Realms of Darkness: A Smashing Good Time

Second quest solved!

      

Our second quest was to deal with a cursed crystal ball. Its previous owner had learned from the ball itself that the solution would be found in the ruins southwest of the city of Grail. The ruins ended up being four levels, and it took me about six hours to fully explore them and complete the quest.

   

In contrast to the odd shapes and sizes of the levels in the first dungeon, the four levels here were a relatively uniform 16 x 16, although with some oddities clearly meant to prevent the player from getting too complacent. Level 1 had a single square jutting out from the otherwise perfect cube of a level. The other three levels each had between 1 and 3 squares of dead space. Each level also continued to offer relatively pointless one-way doors and one-way walls in odd locations, although some of them offered more consequential one-way walls. Teleporters and illusory walls were rare but still a mechanic of the game.

     

The first level of the second dungeon. What is that one stupid square doing there?

         

Let's take the puzzles level by level.

   

Level 1

    

• Two pointless rooms, each of which teleported the party to the other. Both were across the hall from each other. The hallway in between had a message: "Don't get lost!" It would have been impossible. The whole thing had no purpose. It wasn't even a momentary distraction.

• A corridor in which we were driven back by a "dazzling display of lights." We had to find a pair of sunglasses elsewhere on the level and activate them with the text parser. It was not the worst anachronism of the evening.

    

I couldn't think of an appropriate quip.

      

• A door for which we had to find a red key.

• An electric fan found on the floor in a maze of single-square rooms with a lot of one-way doors. The fan came into play on Level 4.

   

Level 2

   

Accessed by a chain from Level 1, Level 2 started in a room that opened into an adjacent corridor. In one square, we saw a sign that read: "Future home of stairs." The corridor wrapped around past a voice that warned "Danger ahead!" and dropped us down a pit. I thought we had dropped to Level 3 at first and started mapping it as such, but it turned out that the pit and the destination were on the same level.

  

It took me a while to figure out how to get back to the beginning of the level, via a one-way door. The enemies were hard enough that while I was searching for the way back, I suffered my first full-party death. As long as one party member remains mobile, the party can keep exploring, try to get back to the surface, and pay the temple for resurrect. But once the eighth person falls, the game says that the monsters have won and instructs the player to insert the boot disk to erase them from the character library. I declined to do this and restored the game from a backup of the disk. I have been playing honestly and paying for resurrection when individual characters die.

       

If "any key" includes the power button, we're good here.

      

Elsewhere on the level:

    

• In a nook in one room, we found a dwarven smith selling merchandise. He also said that his wife had been kidnapped, and he asked us to rescue her, giving us a Wizard's Key we'd need for that purpose. We found his wife elsewhere on the level and brought her back, for which he gave us a "stairway kit." We also bought a bunch of studded maces and leather armor from him, the best items in the game so far.

     

Rule #1 of a happy marriage: Don't move your wife to a dungeon.

     

• As we entered one area, a voice boomed out, "Let the tournament begin!" This small 6 x 5 area had walls to suggest an arena and random encounters every few steps. There didn't seem to be any way to "win" the tournament, but perhaps I just didn't spend enough time there.

   

The "tournament" area had a lot of these guys.

    

• In a room off the arena, a box held a suit of chainmail, the best armor found so far.

• A door to one room announced the "Rogue Alliance branch office," but there was no one there. I had to pass through here to find the dwarf's wife, however.

• In the northwest corner, we found instructions for building stairs. This, coupled with the stairway kit from the smith, allowed us to build a stairway to Level 3.

   

Level 3

   

• A wishing well. We later found a dime in a secret area and tossed it in (I guess regular gold pieces weren't good enough). A message told us that: "If you can find someone to willingly take on the cursed object, your mission will be accomplished."

      

All right, which one of you wished for that?

     

• A bridge preceded by a sign that warned us there was a weight limit of "four characters." For the first time, I had to break the party into two groups of four, then reunite them on the other side. It was a trite use of the mechanic, but it was clearly meant to get the player used to it.

    

Identifying the members for the second party.

    

• On a desk, we found and read a manual titled Programming: The Trial and Error Method. 

        

Who wants to be the first to work it out?

