Fate: Spells

Winwood prepares to enter the Chamber of Lhanis.

   

Fate has 200 different spells organized into 20 different books, giving it more spellcasting classes than any game I've experienced so far. Spellcasting characters generally start with the same class as one of the books--magician, conjurer, sorcerer, wizard, archmage, fairy, witch, enchanter, valkyrie, cleric, priest, angel, warlock, nymph, druid, alchemist, monk, banshee, elementary, and master. (The last two are exceptions, having no particular class.) But each class can learn additional books in a fixed progression. Once the enchanter or enchantress acquires the 10 spells of her initial class, for instance, she can learn witch, conjurer, magician, angel, nymph, alchemist, monk, and banshee spells. I'm not sure about the exact order, and I'm not sure if characters can ultimately acquire all 20 classes (9 is the maximum that any of my characters have), and I'm not even sure if the ladder is the same for all characters of the same class. But whatever the case, once the character has acquired 4 or 5 spellbooks, he or she is pretty well-rounded.

Spells in each book are acquired by paying guilds for one spell at a time, and they basically go in order of power.  The banshee book starts with a "Mindzap" that costs 6 points and hits one creature, and it ends with "Mindcrack" that costs 40 points and affects every creature in every enemy group, often killing them. The cleric progresses from a 3-point "Heal 7" that only works on one party member to a 36-point "Healall" that restores all hit points to all party members.
      

The manual tells you a little about what each spell does, but you have to figure out a lot on your own.

     
Spellbooks tend to be organized around a theme. Aside from a couple of "Light" spells, for instance, the conjurer's book is all offensive spells, and all of them have something to do with casting status effects on the enemies: "Nuts," "Greed," "Weaken," "Scare," and "Entangle," for instance. Wizard spells are also entirely about enemies (not one targets the party), but in a more directly damaging way: "Poison," "Iceball," "Icefist," "Shock." In sharp contrast, every angel spell affects the party or a party member, with several types of "Heal," "Cure," and "Protect." Cleric and priest spells are similarly weighted towards healing and undesirable effects. The valkyrie gets a set of spells that all improve melee combat, such as "Deprotect" (destroys enemy armor), "Surehit," "Longthrow," and "Weapon!" (strengthens the power of all party members' weapons).

Spells in the elementary book are largely about exploration: "Light," "Rain," "Zaptraps," "Zaprain," "Invisible," "Teleports" (turns them off), and "Storm" (for sailing) highlight the book. "Rain" and "Zaprain" are quite unusual, even unique for the era. Rain does have the effect of suppressing the number of enemy parties, but for the most part its effects are seen and heard. Very few games give you spells to manipulate the nature of the graphics on the screen for purely aesthetic reasons; perhaps the "Clear Skies" shout in Skyrim is the closest I can think of. Between "Zaprain" and "Storm," I must really be messing with this world's ecosystem.
     

"Calm winds" sounds great unless you're trying to sail. Looks like it's time for "Storm."

    
More than half of the druid's and alchemist's spells involve creating potions. For these to work, the caster has to have a water bottle (purchased at taverns) in his inventory. The idea isn't bad, but the potions are so underpowered that it's laughable, and almost all of them have redundant non-potion spells in other books. Since potion spells require creating the potion, then trading it to the character you want to have drink it, and then drinking it, they're far more annoying than other spells. Even at the beginning of the game, "AC Plus 1," "Heal 4," or "Dexterity +1" would have been more trouble than their slight advantages provided. (Attribute and skill boosts from created potions are temporary, I should clarify.)

There are quite a few redundancies so that early-game characters of any class can make a go of it. For instance, a bunch of classes start out with a weak-to-moderate spell that does direct damage to a single enemy, like the wizard's "Poison," the archmage's "Acid," the witch's "Stormfist," and the valkyrie's "Blast." Later, they get spells that damage an entire enemy group (e.g., banshee's "Firestorm," warlock's "Mindfire," witch's "Fireball") and from there maybe one or two that affect all enemies at once. A lot of classes have a spell that removes an enemy group from combat for a few rounds, like the Nymph's "Calm," the druid's "Passout," the wizard's "Sleep," and the enchanter's "Tornado." There are a handful of spells meant to soften enemies for other characters' melee attacks, and several classes have some variants of "Heal," "Cure," and "Cleanse."

