Realms of Darkness: #$@* the Lemons and Bail

 

The game's fourth questline opens.

      

This session began with the party in a new land with a quest to defeat someone named "Gorth." I entered one of two dungeons available, and it turned out to be the correct one. Let's take it level by level. I returned to the town for healing and to restore slots once or twice per level.

   

Level 1

 

A small 11 x 12 level with a little tail sticking off of it. There were a couple of teleporters to confuse the party, but one of them had a map near it that said, "You are here," so it helped to figure out where I was. Early in the level, a woman said: "Don't throw away your lives in vain because Gorth can't fell [sic] any pain." Another message, somehow "spelled out in microprocessors," said, "RRDD is the right way."

   

Gorth attacked early in the level, and the characters couldn't do any damage to him. Gorth was depicted either as a guy in a suit or a robot. His right-arm seemed to have a flamethrower while his left ended in a giant mace. He attacked several times as we explored the dungeon, and we had to flee each time.

    

Klaatu barada nikto?

      

Other enemies on the level include great lizards, baby rexes, flames, manglers, blackguards, grim reapers, deaths, sorcerers, pieds, and warriors. Pieds are particularly annoying because they poison, which always means a trip back to the surface, as I don't have any spells that cure it. I noticed that Bilge, the barbarian, got his "berserker fury" attack with his most recent level-up. It does a lot of damage but can only be used once per "expedition," so it's a bit like a spell. My spell use continued to be rare, as even this far into the game, my spellcasters only have 7 total spells each per expedition. The priests' must be saved for healing despite some valuable alternatives; the sorcerer occasionally gets lucky with a "Fireball," "Frost Byte," or "Flames."

   

To go downward, I had to fall into one of four pits, each leading to its own sub-area.  

        

It took me a few tries to catch this in-motion.

     

Level 2

   

This level had the four areas accessed from the Level 1 pits. To get back up, I just had to use my rope-and-hooks or cast "Neutralize Gravity" (a Level 2 sorcerer spell). Together, the four areas had about 400 squares, but a couple were less than 50 each and a couple were around 150 each.

  

• The first area, a large one, offered an elf NPC who told me that "Gorth is controlled by a control center."

   

Not just an elf, an exquisite elf.

      

• The second area, a small one, had nothing except a single encounter at a wall with some draperies and a string. PULL STRING resulted in: "A terrifyingly ugly beast with a menacing grin attacks the party!" And then: "Oh, I'm sorry! It's just a mirror."

• The third area was another small one. The only things I found were a bullwhip and, oddly enough, a lawn mower.

• The fourth, a larger area, had a locked door that made me waste an "Unlock" spell (nothing behind it), a bunch of one-way walls, a rope that every time I pulled it generated a new encounter, and a sign that read: "Remember the robot for directions." Assuming that meant the "microchips" from Level 1, I went right through a secret door and then down some stairs.

      

The python looks awfully friendly.

     

Enemies in these areas were mostly the same as the upper level, but new ones were pythons and nightcrawlers.

     

Level 3

   

The stairs from Level 2 brought me to an area with an immediate stairway downward. The instructions had said to go "down" twice, but I had to explore the area. It was a small 5 x 5, full of one-way walls and doors (as well as one door that turned the party around and faced it the other way, the first time I've seen that). There was nothing to find, and I wasn't on it long enough to fight any battles.

   

Level 4

    

The largest level of the dungeon was 16 x 24. I was a bit beat up the first time I arrived, didn't last long in combat, and had to restore the party from a backup disk. When I tried again, encounters included:

     

• A gold ring that turned out to be a Mushroom Ring. In combat, it cast "Destruction," a terrifically deadly spell that affects multiple enemy groups, but it disappeared after one use.

    

I made good use of that one use.

      

• A sign warning that we were at the "laboratory of the evil, demented scientist, Gene Yus." Behind this magically-locked door, we found an experiment in progress and a flask of "dehydrated demon slayer." Instructions told us to "add milk, approach the victim, and shake."

• Elsewhere on the level, a demon blocking the way. We had to find some milk in a storage area on Level 5 that opened with a Green Key found on Level 4. Adding the milk to the flask and shaking it caused a monster to appear and drive away the demon.

      

We're either getting rid of the demon or making a White Russian. So win-win.

