Game 533: Medical Center (1979)

 

        

Medical Center

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1979 for PLATO educational mainframe

Date Started: 1 December 2024

Date Ended: 2 December 2024

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

     

Medical Center is one of two games written for PLATO that took the mechanics of The Game of Dungeons (1975) and put them in a hospital. Bugs and Drugs (1978) beat it by a year, and there are enough similarities that Center was probably influenced by Bugs, but Bugs may have no longer been available when Center was written.

     

The game puts your character in a 20-floor hospital, each floor specializing in an area of medicine, each crawling with diseases related to that specialty. As you wander the corridors, you encounter these diseases and have to decide whether to treat them with medication, fight them with your innate constitution, rely on a limited pool of immunizations, or refer the patient to surgery. You get experience points and money for diseases successfully fought and eradicated, but if you fail, the disease affects you, weakening one of your systems. The goal is to climb the medical hierarchy as far as possible, from intern to professor emeritus while simultaneously climbing the hospital to the twentieth floor.

     

I wonder how accurate this list is in its depiction of the hierarchy of medical positions.

     

Where Bugs and Drugs had a standard set of RPG character attributes (strength, intelligence, etc.), your character in Medical Center just has a series of percentages associated with his 11 systems. Eight of them are considered "vital": cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, liver, urinary, central nervous system, blood, and skin. If any of your percentages drop below 0%, you die. Vision, hearing, muscular-skeletal, and reproductive systems are "non-vital," but 0% in any of them means that you functionally cannot play the game.

      

Nothing suspends disbelief more than an intern with a perfect liver and a positive bank balance.

      

The moment you enter Level 1, you start meeting gonorrhea, impetigo, nonspecific urethritis, acute cystitis, and a host of other conditions. If you can identify the right medicine, it's almost always successful. Sometimes the right choice is unsuccessful, just like in real life, but in such cases you lose, say, 0-3% of health in your related system. If you choose the wrong medication, you lose in the double digits.

       

My first encounter. Yesterday, I didn't know what "impetigo" was.

      

Naturally, Google helped a lot in identifying the right medicine, although not as much as you might think given that it's been 45 years. The search engine's most common answer was doxycycline, which isn't in the "formulary" list that you can bring up at any time. I learned that when doxycycline is indicated, tetracycline almost always works instead. Also, penicillin is a good default. Overall, this phase of the game is easier than in Bugs and Drugs because the earlier game put you on a time limit whereas Medical Center gives you all the time you need to search the Internet Archive for 1978 copies of The Physician's Desk Reference.

  

25%! This choice was definitely "wrong."

    

The non-medication options are iffier, and I didn't experiment with them much. Just "fighting" the disease hardly ever worked. Immunizations and surgery both seemed like traps; when I tried immunization, it inevitably turned out that there is no immunization for that disease. Surgery, when it works, costs so much that it can bankrupt you.

   

Yes, for some reason, when you order medication or surgery, the cost comes out of your balance. With medication, you generally recoup it with the amount billed to the patient, although the game is realistic in that there are separate "billed amounts" and "collected amounts." Your first couple of encounters can go poorly if you order a medication that's too expensive for your balance, since running out of money immediately ends the game.

    

This is a cutthroat hospital.

    

In addition to encounters with diseases, there are also lots of random encounters with letters, books, cabinets, medicines, and such. You might get a letter with payment for a past bill, or a check from some place for which you wrote an article or gave a lecture. You might find a medicine cabinet with a pair of glasses that increases your "Vision" or a pair of sunglasses that decreases it. You find bottles of medicine that boost your percentages.

       

That was a decent check for 1979.

       

You can find books that tell you outright what the answer is to the medication question--with the caveat that some of them are quite old and may reflect outdated practice. This is an in-game version of what I was going through with Google. Bugs and Drugs also featured such books (though without the possibility of them being wrong), one of the many similarities between the titles.

    

Each 20 x 20 floor also has a few fixed encounters, including stairs to the floors above and below, an elevator (which has restrictions based on your level), a pharmacy where you can buy immunizations, a lounge where you can rest, and the departmental offices, where you can get treatments specific to that floor. Your character has a specialty and receives "privileges" on the associated floor, including free treatments.

    

Family Practice is on the first floor, which is disturbing given the number of times I encountered gonorrhea and syphilis.

       

The goal is to achieve as high a rank as possible. No one has made professor emeritus since 1984. The current top scorer is only a chief resident (rank 6 out of 21). 

           

Everyone who has ever made professor emeritus.

    

In any event, I got my character up to "2nd year resident" (second highest on the current leaderboard) and probably would have been able to go higher except that I insisted on pushing upward in the hospital. I died on Level 6 when I ordered cephalosporin to treat bacteroides-peritonitis. For all I know, that was the right answer, but my GI system was at 0% from some earlier bad choices, so even a slight loss would have killed me.

       

That sounds like an unpleasant way to go. Not that there are any pleasant ones.

