Pagan: The Books of Pagan

        

I'm a sucker for lore, so this bonus entry chronicles all of the books I'm finding in Pagan: Ultima VIII. It will be updated continually until the game is finished. (Note that this entry published at the same time as "Pagan: Skull Island." Don't miss the previous one!)

      

Adventure Quarterly, Vol. IX

An issue devoted to the Forgotten Riches of Knarl. Knarl was a dungeon deep in the earth where magical weapons were forged and magicians were trained. Somehow, it got sealed off, maybe by an earthquake, maybe by a secret sect of monks called the Dark Brothers. Again, I wonder if this place is to be found in-game.

    

Adventure Quarterly, Vol. XII

Discusses the legend of an enormous Ship of Doom that was sent to find a solution to a particularly devastating winter. The ship never returned, but the weather did let up, suggesting that the crew might have found someone to help.

          

The Beauty of Rhian by Toran

A pleasant if prosaic ode to Toran's wife. Toran is the man executed at the beginning of the game; Rhian is the woman kneeling and crying on the docks.

      

You tempted fate with those final lines, Toran.

         

The Big Book of Adventure

Talks about common adventuring obstacles, including lever puzzles, traps, chests, spell chits (scrolls), mazes, and Tricks of the Trixter (exploding books).

     

Brogdan's Helpful Guide to Mushrooms by Brogdan

Blue Bulgie and Green Capper are tasty, but a blue mushroom called Daemon's Paw is often mistaken for the former and causes various maladies. The yellow and green Adventurer's Friend heals; the Stench Mushroom keeps most monsters at bay but attracts undead; the Fire Mushroom explodes. 

      

Captain's Report 

Guard Captain Stovan recommends a guard named Grommet for bravery citation. Grommet recently saved a little girl from a troll—then accidentally killed the girl while attacking the troll. "She was only a peasant, however, and of no import." This place is messed up.

         

De-Venoming the Kith by Ioria

Detailed instructions for removing the venom sack from a kith, a type of giant spider-like creature that the Pagans domesticate for silk and food. It's funny seeing the word used this way since I recently finished Avowed, in which "kith" is used as a term for sentient humanoid races.

    

Ear of Arricorn by Kram, Volumes III and IV 

I haven't found the first two volumes yet. These two describe an outcast called a "Shadowlander" entering a tavern, getting insulted by a herdsman, and shoving his fist down the herdsman's throat and literally turning him inside out. The rest of the tavern-goers then flee for the hills.

     

Expedition Journal, Book II 

Chronicles Days 17-22 of the journey of a party from somewhere to Tenebrae. The party is menaced by a group of strange "children" who might be the conjurations of a companion named Salem, who everyone thought dead. This seems to be referencing something, but I don't know what.  

     

Maybe they met these children.

             

Eye of the Boulder: The Runes of the Myth Drainer 

Chronicles an adventurer's search for the six pieces of the Eye, a meteor with magical properties. Once obtained and fitted into the author's skull, the Eye turned out to be "antithetical to [his] own" magic, leaving him worse than if he'd never found it. There are digs at the famously bad third game in SSI's Eye of the Beholder game: "The images I beheld lost resolution, and the sounds around me began to seem like bland reproductions . . . I am ashamed to have wasted so much time and so many of my resources upon such a disappointing thing." Given how poorly Pagan was reviewed, maybe Origin shouldn't have been so quick to throw shade. 

     

The Final Sunlight by Nolandru the Blind Idiot of Tenebrae

Describes the cataclysmic day in which the elemental titans defeated the Destroyer, which was the last day that the sun shined on the world of Pagan.

     

Honor Lost by Metzars the Troll 

Chronicles the thoughts of the titular troll, who suggests that trolls were once a noble and educated race, but they've fallen into barbarism. Metzars himself fell into a magical sleep while the troll race was still civilized and awoke after they'd turned animalistic. He recently rescued a human child from a fellow troll and plans to bring her to a human city, hoping it will engender goodwill.

     

We're meant to believe that these guys were once poets and scholars.

        

My Dearest Prevan 

A letter in book form. The letter writer, a healer named Veras, tells her husband about a troll attack on a small town in which the trolls kidnapped several children. A young mother called on the god Stratos to protect her, and her knitting needle turned into a silver sword that slew the trolls. The sword was named "Protector," and the writer intends to put it in a shrine on Argentrock Isle. This island is mentioned in the game manual as the "home of the monastery to the Order of Enlightenment," or the theurgists.

