Game 578: The Search for Freedom (1994)

 

         

The Search for Freedom

Canada

Independently developed; published as shareware 

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 19 September 2025

    

This series represents a "first" for the CRPG Addict. We've had guest entries before on special topics, and at least twice (Time Horn and Die Drachen von Laas), I've allowed guest authors to finish a foreign-language game that I started. But I've resisted allowing guest entries that cover an entire game, without my having touched it. The Wargaming Scribe's coverage of Les Six Lys a few months ago was supposed to be the first, but since the game was so short, I figured I could maintain the blog's original vision by giving the Scribe most of the review but still playing it myself. Given that it took—spoilers!—seventy-two hours to play this game, I don't think that will be happening again.

      

Thus, for the first time, I present a guest commentator's full series of reviews of a game, from title screen to GIMLET, including all subtitles and captions. Let's see what we all think at the end of the series, and I'll decide whether or not to do it again. If I don't, it won't be because of the quality of the series, which I think is excellent.

   

Our guest commenter is AlphabeticalAnonymous, who left his first of over 250 comments on this blog in the summer of 2021. He is a science professor working in Kansas. He has previously lived and worked in Boston, California, and Germany.

    

I will comment occasionally [in italics and brackets] but the words in this series, beginning after the asterisks below, are otherwise his. His compiled review of the game is almost 30,000 words and over 100 pages, so I will be alternating them with my own entries for a while, which should give me some breathing room to enjoy a vacation and otherwise get caught up after a difficult spring. Thank you, AA!

     

*****

         

I’ve been playing shareware games, on and off, for decades. The earliest that I can swear to playing was EGA Trek (1988), which hooked me with both its bold colors and vivid sound but undoubtedly even more by virtue of the (wholly unlicensed) Star Trek theme. The author was one Nels Anderson of far-off Framingham, Massachusetts, a location that seemed distant and exotic (I was living in California at the time); little did young Me know that decades later I would be a daily rider on the Framingham-to-Boston commuter train. Anyway, Mr. Anderson gladly took my $10 registration and sent me the latest version of the game along with an eclectic 3.5-inch sampler pack of other offerings. Imagine my disappointment when the new, registered version turned out to have its explicit Star Trek references all safely anonymized: for instance, Klingons and Romulans were now Mongols and Vandals. The gameplay was identical, but my satisfaction was palpably diminished. I suppose it was an early lesson in the power of name brands. The earlier version still offers me a quarter-hour of nostalgia every year or so.

The Search for Freedom is another shareware game, but more modern and with far more complex gameplay than my old EGA Trek. Although the documentation states that Freedom is Howard Feldman’s first game programmed on “the IBM,” the result is no small fry:

     

[The game] will require a minimum of 60 hours to complete successfully. In all, there are 4 towns, 22 dungeon levels, each 20 squares by 20 squares, and 2 outdoor areas, each 32 squares by 32 squares. There are well over 60 magical spells to master, over 120 monsters to battle.

         
The first town and dungeon comprise the free portion of the shareware game, after which one must pay to register the game and open up the rest of the world. The game is still available for download on now-Dr. Feldman’s website and he is still accepting registration at $10 each—in nominal terms the same that I paid for EGA Trek, though rather more affordable 35 years on.
    
Aficionados of computer-based RPGs or adventure games will be familiar with Dr. Feldman through his curation of the Museum of Computer Adventure Game History (MOCAGH). The online-only Museum provides:

    

High-quality scans of the boxes, disks, manuals, clue books, maps, and accompaniments to thousands of computer adventure and role-playing games, most of them curated not from other sites but from scans that Feldman has made of the items in his physical collection. He also has complete sets of gaming magazines, newsletters, and hint books.

       
This description comes from the other exposure readers of these pages will have had to Dr. Feldman, as the author of the freeware CRPG Quest of Kings (1990, link to CRPG Addict's 2020 coverage). That game, his first serious production, was in some sense the prototype for the more elaborate Freedom. This second game was written in Turbo Pascal while he was a senior in high school, and so far seems that it would have provided good value for the money spent on the shareware registration.
     
