The Stack

So here I am on dungeon level 4. Twelve years ago, in my first attempt at Wizardry III, I almost lost my best characters when a teleporter sent them deep into unmapped territory, leaving them with no idea how to get back to the exit, and no way to replenish spells until they did. I somehow managed to get them out, only to see them suffer a stupider and less dramatically-justified TPK shortly afterward.

This whole experience is largely why I’m taking the “abundance of caution” approach this time through. Nonetheless, I blundered into the exact same teleporter again. The level is just set up to make this happen; it’s right on the other side of a door, where you have no way to know it’s there until you’ve sent one party through it. It is, in effect, part of the plot, a “party gets lost” event. As before, I made it through the unconnected part of level 2 and back to the uncharted part of level 4, but was battered greatly by monsters along the way; my mage was dead, and the rest of my characters were hardly in fighting shape. Understand that, unlike most of my TPKs, this was not a matter of folly or hubris on my part. I hadn’t deliberately taken on more than I could handle or stayed in the dungeon when I should have headed for home. I had just been sent on a very long path, with no possibility of going back, and over the course of many encounters, I inevitably ran out of spell slots, then hit points. And I still didn’t know how to get back out. A TPK seemed inevitable.

Here’s what I did about it.

First, I terminated the program. This is something that the version of Wizardry III I’m playing tolerates. It saves your status and position after each encounter, and lets you resume outings in progress. Then I sent in another party, not to drag the dead back to town for resurrection, but simply to thoroughly map out the area around my first party. I didn’t know their exact coordinates — with the mage dead and the bishop out of spells, I had no one to cast DUMAPIC — but I knew their approximate location. It turned out to be accessible from outside. I probably walked over the very map tile where they were invisibly and intangibly waiting to be reactivated.

And, having done that, I knew the quickest and safest way out of the dungeon. It turned out to not be very far, once you knew which way to go. One more character died along the way, but both survived resurrection, and the lot of them racked up quite a few experience points in their perilous adventure.

We’ve looked a bit at the influential aspects of these early Wizardry games. What about the things that weren’t imitated even by its direct imitators? Those should be the aspects that really define Wizardry as an entity unto itself. I’ve mentioned the peculiar randomized point-buy of stats and the way that stats randomly go up and down when characters level up. What else is there?

For starters, there’s the aging mechanic. Every character has an age, apparently recorded in weeks, which increases when they rest at the inn, change class, or get resurrected. There exist items to magically rejuvenate characters. Why is age important? Because it’s related to the random stat changes: the younger the character, the greater the chance that stats will go up rather than down. If someone ages enough, their stats inevitably start decreasing; apparently they die if their Vitality goes below 3, which can be interpreted as dying of old age. I’ve never gotten anywhere near having an actually old character, although one of my fighters is perilously close to dying of old age just from unlucky die rolls. It’s worth noting tangentially that stats other than Vitality are capable of going all the way to 0, and even underflowing to 31, indicating that stats are stored in 5 bits, or 30 bits for the complete block.

It is of course extremely common for CRPGs to have shops where you can not only buy equipment but sell scavenged items. And such shops are usually willing to buy back items you bought from them, for a smaller price. But it’s very rare for shops to keep track of the dungeon finds you’ve sold them — to add them to their inventory, and sell them back to you at a markup. And that is something Wizardry does. You can essentially pawn your +1 broadsword for resurrection fees, intending to get it back once you’re on your feet.

Another thing: Identifying monsters. All monsters have some generic description like “Man In Robe” or “Large Snake” in addition to their proper name, and have a random chance of becoming identified that depends on the level and stats of your characters. And it’s kind of important to know what’s what, because a lot of monsters share their unidentified names — that Man In Robe could be a mere Apprentice or he could be an Arch-Wizard. But if monster identification isn’t a factor in other games, it’s also just barely a factor here; there’s a fairly low-level spell, LATUMAPIC, that effectively eliminates it from the game.

Speaking of monsters, I’d say a strong piece of the Wizardry flavor is the use of out-of-context exotic animals as monsters. Wizardry II has hippopotami roaming the dungeon. Wizardry III has Bengal tigers and anacondas. The first level of episode 1 has “Giant Rodents” that I assumed at first to be your standard D&D giant rats, but which, once identified, turn out to be capybaras. Encountering this as a child, I knew about capybaras only as a bit of trivia: the largest living rodents! By now, I’ve actually seen real capybaras, both in the zoo and on the internet. They’re not nearly as aggressive as the game would have you believe.