      

The Mythology of Zealan Deities 

Discusses how before the titans, the people of the land worshiped common emotions—love, hate, apathy, joy, grief, and fear—and personified them in the deities Amoras, Odion, Apathas, Felicitar, Doloras, and Timyra. The latter three were eventually dropped from the pantheon. The Zealans built temples to these gods, housed them inside, and filled them with mazes and traps so that the average person couldn't reach one of the gods.

     

The Saga of Bone Crusher 

The earth god Lithos demanded that the people of Tenebrae serve him. They pleaded that they already served Hydros. He sent undead to attack the city. The people asked Hydros for help, and she gave them a weapon called Bonecrusher. Lord Elsmil wielded it in battle and defeated the skeletons, but both he and the weapon were lost in battle. The skeletons might have carried them off. I also wonder if this will be something I can find.

       

Stories to Make Children Sleep by Brother Grim 

Only has one story, told in rhyme, about a young boy named Jelly who refused to eat anything but cheese. His father offered money to a mage to cast a spell that would free Jelly of the compulsion, but the mage accidentally turned the boy into a girl. Another mage came along and reversed the spell, and the father gratefully accepted his cheese-eating boy rather than deal with a normal girl. "'Tis not that I don't want a girl,' claims the tired old father, 'But when a boy is young, he is less of a bother.'"    

      

The Voices of Mary by Salem 

A rhyming account of a dream or hallucination or mental breakdown or something. Final lines: "As the waters roll in and I'm swallowed by sea, I can hear Mary whisper, calling to me. 'Come on, baby,' from somewhere she cries. 'I want you to love me like spiders love flies.'" 

      

"And so it waah-aas, that later . . ."

        

Untitled, Anonymous Treatise on Magic

Investigates accounts of magic that are not based on the elemental titans. These include a fisherwoman named Kilandra who claimed a ghost could cast spells (the author decided she was mad); mysterious lights on a plateau (an ornery hermit on the Plateau named Mythran said that they don't exist); and a magical axe called Deceiver, supposedly found on an island in Stone Cove (the author says the island doesn't exist). Mythran is in the game manual, given as a master of thaumaturgy.

     

Untitled Biography of Moriens

A glowing biography of the first Necromancer, who arranged the deal with the earth god Lithos that stopped the earthquakes but ensured the people of Pagan would serve Lithos in death. 

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

   

For further reading:

  

• My entry on "The Books of Britannia," this entry's counterpart for Ultima VII.

08/19/2026  

 

Pagan: Skull Island

The blacksmith is sexist and fascist.

     

The Guardian has banished the Avatar to a world that has undergone a cataclysm. The last remaining city (at least, that anyone knows about) is ruled by a tyrant named Lady Mordea. After witnessing Mordea beheading a dissenter in the last episode, the Avatar is now taking his first steps into the city of Tenebrae. As I do, the voice of the Guardian rumbles: "Yes, Avatar. Seek the way home."

     

Tenebrae looks to have roughly the same early-19th Century technology level as Britannia. It has wide stone streets lined with landscaping, wrought-iron fences, stone statutes, and bright gas lamps that cast pools of light on the street. 

     

A guard tells me that I'm in Central Tenebrae. The palace is to the north; he suggests that I avoid it. The rich area is to the east and the poor area to the west. I explore the guardhouse behind him, which has two entrances connected by a stone bridge. In the east guardhouse, I open a chest, which explodes and takes me down to 8 hit points. There's some food in a nearby barrel, and each piece restores a couple of points. The chest has a helmet and a bag with some obsidian coins.

          

Looting the guard tower. Note the skull on the tankard.

       

In the western guardhouse, I find two Scrolls of Trap Detection and a chest with two cloaks and a flask of oil. It's locked, but there's a key nearby. I decide I don't need to feel bad about stealing from guards who serve a tyrannical ruler.

   

I skip the exits to the rich and poor areas for now and move north across a bridge, where I find myself at Lady Mordea's palace. Most of the NPCs around her are rude guards who suggest that Mordea doesn't really even need guards since she's a powerful Tempest. I find Mordea eating dinner in a dining room. She's affronted that I dare speak to her and keeps asking where I come from. I try all the answers, but she doesn't like any of them.

        

I suppose I should be happy she didn't order me beheaded.

      

Mordea is being served by a woman named Aramina, who says she's too busy to talk now but will be at her house in East Tenebrae "at Bloodwatch." I guess time does matter in the game.

   

Elsewhere in the palace:

   

• I find a bunch of food in the kitchen and dining areas, which slowly get my hit points back to 30.

• I come across several casks, but unlike Ultima VII, this game doesn't let me turn them on and watch their contents pool on the ground while my companions yell that I'm wasting it.

      

I guess I'll just have to imagine Dupre screaming in my head.

