Star Trail: Anvil Chorus

 

I  guess we're not worthy.

       

After the last entry, commenters alerted me that I was, in fact, in the right Pit and that in order to progress, I had to speak to Inradon Xermosch at the Temple of Ingerimm about DWARVEN PIT three times. He goes on a bit about how the Pit is a site holy to Ingra—who I guess is different from Ingerimm—and that the temple holds the key to keep the residents from temptation, as if any dwarf from the community attempted to loot "Ingra's legendary hoards of gold," he would be "swallowed whole by the mountain." On the third click, he gives us the key.

    

There were some opinions that the game manual alerts you to the need to ask the same person the same subject multiple times. This is what the manual says: "Often, you may progress through several rounds of conversation before the two of you reach mutual accord." This is not quite the same thing as "click the same topic multiple times." What makes it particularly egregious is that NPCs have a way of killing conversation before you've clicked through each topic once, let alone multiple times. If you know you only get five clicks before you're booted out of conversation, are you going to waste two of them on the same topic?

      

This seemed paradoxically too hard and too easy.

       

Incidentally, I didn't even have this meager advice from the manual because the GOG version of the manual jumps from Page 22 to 33. I don't know why I didn't just go right to the Museum of Computer Adventure Gaming History in the first place

   

In any event, instead of continuing to Lowangen, I reload, get the key, and re-enter what every bit of dialogue calls the Dwarven Pit but the game calls the Finsterkopp Pit. (It would be nice if everything didn't have multiple names.) The game notes that the key gets stuck in the lock, so the door locks behind us. If we want to get out, we'll have to find another key.

    

The opening room has a skeleton against the far wall, a door to the west, and a corridor to the east. The skeleton has a leather bag with a bit of script and an empty bottle. We take both. Lilii  Borea, with her skill in "Read/Write" and languages, interprets the script, which offers a poem about Ingerimm, dwarven god of smiths. 

     

I assume it was better in German.

       

I try the door, but no amount of bashing or casting the FORAMEN spell will let us through. I can't use the third option, "pick lock," as I have not found any lockpicks. Were their lockpicks for sale in one of the towns, and I just overlooked them?

      

This would be so much easier if you guys didn't keep losing your cool.

       

The corridor leads to a room with a mural of Ingerimm in one alcove and a brazier in another. The game lets us move the brazier out of place for no reason. Toliman is burned searching through the coals and finding an "asthenil ring." The burn drops his dexterity to 1 for a few hours, which may have something to do with my subsequent trouble picking door locks, even after I found some picks.

    

The dwarven god of the forge looks a lot like Kurt Russell.

      

And that's all I can figure out to do. There are no other passages. I find no secret doors. The door in the entry room remains stubbornly locked. Xamidimura breaks a toe trying to kick it down. I'm just about to reload from outside the dungeon when FORAMEN suddenly works, and I have a new area to explore.

   

Almost immediately, I run into another locked door that's as stubborn as the one I just left. I ignore it and move further into the corridors, remembering only now to put Gnomon, with his superior "Perception" and "Danger Sense," in the lead. We turn a corner and come to another door, which fortunately opens in response to force. In this room, we find in a corner a mattock, three torches, a tinderbox, and—hallelujah—some lockpicks. We also step on a couple of traps—so much for Gnomon's "Danger Sense"—but fortunately they don't do any damage. There are also a couple of braziers, which I leave alone for now.

   

Yet another door takes a few tries, and a few injuries, to open, and then we immediately hit another one, then a third, which I can't open after multiple tries. For @*#!'s sake, does this game have to have so many locked doors? Maybe we could have, I don't know, a battle or two?

     

I hear you.

      

In another direction, a stairway goes upwards, and the corridor ends in a shaft with iron rungs on the sides. We can climb up or down. I go up first, and we find the top of the shaft blocked with a stone slab, but examining the slab reveals a secret compartment with a healing potion and a double-bearded key. The experience covers us in soot and reduces everyone's charisma by 2 points. This still has not recovered as of the end of this session.

     

Climbing down the shaft deposits us on a different level of the dungeon, which I decide to explore even though I haven't finished the one above. Continuing to follow the right wall, we encounter:

   

• Two more locked doors that respond to forcing them open.

• A hole in the bottom of a wall. We scare some rats away with a torch and scoop some coins and gems out of the hole.

     

Next stop: the Bocca della Verità.

       

• A door that opens to lockpicks. There are two chests behind it. Between them, they have two Girdles of Might, 3 boots, 3 shields, 3 iron shields, a throwing axe, a hatchet, and a skull girdle. The Girdles of Might are particularly powerful, raising strength by 5 points. The skull girdle reduces necrophobia by 4 points. This treasure does not feel "earned."

     

The girdle snaps into place.

      

• In a chest in a hallway, we find cart grease and a crank. Inventory space is starting to become a problem.

• A stairway brings us back to the previous level. You'd think that strength of 18 would be enough to break down doors, but a few of them still give us trouble.

