Update hooray!
Part 3: Grindin’, Angstin’, Bumblin’
Before heading back down into the dungeon, Emptyeye, Nyperold and mahel042 all bought themselves Plate Mail to make it even harder to damage them. Xanatos also got himself an Anointed Flail in case some emergency came up and he was called to the front lines.
After descending the stairs to the dungeon, Xanatos spoke:
Xanatos: “Hey guys, check out my new magic trick! LOMILWA!”
And with that, the area around the party was illuminated, and they could see down the hallways much further than before. The spell also allowed them to see secret doors in the dungeon.
(LIVEBLOG NOTE: In the original computer versions, the spell names acted as a form of pseudo-copy protection—if you didn’t know the name of the spell you wanted to cast, you couldn’t cast it. In the console versions, you just select the spell you want from a list…but in the pre-Internet days, these still served as a “Hope you’ve saved your manual” measure, as with names like “Kalki”, “Lomilwa”, “Dialma”, and “Tiltowait” to name but a few, you’re going to be more or less slinging spells by trial and error at first without one. Of course, with the advent of the Internet, this effect is lessened.)
Xanatos: “And that’s not all. LATUMAPIC!”
There was no apparent effect.
Emptyeye: “Okay, and that did…”
Xanatos: “Now we’ll know exactly what we’re fighting when we enter combat.”
mahel042: “Oh, neat.”
Nyperold: “Totally. I like knowing exactly what I’m killing.”
For a good 45 minutes, the group did nothing but pound on Murphy’s Ghost over and over.
Rocky: “You know, I feel like someone should create a montage of us doing this. Maybe over a song that has a driving bassline in the key of C. That’d be pretty neat.”
Emptyeye: “Hmm…nah, I don’t think that would work.”
After the training session, the group as a whole felt quite a bit stronger. Zudak had learned to use even larger columns of flame on foes, and instill fright in them, and Xanatos could cure more severe wounds, and even raise the dead! He could also cast a mid-size field of protection that would follow the party around even out of combat.
But things were not all rosy. For one thing, Emptyeye felt that, despite being the nominal leader of the group, he was being outclassed in terms of getting stronger, and especially in terms of being able to withstand injury before succumbing to wounds. While he had known and accepted that the two Fighters in the group would eventually overtake him in this regard, he hadn’t expected the effect to be quite so pronounced—currently, everyone in the group with the exception of Zudak (and Willy, who had yet to see any firsthand combat) had more endurance than he did, and he couldn’t help but feel a bit uneasy about it.
As the group reconvened at the Tavern, Emptyeye soon found that he was not the only one in the group uncomfortable with their role..
Rocky: “Guys, I feel unwanted here. I mean, yeah, okay, I’m not the warrior that Emptyeye, Nyperold and mahel are, and that’s fine, so I stay in the back of the group. But I..I can’t cast spells, either. So what this means is that we train and train and train, and I…do nothing to help out. I Parry, and I Parry, and I Parry some more…and then Murphy’s Ghost isn’t even courteous enough to have a treasure chest on them so I can actually do my thing. You know, disarming traps and whatnot.”
(LIVEBLOG NOTE: Beginning with Wizardry V, Thieves have a Hide option in combat. If successful, they then gain an Ambush option enabling them to deal damage from the back row. This was also included as an option in the Japan-only Story of Llylgamyn collection, a Super Famicom compilation of Wizardry I-III. Here, though, Thieves are rather useless in normal combat, since they won’t be in the front lines [Even in the “default” party, the third physical slot would be taken by the Cleric].)
Nyperold: “Wow, I know what you mean man. If I couldn’t constantly kill things…geez, I’d be devastated.”
Emptyeye: “…right. Anyway, I’ll tell you what. I think we’ve done enough training for now. Let’s explore the rest of the first floor to confirm that there’s nothing that…whoever made this map missed. While we’re doing that, we should come across quite a few treasure chests for you to unlock.”
Rocky: “Cool!”