       

• In what looks like an infirmary (with no patients), a bunch of cloths are laid out on a table with nearby razor blades, presumably to cut them into bandages. But this game won't let me do that. I'm finding that a lot of things in Pagan are not interactable the way they were in previous Ultima games. You can't sit in chairs, use looms, turn lamps on or off, turn the spigots on casks, or move most of the furniture. You can sleep in some beds, but the game just asks how long you want to sleep; it doesn't even show the Avatar lying down.

• I am, however, able to throw darts at a dartboard in the barracks. 

• A Big Book of Adventure by Sladek suggests this game will feature lever puzzles, traps, chests of loot, mazes, and trick books called Tricks of the Trixter. Later, west of the palace in a little wooded area, I find a body lying on a bench. It has a book on it. When I double-click on it to read it, it explodes.

     

The "Trixter" is somehow Chuckles. I just know it.

         

• A lower level has a door opened by a switch. A plaque reads "Authorized Personnel Only." It opens into a torture chamber with a bunch of locked doors leading off of it. I can't figure out how to open them. Cobwebs and desiccated corpses suggest that no one has been here in a while. 

     

I guess they no longer bother to imprison people first.

       

• An armory looks like it has some cool stuff, but the doors are locked. A guard log on a table outside suggests that nothing ever really happens here.

• There's a weird area on the palace roof that has four dragon statues facing inward towards a glowing square on the ground. A throne-like seat sits facing the square. When I step on it, though, nothing happens. 

    

Do I even want to know what happens here?

            

I still hate the controls. I find it hard to steer the Avatar where I want him to go and even harder to activate moving NPCs. I would so much rather move with the keyboard and talk to someone by hitting (T)alk and clicking on them rather than trying to double-click with the same arrow I use for movement. Argh. 

      

That wraps up Central Tenebrae. Next, I go through the east gate to the wealthy quarter. "Your treasured Britannia succumbs easily. Soon, all the land will be mine," the Guardian rumbles as I start moving through the area. Discoveries:

   

• A beggar asks for money. I give him three obsidian pieces.

• A little girl has a lot of questions. 

     

The girl asks what I did in Britannia. The third option is a joking reference to the bread-baking mechanic of Ultima VII, which, silly as it was, exemplified a kind of interactivity that this game isn't capable of.

      

• There's a warrior training hall run by a man named Darion, who also sells arms and armor. He'll spar with me for 50 coins, but I don't have that much. I later find Darion on the other side of town, so I guess he gets around.

• Darion's house is attached to the training hall. It has a basement with several rooms, but I can't figure out how to get out of the arrival room.

     

I see the switch on the other side; I'm just not sure how to get to it.

       

• There's an opulent building in the southern part of the district, but there's no sign on it and no one in it.

• There's a huge building belonging to Salkind the Seneschal (according to a sign). Salkind is inside. Haughty and insulting, he shows loyalty to Mordea and tells me that the title of Tempest is hereditary. He has a number of books in his study, one of which is yet another exploding book, which this time kills me.

      

Were these really necessary?

       

• Salkind's desk has a "logbook of crimes and punishments on it." It lists about eight people recently beheaded for treason and slander. There are several other books that I add to "The Books of Pagan" entry  (which published at the same time as this one, in case you missed it).

      

Beheading and fining sounds like something they'd do in Florida.

       

• There's a patch of mushrooms I can pick.

• Several large buildings are locked.  

• A large pool of water—one of several in the area—is called the Spring of the Eternal Hydros. 

• There's a large library with even more books. This takes me a while. All books are added to "The Books of Pagan." Bentic, author of The Chronicle of Pagan, is in his office here. He's a cheerful fellow who acknowledges that the government is "restrictive." They recently took his personal diary. His best friend is Devon, the fisherman who rescued me. When I ask him about leaving Pagan, he suggests I talk to Mythran. My first lead! He even gives me directions to Mythran's home on the Plateau, north of the city.

      

Just give me the address. I have a GPS.

      

• I can't remember what building it was, but when I entered, the Guardian's voice said: "Soon, Britannia will be mine. It seems that you are missed here. Why, I believe I hear Lord British crying out for you now." 

      

That's about all I can find to do in the rich quarter, so I head back through Central Tenebrae to the poor quarter.

   

• The first building I enter is a tavern. The barmaid is Jenna, who took the job after her father kicked her out for refusing to marry. She wants to be an adventurer and wears her grandfather's sword on her hip; she claims she's killed several men with it. The bartender is named Orlock; he tells me a story about a ghost who wanders the hills above Tenebrae, guarding buried treasure.

     

However he came about it, that's an unflattering sobriquet.

