The Search for Freedom: Won!

 

Whew! About time, too.

      

Guest post by AlphabeticalAnonymous: 

 

In the previous post, I made a serious effort to push through and finish the game. The game manual promises "two outdoor areas, each 32 squares by 32 squares" and the previous 58 hours of gameplay sufficed only to explore the first of those. Luckily, I had some hope that as in other games (e.g., Ambermoon) the final world wouldn’t take nearly as long to complete as the game’s primary world. This dream was given form and in this post I finally finished, but it took a long time to get there.
     
We begin the session having passed through the portal into Aegea, the Netherworld, the Land of the Dead, the Mad Plain—where Kamazol the evil Lich rules and is building his army to invade our planet, Earth, when its moons align. The geography and color palette of this new world are both different from Earth: "the sky is a pinkish hue," water is red, swamps are brown, and deserts are blue (?). 

     

Atlas of Aegea. We exit the portal in the bottom right.

    

We explore the land, generally fleeing from encounters more because of my impatience rather than any challenge, and we find a town to the northwest. As groovy music plays in the background, a sign welcomes us to "Nwotehtyms," which is just the name of the adventure’s first town in reverse. Although the land is ostensibly ruled by Kamazol, there are only a few fixed combats in the town (with killer poodles, guards, witches, and demons). Although we beat them all, the last of these pose a rare challenge: when their crude AI decides to, they can cast the "Gotterdamerung" spell to do 30-60 damage to all my characters, and they can even cast "Invincibility" (from physical attacks) on each other. Witches can also cast "Earthquake," essentially a weaker version of "Gotterdamerung," when the mood takes them. Otherwise the town is very much like any other. It has a standard temple (run by dead clerics), a normal pub and diner, a bank, a magic shop, an inn, stores, and even a training center where we can level up.
    

Would you trust the healing services of a dead cleric?

      
We find two skeletons in town that are interesting for very different reasons. For the first, the game merely tells us that "a skeleton hangs from shackles on the wall—you can't tell if it's dead or undead, but it makes no movement." The ominous part is that this square is not marked (s)pecial on the automap or with the "Vision" spell. I had been using the map to avoid any parts of dungeons that lacked special squares, but if the game allows hidden special encounters then that means we will have to meticulously explore everything after all. The second skeleton, named Dufrey, provides perhaps the longest single text dump in the entire game aside from the introduction. It provides Dufrey some interesting backstory but nothing really relevant. The game makes us automatically release him; he gives us a few tips and bonuses; and before he leaves, he promises to meet us "in the throne room of Kamazol himself." As you’ll see below, he had to be awfully patient to do so.
      
Nwotehtyms offers a few other interesting encounters. There’s a glass orb that I realize we never did anything with, located in a locked case in the center of the "nwot erauqs." We fight and handily best a giant, undead dragon for reasons I neglected to record; everyone gets 3,333 experience and the party recovers 29,000 gold. By now the economy is well and truly broken, and our gold remains maxed out at or near 99,999 for the rest of the game. "A mighty-looking skeleton" calling himself The SwordMaster gives us a quick fetch quest and then improves our to-hit and lockpicking (?!) skills. I suppose that makes three interesting skeletons in town, for those who are counting. A clue helps us recover some +2 plate armor hidden in the "slimy swamp" in the northeast; this is the best armor in the game, as far as I can tell. At this point, we have to find the Temple of Seth (the god of death) to reforge the sword, Soulseeker, and then find Kamazol in his lair.

 

What was this all about?

    

The Temple of Seth is in the middle of a bridge, over a lake. Level 1 is a mortuary, which our "Vision" reveals is filled with around 50 two-square crypts. Each crypt contains a special square. Although we initially try to bypass them by descending as quickly as possible to Level 2 (altar room and chapel), it turns out that some of the crypts contain information we need to advance. The mortuary really provides the perfect antidote to the hugely overpowered "Vision" spell because we have to explore every single room. Most provide pointless and offer trivial combats with undead, but a few others provide what we need to make it through Level 2 below.

    

I think there was only one mimic in the entire game.

      

There, we find a room with a series of increasingly strident warning signs. After ignoring them all, we are told that we have defiled the god Seth’s Holy Room. "The mighty god attacks the party, in one of his many possible forms!" He has 999 HP and 8 armor points, great initiative, and he paralyzes when he hits. He gets all of the party members pretty low, but in the end he can only hit once per turn. We win and earn 16,666 experience per character, enough for everyone to level up at least once.
        

I guess we've now killed a god. In some games this would be the climax of the story, but here it was a mildly interesting but unnecessary optional combat.
     
Elsewhere we meet a "small, cute fuzzy creature" who increases our wisdom and intelligence (unnecessary at this point, since we’ve already maxed out the relevant party members’ statistics). More curious is this character:

"Corpus supremus maxima?" he asks us. Is that even valid Latin?

     

Luckily, the game doesn’t actually expect the player to know Latin. Elsewhere, the dungeon gives us the words "ixnay ooglevay," which in Pig Latin translate into "Nix Voogle." It means nothing to me, but the pig grabs all three pieces of Soulseeker and streaks off like greased lightning. We chase him through several rooms, including this puzzle suggesting someone with pre-calculus on the brain:
     

If you emulate a Pentium, the correct answer is 1.00000003. 