• More braziers in the hallways just injure us when we try to move them and dirty us when we search them. 

• Two more chests behind a locked door. Together they have two more Girdles of Might, a wolf knife, a quarterstaff, two oils, a lantern, a strong healing potion, an Elixir of Strength, an Elixir of Dexterity, 2 Hylailian Fires (I guess you can throw this like a ranged weapon?), a recipe for Vomicum (I don't quite know what it is, but yuck), a recipe for Hylailian Fire, and a document. I don't know whether the elixirs are temporary or permanent. I have no room for most of this stuff, so I have to do some shuffling. Again, some of these items do not feel earned.

       

Sighing and swearing should not be the reaction when an RPG player discovers a chest.

       

• The document has a bunch of words missing vowels. I think it says: "The orc scum is now besieging Lowangen but they have overlooked an exit. Find it and you'll be able to leave the besieged town of war without harm." I don't imagine that this can refer to current events.

      

Let me know if you come up with anything different.

       

• The next room—you have to be @#*#$* kidding—has two more chests: An alchemy set, a crystal ball, a robe, an obsidian dagger, something called "kukris mengbilar," 2 bronze flasks, fire powder, and a document. The second chest has a trap that causes Toliman to lose his lock picks and 4 dexterity points for a few hours. My inventory problem is critical now. I end up tossing a lot of stuff that I could sell for good money.

• The document in that last pair of chests takes me a few minutes. The message is backwards, with breaks in the wrong places: "ONE PIT OF MANY LAYERS DEPTH: THERE LIES THE HATRED OF ORCS AGAINST [garbled; I think it's supposed to be MANKIND] IN WAIT. ANY WHO WANT TO ESCAPE THIS PIT, WILL HAVE TO CONTROL THEMSELVES AND THEIR BODIES WELL. EACH UNNECESSARY SOUND CAN TURN ALL THE GUARDS AGAINST YOU AT ONCE AND SEAL YOUR FATE. BUT WITH TRUE CARE AND STEALTH A SUCCESS WILL BE EASILY ACCOMPLISHED."

           

This took a while because I thought the first word was SHIELD anagrammed and figured the rest of the words were also anagrams.

        

The last room on Level 1 that I finally force open is a large chamber. Each corner has a brazier. There's an altar on the north wall and two nooks in the south wall, one with a relief of Ingerimm's face and one with an anvil. We light the torches around the relief, which causes some rumbling from a level beneath us.

        

Notice, Toliman, that you hold the iron with the tongs and hammer with, well, a hammer.

       

We find nothing to do at the anvil or with any of the braziers. At the altar, Toliman is granted a vision in which he is serving as an apprentice to Ingerimm at a forge. The rest of the party, seeing Toliman in a trance, has options to address him, touch him, take some coins, or tithe some coins. I try addressing him first, which breaks the trance. (I save and reload to try the other options. Touching him also breaks the trance. Taking gold from the altar causes a rumbling below; tithing causes Toliman's vision to repeat.) I wonder how Gnomon feels about an elf getting a vision of Ingerimm.

   

We head back to the second level, which I end up exploring twice. The cause of the reload is a riddle. In a large room with a slab in the middle of the floor, we go to open a chest. A little gnome (not a D&D gnome, but a classic fairy-tale gnome) interrupts us, chides us for stealing other people's property, and demands a gift. (We have an option to attack him, but we decline) I give him a ration package. He introduces himself as Mumpitz of Zappendust-Zwackenpurtz, "Mumpsy" for short. He waves a key in front of  us and gives us this riddle: "They bear palms for their attire, and yet they wear no clothes. You can ride on their backs, yet nobody does."

     

I should have just attacked him.

      

The solution has five letters, but I can't make anything out of it. After two wrong guesses, he tells us the answer is MOOSE, puts us to sleep, and we wake up in a hallway without the key. How does MOOSE make any sense as a response to that riddle? "Bear palms"?! Is the idea supposed to be that antlers somehow represent palms? Whether you're talking about the tree or the part of the hand, they don't. So I didn't feel bad reloading and doing it again.

   

More encounters on this level: 

     

• Gnomon finds several disused pairs of compartments in the wall for bolts.

• We enter a room where the wall closes behind us. A crank we found earlier fits in a hole in the wall and opens the way out. The game is perhaps a bit too detailed in its description of how the entire crank assembly works.

     

This is one of three screens describing the mechanism. If Dungeon Master did this, the game would take 600 hours.

       

• A chest with 10 ration packages, 10 water skins, 10 sets of cutlery, 10 sets of tableware, and a drinking horn. I drink from my existing water skins and drop them, then take the rations, drinking horn, and enough water skins to make up what I dropped. Notable about this game: You can take items out of chests but not put them in. Items dropped are lost forever. Both things are true of most games of the era, but a spate of titles like Ultima Underworld, Ambermoon, and Betrayal at Krondor have gotten me used to the opposite.

