The Search for Freedom: Won!

 

Whew! About time, too.

      

Guest post by AlphabeticalAnonymous: 

 

In the previous post, I made a serious effort to push through and finish the game. The game manual promises "two outdoor areas, each 32 squares by 32 squares" and the previous 58 hours of gameplay sufficed only to explore the first of those. Luckily, I had some hope that as in other games (e.g., Ambermoon) the final world wouldn’t take nearly as long to complete as the game’s primary world. This dream was given form and in this post I finally finished, but it took a long time to get there.
     
We begin the session having passed through the portal into Aegea, the Netherworld, the Land of the Dead, the Mad Plain—where Kamazol the evil Lich rules and is building his army to invade our planet, Earth, when its moons align. The geography and color palette of this new world are both different from Earth: "the sky is a pinkish hue," water is red, swamps are brown, and deserts are blue (?). 

     

Atlas of Aegea. We exit the portal in the bottom right.

    

We explore the land, generally fleeing from encounters more because of my impatience rather than any challenge, and we find a town to the northwest. As groovy music plays in the background, a sign welcomes us to "Nwotehtyms," which is just the name of the adventure’s first town in reverse. Although the land is ostensibly ruled by Kamazol, there are only a few fixed combats in the town (with killer poodles, guards, witches, and demons). Although we beat them all, the last of these pose a rare challenge: when their crude AI decides to, they can cast the "Gotterdamerung" spell to do 30-60 damage to all my characters, and they can even cast "Invincibility" (from physical attacks) on each other. Witches can also cast "Earthquake," essentially a weaker version of "Gotterdamerung," when the mood takes them. Otherwise the town is very much like any other. It has a standard temple (run by dead clerics), a normal pub and diner, a bank, a magic shop, an inn, stores, and even a training center where we can level up.
    

Would you trust the healing services of a dead cleric?

      
We find two skeletons in town that are interesting for very different reasons. For the first, the game merely tells us that "a skeleton hangs from shackles on the wall—you can't tell if it's dead or undead, but it makes no movement." The ominous part is that this square is not marked (s)pecial on the automap or with the "Vision" spell. I had been using the map to avoid any parts of dungeons that lacked special squares, but if the game allows hidden special encounters then that means we will have to meticulously explore everything after all. The second skeleton, named Dufrey, provides perhaps the longest single text dump in the entire game aside from the introduction. It provides Dufrey some interesting backstory but nothing really relevant. The game makes us automatically release him; he gives us a few tips and bonuses; and before he leaves, he promises to meet us "in the throne room of Kamazol himself." As you’ll see below, he had to be awfully patient to do so.
      
Nwotehtyms offers a few other interesting encounters. There’s a glass orb that I realize we never did anything with, located in a locked case in the center of the "nwot erauqs." We fight and handily best a giant, undead dragon for reasons I neglected to record; everyone gets 3,333 experience and the party recovers 29,000 gold. By now the economy is well and truly broken, and our gold remains maxed out at or near 99,999 for the rest of the game. "A mighty-looking skeleton" calling himself The SwordMaster gives us a quick fetch quest and then improves our to-hit and lockpicking (?!) skills. I suppose that makes three interesting skeletons in town, for those who are counting. A clue helps us recover some +2 plate armor hidden in the "slimy swamp" in the northeast; this is the best armor in the game, as far as I can tell. At this point, we have to find the Temple of Seth (the god of death) to reforge the sword, Soulseeker, and then find Kamazol in his lair.

 

What was this all about?

    

The Temple of Seth is in the middle of a bridge, over a lake. Level 1 is a mortuary, which our "Vision" reveals is filled with around 50 two-square crypts. Each crypt contains a special square. Although we initially try to bypass them by descending as quickly as possible to Level 2 (altar room and chapel), it turns out that some of the crypts contain information we need to advance. The mortuary really provides the perfect antidote to the hugely overpowered "Vision" spell because we have to explore every single room. Most provide pointless and offer trivial combats with undead, but a few others provide what we need to make it through Level 2 below.

    

I think there was only one mimic in the entire game.

      

There, we find a room with a series of increasingly strident warning signs. After ignoring them all, we are told that we have defiled the god Seth’s Holy Room. "The mighty god attacks the party, in one of his many possible forms!" He has 999 HP and 8 armor points, great initiative, and he paralyzes when he hits. He gets all of the party members pretty low, but in the end he can only hit once per turn. We win and earn 16,666 experience per character, enough for everyone to level up at least once.
        