      

Medical Center was written by Dr. David E. Trachtenbarg, who attended the University of Illinois College of Medicine from 1971 to 1975. He is still practicing in Peoria, Illinois, and he has taught at the university since 1990. I'm not sure what his status was in 1979 when he wrote the game, but he presumably wrote it to help younger medical students. The title screen also credits Dr. Stephen C. Doughty as an "infectious disease consultant." I wrote to Dr. Trachtenbarg to see if he remembered anything about the game, but I hadn't heard from him at publication time.

    

These two medical games are some of the few truly educational RPGs that we've experienced, games where the player's knowledge (mostly) trumps random rolls and character attributes. I suppose this is not dissimilar to how the player's cleverness, not the characters', determines success or failure with the fairy chests in Betrayal at Krondor. There's a longer entry to be made here about the duality of player growth and character growth and what kind of balance a good RPG favors, but I wouldn't generally mind if occasionally an RPG rewarded a player's knowledge of history, geography, physics, physical sciences, humanities, or other knowledge sets, even if such rewards aren't the game's entire raison d'être.

       

One of the last diseases I eradicated.

       

However, purely as a game (rather than a teaching tool), Medical Center leans too far towards the player's knowledge to be an enjoyable RPG, as enjoyable as it was as a novelty. Bugs and Drugs had more nods to classic RPG tropes, such as being able to earn experience by finding money instead of just curing diseases. Medical Center was fun as a diversion, and to boost a little of my knowledge about diseases and drugs, but not something I'd want to play to the top level.

     

Thanks go to El Explorador de RPG for alerting me to the game along with a few others that history had mostly forgotten. I've since played all of them, so unless yet another one pops up, I have once again reached the end of the PLATO list. That feels sad to type. Even when they weren't superb, they delivered a level of competence above anything in the commercial CRPG market at the time, and Medical Center, although not the best of the RPGs on the platform, is no exception.

The Great Ultizurkian Underland: Volcanic Dungeon

 

Accessing the mysterious ninth level.

       

Dr. Dungeon's earlier games were so short that I had hopes of wrapping this one up in two, but it's clear that it's going to take a bit longer. That isn't a complaint, just an inevitable reality given an independent developer who learned as he went along. 

    

To recap, the protagonist of the game, the Grandmaster from the previous Zurk and Ultizurk games, has been summoned to a civilization living on the inside of a hollowed-out volcano. Trouble is brewing somewhere in this empire, and it's up to the Grandmaster to solve it. In the first session, I met with the ruler, Lord Baldwin, a Lord British-like figure who lays out the quest, resurrects the character upon death, heals him on request, and levels him up when he's accumulated enough experience.

    

I also met the famous wizard, Leomund, who told me that there are 12 spells in this world. Each requires a unique item to unlock. I had unlocked about half of them during the first session.

       

Talking with Lord Henry (of) the 8th (level). The houses on this level are much nicer.

       

The dungeon consists of nine levels. Lord Baldwin and the armory are on Level 1; Leomund and William, the treasurer, are on Level 2. Level 8, the ground level (which allows access to the outside world) is ruled by Lord Henry and hosts the Lycaeum, the empire's great library. Levels 6 and 7 are the domain of the sirens, ruled by Queen Melissa. All these levels are peaceful, full of NPCs. Only Levels 3-5 have enemies, and I hadn't explored them much during the first session.

      

I had talked about how the NPCs offered a series of keyword chains. For instance, Cara on Level 1 asks you to ask Hilda on Level 2 about NEEDLE; Hilda tells you to ask Krysty on Level 6 about THREAD; Krysty tells you to ask Claudia on Level 7 about SPOOL; and Claudia tells you to ask Marilyn on Level 8 about YARN. It turns out that the members of these chains all belong to the same "guilds," although they're not all named. There are 10 of these threads, and the result in all cases, from the final person in the chain, is information about a potion specific to that guild.

        

Learning about a potion's location . . .

. . . and finding it.

       

The potions are all located on Levels 3 and 4, based on certain landmarks. But they all require digging, and to do that, I had to get a shovel. To find one, I looped around the levels again until I found a secret cache of chests on Level 2, one of which had a shovel. 

      

There we go.

       

The next hard part was getting to the potion locations. Levels 3 and 4 are full of monsters. Level 3 has skeletons, bats, and snakes; Level 4 has ghosts, scorpions, and reapers. At character Level 1, you can basically kill one or two Level 3 monsters before your hit points are gone. The WU ZU spell restores your hit points, so you can cast that a couple of times, but once you're out, death is inevitable. Fortunately, dying just means getting resurrected in front of Lord Baldwin with no loss of anything, at which point you can just B)link back to the level on which you died. The monsters restock when you leave and return, alas.