Although I’ve been playing games via various types of emulators for two and a half decades, I had a surprising amount of trouble getting the game to run at all. Whether I tried the official version offered on Dr. Feldman’s website or the various (so-called) “abandonware” versions available on the web, I would repeatedly get errors telling me that “This is not an original copy of Search for Freedom” and to reinstall using my “original game diskette.” Even applying a patch from the game’s official website didn’t solve the issue. But every cloud has a silver lining; in this case, mine was discovering the eXoDOS project, which seems to provide a unified launcher and curated customization parameters for over 7,000 DOS and PC-Booster games. It installed (even on my Linux laptop, which is no small feat) and ran Freedom without any hiccups. 
      

From a bit later in the game. At least we'll recognize our enemy—the evil wizard Macabath—when we meet him.

       

The game begins with the player creating a party of six adventurers. These can be of four races—Human, Elf, Dwarf and Teddy (more on that in a minute)—who can be any one of four classes: fighter, thief, cleric, or mage. A Dwarf cannot be a thief or a mage; a Teddy cannot be a fighter or a cleric. You “roll” for your usual statistics: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, endurance, charisma, and luck (which “can protect the player from danger when all else fails”). I sampled 50 rolls and they seem to be consistent with natural 3D6 in each category. Some classes also have minimum statistics in their prime requisite. Regardless, you can either take the statistics or roll again without limit, but there’s no option here to recreate your favorite adventurer who just happens to have stats of 18 in all categories. Then you pick a name and save the character.
      
The manual strongly recommends taking one character of each class. After thinking about it, I decided to take a slightly more interesting path with my two “extra” characters being a mage and a cleric. I couldn’t help but take advantage of the chance to recruit at least one Teddy; members of this unique race are: “Small, adorable creatures who won't think twice about swiping money or other possessions from under your nose. They are very fast, and are often charming conversationalists as well.” In other words, charismatic thieves. They receive stat bonuses to Dexterity, Charisma, and Luck but penalties to all other stats. I finally settled on the following party:
       

• Ruxpin, a Teddy Thief with low wisdom and endurance but high Dexterity, Charisma, and Luck. 

• Becket, a Human Cleric with low Strength and Charisma (perhaps he’s deformed) with otherwise decent scores in the remaining categories.

• Tyrion, a Dwarf Fighter with abysmal Charisma (4), poor Luck, but good physical stats.

• Kizke, an Elf Mage with low Endurance but very high (17) Intelligence.

• Durkon, a Dwarf Cleric with good Strength and Endurance and with top marks (18) in Wisdom. And finally,

• Elphaba, a Human Mage with high Intelligence and middling-to-decent stats in most of the other categories. 

      

Starting statistics for Teddy Ruxpin. I like the fairly detailed overview of so many statistics that the game offers.

       

After forming your party of six characters (no more, no less), the game begins with nine screens of expository text. It ably lays out the plot and introduces Kamazol, the evil arch-mage and (I presume) the game’s “Big Bad.” After slaying his parents and “ruling the continents for quite some time,” he was in turn (apparently) slain by a hero bearing the sword “Soulseeker.” But as so often happens in these tales, “in death he [Kamazol] would find life” and “did not truly die.” In fact, briefly killing him made matters worse because it allowed him to conquer Aegea (essentially, Hell). He is now a lich with a growing army of evil forces on both planes of existence. In 1000 days, a triple-lunar conjunction will open a portal for Kamazol to return to our world' it is of course our job to stop him. “The prophet of Smythetown” predicted that we six heroes would reforge the broken Soulseeker, find a portal to Aegea deep on the Island of No Return, and defeat the evil. However (the narration continues), upon our arrival in Smythetown the “beautiful little town” was overrun by the evil wizard Macabath and his minions. They work for Kamazol and threw us all in jail. But we are then slipped a lockpick and 250 gold along with a message from “The Viper Alliance” that reiterates the main points of the quest. Thence, the game begins.
       
