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| I spent a lot of this session watching dragons fly overhead. |
The land of Yendor is in trouble. Monsters have been invading the mines,
threatening the production of Nuore, the reagent necessary to fuel all
magic. The great wizard Zamora was struck down by a shadowy figure
during a public address; the orb that was supposed to banish all evil
was stolen. Our only clues to restoring order are to be found in
Zamora's journal, which only members of the Society of Wizards can
translate. The first one, the Hermit, told us to seek out the Diplomat. The Diplomat, who turned out to the governor's advisor in Port Hope, asked us to retrieve a Grapnel Arrow and then use it to grab the Great Red Gem in a particular mine.
I ended the last session wondering what mine would contain the gem. Fortunately, I found it almost immediately. It was in the cave network northwest of Port Hope, and probably the reason I didn't note it during my first circuit of the cave is that I didn't register it as important. High on the cave wall, one square between it and the the party, it was out of reach except for the Grapnel Arrow. The only annoying part was having to flee from dozens of parties of bats on the way.
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| Grabbing the gem. |
Using the Key of Port Hope to warp immediately to the city (hell, yeah!), I gave the gem to Paundor. He crushed it into a powder and then said to go to Moloch, where we'd find someone to help us further. He also increased our dexterity by 4.
As his dialogue closed, an apparition of the orb appeared, and Zamora's voice said: "Half of 'W' is sixth." This goes with our previous clues that:
- The first of last is third.
- The third of first is last.
"Half of W" probably doesn't refer to its position in the alphabet, since it's at an odd number (23). It probably means either V or U. We still don't know how many letters there are between "sixth" and "last"; if half of W is V, it's at least one, since no word ends in VR. So possible patterns are:
_ _ L _ _ V _ R
_ _ L _ _ UR
My crossword mind sees BELIEVER in the first case and SULFUR in the second, but there are of course many other possibilities, especially if we increase the number of spaces after the sixth position. For all I know, it's FILIBUSTER.
We used the Key of Stachus to get most of the way to Moloch. You might recall that we learned last session that there is an island in the southwest quadrant of the game map, but it's surrounded by fog. I wanted to walk along the water to see if I could see the fog. It turns out that I couldn't, but while walking, I found a buried treasure chest that had the Key of Saccate, the starting city. That's great. Saccate has almost all the game's services, and it's close to the other starting cities, where I know I can pay for training, sell excess goods, sell gems and Ancient Scrolls, and get healed.
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| I wipe out three parties of mages. |
Even better, there was a second chest with a Scroll of Death. That sounded awesome, but it doesn't work in combat. Instead, it wipes all enemy parties off of the game map, which is a nice way to avoid having to fight or flee from all of them when I'm just trying to get somewhere. On the other hand, it can only be used once per rest, and the enemy parties repopulate fast. I tended to save it for when I saw parties of mages. It's hard to flee from mages (if you want to flee), as the final character to flee is the target of all attacks and is often killed.
Speaking of combats, my characters got some very powerful, almost game-breaking spells at Level 8. The two clerics got "Critical Wounds" and my wizard got "Spontaneous Combustion." Both damage all enemies on the screen (except those immune to fire, in the case of the wizard) for about 10-20 points. Very few enemies can stand up to a single round in which all three spellcasters unleash. The only thing stopping me from just spamming these spells is the cost in Nuore and the fact that I have limited spell points, but both increasingly ceased to be much of a concern during this session. Even if I wasn't finding processed Nuore (needed for spellcasting) and purple potions (which fully restore spell points) fairly plentiful, the economy has become so generous that I could just buy heaps of them.
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| Casting "Spontaneous Combustion" at mummies and zombies. |
Before hitting Moloch again, I went to Mine 8 to its southeast. The lucrative mine had a lot of platinum, gold, and silver plus a large treasure chamber with plenty of gray (moderate healing) and white (full healing) potions. Enemies were demons and devils, but I mostly just ran from them. There were fixed battles with demons and mummies, plus a memorable one that combined swamp trolls, ghosts, and alligators.
In Moloch, I had already met the person who would help me: Bysette. Last time, he demanded to know who had "sent me," and I had no answer. This time I did: PAUNDOR. "You will need to return a ring I lost before I can assist you anymore," he said. Where did he lose it? On a ship called Blackmane. He couldn't tell me anything else, so now BLACKMANE is one of the keywords I feed to all NPCs. When I get done exploring the cities I haven't explored, I'll return to the original ones and prompt those NPCs, too, I guess.
