Part 1: Valeia

Update 001: Valeia



So when you start the game, it unceremoniously dumps you in the village of Valeia, with most of the options locked off.



You can scroll left...



Or scroll right...



Or go to the inn and make a party. Thanks to everyone for the character suggestions, and apologies to anyone who didn't get picked.

Interestingly enough, the town screens are, for some reason I can't figure out, .avi files. When you're scrolling left and right you're literally playing and rewinding the file. This is mildly baffling to me, as I'm sure there's gotta be a less kludgy way to do it. On the other hand, I suppose it does mean that with, say, avidemux, you could add in a clown or blingee your town screens. Probably a bad idea to do it, though, the game already gives the impression of generally being as stable as a three-legged dog on ice.

Rather than inviting crashes, I think I'll go with the "make a party" option.



First up is Kuros. Each character gets rolled random stats as you make them, and then given a discretionary pool to assign. Note that the discretionary pool appears to be the same every time, but the random stats most definitely are not. If you want to POWERGAME you'll absolutely want to reroll for a maximum. For instance, between making Kuros and Sophia, she ended up with 4 more total stat points than he did, by my count.



In any case, since most of his stats are decent he gets more Intellect(since if I can believe the manual, that gets more skill points per level-up and you WANT those) and bonus Agility to be able to act faster, though how much each point gives is in all ways obfuscated. You will never know.



I make him a classic sword & board fighter, and also invest in a bit of Athletics which boosts our ability to run and jump. Once again, the game never says if it goes with the highest score, adds scores together or takes an average, so you never know, but there are some places where being able to jump and mantle will allow us to progress more easily and, if I remember right, in once case it can potentially let you break the game.



Then before I make the rest of the party I make 15 generic human fighters named Gonk, which I swear isn't just me having a psychotic break. See, W&W doesn't play fair, so I don't intend to play fair in return. I will do everything short of actually cheating and save-editing to make this game eat shit at my hands. One of those things is that since every newly created character starts with 200 gold, I'm gonna make 15 spare characters to toss the gold to the party, and then delete all the Gonks, now that they've done their duty.

It may seem big to essentially give the party quadruple their normal starting gold, but don't worry, it's fucking minor, because this game hates us.





Hierophant gets mostly the same basic stat boosts as Kuros, but with additional Willpower to help him avoid status effects. For spells, I give him Heal(obviously) and Slow(I should've given him Bless, as it turns out), because while you mostly increase skills at level-up, using them sufficiently will also slowly improve them, so I wanted to have access to both the default Vine and Spirit spell schools for him to improve. Casters get no discretionary skill points at all, however.




Sophia gets a spear rather than a shield, leaving me an excess skill point for Leadership. We will literally never know what difference this makes(because non-obfuscated gameplay mechanics are for chumps), but hopefully it isn't just a wasted investment.





King Gizzord mostly gets his mental stats boosted, and then I invest in Burn and Shock, so he can blast things. Bows and crossbows are dogshit useless in this game, but we still want ranged combat options. Speaking of damage spells, each of them has a default damage scale in the manual. You can't cast them at higher ranks or learn them better to cast them with more force, like in Wizardry 8, instead you have a Sorcery skill which doesn't teach you spells but instead nebulously "makes your spells stronger." Enemies also have seemingly random resistances and immunities to spells, even to the extent that some spells from one school of magic are no-sold while others blast right through. This is because DW Bradley hates you for playing his game. And no, of course there isn't any Mythology skill for identifying enemies and their weaknesses. Don't be silly.




Trap Option is fast and fragile, as per rogue standards. Note that at chargen you can't get lockpicking over 1, and that a lockpicking skill of 1 is insufficient for picking even the first chest you come across before the trap blows up in your face.




Lastly, Very Good Rondor(abbreviated to VG Rondor), is relatively similar to Kuros except he goes axe-and-shield so I can spread out the decent weapons a bit. This is probably a mistake as likely the only good melee weapons will all be swords.

Stumbling naked into the streets(characters are generated with NO gear, not even shirts and pants), the party is accosted by a man who tells them about his dreams and asks them to go play with corpses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwHfXxK0uyg

The reason the party doesn't feature in this video is that I was testing out that the capture was working and such, and the first time you leave the inn with any character, this encounter plays and then never plays again unless you literally delete and reinstall the game.