Despite taking a generally cautious approach, I managed to blunder into a completely avoidable TPK on level 2 — it was one of those things where you’re pretty close to visiting all of a certain set of rooms in a single go, and so you try for inconsequential completion when you should be heading home to rest. It took me a while to drag the entire party out, and two of them didn’t survive resurrection. I’ve created replacements for them, and have been trying to train them up. Better to do it now than when there’s an even larger experience gap.

While doing this, I mapped out the entirety of level 2, or at least those parts accessible from the stairs without teleportation. (I’m still several experience levels away from learning MALOR.) Mapping out levels, even the tricky ones full of teleporters and spinners, doesn’t really take long — not nearly as long as it takes to level up your characters enough to survive easily on the next dungeon level, particularly if you’re trying to do this for a full roster of 20 rather than a single party. And when it came to exploring level 3, I had another problem: my entire roster, apart from a couple of thieves, was good.

Recall that one of the chief gimmicks of Wizardry III is that some dungeon levels are alignment-locked. Level 2 is accessible only to good parties, level 3 only to evil parties. Level 1 has stairs leading to both 2 and 3, and 2 has stairs leading to level 4, skipping 3. But I didn’t want to skip 3. I wanted to do all the levels, in order. That means I had a choice: either delete some of my characters and create evil ones, or turn existing characters evil. I opted for the latter. In fact, I opted to turn my entire roster evil.

I’ve described it before, but: The key to changing alignment in this game is in your treatment of friendly encounters. Whenever you leave friendlies unmolested, every evil character in your party has a chance of turning good, and whenever you attack them, every good character has a chance of turning evil. But it can take a while to find a friendly encounter, and when you do, you have no control over which characters turn. What’s more, when only some of your party has turned, you have a mixed good/evil party. Such a party will stay together as long as you don’t take it apart, but it can’t access alignment-locked levels at all, and neither good nor evil characters can join it. The obvious solution to both these things is to simply swap out characters when they turn and replace them with ones that need to. But that winds up in uncomfortable random constraints: all my mages turned early, so I had to make do with just bishops for a while. And of course eventually you wind up with a party consisting of whoever’s left.

Still, what all this means is that I had something else to focus on while grinding. And that’s something this game sorely needs. By the time I everyone was evil, most of them had substantially more XP than before.

And by now, I’ve thoroughly mapped out level 3 and, I am convinced, obtained everything there is to obtain from it. Time to convert everyone back to good so I can access level 4!

The premise of Wizardry III is that the descendants of the legendary heroes are sent to end a series of cataclysms by retrieving the Orb of Earithin from the great dragon L’kbreth, who may or may not be the dragon depicted in the cover art of Wizardry I. (Given the origin of the names Werdna and Trebor, I keep looking at these names, crafted in a void of etymological context, to see if I can find other names encoded in them. “Luck breath” feels too obvious to be right.) L’kbreth is devoted to balance, so her mountain lair is designed in such a way that only good and evil working together can approach her. Whether the idea is to pass her trials and be found worthy or just kill her and seize the orb, I don’t yet know.

Also, that “mountain lair” detail means dungeon levels go up instead of down, not that it makes much difference. But at least it’s an attempt to make the environment a little less abstract. The same can be said of the lake and castle on level 1 — perhaps we’re supposed to be pretending that the entire first level is set outdoors. The castle is described in a text passage when you approach it, but of course the engine here is incapable of rendering an actual castle; it’s barely capable of rendering a corridor. But there’s a castle-shaped region, in the middle of a “moat”, which is to say, a wider loop of corridor where you can encounter “moat monsters”. (It seems like the moat monsters pop up randomly, but possibly they’re fixed encounters at specific points in the moat, like bosses. I don’t think the system actually supports random encounters that are localized to anything smaller than an entire level.) At each corner, the castle has a protrusion like a tower, but of course it’s not a tower, it’s just a little loop of rooms in a shape that suggests a tower. We’re not in a castle, we’re in a picture of a castle, drawn with walls.

I was hesitant to approach the castle at first, because of the sign in front of the moat saying “Beware of moat monsters”, but now that my team is strong enough to more or less freely explore level 1 without any real danger, I’ve gone through it, past the boss encounter, and to the stairs in the back that lead up to level 2. And with level 2, we’re back to nonrepresentational dungeon design, a map made of confusingly similar polyominoes that you really need to map to not get lost in. By contrast, I’m not consulting the map at all as I make my way through level 1 to reach it. And while that’s undoubtably in part just because I’m more familiar with it from going through it so many more times, I think the fact that it has recognizable landmarks like the lake and the castle helps as well.