     

Eventually, we catch the pig (who also speaks English) and can either kill it or (as we choose) listen to its advice on how to make it through the rest of the level. This brings us to the Altar Room of Seth, where Soulseeker must be reforged. We can't approach the altar, because it is protected by a force field—not a magical field (nor the Netzian field, known to Earth science), but an honest-to-goodness technological force field. Two control panels are defended by dark clerics with assorted minions. After destroying the panels (which we are made to understand are definitely technological), we can approach a giant statue of Seth with three vacant eye sockets. We fill these with our three glowing spheres, place the pieces of Soulseeker on the altar, fight the statue (which has of course come to life) and voila: 

       

Room?

      
The temple clear, we head back up to the surface. Unfortunately, I’m not paying close enough attention: I forget to heal the party until it's too late, and then suffer a full-party death to a group of greater demons and witches. To add insult to injury, I lose both my clerics to another such party after reloading. We make it back to town, where we dump our spoils and level everyone up to Level 12 (the highest available is 13). At this point, most stat increases hardly seem to make a difference, and we already have our full complement of spells.
        
We set out to find and finish Kamazol once and for all. We encounter the Alphan Toll Bridge where we are told that "the toll is your life force. Will you pay the toll?" This is a false choice, as are too many in this game: declining just puts us back off of the bridge. We therefore agree, only to find that both of our clerics are knocked unconscious and the bridge disappears behind us. We try to soldier on and enter Kamazol's Den, but the remaining characters are rapidly picked off one-by-one by enemy critical-hits. I worry that perhaps clerics are always knocked out at the bridge to prevent healing, but happily we had just had a bad roll of the dice. On a reload, neither of the clerics are knocked out and everyone just loses a few hit points.
     
Kamazol’s Den consists of five levels with fairly straightforward maps and two main puzzles, as the strains of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor" repeat in the background. I have to consult the hint guide included with the game on several points to advance, but in any case the first puzzle involves a series of keys: ivory, ruby, emerald, crystal, and so on, which open important doors or critical objects. The critical objects form the second puzzle: a series of colored shapes that we have to collect. These include a yellow hexagon, a red pentagon, a green circle, a silver square, and a pink triangle.
     

Let me know the truth, let me kno-ow the truth.

      

Along the way are a number of fixed encounters, some more narratively compelling than others. We meet a Grim Reaper-like figure who reduces all characters’ dexterity by one in order to let us pass. Tossing a coin into a fountain gives us a magic lamp with a genie who gives us one wish: to increase a vital stat by up to three points, heal the entire party, restore all magic points, give everyone 10,000 experience points, or fill our pockets with gold. The first is all but pointless after so much leveling up; the second similarly so as long as one has a cleric (we have two); the third can be alleviated simply by resting for a few hours; and gold is pointless at this stage in the game. We meet and defeat Kamazol’s pet, Shugreth the giant pink slug.

       

At first I thought the slug was shouting for help, which confused me.

      

The final (stone) key unlocks a door in Kamazol’s Laboratory. There we find a blue potion, which is the key to ensuring that a killed lich doesn't return to life (or to undeath). But most unusual of all has to be the Hades Health Spa. After telling an imp that we need to bathe (a word spelled out in the dungeon’s very walls), they give us a spa membership card. Inside we find:

     

• A weight room, where all characters can increase their Strength by two.
• A (or the?) SwordMaster, who can allow us to level up or even purchase spellbooks if we still need them.
• A casino with several games; we can only play the slot machine, which gives us the stone key mentioned above.
• A Sauna: we have to leave all equipment to enter, and then fight some Wights bare-handed.
• A whirlpool tub, which gives +20 HP to all characters and in which we find the silver square. 

        

This was just weird.

    

After this, we have to laboriously work our way all the way from Level 5 back up to Level 1 before quickly descending a set of dedicated stairs down to the bottom floor again. There, we find five candles arranged in a circle around a central pillar of light. Instructions given throughout the upper floors tell us that we have to arrange the shapes at the candles, in order of the number of sides. How many sides does a circle have? We initially assume two (the inside and the outside), but that doesn’t work. We assume some number greater than six, and:
   

Surprised, aren't you? I knew you would be.

      

He asks why I summoned him, to which the only correct answer is LOGARITHMS. In the dark times before Chegg and AI cheating tools, I suppose only the Devil himself could help with math homework. He opens a previously hidden door, gives us costumes to disguise ourselves, and leaves. Based on what I can see of the map, I know we’re close now, and it’s only Day 79. Over 900 days until Kamazol and his army can enter the portal. We have this in the bag!

We step into the newly-opened corridor, and an unavoidable trap of magic gas puts us to sleep until day 994. Yes, we sleep undiscovered and undisturbed for two and a half years. The seasons come and go; Kamazol (not to mention our families) must have forgotten about us entirely as they went about their business, until we suddenly wake up to complete our quest.
      
We enter the throne room and see Kamazol on his throne. He runs away and we have to fight six etherial [sic] guardians, each of whom can one-hit kill our party members. To my surprise, Dufrey the skeleton shows up to help in this and all subsequent combats. He must have been cooling his heels in Kamazol’s halls for 30 months, waiting for us to show. If we hadn’t, I like to think that he would have tried to save the world on his own. Two chimeras guard two final keys, and then we finally face Kamazol for the last time.
     

