I then visit Gerald, the king's guardsman again, and had him train me 1 point in fighting ability, then exhausted my combat options with him.

   

At this point, I was caught up on everything that I'd done already. It was time to do something new. I pointed myself west, looking for the Oracle, Iseult. On the way, I talk to the dragon I spoke to before, and I realized that not only are all the monsters near the castle non-hostile; they'll all talk to the character (although many have nothing useful to say).

     

At least he's not attacking me.

       

I find the first hostile creature--a spider--a few screens west of the castle, in the middle of what looks like an impenetrable ring of stone walls. He shows me he's hostile by hitting me, which completely destroys the leather armor that I put myself in debt to buy. I save (which requires backing up all the game files, since it saves automatically) and reload a few times so I can get some experience with combat. To cast spells you have to first INCANT them. So casting a "Fire" spell at a spider means typing INCANT FIRE and then CAST SPIDER. You have to be relatively close when you cast. Fortunately, once the spell is incanted, you can use the mouse to cast it, so you don't fumble the spelling while in the middle of combat.

   

I blast the spider, kill it, and go up to Level 31. I cross the walled area, setting off a trap on the way, and before I make it to the other side, a bolt of lightning comes down and resurrects the spider. I later determine that this happens a lot. When it doesn't happen, the enemy is immediately replaced by another enemy. The game will not let you "clear" a screen. 

       

This world's god has an exasperating sense of humor.

      

While trying to find the oracle, I fall down into a cave. A spider immediately kills me. Most enemies kill me in just one hit. I reload and flee from the spider, finding Banesthrall in the cavern to the west. I already know I can't defeat him (more below), so I just quit and reload.

        

I feel like I'm here prematurely.

       

Moving around in this game is a nightmare. You get hung up on everything. Screens that look like they have open exits in some direction turn out to have none because there's no path free of boulders, tree roots, and so forth. Other screens that have hard stone walls at the edges turn out to have illusory doors. There are a lot of holes to the underworld hidden behind walls or stones, so you're constantly falling down there and having to find a way out.

        

I don't believe I can cross this screen to engage this oddly-articulate slime.

      

Further attempts to get to the Oracle keep resulting in my deaths at the fangs of spiders or the spells of wraiths. Finally, in frustration, I just INCANT TELEPORT and CAST ISEULT to go directly to her. I expect it to reduce my levels to almost 0, because it always reduced Myth's level when I cast it, but instead it rockets me to Level 57. This game makes no sense.

   

Iseult is spectacularly unhelpful. Despite other NPCs telling otherwise, she has nothing to say about my parents or their kingdom ("Speak to the emperor if your interest lies in political matters"). When I ask her about MAGIC, she gives me the old sphinx riddle. I answer MAN, and she increases my magic ability by 2. She otherwise just repeats stuff that I already know about needing to get a weapon from the caverns below. Then she turns inexplicably hostile in the middle of our conversation and kills me, forcing me to reload. 

    

Iseult gives me the world's oldest riddle.

      

At this point, I'll break from Chester's adventure to relate a little screwing around that I did with Myth before restoring the game from a backup. Knowing that I can TELEPORT to any NPC whose name I know, I tried teleporting first to Samwise the farmer. I otherwise have no idea how to reach his farm. He attributes his ability to keep his farm going despite the acid rain to his luck and the patronage of the Green Lady. 

       

Well, I wouldn't know, Sam.

      

I then warped myself to Tristan, Iseult's lost lover. It turns out he's trapped in a cave, turned into a statue by an earth elemental (EARTHELEMENT) who thinks Tristan stole his jeweled stalagmite. Tristan protests that he didn't steal it, but the earth elemental trusts the "great, good, and wise" sage who told him of the theft: Gaiasbane. I otherwise can't do anything to free Tristan, but between the elemental and the other NPCs, that's three sub-quests I need to solve: find Tei's missing cloak, find Francis's grail, and find the earth elemental's jeweled stalagmite.

        

The earth elemental refuses to release Tristan.

      

I already know where Banesthrall is, so there's no point teleporting to him, but I do try (with SUMMON) teleporting him to the castle with Yelraf and Tei. I know that the king and queen can kill almost anything. Unfortunately, they can't even hit Banesthrall, who exists in some kind of ethereal form. There must be some spell or weapon specific to him.

        

I guess we're at a standstill.