So the group explored the first floor, finding plenty of treasure chests. At first, everything went swimmingly, with Rocky disarming traps with ease. Toward the end of the exploration, though, he started to get sloppy.
Rocky: “Okay, this looks like it’s trapped with a Poison Needle. Now if I just….OW! That wasn’t a Poison Needle at all!”
The rest of the group was amused by his failure to correctly diagnose a Crossbow Bolt trap. They would be much less amused by his next mistake.
Rocky: “Now this! This is obviously—obviously!—an Exploding Box trap. Now if I just…oops.”
Emptyeye: “‘Oops’? What do you mean ‘oops’?”
Treasure Chest: *KA-BOOOOOOOM!!!*
All: “Aaaaagh!”
Rocky: “Well, at least I had the kind of trap correct, right guys? Right? …guys?”
Zudak: “Goddammit Rocky!”
It was the third mistake that convinced the group to head for home, though.
Rocky: “Let’s see here…this looks to me to be a Poison Needle trap. I’ll just remove this spring and…Gah! Yeah, definitely a Poison Needle trap.”
A quick use of the Potion of Neutralizing the group found earlier and Rocky was all better. Without a way to cure him should be screw up again, though (Perhaps showing where his priorities were, though Xanatos could raise the dead, he could not yet cure poison), the group trotted back to town.
Back in the Tavern…
Emptyeye: “Okay. Despite Rocky’s apparently starting to doze off near the end of that little excursion, I think we did all right for ourselves. Let’s go get some new equipment with our hard-won gold and rest up. Next time, we’ll head down to level two!”
The group pawned off an ordinary Staff on Willy after having him confirm that it was, in fact, an ordinary Staff. At Boltac’s, Emptyeye got himself a Sturdy Plate (The last one in stock!), Xanatos outfitted himself in a suit of Body Armor, and Rocky picked himself up an Iron Shield. He also replaced the Potion of Neutralizing he had used, and as an extra defensive measure, Nyperold and mahel042 each grabbed both a Potion of Curing and a Potion of Neutralizing, giving the group a total of three of each.
Rocky: “If an emergency situation arises where I’m called to the front lines, you’d better believe I’ll be ready.”
Xanatos: “Damn right! *High fives Rocky*”
Next Time: Floor 2!
Neat Bonus Commentary!
- Typo alert: I originally misspelled “Anointed” as “Annointed” near the beginning. Additionally, I still can’t decide what the actual correct tense is in Rocky’s complaining about Murphy’s Ghost (..”on him”? or “on them”? I left it as “on them” here, although I suspect that’s wrong.). Finally, while not a typo per se, the original “Eye of the Tiger” video I had linked to has since been removed from Youtube for violating their Terms of Service. I linked to a different one here.
- Nyperold is so cute here…as cute as a bloodthirsty killing machine can be, anyway. He’s trying so hard to have empathy for Rocky’s plight, but he just completely misses Rocky’s larger point regarding his feelings of self-worth, instead latching on to “I can’t kill things”.
- Meanwhile, Zudak’s “calling people out on their idiocy” aspect is further extended here, as he berates Rocky after he clumsily makes a treasure box explode in the group’s collective face.
- Emptyeye’s silent angsting to himself here reflects my own out-of-game bewilderment at how the HP rolls were going to this point. Part of the issue may have been that Emptyeye was a level lower than everyone else–besides being outclassed by Fighters level-for-level in the HP department, it takes Samurai longer than any class besides Lords and Ninjas to actually gain levels–but Emptyeye’s HP were currently lower than everyone except for Zudak’s…and Zudak is, as you’ll recall, the Mage of the group, so we’d have major problems if his HP were higher than Emptyeye’s.
- Finally, I love how Xanatos learned a Level 5 Cleric spell (Di, which actually raises the dead, contrary to what you’d think by its name) before a Level 4 one Latumofis, which is the Cure Poison spell I mentioned earlier.)
- By the way, the brief out-of-context snippets before the chapter headings are usually me responding to other people’s posts in the topic. In this case, “update hooray!” is referring to the fact that I hadn’t updated for a few days before this.
-EE