      

• An area of the dungeon that led to a series of five "outdoor" screens, each describing a garden. One of them noted that the grass was too long. I typed MOW GRASS with the lawnmower found on Level 1, and the mower kicked up a Gold Key necessary to open doors past the demon.

      

I wasn't expecting an outdoor screen in the middle of a dungeon.

     

Random enemies on the level included grand masters, mothons, gremlins, spooks, ghosts, and mummies. Gremlins, in defiance of the Ultima template, are very tough creatures that cause poison. I loved getting parties of spooks, ghosts, and mummies, as my two priests could dispel most of them.

    

The power of Christ compels you!

             

Around this time, though, we ran out of food. I returned to town (via the Blade of Escape), but owing to the money we'd had to spend on neutralizing poison and resurrection, I was broke. I had to go through the ignominious process, 20 hours into the game, of grinding for money to buy food.

   

Eventually, we returned to the dungeon. The Gold Key opened the way to a small teleporter maze, which spit us out in an area of concentric, shrinking rooms. There were a couple of tough fixed battles in this area, one with a bunch of warrior types, one with undead. I used that Mushroom Ring in the warrior battle.

       

Right. There was a helpful skeleton in the teleporter maze.

       

The final room had a single grandmaster, easily defeated. When he was out of the way, we were told that "a lemon PC Junior computer sits on a small desk." I know what a PC Jr. is, or was, but I'm not sure what the "lemon" reference is. Either the author was saying it was a bad computer (i.e., a lemon) or he was suggesting it was made by a company called Lemon, a joking play on Apple.

    

Was it capable of anything other than ALL CAPS? If so, it was better than this one.

    

Either way, examining the computer revealed that it was running the Gorth program and was "plugged into the wall." We tried a couple of things before REMOVE PLUG somehow "reduced [it] to a useless collection of circuit boards." Gorth, who I guess was a robot after all, "receiving no further instructions, crashes into a wall." I guess it really was a lemon if simply unplugging it caused all of that. Although it does make me think of a few computers that had been running for over a decade at an old employer, and everyone was terrified what would happen if the hard drives actually ever spun down.

  

I used the "Blade of Escape" to get out of the dungeon and headed back to town. At the entrance to the town was a new notice: "Adventurers wanted: Visit Stealth the Thief, in the city jail, behind the guardhouse." In the guardhouse, the guard congratulated me on my "victory over Gorth" and told me to go ahead and visit Stealth in his cell. There was a new way out of this room, to the north, that hadn't been there in the past.

     

What a friendly guard.

     

Stealth the Thief told me that he was accused of stealing the bartender's silver. He said the only way to prove his innocence was to get the Amulet of Truth from his brother, Eldritch the Sorcerer. (Eldritch is the main character's master in Tangled Tales.) Eldritch, he explained, "lives across the mountains," which we would have to reach by going through the other dungeon on the other side of the river. He gave us a letter and a ticket and warned us to beware the Rogue Alliance, "a group of fanatics who are determined to rule the world." The ticket, when examined, said: "Admit one party to their deaths. Signed, the monsters."

     

You are a "thief," though, right?

    

During the last quest, only a few of my characters leveled up, and only at the end. I was getting low on food again, so I decided to stay in the area of Grail and grind a bit more before heading out on a long expedition. I was still doing that when I ran out of time and had to post this entry.

   

Probably one of the reasons I have to grind is that I fled from a lot of battles in the dungeon. I came to realize at some point during the previous session that running carries virtually no risk. If you fail, the enemies don't get a free attack or anything; you just enter combat normally. Maybe because I didn't grind enough in previous sessions, I was routinely encountering enemy parties this session that could absolutely wipe the floor with me. While trying to map large dungeon levels, it was easier to flee from such parties than to take time to fight them and probably lose. But that obviously just exacerbated the problem.

     

You want to grind in squares with no immediate walls so that everyone can attack.

     

I still like the game, but I have to admit that it's dragging a bit. The long periods of time between level-ups are a bit discouraging. My sorcerer is just about to cross Level 6 at 16,000 experience points. If he's ever going to get even one Level 7 spell, he's going to need to be character Level 15, which will require 8,192,000 experience points. My best battles are netting me about 250, so you do the math. Either this game has dozens of hours left to it or experience rewards really heat up on the other side of the mountain.

   

Time so far: 21 hours