It's nice to see a boss villain "nervous" for once. They're usually so cocky.

   

He casts "Gotterdamerung," does 400-800 damage per party member, and we all die.

I reload and we fight again. We last a bit longer, until he casts the same spell and slaughters us all. Another reload, and the third battle ends the same as the others. Kamazol has 999 hit points and 8 armor points (the same as Seth, the dark god) and is also attended by six shadow guards with 280 hit points apiece. Dufrey gamely tries to help out, doing 10-20 damage per turn on his own as the rest of us hack somewhat more effectively. Alas, there’s no more strategy than any other combat: we just try to surround the enemies, set up for backstabs, and hold out. Our patience is rewarded, and the fourth time is the charm. Any weapon can hurt Kamazol but once he’s down to one hit point, only Soulseeker, wielded by the doughty Teddy thief Ruxpin, can deliver the killing blow. We sprinkle the blue potion and his body dissolves into ash: "He is now dead for good. You hope."
    

Freeing all the animal friends of By Golly Gulch.

   

In what I have to admit is an interesting twist, that’s not quite the end of the story. We’re stuck in the land of the dead, the portal home doesn’t open for another five days, and an entire army of darkness is assembling to begin the conquest of Earth. We have to wait for five days by (L)ooking around. As the army tramps into the room, the portal opens and we dive into it (we have no choice; the game compels us). It stays open for only a half-hour, so we have to move smartly to make it out of Limbo and back to Earth in time. We fight several battles with undead scouts and clerics, a battle with Kamazol’s general and his evil champions, a battle with more undead, and yet more undead. Sensing that the end is near, we stop being so parsimonious with our magic points and let loose. In all the battles, "Earthquake" (from the clerics) and "Gotterdammerung" (from the mages) quickly clear the field. Dufrey continues to help us with all the battles.

We make it out of the portal and jump 100 feet down to the ground without suffering injury, but the portal is still open for 10 more minutes. We fight three more successive waves of undead, and with magic points running low we have to resort to melee tactics again. It’s only then that the portal closes and all the undead are sucked back through it (I forgot to mention that we had destroyed the device that would have let them stay on Earth permanently). A last enemy rips Soulseeker off of our belt and it flies away with him . . . but then the portal spits Soulseeker back out again, because it staying in Aegea would violate "the higher powers of physics." A note with an illegible signature vows vengeance, but our party disregards it even when it disappears in a puff of magic to the sound of ominous laughter. 
    

Home at last; followed by undead; sucked back to Aegea; home at last.

     

We won, and the world is free at last. The party is right next to Smythetown, right where we started from. There, roaming villagers say, "Thank you ever so much for saving us," and children ask for our autographs. As they should. I’ll have the final rating and a summary in the final posting, yet to come. 
       
Time played: 72 hours. 8 party deaths, 8 reloads, 7 crashes, 10 hints.

    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series 

07/23/2026 

The Search for Freedom: We Have Conjured Them

We explored a lot of dungeons this session.

        

Guest post from AlphabeticalAnonymous: 

 

We rejoin our party of intrepid adventurers in the town of Birshada. There we had recently learned how to climb through mountainous terrain, but were stumped in their quest to reach Aegea (the land of the dead) and destroy the evil lich Kamazol by several puzzles. These include a gnome who asks us to guess his initials, someone named Gnimsh who is looking for an unknown keyword, and the "high priest of Bane" who also wants a word we don’t know. Hoping that the answers may lie in the next dungeon, we head south. Alas, in the desert we are caught in an ambush with 6 lesser demons and 8 fire sprites. The demons have some serious magic and are smarter about using it: along with several castings of "Hail Storm," they first paralyze Tyrion and then turn Becket, Durkon, and Kizke to stone. The survivors make a forced march back to Birshada, fleeing all encounters, to pay 3,000 gold to revive their companions. On a second try, we make it through unscathed. Dorf’s training does indeed allow us to finally climb over mountains and we quickly reach the dungeon of Sardain, which we were earlier told spans two continents. Inside, we are told "To obtain the third and final Bloodstone, you must search this dungeon well." But I've only acquired one so far. I wonder whether Dorf's red sphere could be a Bloodstone, but it turns out not to be. Paranoid about having missed something in Birshada, we tramp out of Sardain and back to Birshada. This also lets us sell our loot and give everyone either +2 Chain mail or +1 Plate Armor. In town, I try to wrestle with Gnimsh’s request, the gnome’s initials, and the high priest of Bane.

The "Vision" spell reveals no new, obvious secret areas on the town map. Gnimsh can accept statements up to 11 characters long. My notes file contains 31 possibilities from "accumulated" and "cachlodytes" (unlikely) to "unfortunate" and "troglodytes." None of them work. The high priest of Bane accepts up to 14 characters. My notes file contains only two such words: "constitutional" and "distinguishing"; obviously, neither of these work. I could probably brute-force the gnome’s initials (only 3 characters), but I'd rather not try. We spend about an hour of real time purchasing fortune cookies at the magic shoppe, but find no useful hints there. I finally resort to the self-decrypting hint guide included with the purchased game. Here I learn that I shouldn't have ignored Hythenforge’s unopenable door; successfully opening it would have led to a ring inscribed with the two (not three) initials "JH." So this is a game where this single, missed encounter can result in a "walking dead" situation. We tell the gnome "JH," and he tells us a nonsense word to pass to his brother Gnimsh. 