      

• A painting on a wall of "ten strange white towers." Examining it led to a message that the "towers" were set up in a triangle. We had found a large black ball earlier on the level, so the whole thing put me in mind of an arrangement of bowling pins. Sure enough, the BOWL keyword led to us rolling the ball through the wall. The stairs to the next level were on the other side. 

    

It was a cute puzzle, but I feel like one of my spiked maces should have been able to accomplish this.

        

Level 4

   

• In three or four places, a "frantic gnome" was running around, screaming about his lost "seismic device."

• A statue of a knight in a nook said, "Those who do not impress me do not pass." I brought up the parser and tried FIGHT, DANCE, JUGGLE, and a bunch of other keywords to no avail. Looking through the screenshots of previous messages, I remembered the programming manual, and I tried PROGRAM. The knight was satisfied and opened the wall for us. Groan.

        

I should show him what it took to emulate this game.

     

We found a boulder teetering on the edge of a ledge, and it seemed obvious to me that we'd be able to use it to smash the crystal ball. From the gnome constantly whining about his seismic device, I figured we'd have to find it and use it to cause the boulder to fall. (I tried reaching the ledge with rope & hooks to no avail). But before we found the seismic device, we found a goblin running a pawnshop who offered to buy the ball for 10 silver. I declined, but I wonder what the consequences are for solving the quest this way. It's nice to have a role-playing choice.

   

The seismic device was found in an area of fog that we had to use the electric fan to disperse. (No idea where we found power for it.) Once we had it, we returned to the boulder. It took me a minute to figure out how to use it—I had to EXAMINE it, note that it had a lever, and then PULL LEVER. Fortunately, the game saved us from doing this while standing directly under the boulder.

        

Again . . . mace.

       

Eventually, I got the sequence right and smashed the crystal. We warped back to the surface (more on how in a second) and returned to the nobleman. He rewarded us with a Staff of Healing and told us we could use "his" bridge. I was wondering how the game was going to offer any more quests given that we'd already explored the only two dungeons.

       

Is the river laughing with me or at me?

      

Enemies naturally got harder and harder during the session, with many of them capable of stunning, blinding, and poisoning. I had to leave the dungeon a lot for healing. Between healing, food, and the few equipment upgrades I bought from the dwarven smith, I ended the session dead broke. 

     

Getting paid 1 silver coin per combat doesn't help.

      

Getting in and out of the dungeon was facilitated by a couple of Blades of Escape that we found. I've been having my sorcerer collect all the equipment we find and painstakingly cast "Item Identification" one at a time whenever we return to town. For a while, I found nothing but standard items, but slowly that started to change, and this session delivered several daggers +2, staves +1, and three Blades of Escape.

     

The blades perform adequately as weapons, but more importantly, when I)nvoked, they cast "Teleport," long before I would have gotten the spell from leveling. It turns out that "Teleport" in this game just lets you teleport by level, not to specific squares. It's risky to use on the way down; my read is that it won't work if there's some puzzle you have to solve to get to a particular level. Every time I tried to use it to travel to Level 4 of the dungeon, we just bounced into solid rock and took a lot of damage (fortunately, unlike Wizardry, you don't instantly die in such situations). But traveling back to the surface has so far been pain-free.

    

I'm still mostly enjoying combat. It's challenging without being punishing. Every time I finished up a level, before heading back to town, I found a completely open square (no walls) and spun in place to generate random encounters. When you have no adjacent walls, all characters can fight in combat. This "grinding" only amounted to three or four battles per level, though. Usually, by the time I finished exploring a level, I was in rough shape.

    

One of the more memorable enemies on the level.

 

I have so many questions.

Never mind. I have new questions.

       

We saw that the distance from Level 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 were each 1,000 experience points, but it increased to 2,000 to go to Level 4 and then 4,000 (8,000 total) to go to Level 5. My characters are all Level 5 at this point, but it's going to take a while to get to Level 6. Earning a few hundred points per battle, it's hard to see how we're ever going to get Level 8 spells unless the game lasts a long time.

