Die Quelle von Naroth: Gone Trolling

I hate these guys.

          

As this session began, my party had solved the quests in two of the six cities of Naroth--Dandall and the Kloster--and had found a note indicating that the destruction of the titular well had been accomplished by someone named "Gonzales," using three magic items, working at the direction of an unknown master. The three magic items were hidden after being used, and I have no idea where they are.

    

The party had moved on to the city of Kospan, and we were in the middle of exploring the dungeon, trying to find a Book of Life, which, along with the Book of Time that we already found, we could trade for the Book of Poetry. No one had given us a quest to find the Book of Poetry, though, so it was kind of a half-hearted quest.

 

The dungeon has at least three levels, with lots of pressure plates and keys. We fought our way through hobgoblins, ogres, orcs, druids, and even a few medusas. My combat "tactics" these days mostly consist of sending my knight and barbarian forward while my cleric tries to keep up with healing them and my mage casts offensive spells. Occasionally, my cleric has nothing to do (when no one has lost any significant health), so I was thinking of giving her a missile weapon. Fortunately, I found a crossbow after one battle. Axon (the mage) has a longbow, so even when we're out of magic points, everyone can attack.

 

The battles I dislike the most are when enemies have bows or magic, as I have to cross the entire battlefield going after them instead of just waiting for them to come to me. 

       

It takes a long time to get to this side of the screen.

      

In a treasure chest on the second level, we found a page from the Book of Death.

       

It is a page from the Book of Death, which has been considered lost for decades. The page can hardly be read anymore, the years have eaten away at it so much. The only information that can be gleaned from it is that the three magical items--the Black Diamond, the Crystal Orb, and the Book of Death--when used in the right place, fuse together to form the most powerful magical weapon ever developed. It also describes how and where you can change dimensions using a magic wand.

        

In case you want to double-check the translation.

        

So I guess I'm looking for those three items to repair the well. The bit about changing dimensions is interesting, as I have a magic wand--I believe it was a quest reward--but I haven't figured out how to use it. It doesn't seem to do anything in combat.

    

Two groups of four trolls blocked my progress, so I returned to the surface, where everyone could level up. My cleric got "Group Healing III" and my mage got "Firestorm," the first offensive spell that damages all enemies in a 3 x 3 area. Unfortunately, even with them, I couldn't get past the two groups of trolls. I couldn't even defeat the party of two trolls back in the first dungeon. So I did what I did last time and headed off in a different direction, this time to the city of Arpolis.

           

I keep finding copper and gold rings I can't do anything with. Maybe they're just meant to be sold.

        

Arpolis has an interesting cross configuration with 10 total doors. The first one I opened led to a tavern, where I got an earful about Gonzales:

        

I'd like to know how you know someone like Gonzales. Gonzales and his men belong to a circle of conspirators whose declared goal is, or was, the dethronement of the king. His power has since become corrupt, and he can be hired by anyone who knows where to look for them. I've heard a rumor that Gonzales had something to do with the destruction of the well, but I don't think he's capable of such a big deal. I assume he was acting on someone's behalf. You can ask him if you meet him.

            

I would have liked to know where to meet him, but that's still a lot more than I had. The city otherwise had the usual selection of services: weapons, bows, healing, potions, and training. The southernmost door to the city was opened by a woman who asked us to try to find her daughter Rosalia, who went missing one day. People say she's probably being held captive beneath the city. 

         

I'm not sure why the game asks if you want to take a quest.

        

An eastern door opened to the house of a sage, who said he could identify rare items. He didn't have anything to say about most of my stuff, but he lit up when I handed him the page from the Book of Death:

        

The piece of paper the poet gave you contains the notes of a magician who lived many decades ago. Under the village of Lapolin there are numerous vaults and corridors that date back to the times of the orcs. I discovered a magical place in one of the vaults that would make it possible to create an extremely mighty magical weapon, but unfortunately I haven't figured out all the ingredients yet. The spot is usually covered by a stone block, but this can be removed. Otherwise it's actually easy to spot.