        

This was all rather difficult to unravel.

     

Gnimsh informs us that the Bloodstone is buried in an unopenable chest under the altar of "Bane the Thrasher," and he teaches us a magic charm that will entrance the priest without even using any magic points. That's some charm! I'd like to recruit Gnimsh to my party. In the temple, the priest goes into a trance, digs up the box, gives us its Bloodstone, and re-buries the empty box. Amusingly, if we charm the Priest again he digs it up again and "is puzzled that the box is empty." That’s a nice touch.     

    

Technically, the priest found it, albeit under magical compulsion.

    

We all march back down to Level 2 of the Sardain. It is several levels with various pairs of enemies: pennagalan and ghosts, red dragons and laughing lizards, necromancers and familiars, various flavors of ogres and giants, werewolves and wererats, evil heroes and white wolves. We can successfully flee from almost any combat when the option is given (perhaps due to our high dexterity), though we are still (rarely) thrust immediately into combat. In any case, most combats feel trivial at this point.

     
There are a few fixed encounters: with a stone golem and a pair of yellow dragons. The outcome of these isn't in doubt, either, but they provide some nice textual flavorings before combat begins. Level 3 contains a teleporter maze, and Level 4 has lots of up and down between dungeon levels. None of it is difficult, but it is time-consuming.

   

Ganging up on giants in the Sardain.

     

Various special squares offer messages as we explore the dungeon. These include:

      

• "Powerful Wizards are useful tools," which turns out to be a hint for the next dungeon.
• "Seek the hilt when you hit the bottom," which is a hint for this one.
• "Bloodstones are not always found in dungeons," which JH already hinted at.
• "The key is not in Blusfor"—no idea.
• "Blusfor reaches to the very depths of the fiery infernos of hell!"
• "Balthazar was here."
• "The truth is often found through reversal."
• "Learn the chant."
• "Strawberry jam goes well with cream cheese."
• "The Caballa is second to none."

       
A magic mouth on Level 4 demands that we "Speak the name of he foretold." It’s not Kamazol, Lozamak, Hawkslayer, Arthur, Dorf, or any of our names. Tiring of the game, I inspect the main executable file which tells me the unexpected answer: Razahtlab. Behind it, we use our second Bloodstone on another force field and recover "the mighty hilt of Soulseeker," the only sword that can defeat Kamazol. He then helpfully appears to tell us that he has hidden the final piece, the blade, "in the deepest bowels of the Earth . . . Your quest is in vain, pitiful mortals." In the next chamber, we are suddenly attacked: "This is no ordinary monster, it is Xanthropobl, a beast spoken of until now only in legends." No legends we’ve ever encountered, but no matter: it only hits twice before succumbing. We get 1,000 experience each, and 9,369 gold in the chest it was carrying—effectively doubling our current stash
   

I believe this is the first Internet page ever to feature the word "xanthropobl."

      

On our way back up, we find the shattered remains of the third and final Bloodstone. A giant stone guardian attacks us but never hits. It yields another 500 experience each, plus 5,864 more gold pieces. Behind it is the passageway to Hythenforge that was formerly blocked by a boulder. We sell all our loot and find ourselves now with over 34,000 gold. The economy seems well and truly broken, especially with no new or improved weapons or armor for sale. We all train up to Level 8, prioritizing strength and dexterity. Our friend the captain is still offering one-way trips to Shylyllia Isle, but instead we visit the man in the Carpalas Mountains. On this previously-inaccessible square, we find "a strange boatman" who will take us to the Isle of No Return. We accept and find ourselves at Blusfor Dungeon! 

       

This welcome message is anything but.

     

At this point, I lost my gusto for meticulously exploring every square of every dungeon level. I kept hoping that there would be "extra-secret" squares—special squares that don't show up on the map from the "Vision" spell. But there are lots of empty spaces that clearly don't connect to the critical path, so at this point I start avoiding those to move things along a bit more quickly. Really, mapping is trivial at this point; for example, giant rooms filled with magical darkness squares are no challenge with the "Vision" spell and an always-impeccable automap.
     
After entering the kitchen and killing the solitary chef, we have a rare choice (of a sort):
    

Possibly the toughest role-playing choice in the history of CRPGs.

     

Crackers poison the active character, whereas a sandwich heals all a character’s wounds (although not status effects such as poison). Otherwise, there are several irritating combats with lesser demons and fire sprites. The former can turn my characters to stone, which I can’t heal yet. I feel under-leveled because we lack the "Stone to Flesh" spell, but over-leveled because most combats are too easy. The occasional "dangerous" combat is just because of random luck, when an enemy spellcaster decides to cast an effective spell instead of something pointless like "Protection from Dragonbreath." I suffer a random crash during one battle.

     

Level 2 of Blusfor contains a minotaur. He is nominally found in the center of a "maze," though it’s not exactly challenging to navigate to the center. Although I am told that he somehow gets the drop on us—"Ruxpin is impaled by the Minotaur's horns, killing him," and two characters were already stone—the remaining characters easily kill him. Nearby, we find a bound and gagged friendly wizard, who tells us that we can restore our broken Bloodstone by putting it in a Magic Box and saying OKUNTHAR. Unfortunately, before we can make it up to the surface to restore half of our party a group of lesser demons turns our remaining party members to stone. An honest-to-goodness loss! I reload, kill the minotaur again, and descend to Level 3.

