Star Trail: Plunder and Lightning

 

The party has displeased the gods.

       

I've started a number of newer RPGs or quasi-RPGs over the last couple of years, all for the Xbox (I don't spend time playing PC RPGs that aren't for this blog), including both Pillars of Eternity games, Avowed, Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and The Outer Worlds. The part I enjoy least are the first few hours, when you're still learning the game's conventions. I'm not talking about its controls, which are usually easy to figure out, but rather more subtle aspects of gameplay. 

 

One of these days, I'll try to organize a comprehensive list, but here are some of the things on my mind as the game begins:

 

• Do health and mana restore automatically, or do you need resources to restore them? How precious are those resources?

• How do you distinguish important NPCs from generic background characters?

• Is this the sort of game where every item has potential value, or are there too many items in the world to possibly grab them all? Is it the sort of game where a thorough player can find every bit of treasure, or would that be insane?

• Is this the sort of game where when you see a valuable item, you take it, or does it have an ownership/theft system? If the latter, what are the consequences for violating it?

       

Just a break in the rhetoric to note that by the end of this session, I did have the Salamander Stone.

       

• What kind of karma meter does the game have? What are its consequences?

• Does the game have fixed classes, or does the player build a character through skill selection? Which skills are most valuable? By the end of the game, will the player have amassed almost every skill, or only a small percent? Does the game offer a way to dump selected skills and start over? 

• Do dialogue options have plot consequences or are they just a means of gathering information?

• Will NPCs keep saying the same thing every time I talk to them, or do I only get one shot at each conversation? 

• How much freedom does the player have to explore the world, outside the current questline? 

• How much control does the player have over the inventories and actions of NPC followers?

       

That is a very small sample of questions whose answers only slowly become apparent, sometimes not until well into the game. Many of the most amusing moments in my personal RPG history have occurred when I thought I was playing one type of game and it turned out I was playing another. Imagine bringing the morality of Ultima IV when it comes to opening a town's treasure chests to, say, Phantasy Star. Imagine coming off of Bethesda's Dishonored, where loot is so limited that you actually get a score after each mission with the percentage that you managed to find, and then trying to scoop up every item that you see in Skyrim. Imagine trying to just tromp off in your own direction during the opening chapters of Kingdom Come.

      

Because your goddamned manual tells me to.

         

In most of the period that his blog has covered, the need to answer these questions has been less acute. Very few games of this era have offered complex enough systems for role-playing, economies, NPCs, crime-and-punishment, and other such themes. But some of them are getting close, and Star Trail is definitely one of them. In recent entries, continuing into this one, we've learned that this is the sort of game where you sometimes need to talk to NPCs multiple times about the same subject. We've also learned that it's the sort of game where having a large inventory of utility items matters, and in which you don't necessarily want to loot everything that you see.

   

You can say that the manual warned me about this or that, or that NPCs warned me about this or that, but that's disingenuous. Manuals are full of what we call dicta in the legal profession. They often give weight to mechanics that barely exist in the game itself or fail to mention important elements. The same manual that obliquely warns the player to click multiple times on the same keyword also emphasizes things that play little role in the game. NPCs are no better. Some of their words may seem prophetic in hindsight, but there is no RPG player that, lacking such hindsight or a hint, operationalizes everything he's told by an NPC.

      

Have I shown the full-party death screen before? If not, here it is.

       

So, yes, I guess I shouldn't have taken so much loot from the dungeon. In my defense a) it feels abandoned; b) I've been trained by 30 years of RPGs that when you find a chest in a dungeon, you open it; c) some amount of looting in the dungeon is 100% required to finish it. Also in my defense—I went back to check the screenshots on this—what Inradon Xermosch specifically says is that no one should "be tempted to desecrate the halls of the Supreme and Most Ancient of Gods by stealing from Ingra's legendary hoards of gold." He doesn't say not to steal anything, just gold. I didn't take the gold.

      

Okay, I did, but just to see what would happen. I reloaded.

