The Stack

I haven’t said anything about the plot yet. That’s because, after nearly a week of play, I’m only just starting it. It took me some time to battle through the one-level dungeon under Sorpigal to the point where I got my first quest, a simple courier mission to the town of Erliquin, and it took me a while after that to be able to reach Erliquin. The closest I’ve come to a Wizardry-like lost-in-the-dungeon experience was when I tried to take an overland route to there, but realized that the monsters in the next map sector were getting too tough for me, then tried to return to Sorpigal, only to find that some of the passages between sectors are only passable in one direction.

I did ultimately reach Erliquin, where I was assigned another delivery to another town — I’m guessing that this whole quest chain is meant as a way to get the player to visit and map every town in the land of Varn. But I did not get there by venturing outdoors. I’m a little displeased about how this happened. Remember that I had had problems with text flashing by too fast to read. I had missed some tavern rumors in this way, and wasn’t having any success getting them to show up again — in fact, I don’t think the rumor texts ever do repeat. So I went online to see if I could find some record of the rumors there, and inadvertently got spoilers about a hidden way to teleport from town to town. I might have found it eventually by myself — I knew from experience that there are secret doors, and that therefore I should be banging my head against the boundaries of any unused bit of gridspace. But spoilage is never all that pleasant.

So now I’m mapping Erliquin. I assume I’ll find a similar teleport opportunity taking me to the next node in the chain. I’ve been in one dungeon not affiliated with a town so far, and that too had a way to teleport to it from Sorpigal. I’m kind of wondering now if it ever really becomes necessary to go outdoors at all. Perhaps the wilderness was a late addition to a game designed without it. That would make this like an inverse of some of the Ultima games.