And then we're free to actually play the game! The first objective is to check out the three guild locations in Valeia: Fighter, Mage and Cleric. There is, of course, no Thief Guild until the second town of three. Fuck anyone who brings a thief, I guess.



Also fuck these store screens. Every character who shows up has to wait through a couple of (unvoiced) lines before they can interact, you even get a bit when you switch characters. Also if you have a quest at the guild, every time you switch to a character with an uncompleted quest, you get another two or three lines of "waah waah my quest isn't done yet boo hoo bloobity."

Ahem, anyway. So we have 3000 gold over our normal starting 1200, for a total of 4200. Seems like a lot, right? It both is and it isn't. It's a lot more than what we'd normally start with, but just to join each guild with a single character, getting access to quests, class changes, training and special gear, costs 500. So that's 2500 of it deleted right away, down to 1700(also for context, doing the game's first dungeon, about two hours of playtime, left me with a surplus of barely 1000 gold after healing non-curable conditions and ID'ing collected items. Even just getting poison cured, and no it never fades away on its own, is 250 gold until you get a curing spell of your own). Also buying something like a suit of chainmail, which I'd say is the second-tier armor after "a shirt" or "some leathers" is 1500 gold for just the torso piece.

The remainder is barely enough to get everyone shirts and swords, and even then Hierophant and King Gizzord are without weapons, and Kuros and Rondor are without shields.

Smitty also gives Kuros, Sophia and Rondor(who all have to sit through the same speech separately, of course), a quest to go murder a thief who stole his cash register.



Then there's the church, for Hierophant's needs as well as the needs of any characters who happen to get hit with, really, almost any condition at all worse than being scared by an ant. The priest, Onabe, asks us to bring a potion to a toadman. We'll probably get around to that at some point. You can also donate a shitload of gold(like starting at 700 for some random buffs or, more likely, jack shit in exchange).



Lastly, King Gizzord gets inducted into the mages' guild and Roendalf here asks us to find his colleague named Scabban who disappeared in/near the graveyard ruins that Gareth also wanted us to check out. I want to point out here that three quests in Valeia point us there, outside of Gareth's quest: The first mage quest, the second priest quest and the third fighter quest. Which is in my opinion kind of some dogshit player-hostile design requiring you to likely retread some ground, because I do not believe anyone could do the second fighter guild quest without first having handled the dungeon and getting some levels there(it basically involves fighting four copies of the last boss-type enemy in the ruins).

Now it's not an awful lot of retreading, but it still feels like those quests should have all been on the first tier or something, to save people some trouble.



Lastly, there's the town hall, each town has one. They've got some non-aligned quests everyone can have(and I'll note that the party doesn't need to get them individually, so the individual quest-getting and completing in the guilds is clearly completely superfluous) and a vault you can stash stuff in. This may occasionally become relevant as characters have both a grid-based inventory limiting the bulk they can carry and a weight limit determined by their strength stat.

Sir Elgar asks us to bust up some skeletons and collect their skulls for his mantlepiece, offering to pay us for every five, and also asks us to huck a package over to the next town along the road, Ishad N'ha. This'll be a while.



Lastly there's the inn. You can buy drinks and exchange them for "hints." They're mostly useless, in my experience, unless they actually cause items to spring into existence just because this idiot tells you about them. They might, it works that way with quests, the guy that Smitty wants us to kill, the quest items that the priests and fighters want from the crypt, don't exist until we actually have the quests for them.

So with everyone now having a shirt and most of the party having shoes and weapons, we're almost ready to leave the village. The last important step?



Setting the encounter rate and "safeguard mode." Even on Seldom, the lowest encounter rate, you'll often be able to walk down a corridor, turn a corner, and thirty seconds later find enemies coming at you from where you stood just before. I cannot imagine playing this game at the normal encounter rate. It must be wall to wall skeletons and goblins all over the place. The safeguard mode, on the other hand, is whether or not I'll be able to accidentally blow up friendly wilderness NPC's with a misclick. I set it to the safest mode to avoid this, since it's the only one where NPC's are safe both from my misclicks and from my AoE spells, as I read it in the manual.

Now we can leave Valeia.



Unfortunately the world of Gael Serran seems to be where Turok undertakes his adventures.

