Part 2: Ladders...

Update 002: Ladders...



Welcome back to Wizards & Warriors! We resume in Valeia after having acquired an epic quest, getting a blinging ring and getting told to go talk to the oracles if we actually want to know any more about it. Ultimately we gotta go fetch the Mavin Sword and kill the immortal pharaoh of evil with it.

But first? We gotta get swole.



I head off to the blacksmith's and listen to Smitty's usual complaints about my not having done his quest yet so Sophia can embark on her Ranger quest. He tells us to go show what a noble and mighty guardian of nature we are by harassing an endangered animal and stealing its eggs. I think there may be a reason why the River Raptor is endangered.

Becoming a Ranger is actually probably one of the least important advances we could get, since it just boosts ranged damage(and no one will ever be using a goddamn ranged weapon in a game where I have to track every single goddamn arrow), but it'll also allow access to Vine Magic. Plus, when levelling a new class, until it reaches your old class you get minimal ability point and HP advances, but still 1 skill point per level, and since those new levels will come a lot faster, they can be used to rack up a decent bit of training.





I poke my head out the gates to the west of Valeia and discover a wounded Mangu troll. It turns out that enemies don't even despawn between town screens, so if you get both the town gates cluttered up with chasing enemies, you may literally have softlocked yourself if you can't beat them. Anyway, while the party beats him to a fine paste, let's have a look at the travel itinerary for this update.



We'll be exploring everything I'm aware of between the Village of Valeia and Ishad N'ha, starting with the Old Millhouse because it's closest by, and also completing all of the sidequests offered up by Valeia's guilds. Both the Temple and the Fighters are pointing us towards the Toad People at the moment, while the mages want us to go chase down an evil snake cult prophet we won't see for a bit yet.





Having turned encounters up to Often to increase how much XP and loot I could get during this training montage, I of course get practically zero, compared to the constant battles of Seldom encounters. I start suspecting that either this game hates me and is actively trolling me or someone flipped the spawn modifiers for the two settings.



First stop is the Old Millhouse, noted OSHA-noncompliant location.





It has active machinery, and any mobile object is a potential crush hazard. For some reason, though, it always seems to choose Rondor as the victim. You get a bit too close to the grindwheel and it just drags you in and starts smashing. Thankfully it's relatively easy to get out again, but then it's time for something even more dangerous...




W&W ladders are awful. They're from that cursed era where you're meant to balance on top of a ladder, then slowly walk backwards off it, and move towards it just as you start to fall, to climb down. And of course in this case we practically fall right on top of a horse-sized spider in the basement.



It's not very dangerous, but I'm amused to see that enemies can suffer from OutOfRange misses, too. See, for most actions in W&W(like pushing a button or picking up loot), if you choose them, the party walks forwards to be in range. Not so with melee attacks, if not in range, PC's just swing at empty air and waste their turn, and nothing ever indicates whether they're in range or not. Apparently it's vague enough to affect NPC enemies, too.




King Gizzord fries it up good with one of his new Sun spells: Flamedrop. It's one of a category of spells that creates a hazard on a location and then does damage every tick. Now you'd think that every tick would be every turn, for either the caster or the target, but no. As the game is partial real-time, every tick is every second, and since in turn-based combat no one moves, enemies just stand there and eat it, making the stronger types disproportionately powerful. The spider also drops an egg, which is useful, as it's one of the two items required for a Warlock class quest(a spider egg and a skull being the two requirements).



This coincides with the party hearing voices. After a few very confused moments, I climb out of the basement to check what's happening outside the mill.



Turns out there is a source to the voices, she's just apparently got X-Ray vision or is psychic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw6txQjp5cs

Unbeknownst to me, I've already kind of locked myself out of her quest which is... hoo, it's a bad thing. It's not necessary, but as will eventually become apparent, it's very important. Also note her description of the Toad People as dangerous, superstitious savages.

I bid her goodbye and go on my way, heading up north along the lake to the Abandoned Lake House.





Coincidentally, the next person we bump into is a Toad Person! Mekdawa here patrols the lake shore and is notoriously buggy and annoying. In the early unpatched versions he'd often accept the toad potion quest item from the priest guild without actually considering the quest completed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rH-rDJ2ZBQ

So if you feel like Mekdawa feels a bit like a racist stereotype of an African tribesman from a few decades past, don't worry! Soon we'll deal with someone who's even more of a terrible stereotype! This bit completes the Temple quest and also gives us more of a reason to visit the Toad Village than just the Fighter Guild quest.






