Game 587: Warriors and Warlocks - Scenario: Castle Myrhavell (1983)

 

The authors had so much faith in the game they made it their company name.

        

Warriors and Warlocks - Scenario: Castle Myrhavell

Canada

Warriors and Warlocks (developer); 408614 Ontario Ltd. (publisher)
Released 1983 for the TRS-80, possibly for Commodore 64 in 1984
Date Started: 29 July 2026

        

Warriors and Warlocks is a Wizardry clone that, at least on paper, tries to one-up its predecessor. Wizardry has six attributes; Warriors has 11. Wizardry has eight classes; Warriors  has 12. Wizardry has two spell schools; Warriors has three. Wizardry offered good, neutral, and evil alignments; Warriors adds lawful and chaotic to the mix. Wizardry let you adventure with six characters; Warriors ups it to nine. Wizardry was hard; Warriors is practically impossible.

   

In the alignment issue, Warriors shows some awareness of Dungeons & Dragons, but in general, all of its ideas are from Wizardry: the basic wireframe dungeon/menu town structure; classes restricted by attribute; passwords on the characters; good and evil characters not adventuring with each other; a "camp" command in the dungeon; the ability to recover a slain party from the dungeon floor; resurrection having a chance of failing; enemies sometimes unidentified when combat begins; leveling coming with increases and decreases in attributes, perhaps allowing the character to change classes. The manual even intersperses instructions with cartoons.

      

Graphics are credited to Martin Murphy, about whom I will have more to say in the next entry. 

       

Getting the game to run was a chore even when it was new. The game comes with confusing (at least time, as a non-TRS-80 owner) instructions for creating play disks out of the original disks. This process required the user to swap a bunch of disks, delete files, and even edit some of the BASIC code. It also took up to an hour. Commenter LanHawk spared me all of this by sending me a pair of prepared disks. He also suggested a better emulator than the one I was using, which dramatically changed my experience with the game. With the first emulator I tried to use, the game crashed every time I increased the speed. That's a big problem with Warriors because it is slow. I mercifully did not have that problem with the emulator LanHawk recommended (TRS80GP).

          

As you might get from the subtitle, the game was meant to kick-start a series, with characters stored on a hub disk and able to proceed from there to any number of scenario disks. The default (and ultimately only) scenario is "Castle Myrhavell," for which the manual offers absolutely no backstory except that it was once a bastion of peace but was later cursed by a warlock. The goal of the game is to "develop characters strong enough to explore the deepest parts of the castle."

     

Options at the Warriors' Inn.

     

The game boots up to the Warrior's Inn. (Despite a menu option to "visit a different inn," it seems to be the only one available.) The character creation process ("Recruit a new character") requires you to specify the character's name, race, and alignment before you find out his attributes and thus what classes he qualifies for. There is no option to reroll attributes, so if you don't like the character, you have to finish the process and delete him from the disk. Since I couldn't tailor the name, race, and alignment to the intended class, I got some weird combinations: a hobbit warrior named "Mystara," a dwarf cleric named "Venom," and so forth.  

      

Races are elf, dwarf, halfling, hobbit, and human. Races aren't mentioned at all in the manual, and I didn't sample enough characters to tell if there were any effects of race on attributes or available character classes. Alignments are lawful good, chaotic good, neutral, lawful evil, and chaotic evil. Attributes are intelligence, wisdom, intuition, ego, piety, courage, strength, agility, dexterity, luck, and vitality.

       

Attribute requirements per class.

       

Professions are fighter, warrior, bowman, archer, cleric, priest, sorcerer, wizard, necromancer, and warlock. Many of these pairs sound like essentially the same thing, and I think they functionally are. Fighters and warriors have the same equipment restrictions, as do bowmen/archers, clerics/priests, and so forth. Clerics share their spellbooks with priests, as do mages and sorcerers and wizards and necromancers. I think warlocks are like the bishops of this game, with access to all spellbooks. A few classes have alignment restrictions; namely, clerics and priests must be lawful, thieves must be neutral, and wizards and necromancers must be chaotic. The greater restrictions are on attributes. I initially rolled about 30 characters, and out of them only four characters qualified for clerics and two qualified for mages. I didn't get a single priest, sorcerer, necromancer, warlock, or even thief. 

          

This character doesn't have many options.

      

The manual warns you to expect this. There are no attribute requirements on fighters or bowmen, so the idea is that you resort to those if you have to, then level them up and switch to other classes as their attributes increase. This is less possible than the manual suggests, as they will almost certainly die before any leveling happens. 

     

The game weirdly creates characters "DEAD" and at Level 0. They "level up" to Level 1 and resurrect the first time you view them. After creation, the next stop is the armory, where each character can spend 20 gold pieces on basic equipment with the usual restrictions. After that, the player switches to the scenario disk, slowly adds up to nine members to the party, and enters the castle courtyard.

      

20 gold does not go far.

       

Once inside the castle, movement commands are (L)eft, (R)ight, and (F)orward, with stubborn doors entered with a (K)ick. One of the game's innovations is allowing the player to move forward up to nine spaces at once with the 1-9 keys, although this movement can naturally be interrupted by enemies.