Okay, I exaggerate slightly, it's a bit better when the sun is up, but only a bit. Thankfully the game knows its weakness and seems to mostly avoid large, open areas as well as it can.

Let's talk game mechanics. Like Wizardry 8, this game is real-time any time you're walking around. You can run, jump, pick locks, etc. to your heart's content and everything remains real-time until you bump into an enemy.



Then it's still real-time. Sort-of. Kind-of. Any character or NPC who acts, i.e. shoots a spell or makes an attack, gets locked into turn-based mode, while everyone else still wanders around freely. This means that at any time any fight you're in can slowly snowball into something bigger and bigger. It also, however, means that at any time you can just turn around and walk away if you're not completely surrounded. So sometimes your best option is to simply circle-strafe enemies with spells, and there are a couple of encounters where I have no idea how you'd solve it otherwise since getting into melee and not being free to dodge huge attack spells in those encounters would be a massive liability.

It sounds simple when described, but it's impossible to explain how very janky and cobbled-together it feels.



Anyway, the terrain outside of Valeia mostly consists of little paths through the woods, some of them more woody and overhung, and others less woody and more cleared. Generally the enemies out here are bats(chump change), worgurs(giant rats, chump change), trolls(mostly chump change) and highwaymen(less chumpy).




Generally it looks pretty alright. It never has that sparse and empty feel that some of Wizardry 8's areas had, to the game's credit.



The first group of rogues I bump into contain Mon the Sculz, the thief that Smitty wanted us to kill. Unfortunately, we literally can't hurt him in melee, as he dodges everything I can throw at him(the rogue leaders are similar, they dodge most things and deflect 90% of the rest with their shields). Also the rogues, like some enemies, keep spamming a bunch of annoying voice lines in fights.

Thus, the solution is to kite him down the forest paths while Gizzord blasts away with spells.



During which the spawn rates keep pumping out creatures of all kinds, also note that enemies seem to have a largely infinite aggro radius and will keep pursuing you pretty much forever until they get hung up on terrain or die. I don't think they despawn either.



Trust me when I say I spend about 20 minutes wandering in circles and blasting him as mana regen rates aren't exactly fast and the initial mana pool that King Gizzord has allows him two casts of Burn and two casts of Shock before he's out.



Him and the rogue leader that spawned with the other rogues.



Most enemies drop the following: a bit of gold, some gear that's barely even worth selling and occasionally one or two useful things(like a single potion or the one useful piece of gear on their drop table). In this case, though, we get a bit more than usual as most enemies actually drop the gear they have in their hands, so, say, when killing an enemy with a shield you can always count on getting a shield drop. This means Kuros and VG Rondor now actually have the second part of their loadout.

Having gotten the rest of the chaff killed or stuck on geometry, I take the chance to explore a few of the surrounding clearings.



I immediately find a horse and a chest.



As far as I can tell, chests always have random loot while anything pre-generated will always be lying around physically in the world, also all chests seem to be trapped. On the left it tells you how good the current character's odds are for disarming the trap, in the middle it tells you what the trap is(the stars above are an objective measure of the difficulty) and the three icons below are "disarm trap," "kick chest until it opens" and "give up." On the right are nine tiles.

If you try to pick the chest, the character tries to "disarm" one tile at a time, chosen at random. For a one-star trap, you need to hit four correct tiles and disarm them before the timer ticks down. The amount of time her tile is also randomized, though with better skill, it will always go faster. It goes green, yellow, red. When it's in the red, it may also randomly go off, so it's kind of a gamble. If you're close to getting the pick, you may let it go into the red, or you may abandon the pick as soon as it gets there. Until you get lockpicking level 2, at the minimum, however, you won't even be able to pick a one-star trap.

You can also expend one-use lockpicks on chests and locks to try to bust them open without risk, since even if they fail, they won't set off a trap or jam the lock.



We can also ride horses, which adds a minor amount of movement speed but isn't really worth your time. I park it near the town walls and go poke more around the woods.





I stumble unto the river which, of course, is full of aquatic enemies. You can't cast (most) spells into water, so you usually have to actually wade in there and actually kill the enemies. Currently, however, I'm on the wrong side of Valeia where the encounters are somewhat nastier, and thus I don't want to get into any fights I don't have to.