     

Who would possibly have room for all of this?

     

• A door we can't open despite multiple attempts at everything. It just leads into a one-square room. Probably another chest in there.

• There's a pressure plate and a wall switch in the same corridor, but they don't have any effect on anything that I can see. 

• We pull a chain on a wall in a room and are dropped into a tiny room with a bunch of dwarf skeletons to fight. It's a tough battle because it's impossible to maneuver. I have trouble even clicking on the enemies. We're successful, but all we get from the battle is a bunch of hatchets that we can't carry.

        

You really get to know your enemy in such cramped quarters.

       

• We're left very bruised and bloodied, so I decide to spend a couple dozen hours resting. We're attacked by spiders while resting, and we hear the sound of blows on an anvil somewhere below us.

       

"That's just the hammerer, men. Hammers every Friday and Sunday night exactly at 12:00. Nobody's ever seen him."

      

• This time, we answer the riddle correctly and get the key. The gnome still puts us to sleep. We awaken in different parts of the dungeon and have to spend some time re-uniting the party. 

   

With nothing else to do on Level 2, we take the stairs down to Level 3. Here, the regular wall textures are supplemented with some mining cart tracks on the floors. Encounters:

   

• A rusted mining cart. We have the option to use the cart grease (found earlier) on the wheels. This gets it moving, and Xamidimura has the option to hop in for a ride. She does and swoops down the track, ignoring several opportunities to bail out, until the cart crashes into a wall and sends Xamidimura tumbling, taking significant damage. I have no idea what this accomplished.

     

Whether I jump off or it throws me off, it amounts to the same thing.

      

• Toliman up and decides on his own, with no input from me, to go jumping down an ore chute leading to another room. He lands in a pile of ore. He has the option to take a piece but cannot bear the weight. Luckily, the other room is not too far away, and we're able to reunite without much trouble.

      

Idiot elf.

      

• We encounter a pit. We have the option to jump across, and after selecting someone, we have the option to secure that person with a rope. Gnomon makes it, ties the rope to the other side, and everyone crosses hand-over-hand. A nearby lever closes the pit entirely.

• A chest offers 10 pitons, a rope ladder, a grappling hook, and a rope. Since we already have all those things, we leave them alone. 

• We find an altar with runes that indicate it is dedicated to Tordol, who "founded the pit," plus "the victims of some kind of mining disaster."

       

You could not pay me to work underground for any amount of money.

        

• A room full of graves, each with war axes on top of them. We leave them alone.

• Another room with two chests. They contain: coins, a kukris dagger, a whetstone, two knives, a dagger, a heavy dagger, and a sickle. We manage to make room for the coins and kukris dagger. 

• At an anvil, Toliman grabs a pair of tongs and starts hammering away with them (?), apparently having a flashback to his vision. Gnomon grabs the tongs from him and tosses them.

       

You didn't really learn much about smithing from that vision, did you?

     

• In a corner, we find some utensils and a large ball and chain. I figure the ball and chain must either be a quest item or a practical joke. I hope it's the latter, as I have nowhere near enough capacity for it.

• We run into a corner that still smells like a latrine "even though this place must be out of use for decades by now." That reminds me of an account I read of excavations of an ancient community in Israel (I wish I could remember where) in which archaeologists reported that the earth under the privy still had its characteristic odor despite the facility having been abandoned for thousands of years.

      

I don't particularly like reading about latrines, but I appreciate the realism.

       

• We spend a bunch of time clearing debris in a corridor, only to have it end in a dead-end.

• We find a single skeleton in a nook. It animates and attacks us. After an easy victory, we find a scrap of vellum with some words. The fragmented text talks of a coin of stone, Ingerimm's forge, some kind of portal, and a companion named Madevik who was buried in a rockslide.

      

Doesn't look so lively here.

     

In another area that requires a lot of digging, we find some red jewelry, a copper key, and an asthenil dagger. It takes so long to dig through this area that we run out of water. I head back to the previous level and grab those extra few water skins. On the plus side, Gnomon gains some experience from these excavations and levels up. 

           

Too many "yeses" ended up starving us.

     

I like all the miscellaneous encounters, I guess. I'd like them more if there had been a couple proper shops in the town and I could have cleared some inventory space first. I'm surprised at the lack of combats. I can't remember back to Blade of Destiny well enough to say if combat rarity was a feature of that game, but I don't remember commenting on it if it was.. 

 

Miscellaneous notes:

       

• What is the purpose of the two creatures in the upper-right and lower-left corners of the interface? In Might and Magic, they signal secret doors and traps. Here, I've never seen them move. Are they activated by spells? 

• I'm not sure how the game decides which character performs certain actions. Sometimes, it's the leader, which I understand. But why did it decide that Xamidimura would ride the mining cart, or that Toliman would get the vision of Ingerimm? 

    

Next time, we'll see if we can finish this dungeon. 

    

Time so far: 19 hours