        

• South of the inn, I find the house of Shaana the Executioner—the woman who cut off poor Toran's head last session. She's hacking away at practice dummies. In conversation, she says that she likes her job, but she cannot countenance Lady Mordea's denying proper funeral rites to those she executes. She's a private person in general and doesn't want to answer my questions; she suggests I go see Bentic at the library. At one point, she says something like: "Why are you so interested in my name and occupation?" I didn't screenshot it and didn't think anything about it at the time, but now I realize it's a joke about the NAME and JOB keywords that characterized a lot of previous Ultima games. Pagan sure enjoys making fun of games that are better than Pagan.

     

Shaana doesn't mind the executions, just the burials. More on her tapestries later.

         

• A blacksmith named Korick runs a shop. He's satisfied with his place in life, even though it hasn't made him rich. He says there was recently a fire on the north end of the district, in which an old man was killed. He laments that the people have become hard and unfriendly lately. He recently captured a cutpurse who attacked an old woman.

     

That third dialogue option seems odd out of context.

       

• While I'm in Korick's place, I make the mistake of slightly moving a saber on a table. He immediately summons a guard and accuses me of theft. The guard (a sorcerer, I assume) sentences me to death and hits me with a fireball. I am literally blown to pieces, with my arms, legs, head, and torso falling into a bloody pile. Lesson learned: don't steal things in front of people. Unfortunately, Korick never seems to leave his shop.

    

Pagan has a brutal criminal justice system.

       

• One house has a dead peasant slumped at a table, with no indication what's happened.

     

Should I alert someone?

       

• There are several unoccupied houses.

• I run across a guard interrogating a woman, either about something that happened last night, her unpaid taxes, or both. The conversation just goes in a circle, and there's nothing I can do about it.  

     

Why, with your wife, my friend.

       

• There's a building that seems like a jail, with a troll wandering behind the bars, and a wounded torax (a domesticated reptile) on the ground. Maybe it's a gladiatorial pit.

     

This series is fond of visual vignettes with no explanation.

        

• Near a ruined building on the north end of town, a specter appears and starts conjuring zombies out of the ground. I kill one of them, but flee from the others. 

    

I do no damage to the specter while zombies close in.

       

And that's it, although NPCs seem to keep to schedules, so it's likely that I missed some of them. Still, in many ways Tenebrae is the opposite of the typical Ultima city. In previous games, the cities were unrealistically small but packed with NPCs. Tenebrae has a larger physical space than any previous Ultima city, but a tiny number of NPCs live there, and most don't have anything interesting to say.

         

Other notes:

   

• The NPCs move about, do chores, pace, and talk to themselves and to each other. I suppose they did that in Ultima VII as well, though.

      

They don't always say profound things.

       

• You have to talk to NPCs at least twice to get everything they have to say. Not all dialogue options come up during the first conversation. 

• If you pause during conversation (for instance, to take notes for a blog entry) without choosing one of the options, the NPCs sometimes get angry.

      

Shaana reacts to a tongue-tied moment.

         

• The water graphics in this game are just bizarre. Even small pools are drawn as if to suggest that they plunge into an abyss.

      

A little thalassophobia here in the courtyard.

             

• The Pagans are obsessed with skulls. There were skull carvings along the bridge, skulls on the tankards, skulls on the corners of the end tables, skulls on the water troughs. Shaana's house is full of skull tapestries. In Lady Mordea's palace, there's a cushion with a skull on it in her throne room, and in her bedroom, she has a picture of a skull propped up on her vanity. 

      

What kind of sick person looks at a skull while putting on her perfume?

       

• In Ultima VII, you could double-click on chests and doors from an entire screen away, and they'd open up. Pagan makes you get right up to objects before you can activate them. 

     

I cannot read this book from here. Realistic, but still annoying.

       

• In the two Ultima VII games, all the buildings were packed with valuable stuff. There's no way I could have gone through any city in Britannia or Serpent Isle and not walked out with a full suit of armor and a better weapon. After leaving Tenebrae, however, I have a dagger, a helmet, clothes, 16 coins, and a couple of potions. 

• Judging by the clocks I clicked on, time passes very slowly. I think there are six time periods: DayTide, ThreeMoons, LastEbb (this is my best interpretation; it actually looks like "LastE66"), EvenTide, BloodWatch, and FirstEbb. (Everyone stop reading my entry right now, click on this, skip past the Pocket ad, and close your eyes. What a great song for a summer evening.) 

       

Or maybe it's LastEgg?