The exploration is ended when I spot this little group of Lake Nymphs in the distance. They take hits better than rogues and they know a bunch of spells, even as I'm running away, one of them nails Trap Option, Rondor and Sophia with a sleep spell. Not the worst condition, but if they keep half the party locked down I wouldn't be able to do a damn thing against them.



On the way back I run into a bunch of trolls and uh, I gotta say, their troll-English pidgin patter sounds an awful lot like a racist stereotype of, say, African tribesmen or something. They're also one of the moderately dangerous enemy types. At the moment they come as Troll Gunis(weapon and no shield) that are easily killed and troll Mangus(weapon and shield) which, like the rogue leaders and Mons we can't hardly dent.



I dodge the trolls(dropping some run-by spells on the weaker ones) and leg it back to Valeia to collect the reward for killing Mons.



Considering that it's clearly not a quest you're meant to be able to do at level 1(considering that it basically only happens if you abuse game mechanics to circle-strafe him to death), the fact that the reward is 200XP(which is 1/5th of a level at first level) and 200 gold(which is literally what you start with to equip yourself with rusty swords and sticks), it seems a bit piddly on the reward level. The next quest he provides is to go to the Toad Village and make sure that they're not planning to genocide the local humans, Smitty seems earnestly worried about this because the Toad People seem upset.



Back on the road again, I set out to explore the side of the village towards the graveyard ruins.




Eventually I start just walking away from encounters because it's not worth my time to spend two minutes killing rats for 2XP each.



Eventually I find the ruins of a house...

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

It's full of Gorthius and his thieves(not the wandering enemy kind, but the robin hood kind that we're supposed to be friends with). I stop to chat with him, during which he asks me to try and save his friend H'tark from the SNAKE TEMPLE. During the conversation, however, trolls keep piling up outside, and once the chat is over I jump out of the broken back wall, at which point Gorthius' men turn on him and instakill him.

They get killed along with the trolls(yes, this involves a lot of kiting), and I find a note on the ground...



Cool, someone we'll kill in the future, probably.

Also, coming back to the ruins...



I find a couple of trolls trying to walk through the damaged walls. The AI in this game isn't great.

I do wish there were more than three thieves to kill, though, since they seem to have high odds of dropping lockpicks, which are expensive as fuck(200 gold a piece from the blacksmith). The killing also gives us our first pack of level-ups!





Look at the fucking swing in random hit points and ability points. Same Fortitude and Class for all three of them. Plus two of them get 2 Ability points, and the third gets 1. That's some spicy bullshit, too.



This forest has more damaged and burnt-down houses than Valeia has actual houses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roN8l0m1xuk

This one is inhabited by a dwarf that's the brother of the cryptkeeper, which seems like a job with a very low life expectancy in a fantasy world of any kind. You don't need his help to get into the crypt or make friends with his brother once you meet him(because of course no one's going to mention an NPC that we won't actually meet), but it helps, especially if it's your first time playing the game.



This is also the first time you find crates and barrels to smash. It's pretty normal, you bust them up, sometimes they contain loot but...



...for no obvious reason they always spawn a big light bloom that briefly lights up their general area until the wooden shrapnel comes down.

Oh yeah, and note that Trap Option is dying from poison because I tried to pick a chest in the woods. At this point he's been poisoned for about 20 minutes real-time so I'm 99% sure this condition doesn't wear off on its own. Thankfully he's dying slowly enough that I can just have Hierophant heal him every time he's puked up a kidney.



Around the corner is the graveyard that we need to reach both to complete the wizard's guild quest and to continue the main plot.



Exploring it, skeletons pop out of the ground at pre-set intervals. As long as you move slowly, you never get more than a couple at a time, at least at first. Generally they're pretty unthreatening, which is also reasonable since they're some of the enemies you have to fight. Bashing my way through the bones also gets King Gizzord and Hierophant their level-ups.




What's interesting for them is getting more spells. I make a good pick for Hierophant, with Bless, which ensures that the party's four punchmancers can land their hits against pretty much everything they encounter for the rest of the update, while with Gizzord I make a bad pick and get Torchlight. It turns out that Torchlight, and I admit this may be a graphics setting issue, only illuminates an area roughly one foot square immediately at the party's feet. Still, the level-up about doubles his MP total, thus allowing him to more effectively blast badguys.




