Warriors and Warlocks - Scenario: Castle Myrhavell: Summary and Rating

This game did not skimp on production values.

           

Warriors and Warlocks - Scenario: Castle Myrhavell

Canada

Warriors and Warlocks (developer); 408614 Ontario Ltd. (publisher)
Released 1983 for the TRS-80, possibly for Commodore 64 in 1984
Date Started: 29 July 2026

Date Ended: 15 August 2026

Total Hours: 23

Difficulty:  Hard (4.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)

     

Summary:

A Wizardry clone that adds a few elements but makes itself absurdly more difficult than even the original Wizardry. The game is really all about character development and tactical combat; the large dungeon levels lack any significant story or main quest.

   

***

   

After the ridiculously long and difficult first session, I reported that reaching Level 2 hadn't really made things much easier. That turned out to be not true. My characters reached Level 3 in less than half the time it took to reach Level 2. At that point, they were tough enough to survive a few encounters, and thus the proportion of expeditions that I needed to quit and reload went from 80% to about 15%. I eventually got my fighters and spellcasters to Level 5 and my bowmen to Level 6. Characters can supposedly age and die, but in my 23 hours with the game, none of them aged even one year. 

        

You may recall from my first entry that during character creation, you get no opportunity to re-roll and that if the statistics aren't high enough, the default choices are fighter and bowman. If you don't like the result, you have to go through the process of deleting the character from the disk and trying again. My opinion now is that as annoying as this process is, it's better to do it than to put your faith in your characters being able to qualify for different classes later. Because characters have a random chance of gaining or losing attributes every time they level up, there's no guarantee that your character will ever meet the minimum requirements for another class. My characters just seemed to get worse in all of the attributes that they needed to increase. Only two of them ever qualified for a better class, and one of them I didn't even want (fighter to cleric). I did manage to switch one of my mages to the wizard class, which allowed him to keep his mage spells even as he gained levels in his new profession.

    

A warrior requires 13 courage, 15 strength, 13 agility, and 13 dexterity. This guy has a long way to go.

        

Spellcasters continued to gain spell slots, although I never got higher than spell Level 2 for any of them. "Sparks" was my first mass-damage spell, available to both the mage and the wizard. I mostly used those, the cleric's "Refresh" (minor healing), the mage's "Magicspear," and various forms of "Locate."

       

My map of Level 1.

      

With my party stabilized, I focused mostly on mapping the first level, which has an enormous, open, cross-shaped space in the center and four quadrants of oddly-shaped rooms in the corners. There were several symmetrically-placed (but, maddeningly, not -sized) areas of dead space. (Secret doors are revealed with the "Glow" spell. I explored all sides for the filled-in squares on the map with that spell active.) In this entire area, there were only a handful of special encounters:

   

• Two fixed battles with three centaurs each. Once the centaurs were killed, those squares had messages about what the characters saw in the area.

• A copse of trees with a buried treasure (a large shield).

• Four locations, symmetrically arranged, in which we found dials that let us set them to -60 to 60. I never figured out what they were about.

     

The game doesn't even acknowledge that you've made a choice.

       

• A square, just behind a secret door, that had a fixed battle that included a black bear. After the battle, we found a long sword +1.

• A message that said: "Goldilocks was here." A wall adjacent to the message had a secret door. Behind the door was a fixed battle with three black bears (ha, ha). In the corner of that room were the stairs to the next level.

        

What is it about RPG developers that they always have to do goofy nonsense like this?

      

Although the game remained miserly with gold rewards, I earned enough to purchase several equipment upgrades. My fighters went from regular swords to long swords, my bowmen from 40-pound bows to 60-pound bows. Everybody got armor upgrades, which include torso armor, helms, gloves, and shields. I never got a point where I felt comfortable purchasing any "electric arrows" or any of the few potions or scrolls that the shop offered.

      

My best fighter's last trip to the armory.

        

The game hadn't offered much at this point, but there's always a certain visceral satisfaction as you slowly grow stronger and start wiping the floor with enemies who once forced you to restore game disks from a backup four-fifths of the time.

   

I was thus intrigued enough that I took the stairs to level 2. My first encounter, right in the arrival square, was with this party:

     

"More behind them" were a bunch of ogres.

          

Nothing on Level 1 had given me more than five or six enemies at once—and all of those enemies were much easier. Two of my fighters were paralyzed from spider venom by the end of the first round. By the end of the second round, three characters were dead. That's when I decided I had enough of this game. I wasn't interested in going through the same multi-hour grinding process again.

      

We can tell a little more from the game files. First, the castle seems to have five levels, titled in their file names MCOURTYD, NDUNGEON, ODUNGEON, LTOWER01, and KTOWER02. The MESSAGES file shows that there weren't many more special encounters on those levels. Here's everything that appears in that file that I didn't cover above:

      

• A ragged piece of parchment you can barely read: 36R27L19R.

• A hole in the wall!

• You can see daylight and the level below! You can jump if you want.

• Scattered equipment and bodies mark the location of a battle.