      

As this session began, we were about halfway through the Dwarven Pit. We arrived on maybe the fourth or fifth level. In the first room, we found a structure surrounding a well or pool. The structure had four alcoves with gargoyles in them, and as we approached, the gargoyles came to life.

   

It took me four tries to win this battle with no party deaths. The first time, we were at half-strength, and death was inevitable. (I appreciate that the game lets you reload from within the middle of combat.) Even at full-strength, they were obnoxiously hard. When I finally won, the party was in such bad shape that I needed to rest for about 48 hours. Other than experience, I don't think the battle earned us anything. 

    

Almost immediately thereafter, I ran into the level's second tough battle, against six undead dwarves wearing tattered leather clothes (this leather becomes important). After a couple of losses, I managed to win mostly by casting "Lightning" over and over. The spell, which blinds its target and makes him unable to attack or parry, seems to work against everybody. All three of my spellcasters can cast it. If there's a more useful spell in the game, I haven't mastered it yet.

       

My go-to strategy works again.

          

I still feel like I need some more experience with the battle system before I offer a detailed analysis. For now, I'll say:

   

• I generally like the number of tactics available, and the ability to do ranged things on the diagonal is a major improvement from Blade of Destiny.

• The axonometric view still makes it hard to see what's happening behind the figures, and it can make it hard to position characters in the right square. I wish there were functions to rotate and zoom, though I realize that's asking a lot from a 1994 game.

     

Try to parse anything going on in that cluster.

        

• I don't understand how the game determines the starting positions of characters and enemies. I wish there were more control over it.

• I wish there were a combined move/attack function. Clicking on an enemy ought to simply move the character next to him and attack with the primary weapon.

            

Auto-combat sometimes produces mysteriously horrific results, even with easy enemies.

       

I've experimented with auto-combat a few times. It's good when the party's success is 100% assured. But it doesn't make the best use of spells, in particular the aforementioned "Lightning." When victory is assured, I sometimes switch to the first type of computer control, where you actually see the characters and enemies acting on the battlefield. This can be turned off in an emergency. The few times I've tried the summary auto-combat, it's produced weird results with no explanation, such as my strongest party members mysteriously dead while my weaker ones are still alive, or one out of three spellcasters coming out with an empty mana bar while the other two never cast anything.

    

The battle with the undead dwarves gave us a Stone Medallion that turned out to be important. I think it was this level that had a giant wheel that we turned and produced "a gurgling sound" in the distance. I was never sure what this accomplished.

      

I assume this did something.

       

The next level had some rivulets of water. When I stumbled into one, the game said that the characters washed off the soot that they had acquired back on Level 1, restoring their charisma.

   

The next stairway went up rather than down, and we found ourselves in a new area of the earlier level. It had a walkway surrounding a deep pit, with stairways down. On the floor of the pit was a stone slab. The game gave me the option to try to lift it and then had the characters struggle in vain for three iterations of "do you want to try lifting the stone slab again?" before finally offering me the ability to use the crowbar I was carrying for just such a purpose.

   

If it's "no trouble," why not just offer me the crowbar option in the first place?

       

On the next level, we found another chest-that-I-was-not-supposed-to-loot, this one containing 3 Girdles of Might and a set of parchments that were key to solving an upcoming riddle, so I'm glad I looted it anyway. At this point, every single member of the party had a Girdle of Might, with one to spare.

   

I didn't record in which chests I found which parchments, but the totality of them suggested that Ingerimm had six apprentices, and those apprentices wore special leather boots, gloves, and jerkins. It was thus little surprise when I found a chest containing seven pairs of each. It had a plaque on the front that read: "Take the God's as long as you need it, though don't use it any longer than need demands."

        

Part of the clue that, I guess, I wasn't supposed to read.

       

Getting my party members clad in the attire took forever. I had to drop so much stuff that I nearly cried, including all my spare water skins (fortunately, the level had a fountain). The issue wasn't so much taking the leather pieces—I could have done that one at a time—so much as preserving my existing armor, pants, and boots for when I returned the leather pieces to the chest. (The game offers no option to temporarily drop items or store them in chests.) I thus had to clear at least 18 spaces. In the end, I think it was mostly unnecessary. The final area had no battles, so I could have split off one character and sent him ahead.