I guess we've now killed a god. In some games this would be the climax of the story, but here it was a mildly interesting but unnecessary optional combat.
     
Elsewhere we meet a "small, cute fuzzy creature" who increases our wisdom and intelligence (unnecessary at this point, since we’ve already maxed out the relevant party members’ statistics). More curious is this character:

"Corpus supremus maxima?" he asks us. Is that even valid Latin?

     

Luckily, the game doesn’t actually expect the player to know Latin. Elsewhere, the dungeon gives us the words "ixnay ooglevay," which in Pig Latin translate into "Nix Voogle." It means nothing to me, but the pig grabs all three pieces of Soulseeker and streaks off like greased lightning. We chase him through several rooms, including this puzzle suggesting someone with pre-calculus on the brain:
     

If you emulate a Pentium, the correct answer is 1.00000003. 

     

Eventually, we catch the pig (who also speaks English) and can either kill it or (as we choose) listen to its advice on how to make it through the rest of the level. This brings us to the Altar Room of Seth, where Soulseeker must be reforged. We can't approach the altar, because it is protected by a force field—not a magical field (nor the Netzian field, known to Earth science), but an honest-to-goodness technological force field. Two control panels are defended by dark clerics with assorted minions. After destroying the panels (which we are made to understand are definitely technological), we can approach a giant statue of Seth with three vacant eye sockets. We fill these with our three glowing spheres, place the pieces of Soulseeker on the altar, fight the statue (which has of course come to life) and voila: 

       

Room?

      
The temple clear, we head back up to the surface. Unfortunately, I’m not paying close enough attention: I forget to heal the party until it's too late, and then suffer a full-party death to a group of greater demons and witches. To add insult to injury, I lose both my clerics to another such party after reloading. We make it back to town, where we dump our spoils and level everyone up to Level 12 (the highest available is 13). At this point, most stat increases hardly seem to make a difference, and we already have our full complement of spells.
        
We set out to find and finish Kamazol once and for all. We encounter the Alphan Toll Bridge where we are told that "the toll is your life force. Will you pay the toll?" This is a false choice, as are too many in this game: declining just puts us back off of the bridge. We therefore agree, only to find that both of our clerics are knocked unconscious and the bridge disappears behind us. We try to soldier on and enter Kamazol's Den, but the remaining characters are rapidly picked off one-by-one by enemy critical-hits. I worry that perhaps clerics are always knocked out at the bridge to prevent healing, but happily we had just had a bad roll of the dice. On a reload, neither of the clerics are knocked out and everyone just loses a few hit points.
     
Kamazol’s Den consists of five levels with fairly straightforward maps and two main puzzles, as the strains of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor" repeat in the background. I have to consult the hint guide included with the game on several points to advance, but in any case the first puzzle involves a series of keys: ivory, ruby, emerald, crystal, and so on, which open important doors or critical objects. The critical objects form the second puzzle: a series of colored shapes that we have to collect. These include a yellow hexagon, a red pentagon, a green circle, a silver square, and a pink triangle.
     

Let me know the truth, let me kno-ow the truth.

      

Along the way are a number of fixed encounters, some more narratively compelling than others. We meet a Grim Reaper-like figure who reduces all characters’ dexterity by one in order to let us pass. Tossing a coin into a fountain gives us a magic lamp with a genie who gives us one wish: to increase a vital stat by up to three points, heal the entire party, restore all magic points, give everyone 10,000 experience points, or fill our pockets with gold. The first is all but pointless after so much leveling up; the second similarly so as long as one has a cleric (we have two); the third can be alleviated simply by resting for a few hours; and gold is pointless at this stage in the game. We meet and defeat Kamazol’s pet, Shugreth the giant pink slug.

       

At first I thought the slug was shouting for help, which confused me.

      

The final (stone) key unlocks a door in Kamazol’s Laboratory. There we find a blue potion, which is the key to ensuring that a killed lich doesn't return to life (or to undeath). But most unusual of all has to be the Hades Health Spa. After telling an imp that we need to bathe (a word spelled out in the dungeon’s very walls), they give us a spa membership card. Inside we find:

     

• A weight room, where all characters can increase their Strength by two.
• A (or the?) SwordMaster, who can allow us to level up or even purchase spellbooks if we still need them.
• A casino with several games; we can only play the slot machine, which gives us the stone key mentioned above.
• A Sauna: we have to leave all equipment to enter, and then fight some Wights bare-handed.
• A whirlpool tub, which gives +20 HP to all characters and in which we find the silver square. 

        

This was just weird.