Once you approach the crypt(which the lighting does some very odd things to), the BONE LORD spawns in. He's not very dangerous himself, he can bonk you with his staff and has a decent amount of HP, plus he can cast a few Fiend-school spells that can do considerable amounts of damage at the party's current level, but he also spawns a big batch of skeletons and every so often he spawns more, so if you try to fight them first and lack the mage power to blast him down, you could get buried.



It's otherwise not a very exciting fight(though the Bone Lord and his skeletons do force me to retreat to the entrance to the graveyard, as mana doesn't recharge while fighting, so I had to literally run around in real-time to recover mana for King Gizzord's last couple of Burn and Shock casts), but does finally provide Hierophant with a weapon(Bone Lords always drop magic staves that have a chance of causing the Sleep status effect) and a felt hat that no one can equip, and I have no idea who can. See, that's another fun thing about Wizards & Warriors. It tells you if a weapon or piece of armor is Restricted for the currently holding party member, but there's no way to inspect the item and tell which classes it isn't Restricted from.

Game design!



A nice view of the crypt up close before I hoof it back to Valeia to sell junk and get Trap Option cured. Then I also buy up a bunch of lockpicks and roam the woods picking all the low-level chests, none of them contain anything even vaguely good nor even recoup more than a quarter of the gold I blew on the lockpicks, but it appears to contribute to levelling his Lockpicking skill, so it's still worthwhile since later chests can have nice things, including one in this very update.



On returning, I interact with the lion on the right to open the door...




And get a bit of flavour text on the way down.



At the bottom is what's essentially an airlock, which most W&W dungeons have. You walk in, pull the lever, it closes the door behind you, loads the dungeon, and opens the door ahead of you, and the reverse for getting out. Outside of that, it actually manages reasonably large areas without any loading being strictly necessary.



Most of the crypt consists of dark brick corridors and copious amounts of pointless skeleton encounters that you can just sort of casually shoulder your way through, also lots of chests with generic loot, which Trap Option is now finally competent enough to pick without getting poisoned or blowing his own face off most of the time.



Surprisingly enough there aren't a lot of new enemies to start with, except for slimes. Maybe they can make you sick or poison you or something, but they die so fast I never had a chance to find out.



And like everything else in W&W that isn't a unique enemy, they come in swarms. Because of course they do.



There aren't a lot of branches, mostly just ones that lead to another chest or door or couple of skeletons, but the one you want to find at first is the one leading down these broken stairs where either broken spawning or broken AI has stacked four living rats on top of each other. Most areas in the game, indoors and outdoors, have little wandering types of vermin and passive animals. Rats, birds, etc. and sometimes they gum up the machinery. You can either jump the gap or drop down, it should come to mostly the same result, but I do a sick-ass jump and only break a couple of ankles coming down.



Badass.

Limping slightly, the party slinks down the stairs.



Look at how dark this fucking dungeon is, by the way, goddamn. Anyway, the door to the left just loops you back to the break in the stairs, it's where you'd come out if you dropped down.



The door on the right is all crypty and fancy, but doesn't really do anything for us at the moment, as we can't open it.



So straight ahead it is!



I greatly appreciate that the first dungeon is also the goddamn sewer dungeon. Thank you DW Bradley.

This little sewery crossroads has some water for us to drown ourselves in and two chambers with nothing (obviously) of interest. The third one, however, has Bilbump's brother Rethpian.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNC6lCuu4IM

If you haven't played the game before, he can save you a great deal of trial and error in proceeding. One of the neighbouring rooms does have a useful thing, in fact a necessary thing, a rod called a bauble stick which has exactly one whole use in the game which is right now.




Walk outside, hope in the water, swim over to one of the gratings and find the one with a crystal and a key just beyond it and just out of reach.




You can use the bauble stick on the crystal, but not the key, to attract it and hooooover it over to you. It's the key for the fancy crypt door upstairs.

Also one of the things I will give W&W credit for is that the interface makes giving items to NPC's and using items pretty intuitive. You just press the use/give key on the right, select which interaction you want, and then you have a little scroll menu on the interface to browse through the items relevant to the interaction you picked. It feels a lot more organic than having to go into your actual inventory.




Anyway, back upstairs the keyhole isn't exactly super obvious.