   

In fact, the game seemed to be hinting at that. After we donned the gear, we went down a corridor with a bunch of glowing floor plates, and a bunch of my characters peeled away from the party, not wanting to continue. I forced them back into formation.

     

I'm not sure I care what Gnomon prefers.

      

The corridor ended at a wall with a circular symbol. One of the bits of parchment had suggested that we hold up a torch to the symbol, and it was at this point that I discovered that I didn't have any torches. I had dropped them all after Lilii enchanted her wand to serve in the place of a torch.

        

I'm curious how anyone else solved this puzzle without opening any chests. Please comment.

       

Fortunately, I remembered a place on Level 1 where some torches and other gear were stashed in a corner, so I went back up there, grabbed one, and returned.

   

Holding the torch up to the symbol opened the way into a forge. We woke up a golem who asked for a "pledge." I assumed he was talking about the Stone Medallion, and I was right. A cinematic showed the golem tossing the medallion into a pool of lava and then operating the forge for a while. In the meantime, we could converse with him, and he had a bit to say about the Salamander Stone.

     

Part of the cinematic showing the golem forging a weapon that I didn't get to keep.

       

When he finished his work, he presented us with a magical sword made out of "asthenil." I was happy for about 30 seconds, and then it became clear that the game expected me to trade the sword for the Salamander Stone. Bastards.

    

I did the honorable thing. Not that it mattered.

     

A chest next to the one with the Salamander Stone was "filled almost to the brim with jewelry, gems, and coins." I had the option to take it or add some of my own coins to the collection. I did neither in the "real" game. On a reload, I looted the chest and got 5,000 gold pieces as well as a bunch of gems and jewels, but the doorway leading out of the area closed and wouldn't open again. Since the party shares all wealth, I think maybe you could steal the money by sending a single character into the area, looting the chest, and letting him die, but for role-playing reasons, I didn't try.

   

Back outside the forge, we returned the leathers and then made our way back to the surface. I didn't find the alternate exit that some commenters mentioned, but I needed to return the key to Xermosch anyway. When we emerged in the dwarven town, we found a very different situation than when we entered. Dwarves refused us entry to their houses and shops and openly threatened us on the street. Xermosch wouldn't come to the door and told me to "put the key on the hook." Clearly, even though it was necessary to take some items from some chests, I must have taken at least one item from a chest I wasn't supposed to loot. I hope it doesn't have any long-term consequences.

       

I got this message several times, but no one actually attacked me.

      

We hustled out of town and hit the road for Lowangen. Almost immediately, we ran into the priestess who we saved from orcs at the beginning of the game. She praised our progress but warned us that there were more challenging tasks ahead. She told us we could keep the experience and levels we had been granted previously—I didn't even know that was a question—but said that we'd eventually have to do things that "the goddess" wouldn't approve of, apparently in the name of ends that the goddess would approve of.

       

Your goddess needs a philosophy 101 course.

      

The next few days were fraught. We completely ran out of food on our third day out of the dwarven town, so we had to rely on nightly hunting, which I often had to try three or four times. Something kept sniffing around our backpacks in the middle of the night. Someone seemed to be stalking us on the road. Characters got diseased several times for no apparent reason. As we passed a crag, a mysterious stranger yelled at us to "take it to Lowangen!" A couple of parties of orcs attacked us.

        

This happened several times.

      

A large dwarf named Hagebar, son of Haralda, accosted us as we rounded a bend. He warned us that an Orcish army was camped on the east bank of the Svellt River, just outside Lowangen.

      

Eventually, we reached the (menu) town of Yrramis, on the Svellt River, south of Lowangen. It had a Temple of Tsa and an inn. The innkeeper, Haldara Alberg (probably Hagebar's mother, though a slightly different spelling), told us that Lowangen was completely besieged by orcs. We stayed a couple of nights in a suite, ate a couple of decent meals, and moved on.