    

If he had gotten one of us with each horn, we might have been in trouble.

      

As suggested by clues on the walls, we encounter a beholder here, which we quickly hack to death. We are then told "You notice that the eye seems to have a strange greenish glow to it. Cut open the eye? (Y/N)" We can hardly refuse such an invitation, and inside find a Green Glowing Sphere. Immediately east of this room, we are attacked by "mutated killer ninja rats," in one of the sillier parts of the game to date. Otherwise, there are several treasure rooms with gold that we don’t need and equipment worse than what we already have.
       
We find plenty of messages on the walls of the dungeon. Something new is that we see several numerals seemingly written on the wall, as seen in the first-person view. That’s something new! We also discover a scroll with instructions for opening the portal to Aegea, a bag of ordinary marbles, and "a gigantic machine here labeled 'Teleporter.' Below is a panel of push-buttons labelled with the numbers 0 through 9." Based on the clues we’ve encountered so far, we correctly deduce that "5209" should take us exactly where we want to go. So it does.
        
We fight some mist demons, fix the Bloodstone in a Magic Box, and then meet: "A large, fat, ugly, child-like creature in diapers here. 'I wanna toy' it whines repeatedly. It will not let you pass. Attacking it would be foolish as it is easily thrice your size and weight and could just sit on you." It must be a child from a century ago, because it’s excited beyond belief by the bag of marbles. It leaves and we find an electronic keypad outside of "THE VAULT." It was just "5902" (the numbers from the previous floor of the dungeon), but then we are faced with "A giant of a man, much resembling the great Thor himself." He tells us we need a glowing key and we will have to dig for it somewhere. I consult the hint guide to learn that we have to walk four floors back up to the outside world, get the key, and descend again. For the life of me, I don’t know how we’re supposed to know where the key was located without the hint file. After following these steps, Thor lets us pass into the "Inner Sanctum" and the sealed portal to Aegea. 

         

The resemblance to Chris Hemsworth is uncanny.

     

Inside the sanctum, another gnome gives us half of a glowing blue sphere and bids us to return to him "for a final gift that you will need for your journey" after we have the last piece of Soulseeker. That piece is guarded by the corpse of Hawkslayer, who defeated Kamazol long ago and who we must now defeat in turn. We kill him and several accompanying specters (losing only Durkon to a one-hit kill), heal up, and recover the blade of Soulseeker. Kamazol taunts us again (not for the last time), and the gnome hands us an onyx key to open the portal to Aegea.  

      

It is 72 inches long and deadly to the touch. How do we carry it?

      

When we enter the portal room, we are attacked by four "etherial [sic] guardians" of the portal. They have 235 hit points each, but more importantly they can kill any character with just a single hit. In an even exchange, we kill four of them but lose everyone but Becket and Elphaba. Luckily, Becket is able to resurrect everyone else (except for poor, stoned Kizke) and bring them back to full fighting trim. 

   

These guys were pretty tricky, I have to admit.

    

We then lift the veil to reveal "that thought by many to have been mere legend—the Portal to The Mad Plain." We unlock it and (with a hint) speak the incantation to open the magical gateway: "ALA CABALLA OPEN FOR ME THAT WHICH WAS SEALED LONG AGO." Ruxpin reaches out and grasps the wooden handle of the portal . . . but is instantly killed. Back to the hint book, which tells us that only a level 7+ Mage can open the portal. So if all of ones' mages were turned to stone in Blusfor, there would be no way to win without a much earlier reload. Durkon resurrects Ruxpin, and then Elphaba tries her hand at it: not only does she succeed, but everyone is healed and gains 100 magic points and 10 hit points.

     

Lucky for us that Kamazol didn't just pop through after we opened it on this side.

     

We awaken in Limbo, Level 1. We are told that we have "a strange feeling of déjà vu, though, as if you've seen, or perhaps heard, of this place before." We find the second half of the Blue Sphere and fuse them together to have our third colored Glowing Sphere. We find a large mirror which causes us to fight our own mirror images: this is a fun twist and sounds interesting, but none of them are particularly bright and so our mirror selves are no match for our real selves. The mirror shatters, and we can take as many mirror shards as we like. I haven’t played too many CRPGs or adventure games, but I know enough not to pass up an opportunity like this. We take six. 

       

No idea what this was about in Limbo, except that this is my real life as a parent.

      

There is an odd section of Limbo including me using "an IBM (It's a Big Machine)" to play The Search for Freedom, as well as a large, furnished living room, dining room, and master bedroom. After a few more combats, we defeat an undead wyvern (just a large dragon, here) who is the final guardian of the portal into Aegea. He tells us that "On Aegea, you must not listen to normal reason, or common sense, for these simply don't exist here. Aegea is the complement, not supplement, to Earth," but this all turns out to be either pointless philosophy with no impact on the game, or an incredibly subtle reference to Thomas Paine. Regardless: we have the chance to leave Limbo and return to the normal world, or to continue on to Aegea in search of Kamazol. Terrified of repeating this entire dungeon, we hurriedly choose the latter.    