    

Speaking of spells, each level has brought a few new spell slots, and I haven't been as adventurous with them as I should be. For instance, I tend to spend all my sorcerer Level 1 slots on "Fireball," but it sounds like "Absentmindedness" (makes monsters forget to attack you) could be equally useful. I've been using priests mostly for healing, but they have some Level 2 spells ("Confuse", "Blind") that I should try more often. I'll try to give a full spell update next time.

   

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• There's a Level 2 priest spell called "Gnihton Spell." This is, of course, "nothing" backwards. The manual says that it makes the party feel invincible, but it doesn't promise that it does anything. The same spell appears in Tangled Tales, the next game from the same authors.

• In interests of full disclosure, I should mention that after completing each map, I have been checking them against the ones that Abacos uploaded to StrategyWiki, because I haven't felt like checking every perimeter wall for secret doors.

• Every time the game asks me who will dare approach a chest and try to disarm it, it amuses me that I named my thief "Timid."

    

Everyone looks at the thief and snickers.

    

Winning the second quest opened a bridge to the other side of the southern river and added 15 new outdoor squares to the game map. There are two dungeon entrances plus a store named "Willy's Weapon Warehouse" that sells long swords. I'm not sure what the next quest will be, just that the guard in Grail said that he heard of "trouble beyond the river" and that a fisherman on the river warns that the other side of the bridge is the territory of someone named "Gorth."

     

Doesn't sound like the kind of place where you want to pitch a tent.

    

By next time, I should have an idea of who Gorth is and whether he's my nemesis or benefactor.

   

Time so far: 15 hours

 

 

Game 549: Pathways into Darkness (1993) and BRIEF: Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete (1992)

     

But do they journey into the realms?

       

Pathways into Darkness

United States

Bungie Software Products Corporation (developer and publisher)

Released 1993 for Macintosh

Date Started: 25 April 2025 

      

For a company that is primarily famous today for launching the Xbox (2001's Halo), Bungie oddly spent its first decade resolutely faithful to the Macintosh. Pathways into Darkness was the company's response to Wolfenstein 3D (1992) for DOS, and I believe that Pathways is the first first-person Macintosh game with continuous movement (as opposed to tiled movement). [Ed. Nope. That would be David Smith's The Colony from 1988.] This landmark status convinced me to play it despite its extremely thin CRPG credentials.

   

Chicago-based Bungie was launched in 1991 by Alexander Seropian, who had already published Gnop!, a variant of Pong, as freeware in 1990. His next title was Operation: Desert Storm (1991), a top-down tank game. That same year, Seropian met Jason Jones at college. Jones had written a multiplayer combat game for the Apple II in 1988, which Seropian offered to publish (as a Macintosh port). The result was Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete (1991), which was successful enough that Jones was soon a partner in the company.

     

(Minotaur is listed on some sites as an RPG, but it really isn't. I nonetheless checked it out prior to starting Pathways, and I offer a BRIEF at the bottom of this entry.) 

         

The manual cover is explained by the backstory.

        

Pathways started as an attempt to make a first-person version of Minotaur, but the pair soon decided that they wanted a single-player game. They went through several plots before settling on the Lovecraftian story presented by the game: An alien race called the Jjaro has contacted the President of the United States with a dire warning. Millions of years ago, an ancient, powerful, malevolent being arrived on Earth with the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Buried deep in the Earth, the ancient god slumbered for millennia but has recently begun to stir. Strange creatures have been seen in the forests of the Yucatan peninsula, around a strange pyramid that does not seem to be of Mesoamerican origin. There's a mention that Hitler sent soldiers to investigate the pyramid just before World War II, but none ever returned.

   

The Jjaro say that they are on their way to Earth to deal with the creature permanently, but they won't arrive for a few years, and the alien god will be fully awake in a week. Their recommended solution is to send a strike team as deep into the pyramid as possible, where they can detonate a nuclear device, stunning and burying the creature. Two days later, an elite team is airlifted to the Yucatan. The player is a member of this team, but a parachute accident leaves him off-course, unconscious, and bereft of equipment except for a flashlight and a survival knife. He gets himself together and enters the pyramid, presumably a couple of hours behind the rest of his team. He has five days to find the device, activate it, and escape the pyramid before it detonates. A secondary goal is to find ancient treasures and return them for study.

      

The game begins.

