The Stack

One thing about Wizardry III I haven’t mentioned yet: the orientalism. It’s not a very big part of the game, really — it’s skin-deep in a game that barely even has a skin. But the first level — remember that castle? The inhabitants of the castle have the unidentified name “Corsair”, and their portrait shows a man in a keffiyeh holding a scimitar. When identified, they turn out to be “Garians” of various sorts — Garian Raiders, Garian Guards, Garian Mages, and so forth — but their boss in the back of the castle is identified as “High Corsair”. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this. Were they intended to be Arabs? The art is really the only thing to suggest it, and since I’m playing the PC version, it’s not even the original art. (Wizardry‘s native platform is the Apple II.) The word “Corsair” was certainly used historically for the Muslim pirates of the Barbary coast, but also for pirates in general. And “Garian” sounds like they’re named after someone named Gary.

(Incidentally, the same scimitar-guy image is used for vultures, which seems like it must be a mistake. I was willing to contemplate the possibility that the word “vulture” was a nickname or metaphor, but apparently their unidentified name is “Large Bird”.)

Anyway, you pretty much leave these questionably-Eastern individuals behind when you leave level 1 behind and the niche of basic-humanoids-that-are-occasionally-spellcasters gets taken over by goblins. But I was reminded of it when I started encountering particularly pernicious dragons called “T’ien Lung” and started wonder just how far east of Llylgamyn this mountain is. (I assume just on the basis of orthography that Llylgamyn is in Wales.) But then, as I’ve noted before, the fauna is all over the place, what with the anacondas and Bengal tigers and whatnot. Before the T’ien Lung started showing up, the dragons I kept having trouble with were Komodo dragons. Like real Komodos, their bite is infectious; unlike real Komodos, they also breathe fire.

The Garians seem a little different, though, because they’re not just random encounters. They have a headquarters, and guard posts at fixed locations. Anything else could be just visiting, but the Garians live here.

I’ve seen every last tile of level 4 now, even the secret bits. This also goes for the parts of level 2 that are only accessible from level 4. That done, I spent a while just grinding for XP and item drops, because level 4 has a very good place to do this, where you can basically summon random encounters at will by deliberately stepping on traps. It’s like the Murphy’s Ghost area that way, but more varied and dangerous.

In fact, I’m not entirely sure I made an overall profit on it, XP-wise, due to the occasional encounter with level-draining undead. Most monsters become less of a peril as you gain experience levels: a monster that can hit you for 8 points of damage will kill a level-1 character outright, but be far less of a concern to a level-10 character with 50 or more total health. But level-draining monsters like Banshees are the opposite. The higher-level the character, the more XP the banshees take away when they manage to hit you. Presumably there’s a break-even point where you gain levels exactly as fast as you lose them, but exactly where that point lies depends on your defenses and your party’s initiative. The best way to deal with Banshees is to kill them all before they get any attacks in, throwing all your highest-level group damage spells at them just to be sure — yes, the game successfully makes me terrified of undead, as is appropriate.

But any encounter has a chance of giving the monsters a surprise round — if you’re really unlucky and ill-prepared, they can kill your entire party before you have a chance to react. Good armor helps here — and that’s what all this grinding is really good for. Every once in a while, I find enchanted armor or a magical pendant or something, usually improving someone’s AC by but a single point, but every single point has a perceivable effect.

At any rate, I’ve braved level 5 by now, albeit just barely. I haven’t yet encountered anything there that wasn’t on level 4 — it’s not clear to me if there’s really a steady increase in difficulty from level 1 onward or if it compensates for the way it’s set up to send good and evil characters into different parallel tracks by making 2 equivalent to 3 and 4 to 5. But I’m not taking any chances.

I’ve been spending quite some time on the 4th floor. It’s been slow going, but this is not a bad thing — indeed, I’ve reached a state where I’m enjoying the game completely without reservation! It’s hit a sweet spot of slow but steady incremental progress, where each venture into the dungeon adds just a little bit more to the map before I’m forced to retreat, and random equipment drops yield something new and better just often enough to be encouraging, but not so often that it stops feeling special.

But for a while, it was going slow because I didn’t have a quick way to get to level 4, and had to take the long route all the way through the moated fortress on level 1 and then from one corner to the other of level 2’s winding maze. There’s a stair joining levels 1 and 4, right next to a stair joining levels 1 and 5, but they’re across a lake from the entrance. The means of crossing the lake is an item called “Ship in a Bottle” — a lovely bit of whimsy, and also a little bit of a puzzle, as the item name is all you get, and exactly how it gets you across the lake is left to the imagination. This kind of guessing-on-the-basis-of-scant-clues puzzle is really coming to the fore, and I remember it being a big factor in Wizardry IV as well. Anyway, the Ship in a Bottle is a very common drop on level 4, but I wasn’t finding it at first, because I wasn’t opening chests. When I was new to the area and scared of the monsters in it, I left the thieves out of the party to make room for a second cleric, and without a thief, you really want to leave chests alone.

