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