     

Gameplay begins with no character creation. The player faces a long hallway on the ground floor. The interface is arranged in four windows: character, inventory, messages, and exploration, each of which can be resized and rearranged. That's good in theory, especially if you want to increase the side of the exploration window to experience a greater sense of immersion, but you really do need to see the other windows much of the time. I wish the game had a full-screen exploration option with a button that called up and dismissed the other windows as needed.

     

Movement is with the arrow keys or numberpad. The SPACE bar attacks. I find the numberpad the easier of the movement options, as strafing is mapped to 7 and 9. On the main keyboard, strafing is mapped to Z and X, so you have to use both hands at once to get all your movement options. 

   

Movement and turning are both smooth and well-timed, neither too fast nor too slow. The graphics are crisp and the controls responsive. Tutorials pop up as you explore to help get you accustomed to the game. A "Map" command brings up a very clear automap. Overall, Pathways doesn't feel like a "first" anything.

      

An excellent automap.

      

The first level, titled "Ground Floor," is small. In the first large chamber, next to a blue rune that I'm not sure what to do with, I find the body of a German soldier, complete with a copy of Mein Kampf. He also has a Walther P4 pistol and four magazines. The manual warns the player to conserve ammunition, so I keep my knife active for now.

     

The game eases the player into its mechanics.

     

The level branches into two directions, each leading to a different ladder, both going up. I thought I was supposed to be going down! Each ladder has a red rune in front of it; red runes are the only places in the game that you can save.

    

One of the rooms has the level's only enemy, this red thing on two legs with a mouth on the top of its head and a tongue coming out of it. He dies with two knife thrusts, so that's not so bad. As I walk over his body, the game tells me that it's a "headless."

      

My first kill.

      

I head up one ladder to a level titled "Never Stop Firing," except the game has already made me paranoid about using ammunition, so I do my best to get through it with my knife. This is difficult because the level is swarming with headless, sometimes appearing three or four at a time. They have a ranged attack, some kind of poison spitball.

       

A few seconds of combat.

      

Amid multiple reloads as I test different strategies, I come to realize that timing is vital. The headless always wait a few seconds between spit balls, so if I can dodge one, I can run forward and stab the creature before he spits another one. This is of course harder when there are multiple headless, or when they're close and I don't have enough time to strafe away. Success involves a lot of keyboard agility, which I have never possessed. Enemies move as fast as the player, so once they have your scent, there's no outrunning them.

    

The level is quite large, with a lot of stone doors that open as I approach, but only from one side or the other. There are two chains that must be pulled to open a room in the far north, which has a yellow crystal. Crystals are magical objects. They come in a variety of colors, and according to the manual, yellow ones let you speak to the dead. When I ready it, it gives me a power bar underneath my health bar. "Dead" must mean human dead, because the dead headless have nothing to say.

       

Finding the yellow crystal.

       

In addition to the headless, there's a single "zombie" (the game's term) on the level. I later encounter a lot more of them. They're particularly annoying because they cannot be stabbed fast enough to kill them before they get to throw at least one bone at you.

   

I need to heal frequently, and the only way to heal so far is to rest. This of course takes time, and if you do it too often, you run the risk of not completing the mission in the five-day window. This is another thing the game has made me paranoid about.

    

Those red runes show up rarely enough that taking screenshots is a big problem. Basilisk has no keyboard shortcut for screenshots, so I have to use the Windows snipping tool. I can't be fumbling with that while I'm trying to avoid spitballs from headless.

     

This happened while I was adjusting it from "rectangle" to "window."

     

"Never Stop Firing" has no more ladders that I can find, so I head back down to "Ground Floor" and try the other ladder, which leads to a level called "Lock and Load." It has a lot more headless and zombies, and there are times that I have to use the Walther. The game's claim to RPG status, incidentally, is that each weapon has a skill level associated with it. I started at "Expert" level in "Melee Combat," the Colt .45 pistol (which I have not found), and the M-16 rifle (which I have also not found). After I fired a couple of shots with the Walther P4, it showed up in the proficiencies list with "Beginner" next to it. These skills otherwise haven't budged. The only other type of "character development" is that you earn points for certain plot milestones, which add to your maximum health.