     

For the next couple of hours, my approach was to move around Level 3 looking for the potion locations (and other interesting things), fighting monsters as I encountered them, and looting their bodies if I defeated them. When a monster dies, there's about a 1/3 chance it has nothing, a 1/3 chance it has a gold nugget, and a 1/3 chance it has food. (Amusingly, the "food," if it has it, is not the monster's own flesh but other food objects like cheese wedges, roast ducks, and bunches of grapes.) When my inventory had enough gold nuggets, I would return to Level 2, walk to William's office, sell the nuggets for gold, teleport to Level 1, and see if I could get a weapon or armor upgrade from Roy, the armorer. Of course, every time I ended up in front of Lord Baldwin, I'd see if I could ADVANCE.

     

Lord Baldwin levels me up.

      

It turns out that you gain a level for every 200 experience points, at least through Level 6, which takes a long time in the beginning but is quite swift later on. There are seven types of weapons available at the armory, and I love that the list is a bit non-standard: knife, awl pike, Lucern hammer, ranseur, elven sword, khopesh staff, and bill guisarme. (This may be the only RPG in which the strongest weapon is a polearm.) Some of them apparently do more damage to certain monsters (e.g., the Lucern hammer to skeletons), but it's too much trouble to swap them in and out. I just went with the overall best.

   

The armory also has three types of helms, three types of armor, and two types of shields. My upgrade sequence got a major boost when I discovered a Wand of Unlock Magic in a chest on Level 3. This allowed me to open two magically locked chests on Level 2 that had a great helm and a khopesh staff.

        

Technically, it's a khopesh staff when you buy it, but for some reason it becomes a khopesh hammer when you use it.

      

Eventually, I was strong enough to make my way through the enemies to the potions on Levels 3 and 4. Once I had all 10, I used them on an empty jar I'd found somewhere to make a "Rainbow Potion." This is going to be important somehow in the endgame.

    

The next major phase was to find Prince John on Level 5. As reported last time, John had led an expedition down to the secret ninth level but never made it back. Someone had spotted him on Level 5, wearing some mysterious glowing armor, leading a pack of spirit demons. Spirit demons are the only enemy on Level 5, and they are hard, though rendered a bit easier by a spell called SIL GOZ that halves the hit points of all spirit demons on the level when cast. I had to give Leomund an elven sword for that spell.

     

This spell is a life saver.

      

Eventually, I found John and managed to defeat him in combat (restoring my hit points with WU ZU twice), at which point he surrendered and thanked me for bringing him back to his senses. He said that his mind was seized by some great evil forming in a rainbow pool on Level 9, "an ancient magical creation of long dead druids." The cyclopes on Level 9 are also controlled by this great evil.

       

The Grandmaster defeats Macaulay Culkin.

       

He announced his plans to return to Lord Baldwin but said he'd give me his magic armor--although instead of just giving it to me, for some reason he strewed it around the dungeon level, so I had to go find it. The magic plate, helm, and shield took the place of the best stuff I'd gotten from the armory.

       

Is that supposed to be a swear? Because it literally is by the dungeon's walls.

       

I still had to solve the other half of Leomund's puzzles. Last entry, I was confused about what some of the spells did, but it turns out that you just have to ask Leomund about SPELL FOUR or SPELL SEVEN and get a full description. This is the full list.

      

No.	Command	Mana	Effects	Token
1	WU ZU	5	Full healing	Nightshade mushroom
2	VAL ZO	5	Create 5 arrows	Light blue berries
3	ZIL FLAS	10	Kill all skeletons on the level	Yellow berries
4	(UNKNOWN)	10	Kills all the ghosts on a level	Gossomar silk
5	SIL GOZ	15	Halves the HP of all spirit demons on the level	Elven sword
6	(UNKNOWN)	3	Magic map	Spirit jelly
7	RIM FA	15	Freezes time for a few seconds	Pocketwatch
8	JO BOZ	20	Weakens every enemy on the level	Great helm
9	POR VAS	5	Creates 5 gold pieces	Gold nugget
10	ZIL LUM	5	Lists the locations of monsters and NPCs	Good sextant
11	FO TI	30	Triples strength for 1 day	Skull of fallen hero
12	ZU FLIM LA	40	Gives you the key to a door on Level 9	Reach Level 7

          

Turning in items for spells.

     

Spells 3 and 4 don't provide experience for the kills, and I got both of them after the associated monsters were a problem. I haven't done anything with Spell 2 or with missile weapons in general. There's supposed to be a way to get a bow from the sirens. Spell 9 would ruin the economy if you just stood in front of Lord Baldwin getting restored after running through your points. I didn't do that. I didn't get Spell 11 until the end of this session, but man, that would have been nice.

    

Spell 12 theoretically "gives you what you most need," but apparently the key is the only thing you need.

      

If I had this spell in real life, it would just deliver an unending supply of gimlets.

      

I got Spells 5 and 8 when I gave up those inventory items for the next upgrade. Spell 12 came when I finally reached Level 7; it turns out that you can still earn three more levels, but a book indicates you'll be somewhat overpowered if you do that. Spell 11 was the last one I obtained because the fallen hero in question can only be found on Level 9. 