Despite knowing the inevitable outcome, I did bring my entire party from Wizardry II straight into Wizardry III for a ceremonial slaughtering. It just seemed wrong to do otherwise. That done, I was in for a bit of a shock: I couldn’t import any more characters. There’s a limit of 20 characters on what Wizardry misleadingly terms a “scenario disk”, and every single slot was filled with someone lying dead in the dungeon. To bring in anyone new, I’d have to delete someone. But who? My new characters? The ones that have been waiting for rescue since 2010? In the end, I opted to just wipe the disk and start over.

Now, once you’ve done such a thing once, it becomes very tempting to do it again. You lose a few parties to the maze, along with their sweet equipment. You’re only going to get a fraction of that equipment back even if you manage to recover their corpses. The dead guys are probably not worth the cost of resurrecting, and no one else has any XP. So what good is anyone? Might as well wipe the disk and stop them cluttering up the roster!

I actually tried streamlining the whole process: instead of creating a party at a time, I created 20 characters, imported them all at once, used all their gold to buy better equipment from the very start, and sent six of them into the dungeon. This might actually be closer to what the designers intended: when you’re through with Wizardry I, why wouldn’t you bring all your characters to the next game? And it worked pretty well, for a while. When one of them died, there was a replacement ready, and all I had to do was hand him the armor he had already partially paid for. But this was subject to an all-your-eggs-in-one-basket problem: when I finally did suffer a TPK, I basically lost everything. Might as well wipe the disk!

Really, I think, the key is to spread things out. XP is the real treasure here; as I noted in my 2010 posts, once you have even one level-2 character, the whole thing becomes much more survivable. So what I really should be doing is hoarding XP. When a party returns from the dungeon with more XP than they started with, don’t just send them all out again. Send one of them out again, with a bunch of new recruits wearing only as much armor as they can buy with their own funds. If they come back alive, add them to your stockpile. We’re essentially gambling here. Creating a character is ante. Sending a character with nonzero XP is a raise. You don’t want to go all in on every hand.

Coming right off of the power fantasy of Wizardry II, it’s impressive just how hard Wizardry III throws you at the wall. As you may recall from my posts of twelve years ago, Wizardry III, unlike Wizardry II, reduces imported characters to level 1. The only things you keep are your stats and your class. While this does introduce the possibility of putting a Ninja in your party from the very beginning, it remains the case that any level-1 character stands a good chance of getting killed in their very first encounter, possibly in a surprise round before you even have a chance to run away. I spoke of Wizardry II‘s eagerness to kill characters without warning, but there, it was at least always because of something the player did, and consequently learned not to do. The thing Wizardry III is teaching us not to do is go into the dungeon at all.

The in-world justification for disempowering the characters is that you’re not actually playing the same characters that you imported, but their descendants. Hence the title “Legacy of Llylgamyn”. Characters aren’t automatically reduced on import, but have to be linked into their descendants through a menu command (L)EGATE, a word that provokes etymological thoughts. (Oddly, the manual incorrectly gives the command (R)ITE OF PASSAGE for this. Were the manual and the executable in this anthology taken from different versions of the game? That would make sense for the first two games, which we know to be ports to the Wiz3 engine, but not for Wiz3 itself.)

This notion of legacy creates a false expectation. When a character wins Wizardry I or II, they’re awarded with a special mark on their stats page, like a medal in the form of an ASCII character. (In the version of Wiz1 that I played as a child, the mark was affixed to their name, but that isn’t the case here.) And these marks are inherited. Once you have a party that’s killed Werdna and recovered the Staff of Gnilda, it’s natural to think “These guys are special. They’ve got honors. These are the ones who will save the kingdom of Llylgamyn from disaster.” But then of course they all just die, and you wind up making a new party that you don’t bother going through I and II with because they’re just going to get deleveled and probably killed anyway. I can imagine getting fully-blinged-out heroes by sending a new party through I and II once you already have some powerful characters in place in III to act as bodyguards and shepherd them through the early levels, but it wouldn’t be the same. They wouldn’t feel like the real legendary heroes. They’d be more like tourists on a Legendary Hero package tour.

Which, come to think of it, fits the theme of legacy pretty well. We’re talking about creating systems to give the children of the rich and powerful a free pass and make sure they receive rewards they haven’t earned.