The door turns out to actually be an elevator (which gets stuck half the time you try to use it, of course).




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tntwjosXDO4

F'lokis Ra gives us a short speech and immediately attacks us. He's thankfully weaker than the other mummies in the dungeon, who can almost one-shot the entire party in one action, but takes a while to beat up.




He drops an amulet that you... I don't think you actually need it, but unless you read a FAQ, you need what it says on the back to proceed.

Now, Rethpian said there was a chamber on top of this tomb...



It's a classic, you send the elevator down, call it up again, hop on the top and ride it to the chamber above.



This gets us back to the level we started on, but in a hidden corridor, where it leads we could have gone earlier, but there was no reason to without the amulet.





Approach her and say "sanctus kerah" through the conversation text parser and directed at the statue.




Which causes her to raise a grating and allow you into a small free-roam dungeon area. It's full of pits of soil that spawn skeletons, wandering rogues(how did they get in there?), bats and a couple of frankly mean traps.



The goal is to find a hidden action figure and toss it into a magic trash can to progress.



One area has these coffins you can open. They either contain free loot, an easily killed skeleton or...



A mummy! One of the things a mummy can do is cast Flamestrike. What does Flamestrike do?





I thankfully manage to disassemble it without losing anyone else, and try out one of the random un-ID'd scrolls I had gotten from a chest on Trap Option, thus reviving him. Thankfully, being resurrected doesn't seem to cause any stat or XP loss.



At the far end is this unassuming corridor. Walk down it and you get assailed by bats. Then while you're getting distracted by the bats, two ghosts show up, and they mean business.



The Spirit of the Warrior appears to be 100% magic-resistant and is the lesser threat, the Spirit of the Wizard spends every second turn Screaming which attempts to terrify and paralyze every party member. Paralyzed party members, of course, can't act. Terrified party members can act but suck at it. Only Hierophant and sometimes Trap Option consistently resist it, making for a very long slugfest to wear them down, especially with the wizard hidden in the back and thus not being easily targetable.

They produce decent amounts of XP and two mystery crystals when killed, which are used just beyond them to gain access to the aforementioned action figures.





You can only pick up one, which determines something about your next challenge. Internet guides say the warrior's statue is the right one to pick(but you can't tell which one you're picking because you can't ID anything until you get a warlock. So it's just luck), and thankfully that's the one I randomly select.

Along the way to the magic trash can I also find some Horny Loot.



C'mon, DW Bradley, really? Yeah no I'm not forcing Sophia to wear that even if it turns out to have good stats.



By the time I get to the magic trash cans, past multitudes of dead things, there have been a couple of level-ups for everyone. King Gizzord has Zap(Stone Realm single-target damage spell) and Elemental Blast(like a fireball spell, throw a thing, it goes boom). Hierophant, meanwhile, has Venom Bite(does damage, poisons, useless against everything down here) and Binding Force(attempts to paralyze an enemy, failed every single time I tried to cast it, god fucking dammit), Trap Option un-traps things better and the rest of the party hacks things better. Heck yeah.



Dump the runed figure into the urn to open it and step through the now-open grating, then head down the stairs.




The room has a grid of very damaging fires and a grate on the far side, touching a fire does something to the grate and there's a very high-IQ way of solving this. Me, though? I just run through at max speed and after two tries this means I catch the grate still open even if it leaves the entire party lightly charred.



And even that quick dip halfway kills Trap Option.



Now drop down through the hole for the next challenge.



And proceed to clown on the Spectral Warrior. Mostly he just takes time to kill because he's well-armoured and dodgy, he isn't actually much of a scary opponent unless you somehow got here incredibly underlevelled or with a party of all mages or something.



Up ahead is a healing pool, which is a bit odd because mana regen rates and out-of-combat health regen in general means anything that isn't a persistent condition or dead is usually fixed by itself in a minute or so, faster if your priest is healing away. There's also the reward for taking the Warrior path, which is a suit of platemail, something that would normally cost thousands of gold pieces from Smitty, and thus an extremely good reason to take the Warrior path.

Said suit of armor is also hidden down a short, dark side path and thus perfectly possible to miss before you take another one-way drop like a chump.






The next area is a set of dimly lit canals/sewers to swim around while big barracudas attempt to liberate you of your digits underwater and your fighters stab them because, as mentioned, most spells can't actually hit enemies underwater.