        

• This is the first Ultima game in a long time with no experience points or levels. The manual suggests that attributes increase directly through exercise. It says that intelligence increases from casting spells, dexterity from jumping, throwing, and grabbing. It does not mention how strength increases. In any event, my intelligence and dexterity have both increased by a point since the beginning of the game. I have not cast any spells yet, though. I don't even know how. 

   

Aramina told me to meet her in east Tenebrae at BloodWatch, so I keep an eye on the clocks and head back to that side of town when the hour rolls around. I run around the district and find her in a house that was locked before. She doesn't offer much, though. She says Lady Mordea is a hard woman who will do anything to retain power, even commit murder. Meanwhile, the seneschal constantly torments Aramina with mindless tasks and sexually assaults her in the hallways. She's afraid she'll lose her head if she says anything. It's good background info, but it's not like I needed a reason to dislike Mordea and Salkind. 

         

Aramina lets it all spill out.

         

Aramina also says she met Devon once in the market and liked his smile. She asks me to mention her to him. I head back to his fishing spot, but he's gone. While I'm there, though, I discover I can roll up his sleeping mat and take it with me, allowing me to sleep wherever I want. On the way back to Tenebrae, I find a ruined building that I missed previously. It has a locked chest in it. It and all the locked doors in town make me wonder if there's some way to open locked things without keys. I try attacking it for a while, but that accomplishes nothing except making the chest jump around, which is kind of funny.

      

One of many mysteries.

        

My only lead at this point is that Mythran might be able to help me, and that he lives on the Plateau north of the city. I head through the palace and out the north gate. I start exploring this new area (from Bentic's directions, I gather this is The Valley) by going counter-clockwise about its perimeter. A few minutes later, I come upon a group of little girls, the ground around them strewn with dolls. The girls attack me! Figuring they're demons in disguise or something, I retaliate, and soon the bodies of four children are on the ground in front of me. What the hell, Ultima?! Is there supposed to be some connection to the Expedition Journal, Book II? Or is this just one of those inexplicable weird encounters like the ones we saw in Ultima VII? I know game development studios aren't like television shows, but I'd like to be in the equivalent of the "writer's room" for Ultima VIII when this kind of decision is made. How does no one object to it during playtesting?

       

Somebody has a sick sense of humor.

      

I reload, skip this area, and continue past a herd of nonviolent toraxes and then am attacked by a kith, which has no trouble killing me. 

     

I wish I had more than a dagger.

      

Reloading again, I take the other direction and head clockwise from the entrance. I find:

   

• A very large area of grassland with nothing in it. It's kind of fun to go skipping through it, though.

• North of a mushroom patch, two trolls are fighting each other. The winner turns his attention to me and kills me in a couple of blows.

         

I miss Britannia's bridge trolls.

       

Okay, clearly I'm missing something. I assume one of the following is true:

   

• There are one or more areas where I can fight and make money, perhaps out the east or west exits from Tenebrae.

• The game assumes I'm going to loot the armory.

• I missed some other encounter that would have helped. In particular, that ghost I fled from was supposed to be guarding treasure. Maybe I should try harder in that area.

• I'm meant to just run through the area north of Tenebrae and not stop to meet the kiths or trolls. 

      

I'll explore these possibilities next time. I'm a bit disappointed as I reach the end of this session. I would have expected a lot more world-building, development, maybe even some side-quests in the land's only city. It's also a bit too much like a generic Britannian city; I feel like the authors could have made an alien world a little more alien.

    

Here's something that will make you laugh: Deep into this session, I was vaguely wondering when I would meet the first member of my inevitable party. I thought it would be Jenna. It didn't hit me until I was four hours into the game that this would be a solo adventure. That's almost startling. The Avatar has been a team player since Ultima II.  

      

Time so far: 5 hours 

   

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

   08/19/2026 

Game 587: Warriors and Warlocks - Scenario: Castle Myrhavell (1983)

 

The authors had so much faith in the game they made it their company name.

        

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

        

Warriors and Warlocks is a Wizardry clone that, at least on paper, tries to one-up its predecessor. Wizardry has six attributes; Warriors has 11. Wizardry has eight classes; Warriors  has 12. Wizardry has two spell schools; Warriors has three. Wizardry offered good, neutral, and evil alignments; Warriors adds lawful and chaotic to the mix. Wizardry let you adventure with six characters; Warriors ups it to nine. Wizardry was hard; Warriors is practically impossible.

   

In the alignment issue, Warriors shows some awareness of Dungeons & Dragons, but in general, all of its ideas are from Wizardry: the basic wireframe dungeon/menu town structure; classes restricted by attribute; passwords on the characters; good and evil characters not adventuring with each other; a "camp" command in the dungeon; the ability to recover a slain party from the dungeon floor; resurrection having a chance of failing; enemies sometimes unidentified when combat begins; leveling coming with increases and decreases in attributes, perhaps allowing the character to change classes. The manual even intersperses instructions with cartoons.