That skull thing was a bit of B.S., by the way. The game tells you that you need the skull of a fallen hero. At nighttime on Level 5, gravestones appear, and if you look at them, the stones say, "The script identifies it as that of a long dead hero." Any player would think that you need to dig at these stones to find the skull of a fallen hero. That doesn't work, though; you just find them on a couple of mangled bodies on Level 9. What is the purpose of the gravestones?

        

A bit of annoying misdirection. Not that you can see any of this.

       

So far, my description of the game sounds relatively favorable, and I suppose my impression is mostly the same. It's a bit derivative, but it's certainly competent. It provides the core RPG experience of leveling up and getting stronger while solving mysteries and puzzles. But we have to talk about the worst parts of the game:

    

• The night/day system. Easily the worst part of the game, this is explained in-game by a book that says someone cast a spell so that the dwellers of the Underland would keep in sync with the surface world. The problem is that you can't see anything at night. The entire color palette changes. Dark blue text becomes invisible on a black background and none of the icons mean anything. When this happens while exploring a safe area, I've just been putting the emulator in warp mode and running myself against a wall until it's daytime again. But it's infuriating when it happens on a combat level because I can't see my hit points or even what kind of monster I'm fighting. There are no light objects or spells in the game that I can find.

       

The same area at night . . .

. . . and during the day.

           

• The graphics. I don't mean the character portraits. They're so bad they're almost endearing. I'm talking about the iconography, which is too small and attempts too much detail. Part of it may be my colorblindness, but I've missed entire NPCs because they were sitting in chairs and looked like blobs.

• The spelling. Dr. Dungeon needed a proofreader. Among other things, you have to buy and sell SHEILDS and LUCERN hammers.

• The movement. Getting the right balance of CPU cycles and NPC speed has been difficult, but even with the right balance, the game is just janky. The controls are unresponsive and buffer your inputs forever, so that when you run into an enemy, odds are you'll spend the next seven rounds literally running into him, since the game reads your inputs from before the encounter. The rest is hard to explain without playing, but it's just slow and annoying.

       

But I pushed through and tried to win. Level 9 isn't hard to find: the ladder is on a small island accessible from the mainland on Level 8. Once you get down there, there are cyclopes everywhere. A magic mirror on the wall lets you talk to their leader. He pleads for you not to kill any of the cyclopes, and the "rainbow man" is controlling them. The rainbow man is deep, "behind iron door." The legends say that only a potion will cure the situation, and "only he with great weapon, armor [can] enter."

       

The cyclops king expresses his sorrow and outrage.

      

You can't even attack the cyclopes; the game just tells you that they're too strong. I skirted around them, occasionally taking damage if I happened to get next to one, and found a grappling hook and the skull of a fallen hero. 

  

What kind of hero am I?

     

The iron door is in the northern part of the dungeon, but you can't enter with the key unless you also hold "the greatest in offense and defense." This is where I'm stuck. I have the greatest in defense, but not offense.

       

I guess I'd better go find a copy of the National Review.

     

The Lycaeum has a potential solution. There are a couple of dozen books in the building, most of them recaps of Dr. Dungeon's other games. There's a book called The Dungeon Master's Book of Tips that gives you a few hints for the game. Levels of Advancement describes the level cap as being 10, "but if you pass 7 or 8, you're probably lost and failed to find something." King Eldor's Morons pokes fun at the monsters in the first Ultizurk, who couldn't move. The Dungeon Master: Man or Myth? is about Dr. Dungeon himself. There are books on the rainbow pool that I'll discuss when I get there.

        

Man, this guy wrote a lot of games.

      

Legend of Soulsbane tells of a powerful weapon, also called the Diamond Sword, that can be made with "a large chunk of diamond ice, found in the polar regions." The grappling hook is necessary to reach the "higher polar lands." The problem is that I haven't found any part of the dungeon that seems "polar." I have no idea where to go for that. The map legend supposedly shows white for "snow," but I don't see that on any of the maps.

    

What is "diamond ice," even?

      

I still have two spell quests to solve, although finding the "gossomar" silk to get a spell that kills ghosts seems moot at this point. I have no idea where to get it anyway. However, the spell that creates a magic map sounds like it could be useful. I still need to find spirit jelly, which is only found in wet places at night; I guess I should have spent more time in the dark on Level 4.

   

So I'll try that, but I've otherwise been all over this dungeon looking for the place I need to use the grappling hook, and I'm having no luck. I'd hate not to win this one, but there's also a limited amount of time it makes sense to spend on it.

   

Time so far: 9 hours

Betrayal at Krondor: Assassin's Creed

 

Who is James talking to? Find out in this exciting episode.

       

The position in which we left ourselves at the end of the last session meant that we could come at Cavall Keep from the direction of Romney, which makes the most thematic sense. It's what we would have done if we hadn't gone "roaming" for the last two entries. The journey takes about a week on foot. We stop at Romney just to make sure we haven't overlooked anything there, but it doesn't appear that we have.