Leaving Mekdawa behind, we kill some nymphs, some spiders and find a statue! This statue is part of why I'm so eager to get Kuros, and anyone else who can do it, advanced to Paladin. You see, touching this thing is the Paladin class quest, which means if you don't get it until, say, Brimloch Roon, you need to haul ass back all the way across the game world to one of the locations nearest to Valeia. Some of the class change quests are very generic(Barbarian: Land the killing blow on 20 enemies, Monk: wear and carry nothing for 2 whole day cycles, Warlock: Collect a skull and a spider egg), but most of them require finding and/or interacting with something that only spawns at one specific point in the game world.



Finding this thing without knowing that could be very confusing as a player might expect a unique object to be an interactible of some sort and be puzzled about how to do something to/with it.





Just around the corner is the lakehouse. One thing I do like about this game is that generally signs are actually readable rather than needing to be interacted with to be read.



The ground floor is just non-hostile nymphs, so I skip that to avoid having to edit in any more black bars, hopping right to the top floor where we're about to get scammed by Harespia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XR5DEiiA6o

So her prophecy sounds very reasonable and we will actually be doing these things she tells us about! Interestingly enough, her babble is actually all about the next major quest points we're about to undertake, but as we'll see in a bit it isn't actually for us or intended to be true. Plus she took our goddamn gold.





Just outside is a pier with a raft which is basically like the horse except, obviously, only on water. It doesn't so much sail as just glide across the water at running speed, though it does prevent fish from being annoying and attacking you and is marginally faster than swimming, so it'll be great for getting to the lair of the River Raptor and hitting up Toad Village.



Despite having a vehicle intended entirely for water movement, Nymph Lake has no islands, no nooks or crannies that require swimming/sailing to reach and nothing actually IN the water except angry fish. So I haul ass along the river leading north out of the lake.





Along the way, Sophia demonstrates her powerful bond with nature by pummelling an endangered species to death and stealing its eggs. Now, fun fact, the River Raptor doesn't spawn unless you have this quest, so if you explored before getting the ranger quest, you might never think to check this little nook along the river for said raptor.



Eventually on the east side of the river I come across two little canals that are just EXACTLY too shallow to bring the raft, so I have to wade them.



Bringing me into a little shallow lake(literally ankle deep) containing several raised structures(of course almost completely invisible in the dark).





I climb one of the ladders and... I am now in Toad Village.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmMwXTqwI9M

In earlier versions of W&W, Ekbu and some other guards could spawn in ways that would softlock the Toad Village by blocking tunnels you needed to enter, and if you killed them, all the toads would get hostile and not help you. The above clip also contains a rare view of me absolutely mastering a ladder.



The Toad Village consists of three platforms above water, the one you enter on, a dead end, and the one we want to reach. Underwater, it consists of these tunnels that look like someone carved a passage through a giant turd, which contain nothing but toad people spamming their voice lines. No loot, no enemies, no objects of interest, no named NPC's.

Just put up with it, reach the ladder you need and scale it back to the surface.





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fX8RDxOIpc

Shinwiki is... I mean, okay, he's not that bad, just Mekdawa-level, until he practically starts chanting OOGA BOOGA OOGA BOOGA. What the fuck. It'd be nice if someone else could confirm that this comes off as just a bit racist and it isn't just me being too suspicious.




The ladder down, once again, contains nothing of interest, just a tunnel to the, ugh, Toadem Grounds.




They're just a quiet patch of forest next to a pond(the tunnel popping you at that little isolated house to the northwest of the Toad Village)... at first.




Then you reach the Toadem Grounds proper and they don't look very cursed. Just a ring of stones around a totem, sorry, toadem, pole and... oooh! A chest at the far end! After a few moments you probably go for it and...



Four copies of Scabban pop up around the edges of the clearing and instantly start firing.



I make a fighting retreat out to the path, firing off burns, flamedrops and elemental blasts as I go, managing to take down one of them while retreating.



With the exciting part done, it then turns into a test of patience as I strafe-dodge around swamp-gas blasts because I'm pretty sure they can potentially Disease my idiots much like Scabban himself could, while waiting for enough of Gizzord's mana to regen to fire back and occasionally healing up with Hierophant when someone gets winged.