      

Graphics are credited to Martin Murphy, about whom I will have more to say in the next entry. 

       

Getting the game to run was a chore even when it was new. The game comes with confusing (at least to me, as a non-TRS-80 owner) instructions for creating play disks out of the original disks. This process required the user to swap a bunch of disks, delete files, and even edit some of the BASIC code. It also took up to an hour. Commenter LanHawk spared me all of this by sending me a pair of prepared disks. He also suggested a better emulator than the one I was using, which dramatically changed my experience with the game. With the first emulator I tried to use, the game crashed every time I increased the speed. That's a big problem with Warriors because it is slow. I mercifully did not have that problem with the emulator LanHawk recommended (TRS80GP).

          

As you might get from the subtitle, the game was meant to kick-start a series, with characters stored on a hub disk and able to proceed from there to any number of scenario disks. The default (and ultimately only) scenario is "Castle Myrhavell," for which the manual offers absolutely no backstory except that it was once a bastion of peace but was later cursed by a warlock. The goal of the game is to "develop characters strong enough to explore the deepest parts of the castle."

     

Options at the Warriors' Inn.

     

The game boots up to the Warrior's Inn. (Despite a menu option to "visit a different inn," it seems to be the only one available.) The character creation process ("Recruit a new character") requires you to specify the character's name, race, and alignment before you find out his attributes and thus what classes he qualifies for. There is no option to reroll attributes, so if you don't like the character, you have to finish the process and delete him from the disk. Since I couldn't tailor the name, race, and alignment to the intended class, I got some weird combinations: a hobbit warrior named "Mystara," a dwarf cleric named "Venom," and so forth.  

      

Races are elf, dwarf, halfling, hobbit, and human. Races aren't mentioned at all in the manual, and I didn't sample enough characters to tell if there were any effects of race on attributes or available character classes. Alignments are lawful good, chaotic good, neutral, lawful evil, and chaotic evil. Attributes are intelligence, wisdom, intuition, ego, piety, courage, strength, agility, dexterity, luck, and vitality.

       

Attribute requirements per class.

       

Professions are fighter, warrior, bowman, archer, cleric, priest, sorcerer, wizard, necromancer, and warlock. Many of these pairs sound like essentially the same thing, and I think they functionally are. Fighters and warriors have the same equipment restrictions, as do bowmen/archers, clerics/priests, and so forth. Clerics share their spellbooks with priests, as do mages and sorcerers and wizards and necromancers. I think warlocks are like the bishops of this game, with access to all spellbooks. A few classes have alignment restrictions; namely, clerics and priests must be lawful, thieves must be neutral, and wizards and necromancers must be chaotic. The greater restrictions are on attributes. I initially rolled about 30 characters, and out of them only four characters qualified for clerics and two qualified for mages. I didn't get a single priest, sorcerer, necromancer, warlock, or even thief. 

          

This character doesn't have many options.

      

The manual warns you to expect this. There are no attribute requirements on fighters or bowmen, so the idea is that you resort to those if you have to, then level them up and switch to other classes as their attributes increase. This is less possible than the manual suggests, as they will almost certainly die before any leveling happens. 

     

The game weirdly creates characters "DEAD" and at Level 0. They "level up" to Level 1 and resurrect the first time you view them. After creation, the next stop is the armory, where each character can spend 20 gold pieces on basic equipment with the usual restrictions. After that, the player switches to the scenario disk, slowly adds up to nine members to the party, and enters the castle courtyard.

      

20 gold does not go far.

       

Once inside the castle, movement commands are (L)eft, (R)ight, and (F)orward, with stubborn doors entered with a (K)ick. One of the game's innovations is allowing the player to move forward up to nine spaces at once with the 1-9 keys, although this movement can naturally be interrupted by enemies.

      

Those enemies are brutal. You may have noticed that my characters all started with hit points in the range of 1-6. There's a fixed battle with three centaurs close to the entrance, and they absolutely slaughtered the first party that I fielded. I backed up the hub disk after making my second party and avoided the centaurs, but I kept losing characters to rabid dogs, squeaky pigs, fighters, bats, kobolds, and whatever else happened to attack me. At the beginning of the game, a single hit is likely to kill new characters, so all it takes is one bad initiative roll.

     

A typical battle after two rounds.

       

In combat, characters have options that, depending on their equipment and position, might include attacking, parrying, shooting a bow, using an item, casting a spell, dispelling undead, waking a character who's asleep, and fleeing. Only the first three characters can attack in melee range, and only they can be hit by melee attackers. Level 1 spellcasters only have access to one Level 1 spell and one Level 1 spell slot, so they're pretty useless.