     

"Young Svellt" sounds like a teen magazine.

                   

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• I want to emphasize again how good the automap is. It annotates doors, chests, stairways, and special encounters more clearly than any previous automap I can remember. It also lets you fast-travel on the surface. You'd think after all that praise, I'd have a picture of the automap to show you, but I forgot to take one, and my party is now in the wilderness. Next time.

• Commenters wanted me to mention the journal. I agree that it's cool. It records texts and major milestones so that the player doesn't have to. The player can enter his own notes in the journal, but the utility is limited since the game doesn't index the terms in custom entries.

      

I apparently did anyway.

       

• Gnomon, the dwarf, reached Level 3 at the end of the last session. No one joined him during this session.

• I thought Lyra was insulting the other party members every time I asked her to treat their diseases, but apparently there is a disease called "Numbskull." I don't know why they keep getting it.  

         

"Stop calling me that!"

         

I crossed the Svellt, hoping to travel up the west side before entering the city, but I don't know if it's going to be possible. The map shows Lowangen mostly on the east side of the river. We'll see. I'm anxious to be rid of this Salamander Stone and to see what the next phase of the game will bring.

    

Time so far: 23 hours 

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion: Won!

 

Pter Rok: the original J.Lo.

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II

Date Started: 25 January 2026

Date Ended: 26 February 2026

Total Hours: 14

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

        

Summary:

 

The first game in the second Dark Designs trilogy, this one was written without the original author (John Carmack) but using his engine and mechanics, a kind of fusion of themes from Wizardry and Phantasie. A generation after the original trilogy, evil once again threatens the land, and it's up to some scrappy adventurers to start at Level 1 and work their way up to defeating it. The entire series was released on monthly subscription disks, so no one was expecting the quality of commercial titles. Nonetheless, all of the games in the series almost make it. Oblivion has fewer features than the first three titles but nonetheless preserves enough of the base mechanics to offer a passable experience with core RPG mechanics. It also has some fun with prestige classes, as outlined in my second entry.

    

****** 

      

Let's recap: Queen Victoria of Tarador has been acting strangely. She's possibly possessed by the spirit of Agamol, the villain from the first Dark Designs trilogy. Someone needs to go to Oblivion, find the Potion of Salvation, and administer it to the queen. The only way to get to Oblivion is to pay a "travel agent" 50,000 gold pieces and the Bones of a Saint.

    

The game ends up consisting of six maps. They have 32 squares along each axis, but every map is at least slightly truncated. There are places in the Old Quarter and New Quarter that the characters cannot reach because of water. The Palace Quarter consists only of about half a dozen rows along the north and west edges of the map; guards block access to the actual palace. The Sewers use less than half of the available space. I assume some of these areas that you cannot explore in Passage to Oblivion will become available in future titles.

       

A rough map of the game's areas.

          

I spent most of the first two entries just building the characters while exploring the city maps. As I ended the last entry, I was just on the cusp of paying the travel agent 10,000 gold to visit Crytus, a burial isle, where I could presumably find the Bones of a Saint. I had dipped down into the sewers briefly but found the battles with acid blobs a bit too hard.

   

Crytus ends up being two maps, both using enough of their space to make a rough "circle" (i.e., not using the four corners of the square map). The arrival map, the Endless Spiral, is true to its name. It consists of a long corridor spiraling slowly into the map's center, where there's a cluster of rooms, and then back out again. After reaching the central point, the player starts to encounter occasional stairways down to the lower level, Crytus, but to different parts of the level, some interconnected by secret doors, some not. The stairway that the player really needs—the one that allows him to get the Bones of a Saint—does not occur until the very end of the interminable spiral.

          

The description is at least accurate.

       

The sheer load of battles in these areas, both fixed and unfixed, meant that I had to visit three times. You can imagine how annoyed I was at having to traverse that damned spiral more than once. It occurred to me after finishing the game that maybe there were secret doors in the spiral, allowing for some kind of shortcut, but my tendency was only to search for secret doors when I had no other options. 

