Yendorian Tales: A Map of the World

 

To be fair, it's not really the entire island.

        

I almost always hate the second entry of any game that I blog about. It exhausts me just thinking about it. More than once during the past week, I launched Yendorian Tales and just sat there, looking at the screen, feeling the energy drain from me.

   

The first entry practically writes itself, as I cover the history, the manual, the opening cinematic, character creation, and first impressions. By the third, I've achieved a certain momentum, and I generally understand the game by then (although there have been some notable exceptions, like the recent Star Trail, where it took me until at least the fifth entry to hit any kind of stride). For the second entry, though, there's nothing to do but to play an unfamiliar, alien title and try to make sense of it.

       

I've learned to watch for the turning point, and for Yendorian Tales, it came at about the four-hour mark, when I was exploring the Athaneum (I'll sic it this once so no one posts a "'correction") and I found, on the bookshelf, a map of the island. There's something about knowing the size and shape of the world that instantly relaxes me—less because I want to know how much territory there is to explore and more because I need a plan for how to explore it. With even the crudest map, I can make a plan.

       

The library in the Athaneum. Note the trap door behind the counter.

       

Backing up, after the opening session, gingerly started to explore the world and almost immediately ran into the Athaneum, just south of the starting city, Saccate, which I really hope is pronounced the Spanish way. Exploring the four-floor complex took nearly three hours on its own. There were more than 50 NPCs. Some highlights:

    

• The Athaneum trains both wizards and clerics in their arts. It is run by a mage named Zamora. A lot of the NPCs were students who didn't have much to say except their chosen specialty.

• It has a temple, healer, horse-seller, tavern, and a kind-of inn called "the dormitory" where you can purchase a room permanently for 250 gold. 

• A couple of custodians named Conrad and Dorothy were preparing a large room for a special presentation from Zamora. 

     

I otherwise heard nothing about this.

        

• Magical arts in Thaine, the empire from which the people of Yendor came from, were governed by the Society of Wizards and the Holy Order of Druids and Clerics. Some of the students were from Thaine, and they reported turmoil and unrest in the homeland. Some planned to go home anyway.

• Lance, a student studying to be a wizard: There are giants in the Great Forest surrounding New Devon. 

• A whole dialogue chain (i.e., "ask BLAH about YADDA") taught me that a teacher named Griffin has the title of Great Scholar, but when I met Griffin, I couldn't get anything out of him.

• In addition to the map, the library had a book chapter titled "The Return of the Great One," which outlined how Zamora revived magic in Yendor after it wasn't spoken of for many years following a great war; a list of potion colors and their effects; and a book on spellcasting that reiterated the importance of Nuore. 

     

I'm guessing the red and pink potions aren't permanent.

      

• A trap door in the library led to the basement, where a maze of hidden one-way doors (you walk into them and they dissolve) led me to an archivist named Danner. He's spearheading an effort to recover scrolls, keys, and magic items. He offers a reward for scrolls in particular.

     

The wall temporarily dissolves as I move into it.

        

• A trap door leading up from the basement brought me to a small room occupied by a guy who can enchant non-magic items and +1 items. 

      

Enhancement!

        

• The second floor had a group of Council Chambers where the land's governors, a three-person body made up of city rulers, passes legislation. 

• I met Zamora in his fourth-floor laboratory, working on some kind of grand experiment. He wouldn't respond to many keywords, and he kept asking if I was there to bring him Nuore. 

        

Yeah, that's not suspicious or anything.

      

If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said that I love games in the Ultima style, where you talk with NPCs via keyword. Either I've changed (permanently or temporarily) or something about this game (maybe the tiny dialogue window?) makes it uniquely annoying. I was so over it by the time I finished up with the Athaneum. That said, I like that the NPCs in this game have stock responses to keywords that every NPC would be expected to know something about, including MONSTERS, YENDOR, MINES, ATHANEUM, THAINE, WIZARDS, and CLERICS.

          

Someone's a comedian.

        

Commands in this game remain a little wonky. A lot of things that look like they ought to be interactable (books, money boxes, chests, barrels) are not. Others interact in strange ways. For instance, (L)ooking at the bookshelves in the library gives you nothing; you have to (P)ick up the shelf, a command that never seems to work on individual books. There's no command to view your equipment and gold; you have to (D)rop it and then ESC from the drop screen without actually doing anything.