    

As I said, I allowed myself to backup and restore the character disk so I wouldn't have to keep creating new characters. Over about a three-hour period, I entered the castle, walked around until I found an encounter, and did my best to win it. At the end of the period, I had fought about 20-25 battles, but I had only emerged unscathed from two of them, giving my characters a total of 73 experience points. The only contemporary review I could find, from the December 1984 80 Microcomputing, complained about this very thing: "Nobody in my house advanced to a point where they could successfully win an encounter."

         

I can relate.

       

You might think save states are the key to cheating, but they're actually quite useless. The game is pathological about its pre-rolled random numbers. If you enter the dungeon, take a save state, walk 10 steps, get a random encounter with three wolves, and have a character killed in the first round, this will reliably happen every time you reload the save state. I can't think of anything to do outside of combat that would interrupt the number pattern. (In-combat, a player could screw around with parrying to change the initiative order, but it would take longer than just reloading and trying again.) The game will insist on using the same generated numbers even if you leave the dungeon and re-enter. The only way to force a new set of numbers is to go all the way back to the inn and disband the party. At that point, it's easier to quit the game and restore the backup.

      

After a while, I reluctantly decided to sacrifice the 73 experience points and start over, this time spending more time on character creation. You really can't expect success when your three fighters and two bowmen—the only characters who can reliably attack every round—got their jobs because they didn't qualify for anything else. I spent about two hours in which I rolled about 100 characters before I found nine that satisfied me. None of them met the requirements for warriors, but I had some strong fighters, a couple of archers, a thief, and a wizard. Then when I went to shut down the emulator, I screwed something up and none of the changes that I made saved to the disk.

     

Options at the Village Square. My party members are all Level 0 because  I didn't know at this point that I needed to view them first.

            

Checking the word count of this entry, I decided I couldn't quit here. I took a day off and then continued with my old party. I got into a comfortable rhythm of:

   

1. Copy the backup hub disk.
2. Start the emulator.
3. Insert the disks.
4. Restore a save state from the inn.
5. "Enter the village square to form a party."
6. "Recruit the same party as last time."
7. "Enter the castle."
8. Spin around the entry square until I meet a battle.
9. Do my best.
10. Exit and save if I won; go back to Step 1 if I lost, which was usually. 

       

This whole cycle took about five minutes (with the emulator on "Turbo," of course) and produced about 100 experience points per hour. A couple of times, I had to restock on arrows and/or buy an equipment upgrade for my lead characters, although I didn't see a huge difference as their armor class went up. 

         

The rare Level 1 blow that isn't fatal.

       

Now, in retrospect, I think that maybe the way that the author intended the game to be played was for the front ranks to have constant turnover while the back ranks slowly leveled. The player was perhaps meant to discard slain characters after every sortie and roll new ones, perhaps occasionally getting lucky and rolling a "keeper" with high attributes or HP. But this process takes a long time and is less subject to automating with macros, so I stubbornly kept at it.   

     

Here are some more things I can report about combat. You'll recognize a lot of them from Wizardry:

   

• When combat begins, there's a chance that enemies will attack from the rear. This means that the three rear characters suddenly become the "front line." There's supposed to be a way to change positions in combat, but I can never get it to work. Those rear characters, despite being mages, don't really have a lot less success in the ensuing battle than the front rank.

• Enemies are often unidentified, given as just general descriptors (e.g., "humanoids," "small animals," "men in leather"). 

     

Kinky.

     

• Either party can be surprised, giving the opposite side a free round of attacks. This was not generally survivable for my party. When I got a free round of attacks, meanwhile, it was enormously frustrating to watch my characters miss almost every time. 

• My bowmen often "do not have a clear shot." I don't know what causes that, but it might have something to do with which fighter they're behind and which of them goes first. Because of this problem, it took me forever to run through my initial purchases of 20 arrows per bowman.

• Sometimes bowmen get an extra shot between rounds. 

• Only once have enemies attacked in more than one group. 

• Enemies I've faced in rough order of difficulty: squeaky pigs, kobolds, vandals, vagrants, fighters, orcs, killer bees, vampire bats, wolves.

• Fleeing causes the party to run around randomly in a panic. I almost never recover from this. I get attacked by something that kills me while trying to get my bearings.

        

Fleeing also causes you to run into walls.

       

• The spells just use plain text names rather than Wizardry's arcane names like MAHALITO. 