The action begins in a locked cell within the City Jail of Smythetown. The initial gameplay seems immediately recognizable to anyone familiar with the Gold Box and similar games; after all, the game manual’s introduction notes that the game was “inspired by such RPGs as Pool of Radiance by SSI, Shard of Spring by SSI, and [The] Bard's Tale by Electronic Arts.” It offers a tile-based, first-person view with simple, solid-color-filled wireframe walls and doors. Either the color scheme is intentionally chosen for high contrast, or Macabath’s evil has manifested in a mandate to paint all of Smythetown’s walls in bright lime-green. Movement is with the arrow keys. 
      

In fair Smythetown's jail cell, where we lay our scene.

     

The interface seems promising, with quick keyboard shortcuts for most actions (the mouse does not seem to be supported). You can see the options in the screenshot above. Magic-users begin with magic points (MP) but they will have to pay at the local magic shop or temple to learn any spells to cast. View gives each character’s detailed stat sheet as shown above. "Encamp" offers options to rearrange combat formation, share or distribute items, rest, save, and so forth. "Search" seems straight out of the Gold Box: turning it on allows the party to notice hidden doors and other interesting phenomena, but at the cost of each tiled step taking 10 minutes instead of just 1. I don’t know how to feel, yet, about that 1000-day time limit, but I leave "Search" on for now. "Look" is just a one-time "Search." "Utter" gives the ability to say something. Finally, one can always view the automap.

     

The games offers several handy options. First, the full manual can be accessed via a text-viewer within the game. I could find no way to search for text, but one can at least jump to desired page numbers as indicated in the table of contents. The same manual is of course also available as a 20,000-word text file with detailed instructions, including a list of over 60 magical spells, 50 types of monsters, and nearly 30 different types of items. The same text-viewer seems to double as the adventurers’ notepad within the game, automatically recording key phrases or scraps of information; unfortunately, it does not seem to allow manual text entry, but then that’s what I have Emacs for. Finally, there is the more-than-serviceable automap that tracks one’s explorations and adds some basic annotations. Between the automap’s “you are here” feature and the blue-on-white compass arrow in the first-person view, it promises to be a game in which getting lost, at least, is not a serious danger.

      

The automap after some initial exploration. A surprising number of those black areas seem to be utterly inaccessible. Completionists, beware.

        

Our motley band assesses the situation. As promised, we have 250 gold pieces, but no lockpicks or any other items to speak of. I suppose the picks are implied by our ability to unlock doors. Regardless, they immediately prove their worth when I try to move through the door to our cell. This presents me with options to pick the lock, bash the door, or cast the OPEN spell. I have no spells and don’t want to attract the notice of the guards, so I have Ruxpin, my thief, pick the lock. He fails several times, but each attempt takes no time and seems to have no negative consequences (the manual mentions that later on, some doors and chests will have traps with various negative effects). After a few tries, the lock clicks open, we step through the open door, and Ruxpin gets +5 experience points (XP). Each character starts out at Level 1 with 300 XP, and reaching Level 2 requires 600 XP in total. That’s a lot of locks to pick, so I hope that enemies provide more experience than that.
     
I soon have a chance to find out: we soon open another cell and find a ourselves face-to-face with a so-called "Insane Creature" and are immediately thrust into combat. I’ll cover combat in more detail once I have some spells and better understand the mechanics. For now, suffice to say that the party and its adversaries find themselves on a 21 x 21 tactical battlefield grid that more or less represents the local terrain (i.e., walls). Depending on their dexterity values, my characters have 9-15 movement points each. Characters can only move up, down, left, or right—no diagonals—and use two movement points per space. Attacking, casting a spell, or using other items requires at least three movement points. In this case, the enemy has only 20 HP. Although my characters are armed with nothing but their fists (1D2 damage, plus strength modifiers), they make short work of the Insane Creature. I also note that this enemy isn’t mentioned in the manual’s bestiary, so presumably there will be other surprises along the way. The Creature leaves behind one Leather Armour and six gold, and the party earns a disappointing 2 XP per character. Maybe picking locks is the way to go, after all.