         

This turned out to be a bug.

       

I don't know what he meant about "the poet gave you," as I found the paper in a chest, but this gives me some more information about how to re-create the weapon that destroyed the well, and then--what?--somehow undo it with the same weapon? That's not really how weapons usually work.

               

Later, I realized the whole purpose of the sage is to read things for you in case you didn't create a character intelligent enough to read the various books and notes. He doesn't impart additional information. When I handed him the page from the Book of Death, he was supposed to just read the bit I already quoted above. Somehow, the text he read got mixed up with that of a "blurred note" that I didn't find until later. Thus, I had all of this information prematurely.

        

Across the way from the sage, I met the member of the Writing Guild who wants the Book of Poetry. 

   

There were two dungeon entrances, one on the east side of the city and one on the west. The dungeon was three levels, and I was surprised that I was able to complete it, wiping out all monsters, in a single visit. There were numerous battles with goblins, hobgoblins, soldiers, ogres, giant spiders, giant rats, and orcs. The most difficult was the final battle, with just two soldiers, but wearing platemail. Platemail is the common denominator among the enemies I haven't been able to defeat so far.

      

Facing multiple druids.

       

The second level introduced teleporter pads in addition to the wall-opening and door-unlocking pads that existed previously. At the end of a corridor, I found an old woman who said she was in the dungeon collecting moss for her brother, who runs the potion shop. She said she heard the screams of the kidnapped girl below. I found the girl, Rosalia, in the final cell. She named her kidnapper as Gonzales, but said she didn't know what he wanted with her. 

   

Back in town, Rosalia's mother rewarded us with a key to a door in "the old castle up in the mountains." She said that Mirag in Kospan could tell us more.

   

Everybody but Chester leveled up, my cleric getting "Teleport" and my mage getting "Ice Storm." With these new levels, or just because I was lucky, I finally managed to defeat the two platemail-clad trolls in the Dandall dungeon. Trolls are so hard because they hardly take any damage. Even the most powerful spells routinely only hit them for 1 or 2 points. If they're wearing platemail, that's especially true. Anyway, the victory got me a modest amount of experience and 300 gold pieces. They weren't guarding anything vital.

      

My mage spells got to be fun.

      

I similarly cleared out the last of the enemies in the monastery dungeon, returned to Kospan, and got another level for my knight and mage. This gave my mage "Hailstorm," which I think damages every enemy on the map. It costs a lot of magic points, though, and I can only cast two between rests. Still, it trivialized combats with large numbers of weak creatures like kobolds, rats, and giant spiders.

    

In the tavern, I asked about the name Mirag. The innkeeper hustled me into a back room and to an old magician sitting at a table. Five full screens of text followed, which I will summarize. Mirag heard of our rescue of Rosalia, and he knew we were looking to fix the well, so he was inclined to trust us. Naroth's ills, he said, have been caused by a stranger named Bersakus, who crossed the mountains "many moons ago" and hired Gonzales's band. He wants to conquer the kingdom, and he thinks he can do it easily by simply waiting for it to dry up. Bersakus is invulnerable to normal weapons, plus he hangs out in a parallel dimension, so it's tough to find him. Mirag thinks we can defeat him with the same object he used to destroy the well in the first place; doing so should reverse the spell. He also suggests that the way to Bersakus's dimension is through the "old castle." This jibes with what we already knew. The quest seems to be: find the Black Diamond, Crystal Ball, and Book of Evil; reunite them in the dungeons of Lapolin; take the object to the old castle; use the magic wand to pierce the veil between worlds; and kill Bersakus.

       

One page of a very long exposition.

        

First, we needed to finish the dungeon beneath Kospan, which turned out to be four levels. There were a couple of tough battles with 4 trolls each, but other than those, we didn't have too much trouble. We had to find our way down to Level 4 to step on a pressure plate, which opened a door back on Level 2 and led to the final treasure. It was guarded by a single gargoyle, a very easy battle that feels like it should have been harder.