I kept working my way counter-clockwise around the world. As I approached the mountains to the northeast, dragons and wyverns started appearing overhead. When they fly by, which they do frequently, the game pauses for the animation. As long as the party isn't in their direct path, they just continue off-screen and I can move again. If the party is even slightly clipped by a wing, however, we enter combat. I can kill a wyvern—I did it back on Level 3, you may recall—but the red and green dragons are something else. Like demons and devils, they have an ungodly armor class. I can barely touch them. Still, I'm sure with a concerted spell-based effort, I could make it happen. I just wasn't in the mood to put in that kind of effort yet.
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| This wyvern is about to get me. |
There are some caves depicted in the mountains that are only accessible from the desert side, so I couldn't explore them yet. I was able to enter one cave southeast of Devon and Duomin. It had a couple of treasure chapters with lots of ore and mining tools, which was ironic because there was nothing to be found in the cave's walls. Fixed combats were with thieves and mages.
Devon, which I reached next, was a dead city, like Magincia in Ultima IV. Set in the middle of a creepy swamp, it was swarming with skeletons, ghosts, and other undead. There were only a couple of NPCs. The first, a ghost named Paltivar, was haunting his own shop, moving crates, hoping his assistant Joseph would return. He reacted to JOURNAL and said that he'd help me if I found his assistant. More on that in a bit.
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| Devon's cemetery. |
The second NPC was Joan, attending the grave of her husband, Winze, and somehow not getting attacked by all the undead in the area. She confirmed that Winze was a member of the Society of Wizards, but I couldn't get anything else from her.
Finally, a wizard named Alcott was holed up in the temple. He admitted quite freely that he was the one who had raised all the undead and sent the townsfolk fleeing. After a few bits of dialogue, he attacked me with an army of zombies, mummies, and ghosts. I destroyed them with mass-damage spells, but Alcott himself was stubborn. He finally fell to my blades, drank a potion, and disappeared.
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| Littering! |
My notes said that Joseph was the NPC permanently in the drunk tank in Mantov. I assaulted someone to get a quick trip to the Mantov jail. Joseph wanted a bottle of Sweet Wine for his cooperation. The tavern didn't know what I was talking about. So that's another thing on my list of keywords.
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| How far in the past? Devon has been a ghost town long enough for a brand-new city (New Devon) to be built. |
In Duomin, a mining town, everyone was abuzz because a kid had been kidnapped by a dragon. His mother, Whitney, begged for his return. The city had an armor shop, a mine shop, a tavern, a fighter trainer, and, surprisingly, a jail. I thought all arrestees went to Mantov, but apparently not, because Keith and Humphrey were in there for horse theft and drunk and disorderly, respectively.
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| I think Victor was one of the guards. |
I got another hit on JOURNAL with Prezlin, the owner of the alchemist's shop in New Devon. "Please find out how my old friend Winze is doing and let me know." When told that his friend was DEAD, he suggested that we meet at his shop in New Devon.
All the rumors said the dragon flew east after kidnapping the boy, so we went directly to the mine visible from Duomin, which I labeled Mine 9. Despite circling it three times, I couldn't find any sign of a red dragon or a kidnapped boy. What I did find, aside from a bunch of random battles with gnolls and mine trolls, were eight treasure caves. I came out of the mine pockets spilling with weapons, armor, ore, potions, scrolls, and processed Nuore. I don't know why the game got so generous when it had already been pretty generous.
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| I would pay real-world money for an "open all chests" spell. |
Further up the mountain range, I found a path into the mountains. Exploring was a pain in the neck, having to stop frequently for the dragon animations, flee from the occasional attack, and reload every time someone got frozen by a wyvern.
I eventually found my way to another cave, entered, and was almost immediately greeted by a red dragon blocking the path. Individual red dragons aren't that hard. One strategy I use for tough enemies is to toss a silver potion on them early, which poisons them and makes them take damage every round. If I can't seem to hit them, I toss gold potions on them every round, which reliably do 15 points of acid damage. My clerics heal characters as needed while my mage, taking a purple potion when he needs to recharge, blasts away with "Beam of Death" and "Ball of Power."
When the dragon was dead, I got a message that a young boy went running out of the cave. I warped back to Duomin with the key, talked to Whitney, and got 5,000 gold pieces and enough experience points for Level 9.
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| Nothing ever explained what the dragon wanted with the kid. |
I warped back to Staccate and the surrounding cities to level everyone up, which cost almost 50,000 gold pieces, but I had about 300,000 by then. I was feeding the new keywords to everyone I encountered in both towns. In Helsingor, I got a hit on BLACKMANE with a Captain Chigon, who I must have missed the first time. He admitted to being a pirate and said that he disguised Blackmane as a passenger ship, then robbed the passengers during the first night at sea. He insisted on fighting for Bysette's ring.