         

Why not?! I can pick up every other chest!

       

Once I left the Athaneum, I used the surrounding road pattern to figure out where I was on the map, which turns out to be the northwest area. I then turned my attention to combat, experience, and gold.

    

Combat at Level 1 is relatively hard. I had a character killed (a reload event) in about 50% of my battles, sometimes maddeningly towards the end. As I reported last time, the mechanics of combat replicate Ultima V and aren't bad, but it does take a long time to mince the characters into position, and I really wish the game remembered which enemy you had targeted last time. 

         

One of my clerics dies with only three enemies left and four chests on the screen.

       

I faced centipedes, ants, giant rats, wasps, bats, pickpockets, skeletons, and rogues, and I think their difficulty is roughly in that order. Humanoid enemies almost always have spells or missile weapons, so I try to avoid them. Fortunately, even animal and insect enemies occasionally drop chests. As I won battles, I slowly upgraded my equipment to silver maces, copper shields, and robes. Although I was making money, I didn't buy anything in the stores, trusting rather in loot-based upgrades (this turned out to be a good decision). Almost all enemy treasure chests have ore that can be sold at the mining company in Saccate, plus Nuore for spells. Spell points are relatively generous, even at Level 1, and they regenerate as you run around, so it's possible for healers to fully heal everyone after most battles, although I do need to keep an eye on Nuore levels (one unit of Nuore is consumed for every spell point).

       

Fighting bugs. I'm glad that giant wasp has wings, as I would not be able to see him otherwise.

        

Eventually, I noticed the letter "T" next to my characters' names, and I assumed it stood for "Train." Sure enough, my characters had reached Level 2. Unfortunately, I only knew where to find training for mages and clerics, in the Athaneum. When I got there, I was surprised to see a 700-gold piece cost. My finances barely covered getting my wizard and two clerics to Level 2. Fortunately, the increase came with "Cure Poison," which will save money now that I don't have to run to the healer in the Athaneum after every battle with a snake or spider.

          

Everyone can level!

      

Even though I couldn't afford it yet, I decided to try to figure out where I could train my miners and rogue. The map showed one other city in the northwest part of the map, so I headed there. The dense forests (the party cannot walk through trees) make it difficult to go anywhere on a linear path, but I eventually found the town.

      

The town was called Thieves Guild. It had no NPCs to talk with, just shopkeepers. There was a Thieves Inn (sic, etc.), a Thieves Tavern, shops selling weapons and thieves' tools, and—yes!—a thieves' trainer. Unfortunately, there were also a bunch of respawning hostile parties of thieves. I must have reloaded 20 times in the place as I slowly explored it, saving after each victorious battle and reloading after each death. The good news is that the loot from the enemies was more than enough to pay for Darkchild's training to Level 2. I also was able to equip everyone with scale mail or ring mail and copper shields. My wizard upgraded from a sling shot to a sling shot +2.

         

The weapons seller's list. Maybe I should invest in my own bows.

       

Behind a couple of illusory walls, the town also had a map seller. He had six pieces of the world map for sale for between 50 and 250 gold pieces each. I eventually bought all of them. At first, I thought that the map simply duplicated the one I'd already found in the Athaneum, and of course I had kept a screenshot of that. But it turns out that this one is interactive; if you click on the quadrants, it tells you the names of the cities there, the enemies you'll find, and the relative cost of ore. This is the only way that I found out the name of Thieves Guild, as there were no NPCs in town to say it. 

      

The in-game map is kind-of cool.

      

I still needed to level my miners. The map suggested that the only way out of the northwest quadrant was to cross a southern bridge, but I decided to walk east to the river and then test it by moving along the riverbank. I was nudged northeast by the pattern of trees, and I soon ran into a mine entrance. I decided to check it out. 

   

As NPCs in Saccate hinted, the party can just (M)ine anywhere and there's a chance of finding gold, Nuore, and other ore. There's also a chance of breaking mining tools, so it's good to have extra. 

      

Not quite worth it.

     

Almost immediately, I found a buried chest with some potions and a lot of Nuore. A little ways in, I met a man named Flagell, "trying to live out the last years of [his] life in peace and solitude." I couldn't get anything valuable out of him, but I'll bet he becomes important later.