    

After this, we have to laboriously work our way all the way from Level 5 back up to Level 1 before quickly descending a set of dedicated stairs down to the bottom floor again. There, we find five candles arranged in a circle around a central pillar of light. Instructions given throughout the upper floors tell us that we have to arrange the shapes at the candles, in order of the number of sides. How many sides does a circle have? We initially assume two (the inside and the outside), but that doesn’t work. We assume some number greater than six, and:
   

Surprised, aren't you? I knew you would be.

      

He asks why I summoned him, to which the only correct answer is LOGARITHMS. In the dark times before Chegg and AI cheating tools, I suppose only the Devil himself could help with math homework. He opens a previously hidden door, gives us costumes to disguise ourselves, and leaves. Based on what I can see of the map, I know we’re close now, and it’s only Day 79. Over 900 days until Kamazol and his army can enter the portal. We have this in the bag!

We step into the newly-opened corridor, and an unavoidable trap of magic gas puts us to sleep until day 994. Yes, we sleep undiscovered and undisturbed for two and a half years. The seasons come and go; Kamazol (not to mention our families) must have forgotten about us entirely as they went about their business, until we suddenly wake up to complete our quest.
      
We enter the throne room and see Kamazol on his throne. He runs away and we have to fight six etherial [sic] guardians, each of whom can one-hit kill our party members. To my surprise, Dufrey the skeleton shows up to help in this and all subsequent combats. He must have been cooling his heels in Kamazol’s halls for 30 months, waiting for us to show. If we hadn’t, I like to think that he would have tried to save the world on his own. Two chimeras guard two final keys, and then we finally face Kamazol for the last time.
     

It's nice to see a boss villain "nervous" for once. They're usually so cocky.

   

He casts "Gotterdamerung," does 400-800 damage per party member, and we all die.

I reload and we fight again. We last a bit longer, until he casts the same spell and slaughters us all. Another reload, and the third battle ends the same as the others. Kamazol has 999 hit points and 8 armor points (the same as Seth, the dark god) and is also attended by six shadow guards with 280 hit points apiece. Dufrey gamely tries to help out, doing 10-20 damage per turn on his own as the rest of us hack somewhat more effectively. Alas, there’s no more strategy than any other combat: we just try to surround the enemies, set up for backstabs, and hold out. Our patience is rewarded, and the fourth time is the charm. Any weapon can hurt Kamazol but once he’s down to one hit point, only Soulseeker, wielded by the doughty Teddy thief Ruxpin, can deliver the killing blow. We sprinkle the blue potion and his body dissolves into ash: "He is now dead for good. You hope."
    

Freeing all the animal friends of By Golly Gulch.

   

In what I have to admit is an interesting twist, that’s not quite the end of the story. We’re stuck in the land of the dead, the portal home doesn’t open for another five days, and an entire army of darkness is assembling to begin the conquest of Earth. We have to wait for five days by (L)ooking around. As the army tramps into the room, the portal opens and we dive into it (we have no choice; the game compels us). It stays open for only a half-hour, so we have to move smartly to make it out of Limbo and back to Earth in time. We fight several battles with undead scouts and clerics, a battle with Kamazol’s general and his evil champions, a battle with more undead, and yet more undead. Sensing that the end is near, we stop being so parsimonious with our magic points and let loose. In all the battles, "Earthquake" (from the clerics) and "Gotterdammerung" (from the mages) quickly clear the field. Dufrey continues to help us with all the battles.

We make it out of the portal and jump 100 feet down to the ground without suffering injury, but the portal is still open for 10 more minutes. We fight three more successive waves of undead, and with magic points running low we have to resort to melee tactics again. It’s only then that the portal closes and all the undead are sucked back through it (I forgot to mention that we had destroyed the device that would have let them stay on Earth permanently). A last enemy rips Soulseeker off of our belt and it flies away with him . . . but then the portal spits Soulseeker back out again, because it staying in Aegea would violate "the higher powers of physics." A note with an illegible signature vows vengeance, but our party disregards it even when it disappears in a puff of magic to the sound of ominous laughter. 
    

Home at last; followed by undead; sucked back to Aegea; home at last.

     

We won, and the world is free at last. The party is right next to Smythetown, right where we started from. There, roaming villagers say, "Thank you ever so much for saving us," and children ask for our autographs. As they should. I’ll have the final rating and a summary in the final posting, yet to come. 
       
Time played: 72 hours. 8 party deaths, 8 reloads, 7 crashes, 10 hints.

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series 

07/18/2026 

Game 581: Dragon Quest (1982)

Or "Seahorse Quest."