   

I'm only halfway through "Lock and Load" when I find another ladder up. I figure it's a better use of time to just take ladders when you discover them, so soon I'm on "They May Be Slow . . ." Amidst more headless and zombies, I find the body of a German soldier and use the yellow crystal. This pulls up a keyword-based dialogue screen. The manual says everyone responds to NAME and DEATH.

   

The German laments that he no longer remembers his name or his life, but he had seen people pass through the room since he died. When I press further, he tells me that someone walked through the wall on the other side of the room. I give it a try, and sure enough, it's illusory. There's a blue crystal on the other side.

      

This game has a bleak view of the afterlife.

      

Again, before I complete the level, I find another ladder. It goes up to ". . . But They're Hungry." I'm immediately attacked by some kind of wraith, which seems immune to my knife and bullets. I imagine I'll have to use the blue crystal on him, but after my death, I wrap it up for the night.

     

You can barely see him, but he's there.

      

I'm not in much of a position to judge what makes a good first-person shooter, but Pathways into Darkness feels like an excellent one to me. Despite somewhat limited graphics (not for the era, just in general), it manages to be atmospheric, visceral, gory, and a bit terrifying. Not since Dungeons of Daggorath have I felt such dread at the sound of enemies in the next room, or felt that I really needed to "get gud" lest I run out of time or ammo.

   

I really could do without the time limit, though. Mostly because of resting, it's already 14:47 on Sunday, about 8.5 hours after I started. I don't know whether that's good or bad for where I am, but even if you tell me it's okay, I'm never going to be able to take my eye off that clock.

   

I'm not so far into the game that I'm loath to start over if I've already screwed up or missed some key game mechanic. Hints are welcome.

   

Time so far: 3 hours

     

******

       

Despite the name, no minotaur appears in the game.

       

Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete

United States

Bungie Software Products Corporation (developer and publisher)

Released 1992 for Macintosh

Rejected for: No meaningful single-player version; no character development

    

Minotaur is a simple, RPG-ish game in which, as the manual has it, "two or more players on different computers are thrown into a huge, randomly generated maze and through the use of various magical and mundane items attempt to find and kill each other." As the computers must be connected by a serial cable or AppleTalk, the game is nearly impossible to emulate today, although this video shows a couple of players who managed to do it recently. 

    

"Character creation."

      

Character creation consists of assigning a name and distributing 60 points between brawn, agility, and lore. When the game begins, each player finds himself in a different part of an enormous maze. Judging by the video and logic, gameplay occurred in two phases. The first was running around collecting items: weapons, armor, spells, and usable items. You can keep four of each. They appear in the upper left-hand corner in four columns, and the player moves a cursor in each column to highlight the active object. Clear statistics indicate what effects the objects have on gameplay. There are common items and unique items, and which ones are close to your starting point is the luck of the draw.

        

The second phase was the actual battle, engaged when any two players first encountered each other, although with more than two players, it was possible for some to form temporary alliances. 

         

Wandering the maze.

      

There are dozens of objects with as many effects. Players can raise and lower attributes, turn invisible, paralyze their opponents, disguise themselves as skeletons, levitate over walls, teleport, attempt to trap their opponents in areas with "stalkers" (the dungeon's only monsters, which players cannot directly engage or kill), turn themselves into stalkers, slow opponents, negate magic, and do a bunch of other things to gain a tactical advantage.

    

There's no "character development," which wouldn't make sense in a game that only lasts half an hour at best. There is technically a single-player mode, which sets you up with an opponent named "Bill the Pincushion" who cannot move, does not attack, and cannot be defeated. The only purpose of the mode seems to be to introduce players to the controls and to let them try out different items on the hapless Bill. 

     

I'm repeatedly stabbing Bill with my dagger here, but it does no damage.

       

In an October 1992 Computer Gaming World review, William C. Fisher lamented that Bill didn't have some rudimentary AI, which would have allowed lonely Mac owners to enjoy the game. (He also whines about the lack of mouse support but otherwise calls it "an engaging and playable game.") I agree. It looks fun, with evocative graphics, lively sound effects, and boisterous gameplay, and I can see how it put Bungie on the map. It feels like a blend of Gauntlet, Sword of Fargoal, and early Stuart Smith games like Fracas or Ali Baba.