     

Teleporting myself to Gaiasbane shows that he exists in a ring of stone somewhere. He kills me immediately and re-kills me every time I'm resurrected, before I can take any action at all. Teleporting him to Yelraf and Tei is no more successful than teleporting Banesthrall to them, as Gaiasbane only dies to that special weapon.

   

For the second game in a row, I'm able to reach the endgame boss but not defeat him.

     

Now, there is a way to cheese the SUMMON spell to kill Gaiasbane and end the game prematurely. I've done it, which means I've technically won. But I've only done it because I watched a YouTube video in which someone did it as part of a speedrun. It's a bit annoying that the only video that exists for this game is a speedrun. The author clearly must have known the game well to hit upon this particular solution, which means he probably has the manual, but he has not responded to a message I left. However, with only a little bit more intelligence from an NPC, it's plausible that I could have figured out this solution on my own. More on that for the final entry. I wanted a "win" in my pocket, even a cheating one, in case Morpheus Kitami and I jointly decide that the game simply isn't playable. Make sure you check out his coverage at The Adventurers' Guild, by the way. 

     

In case I can't win some other way.

    

Let's talk a little about what we've discovered about the game's origins. I had done some sleuthing and found another company using the same P.O. box in San Francisco that Creative Software was using at the same time. I assumed the owner of that company must be the author. But after my first entry, P-Tux7 pointed out that the author was probably named "Farley," and pdw confirmed that it was Glenn Farley based on information in a Computer Game Review and CD-ROM Entertainment issue from December 1992.

   

Busca got some more information about Glenn Farley, showing he was born in 1953, making him 39 at the time of the game's release, which I am persuaded was in 1992, not 1991 as originally reported. The same source shows him as president of Creative Software, but later there's a record of a lawsuit between him and Creative Software, so either he wasn't the owner (the owner may be the person I originally identified) or some other weird legal thing was happening there. Either way, emails to potential candidates have not been returned.

    

It's premature to look at reviews, but let's do so anyway. The aforementioned Computer Game Review gave it 56 percent--the average of scores ranging from 45 to 65. I'm glad to see that one of the reviewer's experience mirrors mine: "Combat is virtually unplayable, since any monster that attacks you kills you instantly." They had other comments about the poor interface and graphics and gave their highest scores to the manual, of all things. Boy, it would sure be nice to have it.

       

Busca also turned up a 53% review from the July 1993 Videogame & Computer World, an Italian magazine. I didn't translate the entire thing, but the opening paragraph calls it an "impeccable atrocity" and the concluding line is: "If you love RPGs, don't be enchanted by the title and avoid the purchase!"

       

I believe this is a complete map of the surface world. Click to enlarge.

          

Back to the game. Unsatisfied with my progress this session, I returned to the map and managed to map the entirety of the topworld (I think). It's an odd 21 x 5. The right half is mostly the town, although I did find Samwise's farm outside the north walls of the town. I was also able to find the Oracle's place and even the tower in which Gaiasbane is waiting (it only looks like a stone circle on the inside).

       

Gaiasbane's tower.

      

A few notes:

   

• There are some places in the corners where you can leave the map onto an endless sea of blank screens in which you can only move east-west. Inevitably, you get blocked by an enemy and have to turn back.

     

This beastie stops me from exploring endlessly eastward. Even if I kill him, his bones will stop me.

      

• There are so many holes going to the underworld that I stopped trying to annotate them.

• I started naming the screens after the monsters I found there, but it turns out that they're not fixed.

• Although a lot of the screens have interesting patterns of walls, boulders, trees, or flowers, I couldn't find anything to do on most of them. There's one odd screen in the southwest in which you get chastised for walking over flowers, as if someone's speaking to you, but I couldn't find anything out.

      

Who is talking here?

    

I'll keep going and explore the underworld, hoping to make the connection necessary to win legitimately. All I need is for someone to tell which NPC carries the weapon that will kill Gaiasbane. I suspect I'll win this purely as an adventure game, though, meaning that I won't really be trying to build my character, find money, and buy more stuff (not that there's anything else for a wizard to buy). The RPG parts of the game are just too weird: you start at a high level, you gain and lose levels unpredictably, and enemies just kill you in one hit no matter how powerful you are. What a weird game.

   

Time so far: 8 hours

Playing out of: Bemusement.