        

Dragon Quest

United Kingdom

Bug-Byte Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1982 for BBC Micro 

Date Started: 3 July 2026

Date Ended: 3 July 2026

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty:  Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

      

It's been tough to identify the first British CRPG given that so many of the early efforts from the country are best described as "proto-RPGs." They have some RPG elements like exploration, inventory, and battle, but they tend to lack character development, whether traditional experience and leveling or some kind of skill-based system.

   

With Dragon Quest (obviously no relation to the more famous Japanese title), we have a game drawn more solidly from Dungeons & Dragons tradition than any British game before it, or for years after it. It has attributes, experience, and the concept of levels—but you never actually level. Or, more accurately, you win the game by achieving Level 2.

       

The dumb, slow type.

          

The backstory asks you to enter the dungeon, kill a dragon who has been terrorizing the local populace, and escape. Character creation rolls a standard set of D&D attributes on a typical scale of 3-18 (no percentile strength). You can re-roll as often as you want. I always got the same sets of values in the same order, so the game must start with the same seed (although in the past we've learned that such problems are often caused by emulator issues). When the player is satisfied, he chooses between (W)arrior and (M)agician, with consequent restrictions on the items that he can use. (Magicians are limited to daggers and no armor; warriors can't use the spells.) El Explorador de RPG discovered that the game also allows you to select (T)hief and (C)leric; the author must have planned for these options before abandoning them. The game treats you as if you chose "Warrior" if you pick either of these.

   

The character is then given a random amount of money and allowed to purchase from a list of 16 items, including three expensive single-use spells ("Protect," "Healing," and "Sleep"), various weapons and armor, torches, lanterns, and rations (which heal). El Explorador's inspection of the code shows that while armor does matter for protective value, the choice of weapon has no bearing on success; the game only checks whether you have one, not what it is. High dexterity or charisma (!) add to the attack bonus. The only attribute visible during the game itself is what the game calls "strength" but is really hit points rather than the strength from the character creation screen. Again, I owe El Explorador for analyzing the math on the strength total: It starts at 1d4 for magicians and 1d8 for warriors, with bonuses and penalties for high or low constitution, wisdom (magicians), and strength (warriors).

     

The store. The flasks of oil are worth it.

      

Once you're done shopping, you're thrust into an irregularly-shaped dungeon of about 200 rooms. It has a fixed layout, including the same monsters and items in the rooms every time. Each room has a name (e.g., "Narrow Corridor"; "Dusty Chamber; " "Rubbly Room"), and—provided you turn on a light source—you're given a quasi-first-person view, if your character was looking at an angle from the ceiling. You can return to the shop at any time, which is a good idea if your health is too low.

     

Commands in the dungeon include (M)ove (followed by a direction), (T)ake, DRINK, EAT, ON and OFF (for torches and lamps), LOOK, READ a spell scroll, set an enemy on FIRE with a flask of oil, and FLY if you have the broom. You can (L)isten for enemies in any of the movable directions.

     

Getting a money bag. I can go north or east—assuming I came in from the west.

      

Each room can have a monster or treasure or both. Treasures include magic weapons (which provide no bonus but produce their own light, saving your inventory space for other things), spell scrolls, gold, potions, and a few special items. These include a flaming sword (which does provide an attack bonus, but only with another weapon), a flying broom that lets you jump to another part of the dungeon, and a mirror which seems to do nothing at all.

   

This is the full monster list: giant centipedes, lone orcs, stirges, gelatinous cubes, huge spiders, bugbears, "minotors," troglodytes, displacer beasts, grey oozes, black puddings, and cockatrices. There are also two brass dragons in the dungeon, although the quest only requires you to kill one. If any of these creatures have special attacks or defenses—or indeed even vary in difficulty—I didn't experience it. There's text in the file about the dragon breathing fire, but that didn't occur in any of my battles against them.

        

Fighting one of the dragons. Neither of us can seem to hit the other.

        

If both a monster and a treasure are in the same room, the game says that the monster is "guarding" the treasure. You can still often snatch it up and escape without a battle.

   

Combat is usually initiated by the player, sometimes the monster. It occurs in rounds, with the player choosing to (S)trike or (R)un each round and then finding the result as well as the monster's counterattack. Each successful hit by a monster, whatever the type, reduces the character's strength by 1, so if death comes, the player should have seen it coming.

 

One fun alternative to starting combat with the (F)ight command is to light your enemies on FIRE with a flask of oil. This often immediately kills the enemy.  