A few classes are mysteriously worthless. The monk is foremost of these. He comes with a couple of very weak healing spells, and a handful of offensive spells that do less than the typical melee attack to a single enemy. His most powerful spell is "Slimefist," which costs 15 points and does a whopping 5-20 damage to a single enemy group. The master class is the opposite of this, with one spell that by itself costs 70 points and does 5,000 to 9,000 damage to all enemies on the screen. But none of my characters have yet achieved this book.

By the time you have several spellbooks, things get really complicated and you find yourself wishing you could delete some of the lower-level ones to save time and space. Fairies, clerics, priests, angels, and nymphs all come with healing spells that heal less than 10 points of damage to a single character. I'll never cast them again. Ditto all of the single-enemy offensive spells from the bottoms of several lists.

I should also point out that once you complete a few books, you no longer have to pay attention to a lot of the logistical considerations of the game. Early on, any number of "Light" spells obviate torches--and once you have the enchanter's "Flare," which not only lights things up but also reveals secret doors, you'll never cast a regular "Light" again. The cleric's "Zapsin" means you can murder friendly NPCs without having to pay for absolution at chapels anymore. The priest's "Zaphunger" and the cleric's "Vitamins" and "Rejuvenate" make resting, eating, and drinking a thing of the past (although I'm not sure if they're perfect substitutes, and I only use them when I can't stop for the night in a town). A priest with half a dozen spellbooks and a few "Restore" potions (which restore all magic points) substitutes for almost all of the taverns, inns, chapels, healers, and potion-sellers in the game.
    

The enchanter's "Locate" is easily the most-cast spell in my game.

    
Finally, there are a handful of starkly original spells among the lists. Oh, you'll tell me that they have analogues in other games, which is fine, but I've never seen them before, and they must be unusual if not unique. I guess I'd start with the enchanter's "Reveal," which "exposes an opponent's treasure." You cast it during a battle, and when the battle is over, you get more gold than you would have originally. For getting rich, there's also the alchemist's "Goldrain" which literally creates a few hundred gold pieces out of nowhere. Since the average mid-game combat might deliver 10,000 gold, the spell is hardly worth casting, but at the beginning of the game it can make a difference.

"Invisible" appears in many games, of course, but rarely like it does here, where you use it to avoid tripping encounters with enemy or friendly parties. You just walk through them as if they were ghosts. Several "Time Stop" spells are unique because of the effects they have in the game: not only do they prevent enemies from acting, but they also prevent a bunch of environmental effects, like teleporters, from operating.

I've covered "Getback" before, which retrieves characters' thrown weapons in combat and allows them to continue using them. Another odd one is the druid's "Mummy": if you want to revive a dead character, you have to do it within a time limit or they're too decomposed. "Mummy" preserves them until you can get to a healer (of course, once you have "Revive" yourself, that's moot).

My favorite pair, in the early part of the game, is the warlock's "Berserker" and "Candor." "Berserker" turns a single character into a humanoid monster with 99 strength, dexterity, skill, and stamina, but only 1 intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. He acts on his own in combat, performing devastating melee attacks, and he has a way of attacking friendly NPCs, too, without your consent. As fun as he is, he ignores his equipped weapon, and once you have greater melee weapons (which damage all enemies at once), you'd rather he didn't do that. "Candor" (an odd name) restores him to regular form. I wonder if the German developer wasn't translating offenheit, which I believe can mean something like "plainness" in German.
   

The "1 charisma" thing makes sense....this is a female character.