      

In keeping with the theme of the "island," most of the battles consisted of undead enemies, like ghosts, skeletons, and ghouls, some of which can only be damaged by magic weapons or spells. My priest's "Turn Undead" invariably killed all of them, but at 11 points per casting, I didn't want to use it on the smaller parties. There were also a lot of human spellcasters, like necromancers, priests, and thaumaturges.

      

Like so.

       

The secret to long-term exploration in this game is mana pills. You basically want to fill every available inventory slot with them. The more you have, the more generous you can be with mass-damage spells in combat and healing spells after combat. At 1,000 gold pieces each, they're not cheap, but you can occasionally find them on the corpses of spellcasting enemies. Still, no matter how many I bought, I never had enough.

 

Combat never got any more interesting. I fell into an early pattern that lasted until the end of the game:

   

• Have the two front characters attack the same enemy, prioritizing the most dangerous, if he has more than 20 hit points. Attack two separate enemies otherwise.

• Move my priest forward in the first round so he can share some of the damage. In subsequent rounds, have him attack if no one has lost more than 10 hit points, have him cast "Cure Light Wounds" otherwise.

• Have my wizard cast "Magic Missile."

   

The only exceptions were if there were more than four non-undead enemies, I would have the wizard cast "Flame Strike" during the first round, and if there were more than four undead enemies, I had the priest cast "Turn Undead" in the first round.

         

We're definitely using it here.

       

More than 90% of the spell points used by the priest went into "Cure Light Wounds," and more than 90% of the spell points used by the wizard went into "Magic Missile." Their effects scale with the caster's level, but they never cost more than one spell point each (for those classes). Even if every character had only one hit point, it wouldn't take more than eight castings of "Cure Light Wounds" (and thus eight spell points) to fully heal the party. Thus, there would be no reason to cast "Cure Serious Wounds" (14 spell points), "Cureall" (21 spell points), or "Cure Party" (24 spell points) except as an emergency in combat. Damage spells have a similar cost/benefit problem.

       

There were a lot of chests on the two levels of Crytus. Almost all of them were trapped, and their traps defied my yakuza's abilities all the way to the end. I had to switch his ring slot from a Strength Ring to a Speed Ring, sacrificing combat effectiveness, before I could open anything.

      

Crytus had a lot of secret doors.

       

The chests offered a lot of gold but not much in the way of equipment. Equipment rewards in this game in general are light. For armor, I never found anything better than the regular armor (leather, plate, full plate) that I initially purchased. Shields never progressed beyond spiked shields. For weapons, I found:

   

• A Staff of Sleep in the Endless Spiral.
• Two Silver Swords, one from an early battle in the Old Quarter, and one from a battle in the sewers.
• A Dagger of Fear. I forgot where.
• Two Aegis Maces, one in Crytus and one in the sewers.

      

Since I gave it to my wizard, I'm pretty sure I never used it.

       

Thus, most of my power increases were from leveling up and acquisition of (expensive) spells. The characters were between Levels 14 and 17 at the end.

    

After hours of exploration, I finally found the Bones of a Saint in an unmarked square. "Unmarked" means the automap didn't show the usual symbol that means "something to find," the way it does for traps, stairs, and very rare special encounters. Fortunately, the area was labeled "Tomb of the Saint," so  I was careful to step on every square.

      

Yum. I love marzipan.

      

At this point, I didn't know it, but I could have won the game in moments. Instead, I took some time to explore the sewers. There are three entrances from the New Quarter. The third is on an island that you can reach by walking through shallow water. But the sewers are unimportant. They have a lot of gnolls and giant ants, and a couple of extra magical weapons.

     

Accessing the sewers.