       

An oil flask makes short work of a gelatinous cube. Which kind of makes sense.

       

I thought I would enjoy the process of exploration and mapping, but a few factors make it a nuisance:

   

• Your view of the dungeon room doesn't give you any directionality. You have to keep track of which direction you entered from to interpret the directions you can leave.

• Some of the door openings are actually teleporters that take you to a random part of the dungeon. You don't know this has happened until your map stops lining up, unless you try to turn around and go back after every step you take.

• Even when you don't get teleported, sometimes the map doesn't line up because the rooms take up more than one "square." Some take up two squares in a row horizontally or vertically; some take up three in an "L" shape. You really can't tell until your map goes wonky, and even then, it's pretty tough to untangle. 

          

Part of my dungeon map. I didn't finish it.

      

But while the game may be hard to map, it's relatively easy to win, mostly because few battles are necessary. You can run through the dungeon picking up gold and special items, then go back to the store for healing rations and (if you're a magician) spells. Both dragons are relatively close to the entrance—nine moves for one and a dozen for the other. Once you've killed at least one dragon, you just have to amass a combined 1,000 points in gold and enemy kills. As long as you monitor your health and don't engage when it's low, you probably won't die.

       

Unless you drink a potion.

      

One exception to the above statement has to do with potions. It's another annoying mechanic. There are about half a dozen of them in the dungeon, and what they do is the result of a random roll when you try to drink them (not when you pick them up). They can heal, turn you invisible, change you into a "gaseous form" and move you to a different part of the dungeon, or increase your strength. They can also be potions of these things and fail to work. And finally, they can be poison and kill you instantly. Overall, it's not worth the risk. Iron rations are a surer thing.

   

The denouement is disappointing. Once you have at least one dragon kill and 1,000 points, you leave the dungeon and the game says: "You have qualified." It then freezes on that screen. "Qualified." What a superlative! Qualified for what, you may ask? The manual promises that after you complete the main quest, "the ability to move onto Level 2 will appear." It did not appear for me. Level 2, meanwhile, is "available from any good software retailers." Issues of Personal Computing Today in 1983 were indeed offering it for sale, but if it ever existed, it's been lost.

        

On to the semifinals?

       

The manual doesn't offer any credit for the game except the letters "P. T. O.," which I suppose might be initials. Liverpool-based Bug-Byte was founded in 1979 by Tony Baden and Tony Milner, and the company cranked out dozens of titles, almost all action games, for the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, Acorn Atom, BBC Micro, Commodore VIC-20, and Commodore 64. A lot of their published games were arcade conversions of titles like Pac-Man, Galaga, and Space Invaders. Perhaps their most well-known games were Matt Smith's Manic Miner (1983), an influential platformer, and Trevor Hall's Twin Kingdom Valley (1983), a graphical adventure. Dragon Quest is the only title that anyone categorizes as an RPG. The company went bankrupt in 1985, and its name and logo were purchased by Argus Press for its low-budget releases, which lasted through 1989.

    

Like many titles of this period, the cover is more exciting than the game.

         

I can't help but wonder if the game might have had some influence on Dragonsbane (1983), from Quicksilva, which was coincidentally also later purchased by Argus Press. I had a two-hour Zoom call with the authors of Dragonsbane last year (I never got around to editing it for publication) and they didn't mention the earlier game, but there are clear similarities in the action, the items you can find in the dungeon, and the look and shape of the game map. Dragonsbane is a more advanced game in most other ways, although it doesn't have a character creation process. It also randomizes its content while in Dragon Quest, the dungeon is fixed. 

     

I give the game a 15 on the GIMLET, with its best score (3) in "Economy," no score for "NPCs," and 1s and 2s in everything else. At least it shows some awareness of Dungeons & Dragons conventions, which is rare for this particular year and country.

   

****

   

For further reading:

• El Explorador de RPGs coverage of the game, including a full map.
• Dragonsbane (1983), the one game that I think may have been influenced by this one.  

 07/03/2026

Al-Qadim: Over, Sideways, and Under

 

I praised this animation in my last entry, then forgot to actually include it.

        

In the last session, we learned that some malevolent force is freeing genies from their vows. My own family's genie, without authorization, destroyed the ship belonging to a rival family and kidnapped my betrothed, Princess Kara. When questioned, the genie intimated that my family ordered the attack, so the caliph had my mother, father, and sister (the only family members who can summon the genie) imprisoned in the capital city of Bandar al-Sa'adat. I don't know whether the caliph is part of the conspiracy, but he said some weird things, and something is clearly going on with him.