    

As we transition to the new area, Owyn mentions his Uncle Corvalis, who owns some estates in Cavall Keep. We're soon ambushed by a party of three Nighthawks who make the mistake of trying to take us out with crossbows, which gives Owyn plenty of time to freeze them with "Fetters of Rime." Someone asked recently if I've been casting "Final Rest" on them, and I said no. It turns out I don't even have it. I'm not sure where I was supposed to get it.

   

We cross a bridge and meet a group of Riverpullers headed south to add their strength to the guild war. They ask if we're supporting Mitchel and the Glazer's Guild. We honestly say no. They then ask if we support Ian. I can't remember who Ian is, but we don't support anybody. They call us "men without commitments" and move on.

      

This is the very definition of "not my circus, not my monkeys."

       

In the town of Prank's Stone:

 

• We meet a man who claims his machine converts rubies to emeralds, and that he's working on a version that converts rubies to diamonds. He wants rubies from us to test it, but we don't have any. 

• At the end of a short path, we find a monolith that seems to be making some kind of humming sound. Owyn says that it's "emitting a very strange energy" and wonders if we should touch it. I reluctantly say yes. We're all startled by a loud bang, but we don't seem to be hurt. Then the name of the town sinks in.

       

The answer to such questions is always "no," but you have to do it anyway.

      

• In the Flying Sow tavern, a trembling woman with a bruise on her face hands us a package that she was told to deliver. She won't or can't answer any other questions. The thing is, when we leave the tavern and I can get into the inventories, there doesn't seem to be any new items. I reload and try again and get the same result. I'm not sure what she was supposed to have delivered. 

      

I have no idea what this was about.

     

• Hearing a commotion in a house, we burst in on an actor running his lines for a play. We have to pay 25 sovereigns to fix his door. 

• A shop called Roots and Herbs. I'm tempted to sell some of my Silverthorn, as I don't think I've been poisoned once, but I don't. We buy a couple of herb packets.

    

The road turns west after Prank's Stone. We defeat four more Nighthawks north of a graveyard. There are two fairy chests in the area:

    

• "The language of men can be mastered. But what Kingdom word is always pronounced wrong?" You never fool me with literal clues. This one has a light crossbow, 20 elven quarrels, a peasant's key, and 2 restoratives.

• "Names give power. Magic to control. But what is broken by naming it?" I've heard this one before in at least three other RPGs (SILENCE). 57 sovereigns and a dragon stone.

   

A regular chest nearby is trapped, but I always have Owyn cast "Scent of Sarig" before opening those. It has a ruby and an emerald, so I reluctantly go back to Prank's Stone just to see what will happen with the machine. It does seem to crank out a diamond, although valued at 2% compared to the ruby's 46%. I suspect the ruby was thus worth more.

        

I don't remember where this was, but I thought it was a nice image.

         

South of the road, we find the Temple of Banath, where two guards try to get us to strip all of our metals before entering: "Metal is base and offensive to our god." They warn that we'll be struck dead if we enter with metal. Motivated less by piety and more by a desire not to have to juggle the inventory, I ignore them. Nothing happens to us, but neither does the temple have anything useful for us. 

     

Along a western spur, three trolls and an easy trap stand between us and a pretty waterfall. Under a pile of leaves on this screen, we find a Ring of the Golden Way, which improves "Scouting" by 15 points. We can also go behind the waterfall, where we find a locked door next to a niche with a chessboard. A knight is missing from the board. There isn't anything else we can do here for now.

        

There's always something behind the waterfall.

       

Most of this game occurs on relatively linear paths between mountains, which I explore by bouncing back and forth like a ball. It's always a bit startling when the world opens up into a large clearing, which happens here.

      

The game world opens up.

    

I probably miss some things, but I find:

    

• A recently-dug hole containing a blessed broadsword in 100% condition.

• A big barn where we're ambushed by six Moredhel warriors. It's a measure of how far we've come that even in an ambush, they don't stand a chance. One of them has a note from someone named "Narab" commanding that they capture or kill Gorath. "Slay him before he discovers our connection to the Nighthawks."

• Three trolls.

• A shop called Dabeh's Fanciful Trinkets. Among other things, it sells wyvern eggs, so I'm not sure why I've been lugging around two of them. I keep one, reasoning that I can return here if I need another. More important, the shop sells a bunch of spells I don't have: "Dragon's Breath," "Skyfire," "The Unseen," "Nacre Cicatrix," "Unfortunate Flux," "Thoughts Like Clouds," and "Final Rest." I buy "Final Rest" for now, plus a skill book called Dorcas' Treatise which increases Owyn's "Casting Accuracy" skill to 100%. That's nice because he accidentally nailed James with "Fetters of Rime" in a recent troll battle.

      

Owyn's current spells.