     
There is one particular oddity to spells that I find half-vexing, half-relieving: enemies don't seem to have particular resistances. Or if they do, they're quite rare. There are some enemies highly resistant to magic in general, no doubt, but fire-based enemies don't seem to have any special resistance to fire attacks, for instance. Enemies without "minds" to speak of (e.g., snakes) will still be affected by mental spells. Undead will respond to "Itch," "Cough," "Sleep," and "Scare." In some ways, this is good--I don't have to learn a bunch of resistances along with the spells themselves--but it's also uncomfortably weird. Because of this quirk, damage spells are just damage spells--whether the manual tells you the damage is caused by fire, ice, acid, or whatever, they all have the same effect.

    

This is almost embarrassing.

   

A lot of my time lately has been sussing out which spells work reliably against NUKEs: "nigh-unkillable enemies." These include the bane giants of Katloch, the dracs in the Valvice grottoes, and the ingols in Mernoc. These creatures seem invulnerable to physical damage. The combat screen will tell me that I've dealt it to them, but no matter how much I do, they never die. They have some kind of Wolverine-like regeneration going on between rounds, I guess.

The only way to kill these guys is through some kind of critical hit or a spell that causes an effect like stoning or instant-death. Fortunately, many of the weakness spells (e.g., the magician's "Armorzot," the valkyrie's "Weaksphere," the banshee's "Unprotect") seem to make them more vulnerable to critical hits. A few spells (e.g., the banshee's "Mindcrack," the warlock's "Stonecloud") have a chance of killing them, and the magic-resistant ones are softened by the warlock's "Zappower." Finally, while I'm testing all of these things, some of the "incapacitation" spells like "Time Stop" and "Faint" at least keep them from attacking me. Such high-level spells drain magic points quickly, so I suspect I'm going to have to stock up on "Restore" potions before the end of the game.
     

"Deprotect" seems to make NUKEs like ingols more vulnerable to melee attacks.

    

It's only late in the game that I've bothered to experiment with spells in such detail. Melee attacks are so effective, and all my spellcasters have excellent melee weapons, that it's easy to just spam attacks against everything except NUKEs. I'm now paying for the lack of accumulated experience. I'd appreciate if those who have played the game can respond with any spell tricks I might be missing.
  

In plot terms, a few things have happened since last time. I found the location of the Chamber of Lhanis--a paved area in the middle of the woods. My hints had only said to "linger," so I had to leave the game running for about 3 hours of real time, checking periodically as I worked on other things, before a gate opened in the middle of the area at 03:00. After some trial and error, I determined that Winwood had to enter the gate alone (in a split party) carrying each of the Moonwand pieces. When he came out, he had a re-forged Moonwand, but he noted that the Dreamstone had not been absorbed in it.

    

      

I had promised to return the Dreamstone to its owner, Rinoges, in Laronnes, and I didn't see any reason to delay that task. I boarded the Cavetrain at one of the forest stations, rode it to Laronnes, and sought out Rinoges in his usual place after midnight. He was happy to get his Dreamstone back and rewarded me with 7 ability improvement slots.
     

     
After that, it was time to use the Moonwand for its intended purpose. Unable to find where I parked my boat, I spent another $3 million on a new one, set sail, and moments later:
     

Doh!

    
I stopped at Pirate Rock on the way to Katloch and stocked up on "Restore" potions. Given that these are my final "money sink," they don't really cost that much. Even having wasted money on six ships, I could purchase about 3,000 of them.
    

I haven't bought anything in a store since the lamps I used to explore the first dungeon level.

     
I fought my way through the streets of Katloch and to the "blood circle" (really just a platform surrounded by water), used the Moonwand, and was automatically teleported to a walled-off section of town. There, a set of stairs led to the fabled Agyssium.
    

The walls and creatures of the Agyssium.

     
I suspect the Agyssium is a large, 7-level dungeon full of NUKEs and plenty of opportunities to update our understanding of combat in the later stages of the game.

Time so far: 236 hours