We pick open several other cells containing dead men, "cause of death probably being old age." The only other clue we find in the jail is a man with a viper tattoo (the sign of the Viper Alliance) who is chained up. When we talk to him, he says not to rescue him but to instead “go on” and that someone named Arthur will rendezvous with us and provide further instructions. “To find Arthur, knock on door of Big Blue House and say ‘WHITE KNIGHT SENT ME.’”

Beyond the jail, I find myself on the loose in Smythetown, although the appearance of the environment is unchanged. I first go south and quickly find stairs down to the catacombs, where Macabath is said to reside. It’s pitch-black, and anyway we’re definitely not ready to take him on. Heading the other way, we quickly find the town Library. The game suggests to us that we need to save the world and don’t have time for books, but I know better. After all, libraries hold something infinitely more precious than gold: knowledge. My perseverance is soon rewarded when we go into the back room and find a book entitled Mastery of the Magic Art. Here I am offered my first real choice: do I want to spend a day (of my precious 1000 remaining) so that my mages can study the book? I decide to take the plunge. While the rest of the party twiddles their thumbs, Elphaba and Kizke pore over the tome for a full day. They emerge, exhausted but smarter: both of their Intelligence stats increased by two! So long as the 1000-day limit turns out to be a true challenge, I like this option of trading time to boost my capabilities for later in the game. But even if the time limit doesn’t really matter, I suppose we still made the right choice.

Continuing north, we pass the entrance to the Wayfarer’s Inn, but we feel nervous without weapons or armor and so continue hunting for a shop we were promised would be somewhere in town. We continue past a so-called Majik Shoppe to the northernmost edge of town, where we find that the main city gates are all locked by Macabath’s evil magic. Between that and the shareware registration, there’s clearly no way for the party to leave Smythetown at this point. We head west and pass through an unlabeled door, only to be informed that "Macabath has guards in each of the four turrets. They attack!" Uh-oh. We enter combat with four Sentry guards, each with 27 HP and 3 armor points (I think that armor reduces damage from successful attacks, rather than affecting a character’s likelihood of being hit). This is bad news because three of my party only do 1D2 damage and so are useful only as cannon fodder. The other three do 1D2+4 due to their better-than-average strength: between that and a few lucky critical hits we manage to miraculously kill two of the Sentries. By that point we’ve already lost a few party members and are too weak: the remaining pair of Sentries slaughters us. We are told that "The Earth is doomed. You have failed in your quest,” which at least doesn’t bury the lede. I’ll have to avoid that door next time.
     

Becket and Ruxpin were not far behind.

 Time so far: 1 hour. 1 party death. 0 reloads.

     

****

   

Next entry in this series

    

For further reading:

    

• Quest of Kings (1990), this author's first game.
• Pool of Radiance (1988), the first "Gold Box" game,  which heavily influenced this title.
• The Shard of Spring (1986), another influence according to the author. 
• The Bard's Tale (1985), another influence according to the author. 

 

Yendorian Tales: A Map of the World

 

To be fair, it's not really the entire island.

        

I almost always hate the second entry of any game that I blog about. It exhausts me just thinking about it. More than once during the past week, I launched Yendorian Tales and just sat there, looking at the screen, feeling the energy drain from me.

   

The first entry practically writes itself, as I cover the history, the manual, the opening cinematic, character creation, and first impressions. By the third, I've achieved a certain momentum, and I generally understand the game by then (although there have been some notable exceptions, like the recent Star Trail, where it took me until at least the fifth entry to hit any kind of stride). For the second entry, though, there's nothing to do but to play an unfamiliar, alien title and try to make sense of it.