   

The sorcerer Farid al-Mutan suggested I seek out the Genie Lords to get to the bottom of this mystery, but to find them, I'll need to learn the name of the island they live on. I can supposedly get that information from a hermit in the library on Shibaz. Before going there, I decided to go to Bandar al-Sa'adat to spend some money at the bazaar and see if I could find a trainer. I've leveled up twice and apparently earned the right to learn "new combat moves," but I haven't had anyone to train me.

   

I rowed back to my ship without incident, healed myself at the orb, and ordered the captain to take us to the capital city. On the way, we were attacked by mini water elementals, but they didn't take much effort. Once on land, I accidentally hit "load" instead of "save" (the menu is very hard for me to interpret), and I had to do it all over again.

        

This is how you have to determine which command is selected. I'm sure that "Save Game" looks like a completely different color to you, but to me it just looks slightly darker.

        

Bandar al-Sa'adat covers its island, so there wasn't anything to find in the "wilderness." The guards challenged me as I entered the city, demanding to know my business. My protestations of nobility got me nowhere. The guards said I couldn't enter any restricted areas or private homes. This is probably the game's way of hand-waving why what is supposed to be a teeming capital is so small. The only area I could explore was a thin north-south street leading to the caliph's palace. There were buildings on both sides.

        

Ha. I'll bet it's not even programmed.

         

Encounters in the city:

    

• A "trade office and money changer." I could trade gems for gold or gold for gems, but I did neither for now. 

• I earned 200 experience points for giving 10 gold pieces to a beggar in an alley. 

• A building "for rent" had a note inside that the previous owner, a scribe, had been arrested for possessing forged seals. "Let this be a lesson to all who plot against the caliph." It was signed by Vizier Zummerand. I told you a couple of entries ago that this game felt a bit like Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (1990); here we have a similar plot of a city ruler turning tyrannical.

      

At least this city's fountain isn't dried up.

        

• A supernatural emporium sold potions of healing (100), extra healing (200), invulnerability (800), and giant strength (500); oils of elemental invulnerability for each elemental type (150-300), Moonstone Shards with different spells ranging from "Water Blast" (400) to "Lightning" (2,200). He also sold me a Gilded Dove for 200 gold. I had the option to say, "No, that is robbery," but it didn't get me anywhere. Apparently, the detailed haggling mechanic in the tabletop game wasn't implemented in the computer version. Anyway, this shop seems to serve as a useful money sink.

• The Travelers' Rest Inn had a sign saying it was closed. A couple of people were hanging out inside, but they didn't have anything important to say to me.

     

This was a common sentiment.

       

• Ingrid's Shop of Wonders seemed promising, but all she would sell me was a slice of honeybread. I wonder if that's like a sweetcake.

• A street merchant was selling cakes, but the game wouldn't let me buy any. Ditto a rug merchant and a guy selling pots.

• Several private residences. 

• On the west side of town, I found not only a trainer, but the same trainer as the one I met in Zaratan, Zubakon. He explained that things are falling apart in Zaratan. I told him I was ready to learn a new combat move. We sparred for a while, but all that happened was I got a second "action circle," which apparently causes my sword swings to damage enemies to the left and right as well as in front of me. If I can get one more (there are only three slots), my swings will damage enemies in all directions. There's no actual "move" to learn.

• A "Gambling Club" offered a game called "Guess the Number," that old "high/low" guessing game that's perfectly solvable in seven guesses. This variant only gives you six, but that's enough to get it 63% of the time, and the game pays 3-to-1. That's a 1.89 gold piece return for each gold piece spent, and the game lets you bet up to 500 gold. The only thing that keeps this from breaking the economy entirely is that it takes time. The interface for adjusting your guess is particularly annoying.

     

This got old fast.

        

• A healing shop. It would be ridiculous to waste money there with free healing on my ship.

• A place called "Reptilian Desires" offered to sell me a "wise serpent" for 102 gems.

• A coal shop, but you need a house in the city to buy from it. 

       

There were numerous NPCs on the streets, most of whom either commented on how oppressive the caliph's rule is becoming or spit on me for being part of the Al-Hazrad family.

        

How does everyone know me?

       

Eventually, I wandered up the road to the caliph's palace, a large building with many rooms. In the grand hall, I met Grand Vizier Zummerand, whom I gave a lesson on agentive versus non-agentive language.

       

This would 100% be my response in real life.

        

The vizier told me I could see the caliph, but I'd have to wait until a gong sounded. So I explored the palace a bit and was treated rudely by multiple guards and other palace residents.