      

• A field of tree stumps containing gold, potions, and minor treasures.

• An inn called Lapping Meadows. 

• A trap guarding three fairy chests, two of which I'm still mulling. The one I get: "We don't need wine, we don't need meat, we have sharp teeth, but cannot eat" (SAWS). The other two: "It can move over water, but cannot fly. It can move under water but stays quite dry." I would say SOUND or SOUNDWAVE, but it has six letters. "Has tongue but cannot talk. Runs but cannot walk." Five letters. Other than an animal, which doesn't go with the second part, I can't think of anything that has a tongue but a shoe.

      

A complex trap.

       

• As I walk through an area, the game dings and says "the party's abilities have increased" several times. What seems to have increased is "Stealth." I assume that means I avoided an ambush?

• A house selling herbal packs, restoratives, Flame Root oil, and Killian's Root oil. I haven't heard of that latter one. It's very expensive (192 sovereigns for 6 doses), but it supposedly increases weapon effectiveness. James haggles them down to 154 and buys one pack.

• A farm with a house and barn. The farmer warns us about "spinners," or giant spiders, found in the area.

      

One more thing happens before we get to Corvall keep: We find a chest on the side of the road with 240 sovereigns and a note from Count Geoffrey Corvalis to the High Priest of Kahooli: "I request that Navon du Sandau be driven mad for his attacks on my person and my family." Is this Owyn's uncle?

           

Finally, we approach Cavall Keep. When I started this entry, I thought we'd be there by the third paragraph. Cavall Keep is a menu town with a weapon shop, a tavern, and Count Geoffrey's manor. North of the city is another large, open area, ending in the town of Kenting Rush. Things get confusing at this point, so I'm going to summarize instead of going in a linear order, but the story comes from a combination of talking to the very unpleasant Geoffrey, Owyn's cousin Ugyne (Geoffrey's daughter), and the slick Navon du Sandau, who is hanging around outdoors in Kenting Rush. We have to go back and forth among these people a number of times to get all the keywords.

      

Count Geoffrey gives me another great phrase to use on students who visit during office hours.

      

Geoffrey's unpleasantness--he barely acknowledges Owyn--comes from a series of misfortunes. Years ago, at his keep outside of the city, he sent his son Neville downstairs for a bottle of wine, and the wine cellar collapsed. The boy's body was never recovered. Then, a few years after that, the keep burned down, killing the count's wife and a maid, forcing the family to relocate to the city.

      

Ugyne.

       

Ugyne is coming of age, and a Navon du Sandau, a merchant from Kenting Rush, has been courting her. Geoffrey doesn't like him because it was a Sandau who designed the faulty wine cellar, although Navon denies that he's related. (In this kind of setting, that seems unlikely.) Navon has been prying into Corvalis business, including the layout of the dungeon (called Cavall Run) beneath the old estate, the amount of gold that might still be found there, and the fate of a legendary magical sword called Guarda Revanche that used to be owned by the family. Increasingly annoyed by the man's attentions ("he brings up memories and feelings I wish to leave buried"), Geoffrey has been trying to hire the Temple of Kahooli to deal with him, but they haven't been coming around lately to collect contracts and payments from their dead-drops. 

        

Navon.

          

Meanwhile, Ugyne drops a bomb: The spyglass in our possession came from the old Corvalis keep, but it disappeared around the time of Neville's death.

 

Our first encounter with Navon is preceded by James reacting to the smell of jasmine in the air, which he also smelled at the Black Sheep Tavern, where the massacre that prompted our current quest took place. Navon explains that he deals in spices, but James is still troubled. Navon expresses surprise that Geoffrey hasn't asked the Nighthawks to assassinate him: "He is surrounded by Nighthawks. They guard his house, his lands, Cavall Keep . . . though they never wear their guild clothing while working for the Count." James also learns a chess move from Navon, as "Ivan Skaald in Malac's Cross tells us you are quite a chess player." I don't remember this conversation.

       

A battle with three Nighthawks and two black slayers. Their obsession with crossbows (and thus staying at a distance) means I can blast four of them with fire.

       

Near the Temple of Kahooli, we meet the prelate that the lector told us about last session. The lector promised to tell us where to find the Nighthawks if we could become initiates of the temple. For a 50-gold-piece donation, he tells us the three codes of Kahooli and the tasks needed to demonstrate piety:

• Subjugation of the Will: Renounce all ties to king and country.
• Mortification of the Flesh: Clean oneself of all appetites of the flesh.
• Subordination of Service: Go through the "water curtain" and pray to Kahooli for a full year.

   

The lector insists that we have to do at least one of these things, but the first and third are clearly out (unless Gorath could do the first alone), and I don't know how to demonstrate the second even if it were possible.

        

Bribing the prelate to learn the tenets of the faith.