   

When we emerged from the dungeon, we had the Black Diamond and the Crystal Ball but no Book of Life or Death. That must be found somewhere else.

 

I'm not sure that's a "diamond."

       

Having completed Arpolis already, we moved on to Lapolin. The first door we knocked on was that of the mayor, who said he lost his wool coat--a symbol of his office--beneath the city. In the tavern, they'd heard of Bersakus. He had visited the town recently and "spread fear and terror with his hordes." He left some minions in the dungeon beneath the town, guarding something that could be dangerous to him.

   

Aside from the usual services, there were two entrances to two different dungeons. One was four levels, one five, and both relatively complicated. I think I spent as much time in the Lapolin dungeons as in the entire game up to this point. I conquered them in a long single day in which I was feeling sick (I picked up a cold or flu or COVID on my trip last week).

    

The first dungeon started with a long maze with multiple pressure plates that I needed to find to unlock doors in other parts of the maze. There were maybe half a dozen battles. Level 2 was mostly open, with encounters and pressure plates scattered throughout the vast interior and behind doors in the corners. 

 

On Level 2 of the first Lapolin dungeon.

       

The walls on Level 3 spelled out the phrase Der Ort ist Nah ("the place is near"). A pressure plate opened the way to a stairway, but another door remained closed. I took the stairway down to Level 4.1, where another bunch of combats and pressure plates finally got me to a treasure chest, in which I found the key to the second door on Level 3. That brought me to Level 4.2, another fairly open level in which the wall patterns created arrows pointing to a central square. The central square had a 1 x 1 block of stone on it when I first arrived, but a nearby pressure plate caused that to lift away.

       

From the Sheltem School of Dungeon Design.

       

This turned out to be the "fusion chamber" where I needed to create one powerful magic item out of the three individual ones. Since I didn't have the Book of Death yet, I had to make my way back to the surface.

     

I wonder if there's any special location on this level.

      

Lapolin's second dungeon started with another maze of pressure plates, illusory walls, and keyed doors. On Level 2, the game did something interesting with the pressure plates and having the same plates close and open more than one door. I had to fiddle with them for a while to get the right combination to open the door to the stairway. I did it through trial and error, and I'm still not sure what the logic is to the plates.

   

Level 3 was another regular maze, but Level 4 was a teleporter maze. The level had 11 isolated regions, interconnected by teleporters--between 1 and 3 in each area. There was only one battle, though, with I believe six gargoyles. They were very easy. I'm not sure why the game thinks gargoyles are hard and keeps using them as "bosses." Maybe they're harder for different party configurations.

      

They don't look much like gargoyles, either.

        

The gargoyles were guarding a chest with the Book of Life. Elsewhere, I found a "Battle Cloak" that gives one of my fighters extra combat movement, plus the mayor's cloak. I can't remember exactly where the mayor's cloak was, but a suit of magic armor came with it. I returned it to the mayor for 2,000 gold.

     

Back in Kospan, I traded the Books of Time and Life for the Book of Poetry, which I took to the guy who wanted it in Arpolis. He gave me, predictably, the Book of Death. Sighing, I trudged back through the four levels of the first dungeon in Lapolin, stood in the center of the arrows, and used the Black Diamond. "The three objects merge into an inconspicuous stone," the game said. It is called the Stone of Death. I now need to go to the Schloß, confront Bersakus, and use the Stone of Death on him.

       

It can't be that unremarkable if we're calling it the "Stone of Death."

     

I was pretty sick of the game's battles by the end of this session, but I can't blame the game. I chose to play for 7 hours straight. Overall, Die Quelle von Naroth does a good job keeping you right on the edge of being able to defeat the foes you face. Of every half dozen battles, one is a walk (e.g., a bunch of spiders, who die if you shout at them), four are just hard enough that you have to pay attention, and one requires a couple of reloads. These usually involve trolls. I've gotten sick about how predictably annoying trolls are, especially in platemail, and I'm looking forward to them no longer being part of my life.

     

Unless something goes wrong, I should be able to wrap this up in one more.

   

Time so far: 14 hours.