          

That's an awfully specific policy.

       

In one room, I found a floor pattern that could be just decoration, could be the solution to a maze.

   

This is like the wallpaper at a Holiday Inn.

     

Eventually, the gong sounded and I went to the caliph's throne room. I demanded my family's release, which got me nowhere ("Your audacity knows no bounds!"), so I asked if I could just visit them. Worried that I might conspiratorially pass or receive information from accused assassins, the caliph summoned the vizier, who cast a spell to detect if I was telling the truth. The caliph then asked if I knew of any information that would point to my family's guilt or innocence, and I honestly said no. (I know it's not going to go this way, but it would be an awesome plot twist if it turned out my family was responsible.) The caliph said I could visit my father but not my mother and sister.

      

Interesting leadership style.

        

I still had to bribe the guard with 75 gold pieces to get into the dungeon. It was curiously enormous, patrolled by both human guards and miniature copper automatons, another creature outlined in the "new monster descriptions" section of the game manual. (Are regular copper automatons part of D&D canon?) A guard escorted me to my father's cell, which looks fine graphically but is described in the game text as particularly squalid. I observed that my father was pale and frail, but a Potion of Extra Healing fixed him up (and got me 600 experience points). I really liked that. So often in RPGs, you encounter sick or injured NPCs and the game won't let you do anything despite a battery of spells, potions, and other items that routinely cure every affliction you have and bring you back from death's door.

          

My father is an understanding guy.

     

My father asked me to find my mother and sister, find out how they're faring, and report back to him. I pointed out that the caliph had ordered me not to visit them, and he asked if I had sworn an oath to that effect. I said no, so he suggested it wouldn't be a violation of my honor if I ignored the caliph's demands. I agreed with him, but there was a dialogue option to hold firm. I wish I had saved and tried it; I'm curious if that was an illusory role-playing option (e.g., my father would have just demanded that I obey him anyway) or a real one.

     

Hiding from a copper automaton.

       

I had to avoid guards and copper automatons as I explored the dungeon, but it wasn't hard (lots of alternate corridors and empty cells to duck into). There were a lot of NPCs in the cells, claiming that they were there for relatively minor offenses against the caliph, such as criticizing the new laws or spitting on the palace wall. Many complained they were ill and dying. It was very evocative. One prisoner who didn't protest his innocence was Shubakan, the forger, who freely admitted that he forged the vizier's seal for "some guy from the caliph's court." Interestingly, while searching the palace, I found a note in a drawer that said, "Do not forget to see Shubakan." I have no way of telling who the room belongs to, though.

    

One of the caliph's pathetic victims.

      

I found my sister talking to herself in the back of her dingy cell. She came to her senses long enough to upgrade my sling with a +1 sling shard. My mother was far to the east of the dungeon, in a better cell block. She was in good health and told me not to worry about her. I returned to my father, told him how things were going, and got a Ring of Protection +1. It went right onto my character sheet, not in my inventory.

     

Like so.

       

I had hoped my family members would have something to offer about the genie's curse, but my father just said the creature must have found some way to slip his bonds. I had to bribe a guard 100 gold pieces (good thing I had plenty!) to get out of the dungeon, and then I bribed the original guard 400 more to move my father to the dungeon's safest cell. I guess I have no way of verifying that he did so, but I got 1,000 experience points for the effort. 

    

Having nothing else to do in Bandar al-Sa'adat, I left the city, rowed back to my boat, and told the captain to set sail for Shibaz. We were attacked at sea by undead pirates; I had to board their boat to defeat them all. They left a treasure chest with 159 gold and 9 gems. The whole dynamic is silly given that I have infinite healing available on my ship.

    

Bringing the fight to the other ship.

        

Shibaz had a small wilderness area with the same type of creatures in the oasis back home. I was therefore able to gauge the differences in combat with my new sling and powers. To use the new swing, I had to hold down the ENTER key instead of just pressing it. It wasn't easy to master when I needed to strike multiple times in a row. On the positive side, the +1 on the Sling of Seeking seems to add a lot more power than you'd expect given that it's only +1 and not, say, x2.

    

The island had a large complex with indoor and outdoor areas. The outdoor areas had lots of air elementals (regular and miniature), giant boars, debbis (what I've been calling jackals), and those goddamned bees. There was a room in which I got attacked by furniture.

    

Furniture closes in on me. I don't even want to know what's happening in that top left relief.