   

Four years later, Paranoid Productions licensed Minotaur's code from Bungie to create Odyssey: The Legend of Nemesis (1996), which is a proper RPG, so we'll see something like these screens again.

Realms of Darkness: A Doom Sweeps the Land

The party solves the first quest.

        

In the first entry, we saw that Realms of Darkness is an eight-character, first-person, turn-based dungeon crawler in the spirit of Wizardry, but with a little influence from other games. Without any real backstory, my party started in the town of Grail and got a quest to find an ancient king's sword in a nearby dungeon. On Level 1 of that dungeon, we learned that the sword had been broken into two pieces by a sorcerer, and we found one of the pieces.

   

At the beginning of this session, we moved down to Level 2. It turned out to be an oddly-shaped level occupying 11 x 32 coordinates. Unlike the first level, I'm sure about my orientation with this one, as the game explicitly told me at one point that an adjacent square with a river was to my south.

 

That river has to be crossed twice. The first time, I got across with WADE. The second time, I needed to pay a ferryman 20 silver to take me over. A message earlier in the level had said, "Don't pay the ferryman," but I couldn't figure out any way to cross without paying him. It didn't seem to have any negative effect.

    

Even Charon is subjected to the invisible hand of inflation.

          

Later in the level were a couple of messages that don't mean anything to me yet:

   

• "The rogue alliance: When you want to maim and plunder, look us up."
• "Bored? Restless? Nothing to do? Visit your local bowling alley today."

    

On the body of a Copan fighter, I found a "blueberry beret." I wonder if Copan fighters are related to Wizardry's "Garian Guards."

   

A sword embedded in a wall opened the way to the next level when I typed PULL SWORD.

     

Just a reminder that there's a text parser.

     

Enemies were naturally a little harder. There were some tough individual enemies, like giant worms and giant slugs, but they usually attacked alone. They often missed their first turn, and my party could usually take them out before they attacked again. What was a lot harder were groups of the same enemies we faced on Level 1—goblins, goblin guards, attack dogs—but in much larger packs.

    

I never like punny enemy names.

      

Lacking programming skills and knowledge about graphics technologies in general, I'm not entirely sure how the graphics work. When you enter a square in which an encounter is going to take place, I think the game takes an image of the wall pattern and then composes a new image with the enemy in the forefront and the wall pattern in the background. I don't think the game is capable of showing an enemy "sprite" (?) on top of the existing vectors (??) used for the walls. 

   

One result of this mechanism is that, unconstrained by the other elements on the screen, the artist can really make some of the monster graphics pop. Many of them are somewhat workaday in quality, but the way a few of them fill up the whole screen is a little intimidating.

       

This guy is coming right out of the monitor.

      

As I finished up the second level, I started to get annoyed with the trek back to town. No fast travel option has yet emerged, and my party has many hours of gameplay in front of them before the sorcerer's "Teleport" spell becomes an option. Because of the small size of the levels and the central elevator, no square in Wizardry's dungeon is more than about 30 moves from the town level. In contrast, to get from the inn to the Level 2/3 ladder here, a player is looking at about 140 moves. That's a long way to stretch a party, and a lot to risk if you stretch yourself too far.

  

My party hadn't made character Level 3 on dungeon Level 2, so I was reluctant to send them forward, but I also didn't want to waste a lot of time grinding when I could be mapping. My concerns came to the forefront shortly after I arrived on Level 3. The entry chamber opened into a large room with a red ceiling, green walls, and a blue floor (as told in a text message, of course). Three doors led to rooms with buttons of those colors, and each button teleported us to a different part of the dungeon. Suddenly, I was without a tether.

      

For the Gambia, our homeland . . .

    

It turned out that every arrival point had a nearby door that took us back to that central chamber, but I didn't know that at the time. Thus, the game offered that terrifying Wizardry feeling when your resources are dwindling and you're lost.

 

The level was also a real pain to map, since the game offers no coordinates or even (usually) directionality. After I had completely mapped the destination areas from the three buttons, I had to piece the different sections of the level together into a coherent map.  