It takes a dog's age of exchanging fire, but eventually I get three of them down and, losing patience, I rush in to cut down the fourth. It ends up working out pretty well with only one of them rather than all of them being available to pelt me.




Now we're free to loot the chest (mediocre loot but did include an Ankh for delicious free stat boosts) and return to Shinwiki for his "bag of yellow"(gold) and spear which will be a nice upgrade for Sophia.




Also more painful dialogue.




Even with the game's obfuscated mechanics, doubled minimum damage and max damage upgraded by 2/3rds is obviously pretty good and means Sophia will be much more able to contribute to the fights that actually involve stabbing someone rather than Gizzord exploding them from a city block away.

Then, of course, I make the trek back to Valeia to cash in my quests.




Smitty upgrades Sophia and grants each of the three Fighter's Guild members 200 gold and 200 XP... just like he did for the very first and much easier quest. Dick. Then he tasks us to recover the SWORD OF MASTUS from the crypt we finished a while back.



Onabe gives Hierophant the same reward... and then tasks him with paying a few hundred gold pieces into the coffers. This is easily done and actually rewards more XP than the other quests(but of course no gold), being a whole 500, which would have been a half level way back. If you had somehow acquired the gold for this one early(possibly with mass sacrificial Gonks), you could have jogged out to Mekdawa first thing out of chargen and handed him the potion, then cashed this one in for what's literally half of level 2's required XP.

Then he tasks us to hop off to the crypt to recover a lost ring.





So, three quests in the crypt! Sword of Mastus, amulet of Algamesh and the ring for the temple.

Let's talk, first, about why I can't get the Amulet and spent like almost an hour fine-combing the crypt for it: The second room you encounter in the tomb is locked, I failed at picking it a couple of times so the lock jammed and now only a 6th-level Vine spell has a chance of ever opening it, which is again only a chance. I ignored this, but it's where the amulet of Algamesh is(found out after reading some posts online). Also, interestingly, it's one of the only quest items that spawns whether you have the quest or not, so a lot of people apparently went in there, grabbed a rando-looking necklace and just sold it during their first trip back to town. What we would have gotten if we completed the quest would be something to make the Snake Temple easier... and we'll see about that once we get to the Snake Temple.

Good thing we can still find the Sword and the Ring, though the Sword is the only obvious one.




Down to Rethpian and dive into the drink. The way back to the four big tombs is still open, and one of them was named the Tomb of Mastus. Normally it only contains the shield that Kuros currently has, but if you have the quest, it also has the sword!




I'm sure Smitty will love a rusty chunk of metal.

Now, the ring...

If we want to go back, we have to head up through the Tomb of F'lokis Ra and the secret room above it.





The ring is in the room above the tomb, and in this screenshot! You see it?

It's the little white speck under the fucking table. Imagine how easy that shit would be to miss since nothing in the quest dialogue or anywhere in the crypt indicates where it might be.



Swoop back to town, collect 500 XP(and no gold) from Smitty and Onabe, and the Fighters and Clerics are now tapped out in terms of quests in Valeia. This leaves us with an assassination on behalf of the Mages, but it's further upriver than the Toad Village, so let's get sailing.





Eventually the river broadens out into, well, again, a small pond.




The only thing of interest is a cave blocked by, of all things, a bridge leading nowhere, apparently only to keep you from bringing your raft in. I have literally no idea why, especially as there's a decent bit of river to navigate at the far end of the caves, too.

I can only conclude that DW Bradley sucks.

So it's time to hop off the raft and swim in.





Oh. Right. The Oracles of Ishad N'ha, almost completely forgot they existed and we were meant to go chat with them. The cave onwards is blocked until we hit all the right keywords in conversation with them, so let's get to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTr4bNsI6z4

So now we've got our new proper quest. We gotta go collect the Masque of Death from the Snake Temple and go find a ghost in a haunted castle. Cool. Exhausting their dialogue unblocks the western end of the cave and allows us to reach the last bit of the lake/river system where the entrance to Ishad N'ha is.





Much like the other parts of the river, there's only going to be a few points of interest up here, and the occasional chest of random loot hidden in a nook in the trees once we're on dry ground.




Hitting the north shore there's a path to Ishad N'ha, with a short side road that has Tevik Teporn, the guy that the mage guild back in Valeia wanted us to kill. You might think that, being a sneaky prophet of an evil religion here to convert people, he'd be sneaky and try to convince or bribe us not to kill him... instead he just starts blasting with the magic as soon as he spots us.




