Oh man! Oh, wow, that was a while ago huh? Oh, uh, oops.
Hey, at least you got 17 attribute points! That puts you ahead of the people who've been leveling "up".
For the rest of the party, into the depths! I'll have to start running a B-team soon to get our bench characters up to par. I have a feeling that this is like XCOM where you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket by relying on a single group of characters.
Immediately as we descend into the depths of the second floor, I can see that it is darker, danker and more perilous than the first. Each dark corridor is austere and foreboding, the cold, empty rooms pervade with the loneliness that comes from knowing there is no friendly thing nearby. Each corner emits a sense of dread, what foul traps and monsters does it hide? This is not a cave with a few shambling skeletons, orcs and rogues, this a dungeon built with purpose, by a madman, to torture and kill every foolish soul in its cold stone walls. Something evil lurks here.
I lied, it looks exactly the same as the first floor. There's a reason the DUMAPIC spell tells you what floor you're on. Back in 1981 they only had four colors and they sure as hell weren't going to use cyan or yellow for the walls.
There's actually something pretty strange about the above screenshot: We're in position 2 North, 9 East, by my reckoning, and looking South. That means the passage before us passes out of the 20x20 bounds of the map described by the manual. I have Hanzoku cast a Dumapic spell after walking south into what should be -1, and he gives the following reading:
Odd! The manual definitely claimed...
When you enter the Maze from the Castle, you always start on the first level as
far South and as far West in the Maze as you can be, facing North.
Oh, well that settles that. Here I thought every staircase started at 0,0 but they clearly state that that's only true coming in from the castle. Time to erase my map and start over again... The stairs down the second floor are on the following position:
So first thing's first, I head out of the starting room, through one door, and into a long, winding hallway. I mean, a LONG hallway. Just a featureless hallway- although I shudder to think how many secret doors I might be walking past, I need our wizard's spells for battle. We haven't had an encounter yet either- the suspense is really growing on me, I have no idea how much harder dungeon floor 2 monsters are. Knowing my luck, we'll barely survive one encounter, the thief will get poisoned, and we'll have to fight three encounters trying to run back.
29 featureless tiles into the hallway, we find a door and go through into a tiny room. There, we have our first encounter: 4 Elvis impersonators! They all have large, dangling crosses, like a christian Flavor flav.
In the surprise round we kill one and damage another, and identify them as Level 1 priests (which makes them a lot less scary). Still, I'm having Broken cast MONTINO to silence them while we beat them to a pulp. One of them still manages to cast BADIOS on Neotetsu for 5 damage.
After the battle, we get a chest. Birdviggins inspects it and manages to set off a crossbow bolt, bringing him down to just 1 health (not far off from my original prediction huh?) Fortunately, Broken brings to party back into shape with three of his five DIOS spells. I figure it's time to go back. Immediately, we encounter 2 "WEIRD HUMANOIDS" that use the skeleton graphic (still right on the money. I know I'm always right when I predict bad things happening.) They have more than 10 hit points each, but we still manage to get rid of them before they can attack back.
In what may or may not be a rash moment of stupidity, I decide to explore further instead of retreating, my confidence partially bolstered by correcting a mapping error (you guys do NOT want to know how often I miscount the number of tiles in a hallway by 1). The hallway we've been in seems to be forming a long spiral, or at least, some rectangular analogue of a spiral.
At the very center of the spiral, I find the stairs down! Good to know. Now let's stay far, far away from those until we're more powerful.
On our way out of the spiral we encounter a friendly group of gas clouds.
Our heroes are, probably, hallucinating by now.
I decide to explore a little more. We encounter a party of 4 slimes, which I expected to be easy, but I guess 2nd-floor slimes are a different lot. We chew through them for a while, and then in one round, both Birdviggins and Neotetsu get poisoned (I
knew the thief would get poisoned!) In the next round I decide to go all out of the two remaining slimes, with Birdviggins parrying, Broken freezing the slimes in place, and Hanzoku and Tawarochir both shooting fireballs. Despite all this, one slime manages to hit Birdviggins hard again.
There's a chest afterwards, and I decide to inspect it myself: OOPS! POISON NEEDLE. Now three of the party members are poisoned. I use Broken's last DIOS and it gives Birdviggins a measly one hit point. By the time we reach the first floor, Birdviggins is down to 3HP. Around the last corner of the first floor, he still has 3HP, so I figure, he's going to make it!
Nope. Apparently, with poison, you can lose 3HP at once. It's just totally fucking random. Birdviggins collapses just a few tiles short of safety, and it falls to the rest of us to drag his lousy thief corpse out.
Unfortunately, there's only one temple in town. I have no choice but to take Birdviggins to those Temple of Cant crooks for resurrection, and hope they do the job properly this time.
Huzzah! He is saved!
Not only that, he leveled up!
It's not that amazing, but increasing strength and agility is a win for a thief in my book. On the other hand, I think losing IQ means he's only going to set off MORE traps. Dear lord. Let's see what the manual says...
Needless to say, your thief is much better at inspecting and disarming than anyone else. Even so, when he is just starting out, he will be pretty inept and things will blow up in his face fairly often. Fortunately, most of the traps on the first level won't kill him unless he is already hurt.
I sure hope that means he gets an arbitrary bonus just for being a thief of X level, and it's not just assuming he has more IQ and Agility than everyone else. I mean, he was
supposed to, but
you sure took care of that didn't you, you cheating fuckers. Sorry, the notion of losing abilities when leveling up affects my blood pressure.
Pictured: Birdviggins, forever.
The party now has 1004 gold. I'll be spending at least 300 on one Antidote potion, I think. Oh yeah, and lastly, here's what we've explored:
The pencil is pointing at the room where a few slimes wrecked our shit.
Next time, I plan to do a bunch more stuff, and maybe get more than two hit points in one level-up. Am I missing anything?
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Topic: Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981): Second Level (Read 10825 times)