    

From the first battle on Level 3.

      

I ended up having to return to town twice during my explorations of Level 3, but the battles offered so many experience points that the characters soon hit character Level 3. This happened at 2,000 experience points, and Level 2 had happened at 1,000, so I figured that we'd be leveling up every 1,000. But we didn't reach Level 4 at 3,000, so I guess not. Anyway, leveling comes with more hit points and spell slots, and some of the characters gain new abilities at certain levels. For instance, my friar got the "Flying Kick" ability at Level 3. Characters do not gain attributes as in Wizardry.

   

There were a lot of "Copan" enemies on the level (warriors, knights, adepts), plus sorcerers and a new enemy called a "sparks."

     

Your guess is as good as mine.

     

The spellcasters were the most difficult of them, and having to heal from their damage sent me back to town a couple of times. I used "Act Friendly" and "Run Away" a lot to avoid taking too much damage.

    

They aren't really "monsters" then, are they?

     

One of the buttons led to an area with two key encounters. We met a goblin who begged us: "Please! Don't hurt me anymore!" When we talked to him, he whispered: "CLXVII."

   

CLXVII is, of course, 167 in Roman numerals. But it was also the answer to the next encounter. We found a library and a desk with a librarian. She asked what book we wanted to read. After trying a couple of random things, I fed the number into the parser, and she gave us a book that said to summon Vulcan, we needed to shout "MAGMA."

     

Sure, this makes sense in an ancient ruin full of monsters.

      

A second button led to a maze-like area in which we found the second piece of Zabin. There was also a weird encounter with 10 Copan knights and a Copan lord. I thought the game was over—that I'd be facing my first full-party death—but they were curiously unable to hit us. When I finished wiping them out, the characters got single-digit experience rewards, and some of them got 0. I have no idea what that was about.

    

This fight seems a bit unbalanced.

        

The third button led to an area with Vulcan's forge, as signaled by an engraved "V" burned into the rock. There, I shouted "MAGMA" and Vulcan appeared to reunite the pieces of the sword.

      

We ended up returning it to some random guard. I hope that was close enough.

     

The level ended up being 24 x 16 with only one square of unused space. It was thus the least irregular of the three levels, though that single unused space bothers me.

       

You can bet I'll try to "Teleport" there when I have the ability.

     

We made the long trek back to town and returned Zabin to the guard. He rewarded us with a few hundred silver pieces, a few hundred experience points, and a lead on our next quest: "There's a widely traveled nobleman dining at our local tavern."

   

When we went to the tavern, we found the man pacing out front. He explained that he had inherited a crystal ball from his father. The ball had driven his father insane, and the man worried that he'd be next. He asked us to break the curse by taking the ball to the ruins southwest of the city. We said yes, of course.

    

I suspect there's going to be more to it than that.

     

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• There have been essentially no equipment upgrades. All the stuff that I've found in the dungeons has been the same non-magical gear found in the shop in town. And I've already bought the best stuff in the shop. Thus, my characters are still making do with daggers and padded armor. Even the odd-sounding stuff doesn't appear to be magical.

       

How many of those do you imagine are in circulation?

      

• If a character gets hit with "Sleep" in combat, the condition may last for a few minutes outside of combat. Sleeping characters get no experience at the end of the battle.

• While I was exploring Level 3, I got a message that Palliata's food was low. I had completely forgotten that food was a thing. Fortunately, there's a quick command to "equalize food," and that was enough until I got back to town.

    

Our starting ration lasted a long time.

    

• The levels offer a lot of one-way doors and walls, but rarely in any places where they pose a real puzzle or challenge.

      

I had a couple of close calls this session, and I wanted to know what the stakes were if I suffered a full-party death, so I backed up the game disks and started mapping the next dungeon, intending to let the party get wiped out there. I ended up mapping most of the level and earning enough experience points that I lost my nerve. Maybe next time.

    

Sorry for the short entry this week. The closing weeks of the school year are always a nightmare for me, and I've been struggling not to have to take a break from the blog. Hopefully, in a few days, we can continue our explorations of "darkness" with the next game, and I'm sure many of you this week are exploring a place beyond which no waking eye may see.

 

Time so far: 9 hours