        

The large area between Cavall Keep and Kenting Rush is full of treasure chests, fairy and otherwise, and we end up loaded with gems, which we sell at a shop in Kenting Rush called Jewels, Keys, Rings. We have well over 2,000 sovereigns by the time we're done, so I guess there's no need to skimp on anything. I'm going to omit a few other encounters in the area, including James getting beat up by the husband of a former lover and a visit to a sorcerer that nets us a Lighting Staff we don't have room for.

     

I enjoy the shop screens.

      

There are a few encounters with Nighthawks in the area, and after the battle, I try to cast "Final Rest" on them only to find it's a combat spell. Why would I cast it in combat? I'm more confused than ever.

      

We also find the knight chess piece in a well in the town, locked behind a grate that we need a virtue key to open. James has a long speech about how this type of lock used to be found on chastity belts.

      

How do we know this background?

     

I suspect that Navon is lying about Geoffrey and that in fact Navon is the leader of the Nighthawks. He's just a little too smooth, and there's the jasmine thing. Plus, if Geoffrey really were so embedded with the Nighthawks, who are allied with the Temple of Kahooli, why would he have so much trouble getting the services of the temple? However, I don't know how to prove it just yet, so in the meantime, I head back to the waterfall. Placing the knight piece on the chessboard causes the door to open.

            

Is that supposed to be some kind of pun?

      

The resulting map is quite large--easily the largest of the four dungeons we've explored so far in the game. As I noted last time, I like dungeon exploration in this interface. It works better than outdoor exploration with its weird, impassable hills that blend in with the landscape and force you to constantly switch between first-person view and map view. It also feels very module-like.

        

A bit of the dungeon.

      

By exploring with  my usual "follow the right wall" approach, we encounter the following:

    

• A battle with four giant spiders. Very easy.

• A battle with two giant spiders and a Black Slayer. Still easy.

       

The graphics for the spiders could be a little better. They just look like blobs.

     

• A fairy chest in an alcove: "You tie these things before you go and untie them after you stop." It's not LACES or REINS. There are only five letters, though, and the last is clearly an "S," so I get it through brute force and do a face-palm when I get the answer (SHOES). A crossbow, a ruby, and 121 royals.

• A battle with three Nighthawks and one Black Slayer. They could be tough, but they make the mistake of thinking that archery is the key to success, which allows Owyn to nail them from afar with spells. However, one of them does manage to poison Owyn. Good thing I kept those berries. They're guarding a chest with an elven crossbow.

       

The game narrates everything, even a simple status effect.

      

• Three more giant spiders in a hallway.

• A couple of pits that we have to swing across on a rope.

      

I keep forgetting to take a video of the little animation that accompanies this.

        

• Several locked doors that James manages to pick. As he does, I can't help but notice he has a lot fewer keys than he did before. A screenshot I showed in the last entry has him with 9 peasant's keys, 3 virtue keys, 1 noble's passkey, 9 guilder's passkeys, 1 Guildis Thorn, and 1 Royal Key of Krondor. Since then, he somehow lost 6 peasant's keys, all 9 guilder's passkeys, the noble's passkey, and the Guildis Thorn. I'm sure I didn't use them.

• A room in which a Nighthawk is guarding two chests. The moment he sees us, he swallows poison and dies, which confuses the party. The chests just have a rope and a sword. There's a locked door that James cannot open on the south wall.

      

That seems like an extreme reaction.

      

• Fairy chest: "This sparkling globe can float on water and weighs not more than a feather. Yet despite its weight, ten giants could never pick it up" (BUBBLE). I probably would have gotten it anyway but half the correct letters are already in place. A crossbow, 158 royals, a Moredhel brooch, and a torch.

• Fairy chest: "Ten troll's strength, ten troll's length, one troll can pick it up, no troll can stand it up" (ROPE). No four-letter answer is hard since each dial has only four possible letters. This chest has the journal of an abbot from Malac's Cross who, on the edge of Elvandar Forest, saw someone open a fairy chest with the password GLAMREDHEL and reveal the Guarda Revanche. I'm not sure it's possible to get that far west in this game, so I'm not sure how that helps. This is the first time that a plot-specific item has been in a fairy chest, I think. Now I'm paranoid about the ones I didn't open.

    

I've heard of this book before, though I don't know it.

       

• A room with a locked, trapped chest containing a blessed broadsword and a medium crossbow.

• An impassable stairwell choked with collapsed stones.

      

This is another hint I should have picked up on.

       

• A room with three Nighthawks. One of them has a noble's passkey, so at least I got that back.

• A room with four black slayers guarding a fairy chest that opens to MUSIC. (I don't feel like typing out those riddles anymore.) It has a blessed Moredhel lamprey and 3 doses of Killian's Root Oil. At this point, I have so much stuff to rub on my weapons before battle that I've started doing it before literally every battle.

  

My inventory is getting out of control.

       

• One Nighthawk, three black slayers.

• Two Nighthawks in a corridor. Really? Two?!