       

I've learned to watch for the turning point, and for Yendorian Tales, it came at about the four-hour mark, when I was exploring the Athaneum (I'll sic it this once so no one posts a "'correction") and I found, on the bookshelf, a map of the island. There's something about knowing the size and shape of the world that instantly relaxes me—less because I want to know how much territory there is to explore and more because I need a plan for how to explore it. With even the crudest map, I can make a plan.

       

The library in the Athaneum. Note the trap door behind the counter.

       

Backing up, after the opening session, gingerly started to explore the world and almost immediately ran into the Athaneum, just south of the starting city, Saccate, which I really hope is pronounced the Spanish way. Exploring the four-floor complex took nearly three hours on its own. There were more than 50 NPCs. Some highlights:

    

• The Athaneum trains both wizards and clerics in their arts. It is run by a mage named Zamora. A lot of the NPCs were students who didn't have much to say except their chosen specialty.

• It has a temple, healer, horse-seller, tavern, and a kind-of inn called "the dormitory" where you can purchase a room permanently for 250 gold. 

• A couple of custodians named Conrad and Dorothy were preparing a large room for a special presentation from Zamora. 

     

I otherwise heard nothing about this.

        

• Magical arts in Thaine, the empire from which the people of Yendor came from, were governed by the Society of Wizards and the Holy Order of Druids and Clerics. Some of the students were from Thaine, and they reported turmoil and unrest in the homeland. Some planned to go home anyway.

• Lance, a student studying to be a wizard: There are giants in the Great Forest surrounding New Devon. 

• A whole dialogue chain (i.e., "ask BLAH about YADDA") taught me that a teacher named Griffin has the title of Great Scholar, but when I met Griffin, I couldn't get anything out of him.

• In addition to the map, the library had a book chapter titled "The Return of the Great One," which outlined how Zamora revived magic in Yendor after it wasn't spoken of for many years following a great war; a list of potion colors and their effects; and a book on spellcasting that reiterated the importance of Nuore. 

     

I'm guessing the red and pink potions aren't permanent.

      

• A trap door in the library led to the basement, where a maze of hidden one-way doors (you walk into them and they dissolve) led me to an archivist named Danner. He's spearheading an effort to recover scrolls, keys, and magic items. He offers a reward for scrolls in particular.

     

The wall temporarily dissolves as I move into it.

        

• A trap door leading up from the basement brought me to a small room occupied by a guy who can enchant non-magic items and +1 items. 

      

Enhancement!

        

• The second floor had a group of Council Chambers where the land's governors, a three-person body made up of city rulers, passes legislation. 

• I met Zamora in his fourth-floor laboratory, working on some kind of grand experiment. He wouldn't respond to many keywords, and he kept asking if I was there to bring him Nuore. 

        

Yeah, that's not suspicious or anything.

      

If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said that I love games in the Ultima style, where you talk with NPCs via keyword. Either I've changed (permanently or temporarily) or something about this game (maybe the tiny dialogue window?) makes it uniquely annoying. I was so over it by the time I finished up with the Athaneum. That said, I like that the NPCs in this game have stock responses to keywords that every NPC would be expected to know something about, including MONSTERS, YENDOR, MINES, ATHANEUM, THAINE, WIZARDS, and CLERICS.

          

Someone's a comedian.

        

Commands in this game remain a little wonky. A lot of things that look like they ought to be interactable (books, money boxes, chests, barrels) are not. Others interact in strange ways. For instance, (L)ooking at the bookshelves in the library gives you nothing; you have to (P)ick up the shelf, a command that never seems to work on individual books. There's no command to view your equipment and gold; you have to (D)rop it and then ESC from the drop screen without actually doing anything.

         

Why not?! I can pick up every other chest!

       

Once I left the Athaneum, I used the surrounding road pattern to figure out where I was on the map, which turns out to be the northwest area. I then turned my attention to combat, experience, and gold.

    

Combat at Level 1 is relatively hard. I had a character killed (a reload event) in about 50% of my battles, sometimes maddeningly towards the end. As I reported last time, the mechanics of combat replicate Ultima V and aren't bad, but it does take a long time to mince the characters into position, and I really wish the game remembered which enemy you had targeted last time. 