• You see the faint glow of a Camp spell!

• A message posted on the wall: "Magic User's Conference. By Invitation only!"

• There's been a lot of digging but some yellow still glints in the walls and floor.

• Many bodies litter the floor. One of them has not decayed. A striking silver bracelet adorns his wrist, and his axe still lies by his side.

• A broken sign on the floor: "Breeding experiment! Keep out!"

• Directly north you see statutes and an altar. So many statues! On the altar lies a body. The glow of hibernation masks the detail, but you can dimly make out her flowing robes and a silver bracelet. 

      

That first message, perhaps meant to be found on the first level, would seem to perhaps offer a code for the dials, but there are four dials and only three numbers here, plus no indication of the order.

      

Spells available to my Level 5 mage.

       

A review of the WEAPONS file suggests that the long sword +1 was in fact the best weapon in the game. No higher-level weapons are coded. Everything in the file except for the long sword +1 and one other thing is available in the shop. That one other thing is a bracelet called "Valkon's Band." You may recall from the last entry that two characters are listed on the character roster, but as "OUT": Valkon, a Level 8 warrior, and Myrhavell, a Level 7 warlock. My guess is that one of them is the undecayed body described above, and the other is the sleeping beauty. Those encounters would then let you recover them and use them in the party. The files don't give any hint of any explicit acknowledgement of those recoveries, though.

   

As for enemies, there are just over 60 listed in the appropriate file. Some are listed multiple times, suggesting that they come in different power levels. Per the manual, they are supposedly organized into six categories: humanoid, animal, animate matter, were-creatures, undead, and spirits, but I'm not sure where some of the enemies fall in this classification. Are dragons just "animals"? In any event, the list has the standard D&D fare, including orcs, kobolds, black jellies, werewolves, gargoyles, wyverns, harpies, ghouls, demons, specters, fire and storm elementals, vampires, and dragons. As we saw from my Level 2 encounter, they have different special attacks and defenses. There are a few mysteries, like "mere-dragons" (maybe it was supposed to be were-?) and "ethyl cats."

     

An accurate depiction of the game's first dozen hours.

        

I am sorry I didn't get to experience higher-level spells. In addition to mages getting spells that affect multiple enemies in a group and then multiple groups, and clerics getting spells that heal various conditions and restore more damage, we have a few original ones. The Level 5 wizard spell "Incarnate" turns ephemeral enemies like specters into corporeal form. "Dank Smoke" level-drains enemies; you don't usually see this on the player characters' end. The Level 5 mage spell "Power" increases the potency of every spell cast after that point.

      

From my experience, I give the game a 21 on the GIMLET. It does reasonably well in a few areas, with 4s for character creation and development, magic and combat, and the economy. These are balanced with 0s in NPCs and 1s in a lot of other categories, including "Graphics, Sound, and Interface": it has no graphics nor sound, and while keyboard interface is generally okay, speed is a huge issue. In the game's best moments, it almost makes it to Wizardry levels, but it doubles down on Wizardry's challenge without understanding its sense of balance.

      
The game was reviewed in that issue of 80 Microcomputing, which gave it one star. "It's too challenging to get past the first hurdle," reviewer Thomas Quindry said, "even if you're a practiced D&D player, as were some of the people with whom I played. And if you can't get into the game, why would you want to continue to play? My family certainly didn't." The review prompted a response from creator Brian Livingston in the April 1985 issue, where he argued that the game isn't that hard, although he allowed that "a discovery period is necessary to successfully play the game." Judging by the manual credits, the game had at least six playtesters, and you'd think one would have brought up the fact that the early-game difficulty is unhinged.

      

One of the manual illustrations credited to Martin Murphy.

           
I wasn't able to get in touch with Livingston, but I did reach artist Martin Murphy, whose work in the manual is perhaps the best thing about the game. He says he met Livingston through his friend's step-father, who was one of Livingston's friends. He recalls that Livingston was in his 30s at the time, which puts him anywhere from the early-70s to early 80s today. Other than his work on the illustrations, Murphy didn't have much interaction with the team. He went on to a long career in painting and visual effects for film, including nearly 20 years at Industrial Light & Magic and Lucasfilm, where he worked on the Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Wars, and Terminator series, among others. You can visit his online studio here.

         
Livingston appears to have created a company, "408614 Ontario  Ltd.," to publish the game; it was created as early as March 1979 and named after its Ontario corporation number, which I find about as nuts as business owners who name themselves after their street addresses (including the best steakhouse in Worcester, Massachusetts: the 111 Chop House). There are reports of a Commodore 64 port, which I have been unable to confirm. All signs, including the modular nature of the game and the $39.50 selling price (about $127 today), suggest that the author thought he Really Had Something Here. Alas, given its lack of presence online and in other media, it's possible I'm the only person to have even made it to Level 2.

    

Thanks again to LanHawk for helping me figure this one out. 

      

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

For further reading:

   

• Wizardry (1981), from which this game takes most of its ideas.

08/22/2026