      

Can one be foolish when common sense doesn't exist?

    

In Aegea—the world of the dead—at last. As the first notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony begin to play, the voice of our arch-nemesis Kamazol fills the sky. He boasts that: "Here, I am all-powerful. I shall bring you to your knees . . . I am unstoppable, mortal fools! Ha ha ha!" He also claims that there are only a few weeks until the 1,000-day deadline when his portal will open to facilitate his conquest of Earth, even though we’ve only spent 58 days in our quest so far. I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly take multiple game years to get to this point.
   
Time played: 58 hours. 7 party deaths, 6 reloads, 7 crashes, 7 hints.
    

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

Next entry in this series

   07/18/2026 

Star Trail: Arena

 

Art imitates art.

         

As I began this session in the Blood Peaks, I reflected on our reasons for even being here:

    

• In Lowangen, an NPC said he thought Ingramosch, the dwarf to whom we were supposed to deliver the Salamander Stone, had gone to the Blood Peaks to "take care of the orcs."

• The party of mages who stole the Salamander Stone from us were last seen traveling through or near the region.

• At least two fixed encounters lead to the party being hogtied, stripped of equipment, and carried to a cell in the Blood Peaks.

• I explored the entire map during the last session, and it is literally the only available map that I haven't already explored.

         

A typical chest during this game session.

        

We had also received some history on the region from a smith in Lowangen: An ancient dwarven prince named Tordol conquered the area from the orcs. They had been called the Great Peaks, but the conquest was so violent that they were renamed the Blood Peaks. I guess the orcs must have moved back in after he left.

     

Despite promises from commenters that the party could recover its gear this time if I just rolled with the capture-and-imprisonment, I looked for another option and managed to find an alternate entrance to the dungeon. This is where we pick up.

      

Thirty seconds later. This is a bad start.

         

Many times in the past, we've seen odd parallels, always coincidental, between the two games that I'm playing at any one time. This pairing is no exception. Just like the recently-finished Halls of Colossus in Arena, the Blood Peaks offered numerous "arena" themes, including holding cells and a bloody battle floor. It's interesting to see how the two games take the same basic assignment ("make this arena feel like a real place") and approach it very differently. Arena focused on graphics—though this being 1994, not terribly good ones—while Star Trail adopted the slightly more timeless approach of relaying most of the environmental context in text. (The environment isn't completely devoid of furnishings and such, but it's more suggestive, like the occasional barrels and bookshelves in Gloomhaven, than truly evocative.) Star Trail's approach is better in that they were able to weave some encounters and role-playing options into that text.

     

Okay, those holes are in the walls, not the floors. And they're enormous! Who uses this latrine?!

         

The dungeons in the two games are similar in that they're both three levels and have a number of doors that require about half a dozen keys to open. They both thus require quite a bit of backtracking. At about five hours, the Blood Peaks took me a bit longer than the Halls of Colossus, but that's entirely because of Star Trail's slower (but more tactical) combat system.

       

One final weird coincidence: Both games make it hard to see secret doors, but both of them annotate them on the automap. 

    

Given what I just said, you'd think this would be a screenshot of the automap. But I forgot to take one. So it's just a battle with some ogres.

                

The game sets up the Blood Peaks as a living dungeon. The orcs actually reside here; they're not just marauding through. There are kitchens, sleeping areas, latrines, forges, meeting halls, trash heaps, and storage rooms. Lots of storage rooms. A party that was stripped of its equipment could mostly re-equip itself here. I have numerous screenshots showing chests, shelves, and tables with dozens of pints of beer, wine bottles, hundreds of rations, scores of arrows and crossbow bolts, other weapons, armor, writing utensils, throwing knives, ropes, torches, lanterns, flasks of oil, snowshoes, hatchets, crowbars, mattocks, hammers, shovels, pitons, rope ladders, grappling hooks, blankets, winter coats, glass flasks, and many vials of poison called "golden glue" that I never found a use for. I found an alchemy set to replace the one I lost ages ago, and Toliman replaced his flute with a lute. Because of all the liquid and rations, I felt free to rest often and restore health and magic.

      

We had to answer about two dozen questions like this.

      

There was also a lot of jewelry: gold, silver, and orc. I started by taking all of it, but when I ran out of inventory space, I had to prioritize the gold and silver. It later turned out that gold jewelry sells for about 10 gold pieces each, while silver jewelry only sells for a couple of silver pieces. I wonder if I would have done better with the orc jewelry. 

           

Jewelry items do not stack. This was painful.

       

The hallways were crawling with orcs and ogres, plus a few adjacent caverns that had spiders. At first, the game noted that I saw the orcs and hid, and they passed by. Eventually, I failed one of those checks, and from then on, any time I ran into orcs, there was a battle. A lot of them were with only two or three orcs, and my habit in such circumstances was to put the combat in auto-mode, no magic, and let the computer duke it out. Korima, my NPC fighter, was a big help in these fights. I did have to take control of two or three battles, one of them notably longer than the others, which I'll talk about below. In contrast to the many chests and shelves and such, most of the battles offered no material rewards, and during the entire six hours I spent in this session, only one of my characters (Gnomon) leveled up. 

       

This happened a few times. Then we lost it.