         

One of my clerics dies with only three enemies left and four chests on the screen.

       

I faced centipedes, ants, giant rats, wasps, bats, pickpockets, skeletons, and rogues, and I think their difficulty is roughly in that order. Humanoid enemies almost always have spells or missile weapons, so I try to avoid them. Fortunately, even animal and insect enemies occasionally drop chests. As I won battles, I slowly upgraded my equipment to silver maces, copper shields, and robes. Although I was making money, I didn't buy anything in the stores, trusting rather in loot-based upgrades (this turned out to be a good decision). Almost all enemy treasure chests have ore that can be sold at the mining company in Saccate, plus Nuore for spells. Spell points are relatively generous, even at Level 1, and they regenerate as you run around, so it's possible for healers to fully heal everyone after most battles, although I do need to keep an eye on Nuore levels (one unit of Nuore is consumed for every spell point).

       

Fighting bugs. I'm glad that giant wasp has wings, as I would not be able to see him otherwise.

        

Eventually, I noticed the letter "T" next to my characters' names, and I assumed it stood for "Train." Sure enough, my characters had reached Level 2. Unfortunately, I only knew where to find training for mages and clerics, in the Athaneum. When I got there, I was surprised to see a 700-gold piece cost. My finances barely covered getting my wizard and two clerics to Level 2. Fortunately, the increase came with "Cure Poison," which will save money now that I don't have to run to the healer in the Athaneum after every battle with a snake or spider.

          

Everyone can level!

      

Even though I couldn't afford it yet, I decided to try to figure out where I could train my miners and rogue. The map showed one other city in the northwest part of the map, so I headed there. The dense forests (the party cannot walk through trees) make it difficult to go anywhere on a linear path, but I eventually found the town.

      

The town was called Thieves Guild. It had no NPCs to talk with, just shopkeepers. There was a Thieves Inn (sic, etc.), a Thieves Tavern, shops selling weapons and thieves' tools, and—yes!—a thieves' trainer. Unfortunately, there were also a bunch of respawning hostile parties of thieves. I must have reloaded 20 times in the place as I slowly explored it, saving after each victorious battle and reloading after each death. The good news is that the loot from the enemies was more than enough to pay for Darkchild's training to Level 2. I also was able to equip everyone with scale mail or ring mail and copper shields. My wizard upgraded from a sling shot to a sling shot +2.

         

The weapons seller's list. Maybe I should invest in my own bows.

       

Behind a couple of illusory walls, the town also had a map seller. He had six pieces of the world map for sale for between 50 and 250 gold pieces each. I eventually bought all of them. At first, I thought that the map simply duplicated the one I'd already found in the Athaneum, and of course I had kept a screenshot of that. But it turns out that this one is interactive; if you click on the quadrants, it tells you the names of the cities there, the enemies you'll find, and the relative cost of ore. This is the only way that I found out the name of Thieves Guild, as there were no NPCs in town to say it. 

      

The in-game map is kind-of cool.

      

I still needed to level my miners. The map suggested that the only way out of the northwest quadrant was to cross a southern bridge, but I decided to walk east to the river and then test it by moving along the riverbank. I was nudged northeast by the pattern of trees, and I soon ran into a mine entrance. I decided to check it out. 

   

As NPCs in Saccate hinted, the party can just (M)ine anywhere and there's a chance of finding gold, Nuore, and other ore. There's also a chance of breaking mining tools, so it's good to have extra. 

      

Not quite worth it.

     

Almost immediately, I found a buried chest with some potions and a lot of Nuore. A little ways in, I met a man named Flagell, "trying to live out the last years of [his] life in peace and solitude." I couldn't get anything valuable out of him, but I'll bet he becomes important later.

   

There were no monsters in this mine, and nowhere else to go, so I continued the journey. I soon found another buried chest, next to a waterfall, with 275 gold, a steel shield, chain mail, and a "Giant glass."