      

Those enemies are brutal. You may have noticed that my characters all started with hit points in the range of 1-6. There's a fixed battle with three centaurs close to the entrance, and they absolutely slaughtered the first party that I fielded. I backed up the hub disk after making my second party and avoided the centaurs, but I kept losing characters to rabid dogs, squeaky pigs, fighters, bats, kobolds, and whatever else happened to attack me. At the beginning of the game, a single hit is likely to kill new characters, so all it takes is one bad initiative roll.

     

A typical battle after two rounds.

       

In combat, characters have options that, depending on their equipment and position, might include attacking, parrying, shooting a bow, using an item, casting a spell, dispelling undead, waking a character who's asleep, and fleeing. Only the first three characters can attack in melee range, and only they can be hit by melee attackers. Level 1 spellcasters only have access to one Level 1 spell and one Level 1 spell slot, so they're pretty useless.

    

As I said, I allowed myself to backup and restore the character disk so I wouldn't have to keep creating new characters. Over about a three-hour period, I entered the castle, walked around until I found an encounter, and did my best to win it. At the end of the period, I had fought about 20-25 battles, but I had only emerged unscathed from two of them, giving my characters a total of 73 experience points. The only contemporary review I could find, from the December 1984 80 Microcomputing, complained about this very thing: "Nobody in my house advanced to a point where they could successfully win an encounter."

         

I can relate.

       

You might think save states are the key to cheating, but they're actually quite useless. The game is pathological about its pre-rolled random numbers. If you enter the dungeon, take a save state, walk 10 steps, get a random encounter with three wolves, and have a character killed in the first round, this will reliably happen every time you reload the save state. I can't think of anything to do outside of combat that would interrupt the number pattern. (In-combat, a player could screw around with parrying to change the initiative order, but it would take longer than just reloading and trying again.) The game will insist on using the same generated numbers even if you leave the dungeon and re-enter. The only way to force a new set of numbers is to go all the way back to the inn and disband the party. At that point, it's easier to quit the game and restore the backup.

      

After a while, I reluctantly decided to sacrifice the 73 experience points and start over, this time spending more time on character creation. You really can't expect success when your three fighters and two bowmen—the only characters who can reliably attack every round—got their jobs because they didn't qualify for anything else. I spent about two hours in which I rolled about 100 characters before I found nine that satisfied me. None of them met the requirements for warriors, but I had some strong fighters, a couple of archers, a thief, and a wizard. Then when I went to shut down the emulator, I screwed something up and none of the changes that I made saved to the disk.

     

Options at the Village Square. My party members are all Level 0 because  I didn't know at this point that I needed to view them first.

            

Checking the word count of this entry, I decided I couldn't quit here. I took a day off and then continued with my old party. I got into a comfortable rhythm of:

   

1. Copy the backup hub disk.
2. Start the emulator.
3. Insert the disks.
4. Restore a save state from the inn.
5. "Enter the village square to form a party."
6. "Recruit the same party as last time."
7. "Enter the castle."
8. Spin around the entry square until I meet a battle.
9. Do my best.
10. Exit and save if I won; go back to Step 1 if I lost, which was usually. 

       

This whole cycle took about five minutes (with the emulator on "Turbo," of course) and produced about 100 experience points per hour. A couple of times, I had to restock on arrows and/or buy an equipment upgrade for my lead characters, although I didn't see a huge difference as their armor class went up. 

         

The rare Level 1 blow that isn't fatal.

       

Now, in retrospect, I think that maybe the way that the author intended the game to be played was for the front ranks to have constant turnover while the back ranks slowly leveled. The player was perhaps meant to discard slain characters after every sortie and roll new ones, perhaps occasionally getting lucky and rolling a "keeper" with high attributes or HP. But this process takes a long time and is less subject to automating with macros, so I stubbornly kept at it.   

     

Here are some more things I can report about combat. You'll recognize a lot of them from Wizardry:

   

• When combat begins, there's a chance that enemies will attack from the rear. This means that the three rear characters suddenly become the "front line." There's supposed to be a way to change positions in combat, but I can never get it to work. Those rear characters, despite being mages, don't really have a lot less success in the ensuing battle than the front rank.

• Enemies are often unidentified, given as just general descriptors (e.g., "humanoids," "small animals," "men in leather"). 

     

Kinky.

     

• Either party can be surprised, giving the opposite side a free round of attacks. This was not generally survivable for my party. When I got a free round of attacks, meanwhile, it was enormously frustrating to watch my characters miss almost every time. 

• My bowmen often "do not have a clear shot." I don't know what causes that, but it might have something to do with which fighter they're behind and which of them goes first. Because of this problem, it took me forever to run through my initial purchases of 20 arrows per bowman.

• Sometimes bowmen get an extra shot between rounds. 

• Only once have enemies attacked in more than one group. 

• Enemies I've faced in rough order of difficulty: squeaky pigs, kobolds, vandals, vagrants, fighters, orcs, killer bees, vampire bats, wolves.