   

Without going in chronological order, here were the major features and mysteries of the Blood Peaks:

   

• Numerous hallways with traps, most of which my characters were able to avoid with Gnomon's high "Perception" and "Danger Sense" skills. The spider caves had some exceptions, where we repeatedly ran into "an avalanche of stones" from the ceiling, causing us to stop and rest several times.

      

Why couldn't I get this to stop!?

     

• Several doors and chests I was never able to open. One of the problems is that I forgot to buy more lockpicks last time I was in town, so I was relying exclusively on force and "Foramen." Perhaps there are some locks that you have to pick to open? 

• A wall that looked like it had a secret door, but every time I ran into it, the game just said, "Wow!" 

• A box contained a mummified hand and a copper disk. I took the disk, although I don't know what it does. When I tried to take the hand, it started glowing green and did damage to Gnomon, who dropped it. 

• A lever. The game asked if I wanted to flip it. I did. It said: "En voila! A perfect triple somersault . . . No, wait a minute, that's no good. Let me rephrase that. Do you want to move the lever to a different position?" Ha ha. Anyway, when I said yes again, nothing happened.

• A huge barrel of beer. Toliman became obsessed with something at the bottom of the barrel that he could only barely make out. He ended up spilling it all over the place and reducing his charisma for a while. It was a dead rat. I assume he failed a "Curiosity" check?

• There were a few wells where we could fill up our waterskins. For some reason, we got +1 "Courage" doing so. 

     

I supposed it takes a certain amount of bravery to drink out of a cistern in a dungeon.

     

• A couple of cages with war dogs (again, going with the arena theme). We had an awful role-playing choice to stab them to death through the bars (which we did not take). Later, other dogs attacked us when we opened a couple of rooms. 

       

It occurs to me that I might have done this in Skyrim. Why does choosing it as an option feel so much worse than doing it in an action interface?

      

• We took several opportunities to hinder the orcs. We destroyed a statue to the orc war god, Brazoragh. We destroyed a couple of catapults. ("The gods only know how the blackpelts ever got hold of these war machines.") We smashed up a cache of weapons. We sliced open sacks of grain meant to feed an army. We burned an orc war flag.

      

I hope this doesn't come back to haunt us.

     

• In the main arena hall, we found a statute to Brazoragh. It had gold plating, and Korima became fixated on scraping the gold off. Failed an "Avarice" check, maybe? 

• In a pile of dog feces, we found a Ring of Magic Resistance. 

• Under some straw in a jail cell, we found an Amulet of Mirroring. On the way back from this dungeon, I returned to the basilisk to see if it would do anything, but we just died again. 

• There was a large, cavernous area full of spider webs. We had to hack through them. We had multiple easy battles with cave spiders in the region.

      

For once, my characters give voice to my own thoughts.

         

• The spider area culminated at a nest where we had the option to destroy baby spiders and eggs. When we did, a Queen Spider arrived and (in a scripted event) killed us all with her poisoned stinger. We had no option or ability to fight or avoid it. I had to reload. The best I could do was only get one party member killed if I split the party before destroying the eggs, but I didn't even want that.

     

The way The Return of the King should have ended.

       

• A skeleton wrapped up in webs had a magic sword on him. I was unable to identify it. Casting "Analyze" just tells me that it has "evil influences," but I'm reluctant to get rid of it, as it's not like the game is over-stuffed with magic weapons. 

         

That might be for reasons having nothing to do with the sword.

       

The largest battle occurred early in the session when I ran into about a dozen orcs and three orc veterans in a large courtyard. I hate large battles in this game because everyone forms a tight cluster and it makes it impossible to see what's happening. If any of my characters gets caught in the middle of the cluster, I can't even see the selector when his or her turn comes up, let alone which enemies are within his or her range. I just have to guess. It also encourages me to eschew regular tactics in favor of clearing as many enemies as possible from the southeast side of the cluster. Paradoxically, these large battles are the ones that most require the player's attention.

    

Go ahead, make anything out of that mess.

      

I like tactical combat, but I haven't really enjoyed Arkania's approach to it. In my final entry on Blade of Destiny, I outlined what I thought were its biggest weaknesses of the Arkania. I'll repeat them here because they're all still relevant here:

   

• "The axonometric perspective doesn't work well for combat. It's hard to separate the characters and enemies from each other and particularly hard to move to a specific tile." I think I already covered that adequately.

• "Everyone misses too often." Aaargh, is this infuriating. With my characters at Level 7, having pumped their primary weapons skills to 10 or 11 (which involves sacrificing a lot of points to failures), the default response to any of my attacks is still to do no damage. Even my best fighters hit and wound the enemy maybe 40% of the time. Where with most RPGs, you only have to pass one accuracy check to hit and then roll for damage if you do, Arkania makes it possible to fumble the attack at the outset, for the enemy to parry the attack, and for the attacker to hit but do no damage. I think there might even be a fourth one, where the attack simply "fails." Not to mention that "fumbling" carries a chance that the attacker will wound himself. Now, all these things are true of enemies, too, so they don't necessarily make combat harder than the typical RPG; they just prolong it. 

           

The most infuriating message ever.