All he casts is Venom Bite, which does extremely minimal damage and poisons you. Now, poison, as mentioned, doesn't pass on its own, but it also doesn't seem to scale with your HP pool or any sort of "poison power" like in Wizardry 8. Instead, it seems to do about 2 or 3 damage every five or ten seconds, and can always be cured with a single cast of Cure Poison(which Hierophant has learned by now), so it's about one of the least threatening things an enemy can cast at us.

He goes down with a few casts of Meteor, the newest attack spell Gizzord has picked up, and drops nothing except a big shiny novelty coin.





Slightly further down the road is the second of three town screens in the game, Ishad N'ha. Most of it is just the same services and guilds as in Valeia, but with new architecture. The two new things are the Bushido Guild, which we can't do anything with until we have a Ninja, Monk or Samurai, and the Pawn Shop, which is the guild for thieves.



Now Trap Option can get enguildenated, too. This gives him a quest to collect ten novelty coins from snake priests as well as his Bard Promotion, which involves stealing a scroll from the depths of the Snake Temple. It's somewhat funny to me that you finally get access to buying upgraded lockpicks after your rogue's lockpicking skills have actually had a chance to become reliable. Bards are just Rogue+, they get access to Music, like in Wizardry 8, letting them use found or bought instruments to copy spells. I remember never having brought one before, but we'll see how it works out.



The mayor reward us with a pittance for delivering the package from Valeia, and gives us two new quests. One is to go hunt down what sounds like a werewolf, and the other is to "disable" the "Beast of Bronze" in a cave to the northwest, because people keep going camping in the cave and getting incinerated by it. From the wording it obviously isn't a living creature.



Hierophant gets a quest to go to the Snake Temple and kill the evil Naga that they worship there. The priest gets a bit heated up about how impure and corrupted and cursed she is, to the point where in any modern game I'd assume he was in the wrong and being some sort of heretic-hunting maniac oppressing the populace. But this was a more innocent age.



Damosh is the new blacksmith, who tasks us with convincing a ghost at Shurugeon Castle to go on to the afterlife. It's where we're headed anyway eventually, on account of the main quest to go find D'Soto and get the user's manual for the Mavin. Like with Smitty and the quest to go to the toad village, it's delivered at a point where we'll be nagged at for not having done it yet for a while. At least all of the Snake Temple quests come in one relatively compact package, so you're unlikely to need to go revisit again once you're done with it.



Time to go check out the rest of the area around southern Ishad N'ha. Unlike Valeia, where you can loop around on the outside map from one gate to the other, Ishad N'ha actively separates two world map sections, and there's no way there except through the town.





A bit further down the river is an old man yelling at a large temple shaped like a snake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibj8tw_JDVo

Kol here is a former Snake Priest of the temple, who's seen the light and left. It only takes a couple of quick prompts for him to tell us about the back entrance, but there's a secret here that I miss and don't even learn about until it's much too late. See, if you hit all of the right prompts with Kol, he'll give you a key, which opens up a secret loot room in the temple that also is the only place the game will tell you a bunch of backstory. I guess we're doing an Any% Speedrun now, so we're skipping all the un-necessary parts.



The back entrance is just around the corner, but I've got a few other things to do first, mostly to head down south and collect my mage guild reward and finish off their third quest.




Back to Valeia. Roendalf praises us for killing Tevik, and then asks us to go fetch the mysterious Orb of Clarity from the gypsy fortuneteller. I'm sure she'll just let it go no questions asked, right?





So what she wants in exchange for it, is for me to go to the Snake Temple, kill an evil wizard and bring back his wand to her. Now, I could do that, but that would involve yet more slogging back and forth to Valeia once I've gotten it sorted...




It's on her drop table anyway and she drops some nice stuff besides, finally getting Sophia upgraded to some proper armor, leaving only VG Rondor with a basic weapon and armor setup.



To further rub salt in the wound, it also turns out that both blacksmiths we've met so far have plenty of upgraded swords and maces, but no upgraded axes at all. So he's stuck with it for a while, it looks like. But anyway, now that we've killed some natives for their priceless artifacts, we can go bust into the Snake Temple and start on some religious persecution. Thankfully we'll never have to see Valeia again.

Continued in the next post