It's pretty good at making you feel trapped and isolated underground, though.



It's a bit labyrinthine and even the right direction never entirely feels like you're headed the right way as you move up and down winding, twisting, narrow corridors, blowing up asylum zombies and slimes.






The final objective is this lab where a hulking, but non-hostile, shape looms...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30Ii-3p7zoE

Scabban sounds like an excitable Clan Pestilens adept. I'm not sure if his leaps between "I'll get better and then fix this!" and "I'll get better and then RULE THE WORLD!" are poor writing or intended to indicate his insanity. But polite as he seems to be to us, well, he clearly intends to kill everyone in the world. We're part of everyone and in the world. We gotta do something about this.



Hey get back here!

Turns out Scabban apparently heard me plotting and fell down the hole in the middle of his lab. Before following him, I whack a well-hidden switch on the wall to avoid having to loop all the way back here afterwards. You could spend a LONG time looking for the switch as nothing anywhere indicates its existence, and you can't get out of the crypt without it.



It opens the grating at the bottom of the pool down below Scabban's lab, giving you a route out.



I run after Scabban and get to choppin'.



However, Scabban may well be the most dangerous enemy in the Crypt.



So let's talk conditions. The green face icon can be either Nausea or Disease. Much like in Wizardry 8, Nausea means a character might lose a turn to gagging. Disease, on the other hand, has no immediate effect... but over time it drains stat points permanently. We're still like four or five levels from being able to cure it on our own, and I have no potions or scrolls for getting rid of it, which means that getting the hell out of the crypt fast suddenly become a high priority.



Step one of this plan is to flatten Scabban. He melts on death. Gross.





Step two, almost drown underwater.



We surface in a sewer canal on the far side of the grating where Rethpian's keys and crystal had fallen.



Score. This key unlocks four tombs on a small sewer island, we want to get in all four.



Two have no enemies and a big kite shield and a plate helm.




One contains a few bats and a chest with some random stuff in it. However one of those random things is a fucking ankh. Now, in Wizardry 8, an Ankh was just a misc. equippable that had a small passive stat boost. In W&W, Ankhs are consumable items that give a permanent +1 to a stat, which is rad. If nothing else, it helps you get to the stat prereqs for class advancement.



The fourth tomb holds PLOT ADVANCEMENT.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiYpIzjS8Tc

Sadly, no sword that was cursed by eeeeeeeeevil, instead Kuros just got a blingin' ring.



Even ignoring all of the resistance boosts, this by itself doubles his armor class. Now, time to get the heck out of here.



Swimming out brings us back near Rethpian, at which point it's just a quick skip up the stairs, into the tomb of F'lokis Ra, up the elevator into the hidden room and then out the front door.



On the way, part of King Gizzord's brain melts from the disease and I double-time it.





And I make it back before any other important parts of him melt. Fixing up Gizzord takes a solid quarter of the gold the party has accumulated from the tomb, and ID'ing loot(and finding most of it useless, of course), takes a fat chunk of the remainder.



Roendalf is a kind and compassionate soul when he hears about what happened to Scabban, and then tasks us with murdering someone for having the wrong religion. To be fair, it does sound like an evil snake cult, of the kind you get in fantasy settings every so often, so we'll take the job.




Spell learning aside, the main changes are that Kuros can now become a Samurai(and is also decked out like a real warrior now) and Sophia a Ranger, everyone else is short some stat points for advancements. Sadly, becoming a Samurai is impossible until we've gotten past Ishad N'ha, so this advancement is just kind of a tease. Frankly I'd rather make him a paladin for now.



Oh and Trap Option got to dual-wield daggers! Turns out you can't just put any dagger in your off hand, you need a special dagger with the Side Weapon tag!



Our new story quest is to get to the Caves of Ishad N'ha and talk to the oracles. Aside from that, we've got a Toad Village to save, some satyr bandits to kill and at least one class change to make happen. I'd really love to get Kuros turned into a paladin before Ishad N'ha, too, and I think Rondor would make a nice Barbarian for now. All of which probably means a bunch of off-screen grinding.

And before anyone asks: yes, I did have Torchlight cast for every single one of those crypt screenshots. The crypt is just that dark and Torchlight that useless.

Next: A toad yells at us a lot