• Fleeing causes the party to run around randomly in a panic. I almost never recover from this. I get attacked by something that kills me while trying to get my bearings.

        

Fleeing also causes you to run into walls.

       

• The spells just use plain text names rather than Wizardry's arcane names like MAHALITO. 

• The mage spell "Magicspear" does a ridiculous amount of damage, like 20-30 compared to roughly 1-5 from my melee fighters. Only one mage has that spell, though, and he only has one of them. 

• My other mage started with "Glow," which finds secret doors.

• One of my clerics started with three spells: "Refresh" (minor healing), "Bless" (reduces opponent damage), and "Location" (gives coordinates). The other started with no spells at all. The one who started with no spells has worse attributes than the one who started with three, so I don't know what that's about. I ended up dumping the one with none and replacing her with another bowman. 

     

Level 1 cleric spells. Although the spell levels on this list go up to nine, the manual suggests that there are only five.

       

• The game is very stingy with gold. Battles even with humanoids generally return 0 gold pieces. Two is a bonanza. Needless to say, resurrecting characters has never been even remotely possible.

• I haven't found an item in post-combat looting, but the manual suggests it's possible. 

• I'm not convinced that "Parry" does anything at all. I think it's just a way of passing the turn.

• Characters apparently target specific enemies at the beginning of a round, not just the general enemy party. If we're facing three kobolds and Moronoe kills one in Round 1, I might get a message that "Morgen's target is already dead," even though there are still two kobolds. Again, this might have something to do with their specific positions in the party formation.

       

Changing the formation in camp. You can bring up this same screen in combat, but it never does what I say.

          

• Two Level 8 characters come on the game disk but are listed as "Out" (some contemporary material shows that those two characters are original and not the remnant of some previous player). If the new party could find them, they would be game-changing, but they'd have to search every square in the dungeon. 

• Nothing is more enraging than actually winning a rare combat then facing another one that you cannot beat before you reach the exit. Even keeping very close to the exit, this is possible. 

               

While I was going through all of this, LanHawk emailed to let me know that the Level 2 threshold was 800 experience points for bowmen and 1,000 for warriors. I had about 200 experience points by this point, and I was starting to despair. The only reason that I didn't quit is that I was about seven entries ahead. I had been hoping to get to the point where by mid-August, I had entries scheduled through mid-September, which would make it less likely I'd have to take a usual beginning-of-the-semester hiatus. Even given this, the amount of time I spent on Warriors and Warlocks basically qualifies me for institutionalization. I had it going almost constantly during the first week of August, dipping in every time I wanted a break or needed to listen to something or watch a training video. I binged an entire Teaching Company lecture series on Machiavelli. I broke down and looked into editing the character file at one point, but I couldn't figure out how experience was encoded. 

      

Finally!

     

After a ridiculous amount of time, my bowmen hit Level 2, followed shortly by my fighters. My mages hit it at 1,100 and my cleric at 1,200. Each level up is accompanied by a mix of increases and decreases, mostly increases (just like Wizardry). Characters get some extra hit points; spellcasters get extra spells and extra spell slots. I wish I could report that it made the game easier. It did, a little, but my fighters only gained a couple of hit points and still routinely die in one hit. Having two mages capable of "Magicspear," and each capable of two of those, helps more than anything else. I wish I could get to the point that I could kill wolves without losing someone. They're worth almost 100 experience points each.

     

My level 2 party reaches an intersection.

        

I got into a somewhat absurd situation where I actually preferred when enemies attacked from behind, since my spellcasters all have between 7-10 hit points and can survive more than one hit. 

   

With all my efforts focused on survival and leveling, I didn't get much mapping done. The first level of the castle, which the game refers to as the "Courtyard," seems to have 39 x 38 squares, a weird number, made even weirder by the coordinate system, which counts in multiples of 10, with the (0,0) square inaccessible, one square south of the entry square. From there, coordinates are given as up to 180W and 200E, but on the y-axis, they're all north, up to 390. Even odder is that the x-axis is only 39 squares (instead of 38) because of a single alcove (200,20) in the eastern wall.

     

My map of the courtyard so far.

       

I've only found a couple of fixed encounters so far. There are two fixed battles with three centaurs (each) near the main entrance. These are the only battles for which the game has given me the option to "search for treasure" afterwards, but I didn't find any. The centaurs are replaced with messages telling of trees to the northwest and brambles to the northeast

   

Beyond that, the only other special encounter has been a notched dial on a wall, with numbers from 0 to 60. I haven't tried to do anything with it yet.

     

Try to qualify for the showcase showdown?

            

I nearly just wrapped up the entire thing here, particularly since it doesn't seem to have a main quest (though it's possible one develops). But where this game is so lightly documented, I figure I'll give it another few hours and try to at least map the first level.

   

What do you think: Do experiences like this teach me persistence? In my 50s, do I still need to be building character? 

      

Time so far:  13 hours

     

****

   

Next entry in this series

   

For further reading:

   

• Wizardry (1981), from which this game takes most of its ideas.

08/15/2026