   

There were no monsters in this mine, and nowhere else to go, so I continued the journey. I soon found another buried chest, next to a waterfall, with 275 gold, a steel shield, chain mail, and a "Giant glass."

     

It pays to watch out for those "mounds."

       

There is indeed no way to cross the river except for the one bridge southwest of Saccate, so I took it to the island city of Helsignor. The city had a weapon shop, armor shop, inn, healer, alchemist, and tavern.

     

Exit, pursued by a rogue.

      

The tavern offered a casino with three card games: "Twenty-One," "High-Low," and "Even-Odd." The Yendorian deck is a bit different than our standard deck. It has five suits with cards numbered 1-10 plus an asterisk, which always counts as 11.

          

Instructions for "Twenty-One."

     

"Twenty-One" has generally the same rules as blackjack, except with no face cards, the odds are very different. The instructions didn't say, and I didn't play enough hands to discern whether the house must hit on a 16 or below or stand on a 17 or higher. (There's no "soft" total in Yendorian blackjack, since * is always 11.) I started to work out the probabilities and a playing strategy, but I stopped when I realized how late I was with this entry. Overall, the odds seem worse to me than regular blackjack, although I did win two out of three hands that I played.

   

"High-Low," on the other hand, is a bonanza for the player. You get dealt a card and have to guess whether the next card will be higher or lower. Ties are a loss, but correct guesses pay even money. I calculate that the player has a 71.55% chance of being right. These extremely favorable odds are probably why this game has a 10-gold piece limit instead of the 1,000-gold piece limit for "Twenty-One."

      

Of course, I get a 5.

       

"Even-Odd" is like Yendor's version of roulette. If the numbers were just 1-10, the odds would be 51% in favor of the player, but any * is a loss, so that drops the odds to about 46%.

    

Tempting as it was to save-scum, I played a few low-stakes games and called it quits.

 

The suits are interesting. They are a sword, a ball being dropped from one hand to another, something that's either a lightning bolt striking a dancing mage or a mage casting a lightning spell at a cloud (or tree), two shields, and a dragon's head.

               

After selling my excess equipment, I had just enough money to get my two miners to Level 2. Unfortunately, by now my characters were all ready for Level 3, which for the miners will cost 1,700 gold pieces. Clearly, I need to hit the mines sooner rather than later. The map shows over 20 mine entrances. I'll start in the northwest corner near Saccate and see how it goes.

      

I can only afford one of them.

       

More encounters in Helsignor:

    

• A despondent woman named Olga said her favorite piece of art had recently been stolen by thieves.

• A man named Alden lay comatose in bed, tended by his wife, Phoebe. He had been a miner, and he was attacked by a giant scorpion.

• A man named Jacob will buy jewels for 1,250 gold pieces each. 

• An injured man in the healer's shop warned me that trolls hide under bridges.

       

Another borrowing from Ultima V.

      

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• The outdoor map has occasional mounds of dirt that the party can (M)ine to find treasure chests.  

• Leveling up gives you more maximum hit points and spell points and allows you to allocate a random number (roughly between 5 and 8) to each of your attributes. 

     

The highest bonus I've received so far.

      

• As far as I can tell, the rogue's only function in the game is to spare the clerics from having to spend spell points and Nuore opening chests with their "Open" spell. (In fairness, that was his only purpose in Wizardry, too.) There is no way to steal anything in town and he doesn't seem to backstab. 

       

He's about as successful as my Wizardry rogue, too.

        

• DOSBox saves screenshots by prefixing them with the name of the program running at the time the shot was taken. Usually, when I play a DOS game, all the screenshots end up having the same prefix. The ones for Yendor cycle frequently between different numbered programs, all beginning with "PROG" (e.g., "PROG1," "PROG9"). This suggests that the game is passing the data between completely different executable files for exploration, dialogue, combat, gambling, and other aspects of the game. I wonder if anyone has any insight as to why a developer would choose to do this instead of putting everything in one program like most games do.

     

By the end of this session, I was in a nice groove and wondering why I had been so lethargic earlier in the week. Let's hope it's clear sailing from here.

   

Time so far: 6 hours 

    

****

    

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