The Stack

By now, I’m well into the second and more difficult of DROD RPG‘s two chapters. Apart from plot, the two chapters are self-contained: at the beginning of chapter 2, Tendry is stripped of all his equipment. Chapter 2 makes things more complicated by providing options that were absent in chapter 1, such as spending money to raise your stats. Finding adequately efficient ways to spend your scarce resources is tricky. I pretty much played chapter 1 straight through, but in chapter 2 I’m frequently saving the game to try out different options and see how they play out. I’ll probably want to restart completely at some point, to better take advantage of some secret areas I didn’t notice early enough to use optimally.

But that might wait until I’ve completed chapter 1 to my satisfaction. There seems to be a whole chain of undocumented special items that enhance Tendry’s ability to go places and do things and get more special items, and I’ve probably only scratched the surface of it.

The first significant item is an invisibility potion which lets you sneak by spontaneously-attacking monsters. This seems somewhat optional: it doesn’t actually open up any new territory, but it does make it a lot easier to get another special item, a one-use “wall-walking” token — that is, a device that teleports you forward two squares, regardless of obstacles. This can obviously be applied in all sorts of situations, but is best used in a situation where nothing else will do. My first thought was to use it to get into a certain doorless enclosure I had noticed containing a door-opening device called a Portable Orb, but once I was in that enclosure, there was no way out. So instead I used it to enter a different inaccessible area that had a door that could be opened from the other side. There, I found a handheld bomb, a device capable of destroying even wubbas.

And that’s as far as I’ve got. I can kill the wubba blocking the staircase near the final exit, but the bomb doesn’t have enough range to kill the snake blocking the corridor behind the wubba as well. It’s likely that there’s something else I should be using the bomb on, but it only affects items, not architecture. There are a couple of other obvious inaccessible spots, including some some platforms leading out over a pit like stepping stones, but with no way to get from one platform to the next. There’s a similar set of platforms in chapter 2, with a Really Big Sword (the kind Beethro uses) clearly visible in the middle. There has to be some way to jump from platform to platform — say, a pogo stick or something.

I haven’t found any devices like these in chapter 2 yet. They seem like general-use items, so it’s possible that they’re introduced over the normal course of the game. I’ve only just encountered the first non-portable bombs, for example, so it’s conceivable that the game will introduce handheld ones next. If so, encountering new items in chapter 2 may give me some idea of which obstacles they should be applied to in chapter 1.