Now, there are many versions of Wizardry I, and the one I’m playing today is not the same one I played in my youth. They’re both PC versions, but the standalone box I had back then had a very different UI from the one in the Ultimate Wizardry Archives CD-ROM anthology, the former displaying the first-person view of the dungeon in one corner and filling the rest of the screen with stats and messages, the latter keeping the dungeon view full-screen and overlaying temporary windows on top of it. I understand the full-screen approach to have been originally created for Wizardry III. And neither is completely identical to the Apple II version that preceded it, or the console versions that followed it. Some versions change the content, too. There are entire maps that are completely different on Nintendo. I don’t know why. Names of items vary wildly by platform, as if they had been translated by different localization teams, except that they were originally written in English. (Maybe they got translated into Japanese and back? It’s not as wild a supposition as it sounds; somehow, the series has long been most popular in Japan.)

Still, the Ultimate Wizardry Archive port is completely faithful the original maps, even when they seem like they must be wrong. There are portions of the maze that are inaccessible without teleporting, including part of the tunnels forming Andrew Greenberg’s initials on level 9, as if they left out a door and didn’t notice. There’s a sort of quest chain on levels 1 and 2 where you find keys to access other keys, culminating in a gold key that has no use. Apparently in the Nintendo port, the gold key gives you access to the elevator from level 1 to 4, just as the blue ribbon lets you ride from 4 to 9. Maybe that was the intention all along. As a child, I always thought of Wizardry as a class act, with its sleek and elegant black boxes and its substance-over-style design. It tarnishes this impression somewhat to notice not just such slapdash QA, but that the apparent mistakes went without correction in a port made 17 years later.

The version I’m playing now makes one change that I find really significant: in porting to the Wizardry III engine, it inherited Wizardry III‘s alignment mechanics. In the original version, you chose each character to be Good, Evil, or Neutral on creation, and that was pretty much it for them — I’ve seen claims that picking fights with friendly monsters provided a miniscule chance of turning Good characters Evil, but it never happened to me. A character’s alignment limits both what classes they can be and who they can adventure with, so this effectively meant you couldn’t have a party containing both a Lord (Good only) and a Ninja (Evil only). ¹Except by giving a Thief’s Dagger to a Neutral Thief, anyway. But Wizardry III made it so easy to switch alignments through your treatment of friendly monsters that the distinction became almost meaningless: anyone can adventure with anyone else, given enough time to arrange it. But at the same time, shifting alignment is randomized enough that it also became easy to split your party’s alignment, rendering them temporarily incapable of getting together again if they’re split up, either voluntarily, by quitting the game, or involuntarily, by getting someone killed and resurrecting them in town. This creates a pressure to keep acting your alignment all the time to avoid splitting the party. If you’re playing a Good party, you have reason to leave all friendly monsters alone, which is simple enough, but makes the Murphy-grinding slower; if Evil, you have reason to attack all friendlies, even the ones that are liable to cause problems. Wizardry I as originally released lacked such considerations.

My craving for making maps on a grid unsatisfied, I turn back to the game that taught it to me in the first place. I left off Wizardry III in the middle more than a decade ago on this blog; I think it’s time I got back to it. But first, it’s been so long now since I played the first two Wizardries that I feel like I should start over from the very beginning. So last night I created a new party of adventurers to explore the Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Just like when I started over Wizardry III, I still have some old characters around — I’m not using the same machine as 12 years ago, but I still have the files — but I intend to only use them for emergencies like dragging characters’ carcasses out of the dungeon for attempted resurrection after a TPK. (Recall that resurrection is not guaranteed to work in this game.)

My writeup of Wizardry III describes generating lots of level 1 characters and getting most of them killed immediately, a cycle that repeats until I finally, painstakingly get someone to survive to level 2, which provides the leverage I needed to get more characters over that hump. Strikingly, that didn’t happen at all in my replay of Wizardry I. I just took some simple precautions, like pooling my party’s gold to buy the front-line fighters decent armor, and heading for the exit before I ran out of healing spells, and that was sufficient to get my entire party up to level 2 without any deaths at all. By the end of the evening, they were level 10-ish with only one replacement. I remember the game being a lot harder than this. Of course, when I first played it, I had no idea what I was doing, and this time around, I’m very familiar with both CRPGS in general and Wizardry in particular. The opening hallways and chambers of level 1 are engraved in my memory, and instantly recognizable — moreso than the rest of the dungeon, because this is the part you see at the start of every delve.

But to be honest, the main reason I’ve been able to advance so quickly is the Murphy’s Ghost. Hidden away in a secret area of level 1 where you won’t find it easily, it may have been initially intended as a kind of trap. You enter a room and get some text describing an altar, and a prompt asking if you want to search it. Say yes, and a Murphy’s Ghost appears — or sometimes two; I think the name must not mean “the ghost of Murphy” but rather, something like “a species of ghost identified by Murphy”, like “Thomson’s Gazelle” or “Pallas’s Cat”. At any rate, the Murphy’s Ghost is a great deal tougher than other monsters you encounter on level 1, but once you’re advanced enough to beat it, it offers an unparalleled reward-to-risk ratio. And since you can just enter the altar room and summon it again as many times as you like, it’s the ideal grinding spot. And grind I did.