• The mage spell "Magicspear" does a ridiculous amount of damage, like 20-30 compared to roughly 1-5 from my melee fighters. Only one mage has that spell, though, and he only has one of them. 

• My other mage started with "Glow," which finds secret doors.

• One of my clerics started with three spells: "Refresh" (minor healing), "Bless" (reduces opponent damage), and "Location" (gives coordinates). The other started with no spells at all. The one who started with no spells has worse attributes than the one who started with three, so I don't know what that's about. I ended up dumping the one with none and replacing her with another bowman. 

     

Level 1 cleric spells. Although the spell levels on this list go up to nine, the manual suggests that there are only five.

       

• The game is very stingy with gold. Battles even with humanoids generally return 0 gold pieces. Two is a bonanza. Needless to say, resurrecting characters has never been even remotely possible.

• I haven't found an item in post-combat looting, but the manual suggests it's possible. 

• I'm not convinced that "Parry" does anything at all. I think it's just a way of passing the turn.

• Characters apparently target specific enemies at the beginning of a round, not just the general enemy party. If we're facing three kobolds and Moronoe kills one in Round 1, I might get a message that "Morgen's target is already dead," even though there are still two kobolds. Again, this might have something to do with their specific positions in the party formation.

       

Changing the formation in camp. You can bring up this same screen in combat, but it never does what I say.

          

• Two Level 8 characters come on the game disk but are listed as "Out" (some contemporary material shows that those two characters are original and not the remnant of some previous player). If the new party could find them, they would be game-changing, but they'd have to search every square in the dungeon. 

• Nothing is more enraging than actually winning a rare combat then facing another one that you cannot beat before you reach the exit. Even keeping very close to the exit, this is possible. 

               

While I was going through all of this, LanHawk emailed to let me know that the Level 2 threshold was 800 experience points for bowmen and 1,000 for warriors. I had about 200 experience points by this point, and I was starting to despair. The only reason that I didn't quit is that I was about seven entries ahead. I had been hoping to get to the point where by mid-August, I had entries scheduled through mid-September, which would make it less likely I'd have to take a usual beginning-of-the-semester hiatus. Even given this, the amount of time I spent on Warriors and Warlocks basically qualifies me for institutionalization. I had it going almost constantly during the first week of August, dipping in every time I wanted a break or needed to listen to something or watch a training video. I binged an entire Teaching Company lecture series on Machiavelli. I broke down and looked into editing the character file at one point, but I couldn't figure out how experience was encoded. 

      

Finally!

     

After a ridiculous amount of time, my bowmen hit Level 2, followed shortly by my fighters. My mages hit it at 1,100 and my cleric at 1,200. Each level up is accompanied by a mix of increases and decreases, mostly increases (just like Wizardry). Characters get some extra hit points; spellcasters get extra spells and extra spell slots. I wish I could report that it made the game easier. It did, a little, but my fighters only gained a couple of hit points and still routinely die in one hit. Having two mages capable of "Magicspear," and each capable of two of those, helps more than anything else. I wish I could get to the point that I could kill wolves without losing someone. They're worth almost 100 experience points each.

     

My level 2 party reaches an intersection.

        

I got into a somewhat absurd situation where I actually preferred when enemies attacked from behind, since my spellcasters all have between 7-10 hit points and can survive more than one hit. 

   

With all my efforts focused on survival and leveling, I didn't get much mapping done. The first level of the castle, which the game refers to as the "Courtyard," seems to have 39 x 38 squares, a weird number, made even weirder by the coordinate system, which counts in multiples of 10, with the (0,0) square inaccessible, one square south of the entry square. From there, coordinates are given as up to 180W and 200E, but on the y-axis, they're all north, up to 390. Even odder is that the x-axis is only 39 squares (instead of 38) because of a single alcove (200,20) in the eastern wall.

     

My map of the courtyard so far.

       

I've only found a couple of fixed encounters so far. There are two fixed battles with three centaurs (each) near the main entrance. These are the only battles for which the game has given me the option to "search for treasure" afterwards, but I didn't find any. The centaurs are replaced with messages telling of trees to the northwest and brambles to the northeast

   

Beyond that, the only other special encounter has been a notched dial on a wall, with numbers from 0 to 60. I haven't tried to do anything with it yet.

     

Try to qualify for the showcase showdown?

            

I nearly just wrapped up the entire thing here, particularly since it doesn't seem to have a main quest (though it's possible one develops). But where this game is so lightly documented, I figure I'll give it another few hours and try to at least map the first level.

   

What do you think: Do experiences like this teach me persistence? In my 50s, do I still need to be building character? 

      

Time so far:  13 hours

     

****

   

Next entry in this series

   

For further reading:

   

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

08/15/2026