         

I thought that once I paid the travel agent for the titular passage to Oblivion, we'd actually have to explore Oblivion, or at least, you know, the passage to it. I arrived at the travel agent's office loaded with mana pills. But choosing the "Passage  to Oblivion" option led immediately to the end of the game. You explore Oblivion in Dark Designs: Search for [the Potion of] Salvation, which means that title qualifies as "banallure," but it gets even better: I had assumed that the travel agents would be opening some kind of mystic portal, but the "passage" is just a ride on a ferry, and "Oblivion" is just the next town along the river! Double "banallure!"

       

I guess "Paradise" becomes available in the last game.

          

Some random notes:

   

• In addition to Strength Rings and Speed Rings, I found Opal Rings and Ruby Rings, but these didn't seem to have any effect on my statistics. I assumed they were just for selling, but I kept one copy of each until the end of the game just in case.

• Something kept destroying my shields. I'm not sure which enemy it was—I mostly rapidly clicked through combat because it would have been torturous otherwise.  

• I kept my wizard equipped with a Speed Ring so she'd go early in combat. That would have been nice for my priest, too, but his dexterity was so low that even with a Speed Ring, he tended to go last in combat. 

• Although he had a reasonable number of spell points by the end of the game, I mostly forgot that my paladin could cast spells. Replacing my thief with a yakuza (fighter/thief) was definitely worth it, though. 

       

My thief's inventory at the end of the game.

      

It's worth talking about some of the features of the first three Dark Designs games that we don't see here:

   

• Nicer looking maps and textures.
• A greater variety of special encounters and NPCs (this game only has one NPC, the barmaid)
• More boss battles
• Shops that sold high-end items
• Some light puzzles

      

Winning the game took 10 hours longer than the shortest game in the original trilogy and four hours longer than the longest. Thus, in Oblivion, players have to invest more time (mostly in combat) while receiving less interesting combat. The only positive thing that Oblivion adds to the series is the availability of prestige classes, but since these don't become available until the player has leveled up several characters, they're also a function of time.

      

And my paladin's character sheet.

      

For these reasons, Oblivion gets a lower score than the 30/31 I gave to each game in the previous trilogy. I award it a 26. It must be said that it's still not a bad rating for a diskmag title; even with its length and flaws, I'd rather play it than most other diskmag games of the period. Any game that gets its highest ratings in character creation and development, magic and combat, equipment, and economy (3s and 4s here) at least understands what it means to be an RPG.

       

At the same time, I don't plan to play Dark Designs: Search for Salvation or Dark Designs VI: Restoration (the only one with a number in its title), both also from 1994, unless they come up as random rolls in later years. Neither game has any YouTube video available, but judging by limited screenshots, it looks like Restoration does use the same maps as Passage to Oblivion.

    

The Dark Design games are, notably, the last Apple II titles (even including the GS) that I have on my list until deliberately-retro titles appear in the 2010s (starting with Leadlight in 2010). True excellence was unlikely from a disk magazine serving a platform well past its glory years, but Peter ("Pet Rock") Rokitski deserves some credit for sending the platform off with, at least, some modest dignity.

Star Trail: Anvil Chorus

 

I  guess we're not worthy.

       

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

    

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

      

This seemed paradoxically too hard and too easy.

       

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

   

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

    

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

     

I assume it was better in German.

       

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

      

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

       

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

    

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

      

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

   

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

   

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

     

I hear you.

      

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

     

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

   

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

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

     

Next stop: the Bocca della Verità.

       

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

     

The girdle snaps into place.

      

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

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

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

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

       

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

       

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

      

Let me know if you come up with anything different.

       

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

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

           

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

        

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

        

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

       

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

   

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

     

I should have just attacked him.

      

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

   

More encounters on this level: 

     

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

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

     

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

       

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

     

Who would possibly have room for all of this?

     

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

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

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

        

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

       

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

       

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

      

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

   

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

   

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

     

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

      

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

      

Idiot elf.

      

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

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

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

       

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

        

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

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

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

       

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

     

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

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

      

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

       

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

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

      

Doesn't look so lively here.

     

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

           

Too many "yeses" ended up starving us.

     

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

 

Miscellaneous notes:

       

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

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

    

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

    

Time so far: 19 hours