When battle began, he was accompanied by about two dozen assassins, rogues, and harriers. Assassins have a chance of one-shotting characters during their attacks, so the battle took me a few tries. When it was over, I had Bysette's ring.
Before returning to Moloch, I decided to spend some of my money on enhancements. The guy in the Athaneum can add +1 to non-magical items and +2 to magical items. The cost was only a few hundred gold pieces per enhancement, not the tens of thousands I assumed. I'm not sure why I didn't do this earlier. I thought I could go immediately to Port Hope and get the same items enhanced up to +4, but it turns out that the guy there only works with items already at +3, so I have to find an intermediate enhancer.
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| Alcala's equipment after our visit to the enhancers. |
I brought the ring back to Bysette, who gave me a "magic branch" and told me to seek out the Merchant. If it's not clear, I think these titles—Hermit, Diplomat, Merchant—all belong to members of the Society of Wizards. (I wonder if the Merchant isn't Prezlin, who I've already met, given that he owns a shop.) Again, a floating orb appeared with Zamora's voice: "It is in the middle backwards." This suggests, if taken literally, that the letters TI appear in the middle of the word. Putting that together with our previous hints, the options are now:
_ _ L T I V _ R
_ _ L T I U _ R
This assumes that "middle" is literal, and there thus must be an equal number of letters to the left and right of the TI. It also assumes the word isn't ridiculously long. I suppose it could be. It could be:
_ _ L _ _ V T I _ _ _ _ _ _ R
But it's probably not. On the other hand, I can't get any real words out of the first two options, so either it's a proper name or a nonsense word.
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| Hmph. I'll bet it's just a regular branch. |
Miscellaneous notes:
- The game won't let you carry more than 50,000 lose gold pieces at a time. Once you hit that number, you have to store the excess in a chest. If you get the excess from trading in shops, I guess you get a free chest with it, because that's never been a problem. You can also occasionally find empty chests in dungeons and such. But if you don't have an empty chest and you hit the cap while exploring out in the world, you're out of luck. The game is inconsistent as to whether, when you don't have any "loose" gold, it will deduct from a chest. Sometimes it just says you don't have enough.
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| Here, I have 269,472 gold pieces |
- My thief has gotten a lot better with his lockpicks. He only springs about one trap in ten. Unfortunately, one of the traps that started showing up this session can curse multiple players. That status means that the character misses most attacks. It can only be healed at healers, as far as I can tell. It's not worth the risk. My spellcasters now open all chests. I wish I'd put a second wizard in the thief's spot.
- Speaking of healers, you can donate money to their temples. I'm not sure whether there's any benefit to doing so. Nothing ever seems to happen.
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| "Surplaying." |
- The city keys subvert the crime and punishment system. You can get drunk in Saccate, and instead of leaving town by the main gate, just teleport somewhere (even right back to Saccate). Your crimes are wiped away.
I ended this session in the far north of the map, first by visiting what I labeled "Mine 10." It had Nuore, nickel, and iron. The centerpiece was a fixed battle with a unique creature called a paleoscinus, which looked sort of like a giant armadillo. He shot spikes at us, but he thankfully wasn't hard to hit.
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| I felt bad about killing him. He looks like a pet turtle I used to have. |
Behind him was an exit to the desert—which I don't think I'm ready for yet—and a chest with the Key of Anatolay.
The town near Mine 10 turned out to be a town of giants—ogres, cyclopes, stone giants, and forest giants—with giant-sized buildings and a giant-sized jail. A human NPC is in one of the jail cells, but if I talk to him, he just says: "Since I have given you my map of the desert there is nothing else to tell you." I don't know what he's talking about, and I assume it's a bug. If this was my only way to get a map of the desert, that's too bad.
Most of the other encounters in the city were hostile. Giants have a "stomp" attack that does damage to everyone, so I avoided as many battles as possible. I was able to talk with Koleman, King of the Giants, in his throne room. He didn't have much to say, just that he resented the "little people" invading his space.
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| Forest giants apparently wear animal skins inside modern, pristine buildings. |
I'm almost done with my primary exploration of the main world, and I'm hoping things move quickly after that. This game is fun enough, but it's not a 40-hour game, and most of the things that I liked about it 10 hours ago are starting to wear a bit.
Time so far: 26 hours
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Please remember that this Saturday, 20 June, is MUD Day! More information is found here.
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Next entry in this series
A possible word is CULTIVAR.
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