• A black slayer leading four Nighthawks. Harder. Owyn goes down, which means days of resting and healing to remove his "near-death" status. Fortunately, I have plenty of herbal packs and rations, or I could just pay to have him healed at a temple. The dungeon is almost over.

• Another battle with four Nighthawks leaves Owyn unconscious and near-death again. "Near-death" means that he doesn't gain much health or stamina until the effect is removed. Even with herbal packs active, it decreases only a few percentage points a day. I think it matters where you sleep. The dungeon must be the worst place because it barely budges.

         

"Fetters of Rime" continues to do its job.

       

At this point, having decimated the Nighthawks, we're still no closer to the solution to the quest. I resolve to go back to the Temple of Kahooli, get Owyn healed, and figure out how to complete one of the tasks of piety. I stop at Cavall Keep on the way, but Count Geoffrey has gone hunting. Ugyne has nothing new.

    

But when we encounter Navon in Kenting Rush again, there's a new dialogue option: "Sword." Ugyne told us that she had loaned a book about the Guarda Revanche to Navon, but he insists he left it at home. "Some place like Cavall Run?" James says, putting two and two together faster than I did. Apparently, the dungeon under the waterfall is the same as the one that used to be under Count Geoffrey's keep; hence, the stairway blocked by debris. The book that Ugyne loaned Navon is the abbot's journal.

    

James calls him out: "I have always wondered what the leader of the Nighthawks might be like and now it seems we meet face to face." He goes on to deduce that not only is Navon the leader of the Nighthawks, he is also Neville, Count Geoffrey's lost son. ("As I recall, the body was never found and you have displayed an unerring interest in the Corvalis family.") Navon confesses that James is correct. Geoffrey isn't his father, however; his mother had an affair. The business with the wine cellar was Geoffrey's botched attempt to kill him. The Nighthawks (still bloodied from their war with Arutha in Silverthorn) ended up kidnapping Neville for ransom, but he used the magic spyglass to convince them that he had magic powers. He eventually took charge of the organization, set up in Geoffrey's old dungeon, and began tormenting his former "father" and courting Ugyne: "Not that I would have conjugated the marriage, Ishap forbid. She would have died some unpleasant death on our wedding night." He mentions something about Geoffrey's servant, Isunatus, accepting money from Delekhan and somehow funneling it to Navon. I'm confused about this bit.

     

He's speaking to James, not me. I'm an idiot.

       

James demands the key to the locked door in the dungeon, and Navon challenges him to take it from him. Combat begins. Navon starts some distance away and nails Owyn with an arrow, sending him to the mat. Owyn would have been useless anyway. Navon doesn't stand up more than a couple of rounds to James and Gorath. On his body, we loot a suit of Dragon Plate armor, a poisoned greatsword, 38 sovereigns, 9 enchanted quarrels, a diamond, some Silverthorn poison, a cellar key, and a note. The note just clues us in about the cave behind the waterfall, so I'm guessing there was another way to expose Navon through the temple.

  

Double-teaming the Nighthawk leader.

     

Another visit to Jewels, Keys, Rings leaves us with over 4,400 sovereigns (the diamond that we took from Navon sells for 1,300 alone). We buy a couple of the keys that we mysteriously lost. We head up the road to the Temple of Kahooli--where the lector will no longer see us--and get Owyn healed. Finally, we head back south to the waterfall. On the way, we stop at Cavall Keep, but there are no new dialogues with Ugyne or Geoffrey. 

     

"Only?!"

     

In the dungeon, the key opens the way to a single room with a single fairy chest. "This engulfing thing is strange indeed. The greater it grows, the less you see." At least it's an easy one (DARKNESS).

    

The chest has a scroll detailing Delekhan's plans to attack Northwarden, which we visited last session. James is concerned because the plan calls for too few Moredhel troops to possibly capture the city, suggesting that Delekhan has a secret weapon or other advantage. "Maybe the Nighthawks have infiltrated the castle," Owyn suggests. James scribbles a warning letter to Prince Arutha and gives it to Gorath and Owyn to take to him outside Dimwood Forest, near Sethanon. James himself plans to go to Northwarden to warn Baron Gabot. A cut scene relates that Owyn and Gorath are captured by Delekhan's lieutenant, Narab, before they can reach Arutha. And with that, we transition to Chapter 4: "Marked for Death."

      

Chapter 3 ends.

      

I may have to reload and replay a bit, since now that I know that I'm going to be starting the next session with no money and only Owyn and Gorath, I may want to buy some stuff and shuffle some equipment around.

       

Great artistic choice to silhouette the horned helmet against the full moon. Was it made by the same person who did the character portraits?

     

This was a very long session, but I wanted to get to the end of Chapter 3. This is a very dense game, and not one that I would recommend taking long breaks (which I've done twice) while playing. It's hard to keep track of all the plot developments and allusions when you play it bit by bit. But I hope that now that I've explored most of the game world, the rest of the chapters will go a bit faster. Then again, I said that last time.

    

Time so far: 43 hours