     

It pays to watch out for those "mounds."

       

There is indeed no way to cross the river except for the one bridge southwest of Saccate, so I took it to the island city of Helsignor. The city had a weapon shop, armor shop, inn, healer, alchemist, and tavern.

     

Exit, pursued by a rogue.

      

The tavern offered a casino with three card games: "Twenty-One," "High-Low," and "Even-Odd." The Yendorian deck is a bit different than our standard deck. It has five suits with cards numbered 1-10 plus an asterisk, which always counts as 11.

          

Instructions for "Twenty-One."

     

"Twenty-One" has generally the same rules as blackjack, except with no face cards, the odds are very different. The instructions didn't say, and I didn't play enough hands to discern whether the house must hit on a 16 or below or stand on a 17 or higher. (There's no "soft" total in Yendorian blackjack, since * is always 11.) I started to work out the probabilities and a playing strategy, but I stopped when I realized how late I was with this entry. Overall, the odds seem worse to me than regular blackjack, although I did win two out of three hands that I played.

   

"High-Low," on the other hand, is a bonanza for the player. You get dealt a card and have to guess whether the next card will be higher or lower. Ties are a loss, but correct guesses pay even money. I calculate that the player has a 71.55% chance of being right. These extremely favorable odds are probably why this game has a 10-gold piece limit instead of the 1,000-gold piece limit for "Twenty-One."

      

Of course, I get a 5.

       

"Even-Odd" is like Yendor's version of roulette. If the numbers were just 1-10, the odds would be 51% in favor of the player, but any * is a loss, so that drops the odds to about 46%.

    

Tempting as it was to save-scum, I played a few low-stakes games and called it quits.

 

The suits are interesting. They are a sword, a ball being dropped from one hand to another, something that's either a lightning bolt striking a dancing mage or a mage casting a lightning spell at a cloud (or tree), two shields, and a dragon's head.

               

After selling my excess equipment, I had just enough money to get my two miners to Level 2. Unfortunately, by now my characters were all ready for Level 3, which for the miners will cost 1,700 gold pieces. Clearly, I need to hit the mines sooner rather than later. The map shows over 20 mine entrances. I'll start in the northwest corner near Saccate and see how it goes.

      

I can only afford one of them.

       

More encounters in Helsignor:

    

• A despondent woman named Olga said her favorite piece of art had recently been stolen by thieves.

• A man named Alden lay comatose in bed, tended by his wife, Phoebe. He had been a miner, and he was attacked by a giant scorpion.

• A man named Jacob will buy jewels for 1,250 gold pieces each. 

• An injured man in the healer's shop warned me that trolls hide under bridges.

       

Another borrowing from Ultima V.

      

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• The outdoor map has occasional mounds of dirt that the party can (M)ine to find treasure chests.  

• Leveling up gives you more maximum hit points and spell points and allows you to allocate a random number (roughly between 5 and 8) to each of your attributes. 

     

The highest bonus I've received so far.

      

• As far as I can tell, the rogue's only function in the game is to spare the clerics from having to spend spell points and Nuore opening chests with their "Open" spell. (In fairness, that was his only purpose in Wizardry, too.) There is no way to steal anything in town and he doesn't seem to backstab. 

       

He's about as successful as my Wizardry rogue, too.

        

• DOSBox saves screenshots by prefixing them with the name of the program running at the time the shot was taken. Usually, when I play a DOS game, all the screenshots end up having the same prefix. The ones for Yendor cycle frequently between different numbered programs, all beginning with "PROG" (e.g., "PROG1," "PROG9"). This suggests that the game is passing the data between completely different executable files for exploration, dialogue, combat, gambling, and other aspects of the game. I wonder if anyone has any insight as to why a developer would choose to do this instead of putting everything in one program like most games do.

     

By the end of this session, I was in a nice groove and wondering why I had been so lethargic earlier in the week. Let's hope it's clear sailing from here.

   

Time so far: 6 hours 

    

****

    

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