The Stack

I’ve mapped out most of level 5, and even acquired a Crystal of Good to go with my Crystal of Evil, but there are still parts of the level that I’m clearly not ready to tackle yet. One enclosed mazy region has been claimed by priests of Fung the Irascible, who stop and harass you every two steps or so. They’ve got instant-death spells — sure, they fail most of the time, but when they don’t, the result is instant death. So I’ve been mostly leaving them the Fung alone. Nonetheless, I managed to get a party stuck inside their turf by teleportation — not a fixed teleporter with a planned destination like before, but one of the random teleporter traps you sometimes find on chests.

Seriously, those teleporters are the scariest traps in the game. With high-level characters, you barely notice the effects of most traps. I spent a while adventuring without a thief recently, and couldn’t disarm traps at all, and my basic approach to most was like “Oh, an exploding box? That’s fine, my guys have good armor. Poison needle? I can cure poison a bunch of times. Mage Blaster? It’ll turn my mage to stone if I open it? Sure, he can take it.” Teleporter traps, though? I left those alone, when I successfully identified them. Which is something even the best thief possible only does 95% of the time. Hence the predicament I was describing.

I applied the same tactics as last time, leaving the teleported party suspended in the dungeon while I brought in a different party to explore the unexplored and figure out how to get them out of there. The big problem was that even a fact-gathering mission would have to go through multiple Fung encounters. So I spent a good long time leveling up, and came to the conclusion that there was in fact a fairly short route from the party’s current location to the exit, but that they’d probably all die along the way. But at least I could make them die in a more convenient place, one where I’d only get Funged one or two times on the way to collect the corpses. And as chance would have it, that didn’t even come to pass: the very first encounter after reactivating them had another chest with a teleporter trap, carrying them out of danger as easily as they were carried in.

The main effect of this misadventure, then, is that I spent a lot of time leveling up in preparation for Mission: Fung. I have two level-13 characters now! That’s a big watershed in this game: level 13 is when you get access to the highest spell level. In particular, I now have a mage who can teleport, which should help further exploration enormously.