       

• "Attacks don't cause enough damage." This one has either changed or I just got better at combat. When my attacks actually do any damage, they usually seem to me to do sufficient damage. Orcs die in about three hits, sometimes two. And the animation where they stand rigid, turn to the left, and then dissolve into bones never stops being fun.

• "Spells, which would make the whole thing go faster, eat up so many magic points that you can rarely cast more than three or four before needing multiple nights' rest to recharge." Still very true. Later in the entry, I made the point that even though the game offers a few dozen spells, you're not really encouraged to experiment with them because of the comparatively low number of mana points. At the same time, I'll allow that I probably could have exploited the economy and potion system better, bought or made more mana potions, and maybe gotten more use out of spells. My defense is that potions don't stack and inventory space is extremely limited.

 

Because of the spell issue, I think that players are highly incentivized to find one or two strategies that work and just stick with them. I spent most of my spell points on "Bambladam" (a kind-of charm spell makes the enemy stop attacking), "Balm of Roond" (healing), "Lightning" (blinding), and "Ignifaxus" (direct damage). During this particular battle, I had some success with "Horriphobus" (makes enemies flee). I wish I'd been able to experiment more with summoning spells, but none of my characters started near 0 with them, and I didn't want to waste a dozen spell increases getting them competent.

     

An old reliable.

        

I have a few other complaints that I didn't think to levy in my Blade entry:

    

• You have no control over your character distribution (vis-à-vis the enemy) when combat begins. 

• If you've nailed an enemy with a status spell, there's no way to see that condition, so you have to keep careful track of who you previously targeted.

• Unless I missed something there are no spells at all that target multiple enemies.

• Using items during battle sucks. Instead of just opening up the regular inventory interface, you have to switch items into your off-hand (putting down a shield, if you have one) via a menu.

      

But having said all of that, I will allow that the game basically scratches the tactical itch and gives the player those moments of agony and ecstasy that a good tactical combat system evokes. I just wish it were a little less annoying.

      

I should also mention that encumbrance has been an issue for most of the game, so much so that even with the Girdles of Might I found earlier, I've been having every character take strength with every level-up, so as to offset some of the limitations caused by their heavy armor and shields. Given how often those armor and shields block enemy attacks, I still think they're better than having extra movement in battle, but I haven't experimented enough to be sure.   

     

I think we're going to make it!

      

I won the orc battle after three tries, mostly by ganging up on individual enemies (as well as I could, given their sheer number), casting the spells listed above and restoring my mana with the few potions I had, and healing with herbs and potions in the middle of battle. Lyra and Lilii, not great fighters, ended up surrounded by enemies, and after I exhausted their spell points, I basically just had them use healing potions or herbs every round. They each kept four orcs occupied while the fighters cleaned up the rest. It was a bit thrilling to slowly winnow them down and realize that I was going to win.

     

We eventually found the cells where we would have started if we had sucked up the orc ambushes. There was an orc named Thurazz in one of them and a human named Praiodan vom Tann in another. They both offered to join, but we would have been forced to get rid of Korima.

       

He didn't care for our rejection.

      

A couple of the cells had graffiti scratched into the walls. I looked dozens of times and rarely got a duplication. Some of it is clearly procedurally generated.

     

• "Up the III. Regiment."
• "Shite!"
• "B. J. Blaskowicz was here."
• "Up the 11th Banner."
• "Help Rondra!" (or any of the other gods)

Get her out of your heart?

• "The Polar Diamant is in the temple of aaaarrrghhhh . . . "
• "Sadrak Whassoi is a XXXXX."
• "KiL aLL OrG SkuM!!!"
• "Long live Emperor Hal!" 
• "Beware of Belgor!"
• "No one gets out of here alive!" 

     

Finally, the game noted that we found a mage on the floor of another cell. He appeared to have died of dehydration. Gnomon recognized him as one of the mages who stole the Salamander Stone from us. We searched the body, and sure enough, the stone was in the pocket of one of his robes. Unbelievable. 

      

I suppose we were due.

      

When we exited the caverns and headed back to the north, we kept getting "the pursuers are getting closer" messages, just like we had near Lowangen the first time we had the Salamander Stone. Commenters suggested that casting "Without a Trace" was the way to avoid getting attacked by these pursuers, but I could never find the right moment to cast it. If I tried to interrupt travel, I just got attacked by the pursuers anyway. If I cast it at night, the message suggested that only the caster's presence had been masked, and anyway it didn't seem to have any effect on the pursuing party. I thus had to fight long, difficult battles with druids, mages, and rogues twice on the way back.

      

These guys are harder than the orcs in the Blood Peaks.

      

We stopped at a couple of inns and briefly at Tiefhusen, but our ultimate goal was Tjolmar. Once there, we healed up and then went to Ingramosch's house. As I suspected, the Salamander Stone dissipated the magical aura on the door.

      

I wonder if we could handle "the truth."

        

Some random dwarf answered the door and refused to tell us anything about Ingramosch. We were forced to barge inside and fight a battle with dwarves and spellcasters. Unfortunately, Korima refused to go with us and took off.

      

You're much too young to die for one silver piece per day, I'll grant you that.

       

When we were done, we found ourselves in a "Vault beneath Tjolmar." At this point, I exited the building and ended the session. Next time, I want to sell excess items and load up on potions and herbs before going back. I trust this dungeon will be the last.

   

Time so far: 54 hours