All this ease inevitably led to overconfidence and a TPK on level 4 when I prematurely took on the game’s first real boss encounter. I’ve more or less recovered from that, but my party has been almost entirely Ship-of-Theseused, with only one of the initial roster remaining. The Murphy’s Ghost helps a lot with that, too: it doesn’t have any ranged attacks, so if you’re training up a fragile new level-1 character, you can just park them in the back row and let them earn XP by watching the big guys slaughter ghosts for a while.

A TPK of my second party has left me in a poor position. Oh, it’s a better position than starting over from scratch — I meant everything I said last time about saving up the snazzy gear, and I still have a few back-up characters waiting in the wings. The highest-level one remaining is a priest, which is probably the best class to jump-start a new party, what with all those healing and protection spells. Nonetheless, the plan was to pull out a new game every two weeks, and since it’s pretty much time for that, I’ll take this as an opportunity to bow out for a while.

It’s funny. After mastering dungeon levels 2 and 3 so handily, I really thought I was going to finish the game before my self-imposed deadline. But that sort of attitude just encourages recklessness, and this is a game that rewards patience — the reward being those “I can’t believe I actually pulled that off” moments, rendered meaningful by the very real possibility of failure with major consequences. With that and the major role of randomization, the game plays more like gambling than most CRPGs do, albeit gambling where the odds are really tilted in your favor, however it seems sometimes.

I do want to get back to it, and will probably take it up as this year’s game-to-play-between-other-games. As I mentioned before, I’m finding it’s a good thing to play on the bus with a laptop: it occupies the attention, but doesn’t absorb it so much that you miss your stop. Dealing with maps on the bus is awkward, but that just means mapping is best done at home and the bus is better for grinding. After you’ve spent some time grinding on a level, you don’t even really need to consult a map very often; you just develop an orbit that takes in a few guaranteed monster encounters and returns to the exit.

Maps are still necessary if you trigger a teleport trap, mind you. Traps are the single deadliest things in the game — my latest TPK was the result of triggering a teleport trap and winding up in a place that I was in no position to get through, and in the near-TPK I described last post, the reason my party was mostly poisoned was a gas cloud trap. Traps are also completely avoidable: they’re only found on treasure chests, and opening treasure chests is optional. But pass them up and you’ll never get the buff gear that makes it so easy to train up your replacements. I’ll admit that it’s kind of a circular argument, but there it is.

Next up: Another old RPG from an anthology package! I have a lot of those. If I stick to schedule, it’ll be mid-March before I play anything else.

I’m recovering from another TPK. It was a pretty anticlimactic one, too. I had just gone through a heroic effort to bring my party back unharmed from a one-way trip into a lengthy sequence of unexplored tunnels — basically, the previously-unexplorable reaches of dungeon level 2. The monsters back there don’t pose a serious threat to me any more, except perhaps through slow attrition after I run out of spells, but there was one complication: most of my party was poisoned, and losing health just from walking around. Not only that, but there was a point where the only way forward required a password. After guessing wrong twice, I really thought I that was it, but, in classic storytelling form, I solved the riddle on my third try. And I made it out without loss of life. It was the sort of adventure that leaves you elated for having beaten the odds. And then, on my next try, I blundered into a previously-unseen boss lair, was surprised, and bam. I couldn’t even run away.

Fortunately, I had another party waiting in the wings: the reclaimed remains of my last TPK. They’re not quite as advanced as the ones newly-lost, but they’re pretty close. The only real drag on my progress right now is the need to train up a new mage, as I seem to be fresh out of mages. In fact, I should probably train two. Two in the hand is worth one lying inert on the dungeon floor, right? After all, I’d be in really bad shape if the party I’m currently using got wiped out too.

But not as bad as you’d think. Spending a long time in a particular area of the dungeon means picking up a lot of redundant magic items. Even if I had to start over with level 1 characters, I think I could get through the opening stages of the game again pretty quickly if the entire front row started with +1 plate mail. Which means I have to make sure to actually give the spare gear to someone not currently adventuring. This is certainly doable, but it goes somewhat against instinct, and involves fiddling around with menus instead of just selling your loot and going straight back into the dungeon.

Still, one thing is clear: I’m going to need a much more powerful party to do the rescue this time. My best characters are going to rot in a heap until they aren’t nearly my best characters any more.