      

I found a new enemy amidst some oil lamps on sticks: greater ghuls, which can go invisible in the middle of battle. They had me furiously paging through the manual to look up a description (I love these moments), and it turns out that you can still target them when they're invisible. That was the key to defeating them. 

      

They got me the first time, though.

       

I had to bypass a couple of statues, one of which wanted me to recite a pledge to "uphold and protect the wisdom of this place." There was a book that taught me the words, but unfortunately I found it after the statue. The statue gave me the correct oath, but one word at a time, for which I had to pay a gold piece per word. The other statue required me to contribute knowledge to the library, so I had to find a scroll with something valuable on it. I ended up finding three scrolls, but the statue rejected two of them.  

      

If a substance with a partially reflective surface is positioned so that its third index of refraction matches the wavelength coefficient . . . 

        

Beyond the statues was a chest that spoke to me when I opened it. It accused me of trying to steal its treasure, but I protested that I had planned to put treasure in. We negotiated a fee of 13 gems for a shard that it carried; the shard added +1 to my sword.

      

I promise you I no longer think that.

        

Around this time, a guy on a magic carpet started flying around the area. I finally caught up with him outside. He refused to take the mirror I had brought from Farid. When I asked him about the name of the Genie Lords' island, he said he'd go look it up in the library, and he took off.

   
When he didn't come back, I went looking for him. In a room where I'd found some kind of altar (with symbols similar to the floor in the caliph's palace), it was now slid aside, revealing stairs beneath.

     

Either there's a secret staircase in the caliph's palace or this symbology means something else.

       

I went down into a large cave maze, where I spent the next hour or so running around and solving puzzles. This game really likes its puzzle mazes. There were spikes to negotiate, levers to pull, flame elementals to kill, urns to smash, runes to step on, and bridges to cross. Some of the rooms had statues that rushed up to me (causing damage) when I got near them. There were a number of chests with gems, gold, and magic shards.

     

Pulling a stone block.

Solving a rune puzzle to pass through an archway.

Attacked by clingy statues.

          

The hermit was buzzing around on his carpet the whole time. He kept telling me things other than the answers to my questions, claiming that he was answering the question behind the question. But as I made my way forward, I discovered that the secret to reaching the library myself was to find a magic carpet and fly to its entrance. I finally found one, and I hoped I could take it for the rest of the game, like in Ultima, but it only works between floor runes.

     

He was in the backstory!

       

The library was another large maze full of giant rats, giant spiders, earth elementals, and ogrimas (like ogres). There was one battle with a group of thieves trying to loot the place. I reached Level 6 after some random fight. Chests had more gold, gems, shards, and a Ring of Protection +2.

       

An ogrima.

 

How did you even get here?

        

The hallways had about two dozen scrolls, each with a line or two of pithy wisdom, all useless, such as: "Those who need advice the most love it the least" and "Adversity is the straightest path to truth." Some of my favorites:

   

• "Indolence is the stepson of ambition" and "Admiration is the daughter of ignorance." A few more, and I could construct a family tree. 

• "Avoid fighting shirtless young men and you will live long."

• "The mind of the djinn is like a songbird—the words are sweet, but ultimately are about nothing."

• "Allegories are like the waterbags of desert wanderers. No one knows why, but this is so." 

        

I'm pretty sure this is a direct Jack Handey quote.

      

I found a chest called the "Casket of Worldly Cares," which asked me if I wanted to put the magic mirror in it. I did. The hermit later picked it up and started arguing with his own reflection. When I interrupted him, he said: "Why don't you sail on to Jaza'ir Jiza and leave us alone?" I thus got the name of the island of Genie Lords. Later, I found a scroll with the same information.

     

Either way, that's where I need to go next.

     

I got out of there and returned to my ship. I finished off this session with a quick trip to Bandar al-Sa'adat to train to the next level (I now have an attack that damages everyone around me), and then to Sorcerer's Isle to deliver the Gilded Dove to the pahari. In return, she told me that she had spoken to a marid genie who used her Crystal of Vision to determine that Kara is still alive, but "trapped behind a wall of blue energy and grows weaker every day." The marid also wrote words on a parchment that I should speak when I meet my "true enemy": JIZALA MIR'ZABIN. This is the second parchment I'm supposed to read to my nemesis. 

       

Next time, it's on to the island of the Genie Lords. I find the plot fun, the world-building solid, and the atmosphere just on the edge of immersive. I'm still not wild about the mechanics, but I wouldn't mind another 8-10 hours with this one. 

      

Time played: 12 hours 

   

****

   

Previous entry in this series

    

Next entry in this series

07/13/2026