But even when I couldn’t use those stairs as a quick entrance, I could use them as a quick exit. This has to do with what I’ve been calling “alignment-locked”. Levels 2 through 5 are alignment-locked: a party with any evil characters can’t enter levels 2 or 4, and a party with any good characters can’t enter levels 3 or 5. I think the content of the levels is tailored to their alignment a bit, too. Level 3, an evil level, has evil architecture: the bulk of the level looks like a massive open space, but is really made of one-way walls, invisible and passable from one side, visible and impassible from the other. Also, it has the most evil trap I’ve seen: an open passage into a space that, once entered, turns out to be solid rock. Teleporting into rock is one of the few ways to instantly lose an entire party with no possibility of resurrection, and here it’s possible to do it without even teleporting. To be fair, it’s preceded by a series of signposts warning you away, but if I paid any attention to warning signs, I never would have finished Wizardry I. Anyway, levels 2 and 4, the good-aligned ones, have plenty of tricks and traps of their own, but they play relatively fair about it.

So, what happens if you try to enter an alignment-locked level with the wrong party? You get teleported back to town, that’s what. And that’s why a stair to level 4 and a stair to level 5 next to each other work as a quick exit, even if you can’t cross the lake to the stairs out.

Now, level 4 also has a stair up to what I believe to be level 6. And it displays the same behavior: attempting to go up it sends you back to town with the familiar “You’re not welcome here” message. And that made me wonder, because it seemed like it was expecting an evil party, but an evil party couldn’t get into level 4. A puzzle! There were two obvious approaches, but neither seemed very practical. First, you could stay on level 4 until you had fought enough friendly encounters to turn your good party evil. But this would require surviving on level 4 for a very long time. Second, you could create an entire neutral party, which should in theory be allowed everywhere. The problem with this is that an all-neutral party couldn’t have any healers — priests are allowed to be either good or evil, but they have to be one or the other. Perhaps a mixed party would be allowed through? I made a note to try experiments once I finished mapping out levels 4 and 5.

But in fact I found a solution without meaning to. I had a weary and injured party, looking for the quickest way out, and it looked like getting teleported back to town by those stairs up would be it. To my horror, however, they simply went up the stairs. I immediately realized it had to be due to the Crystal of Evil in my inventory, picked up after a tough battle with a wizard named Delf, whose minions turn people to stone (a status I can’t cure yet, but I can easily afford the fee to have it done in town). I closed my laptop still in the dungeon, wondering what to do, and after some time, it came to me: Go back down the stairs, drop the crystal, and go back up again, both getting back home intact and confirming my guess. The game doesn’t really keep state for stuff in the dungeon; all state-tracking is done through character inventory. So what if I don’t have the plot-important crystal any more? I could just fight Delf for it again — something I kind of wanted to do anyway, because he gives massive XP.

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!

I keep calling the Wizardry “seminal” and “influential”, and it’s plain to see that loads of other early CRPGs like The Bard’s Tale and Might and Magic are shamelessly imitating it, but what exactly do more modern games owe it? It’s an interesting question. We can set aside the things it inherits from D&D. We can probably even discount the first-person view, which was invented independently in Ultima and its predecessor, Akalabeth, albeit with a simpler model that doesn’t allow for things like one-way walls.

Most of the things that are obvious Wizardry innovations are obvious precisely because they’re not widely-imitated any more, but we can pinpoint a few things that still get used occasionally. The whole business of an extended character roster that only comes together to form parties on a per-session basis has fallen out of favor for most CRPGs, but still forms the basis of Pokémon — not to mention Darkest Dungeon, which uses the construction to great effect by forcing you to give individual characters downtime between missions. (In a way, Wizardry does that too; it just calls the needs-downtime status “Dead”.) Also, the abstraction of positioning into a mere pair of rows, a front row for melee fighters and a back row for casters or anyone you’re trying to protect, was adopted by every Final Fantasy game up to IX.

But I think we can see more influence in the mechanics we now take for granted. Like spell slots — the idea that casters can cast a limited number of spells of each spell level, but the spells themselves are chosen on the fly. Remember that in D&D at the time, all spells were chosen in advance. Slots were clearly a simplification meant to reduce the amount of state associated with each character: instead of a list of as many as 63 prepared spells, a maxed-out caster just has a list of seven numbers from 1 to 9. So it’s a little ironic that this innovation was later embraced by tabletop D&D while CRPGs tended to opt instead for a mana system, where you have just one pool of magic power that different spells use in different mounts.

Similarly, as far as I’ve been able to tell, Wizardry may well be the first RPG, computer or tabletop, to use a “point buy” system for assigning character stats, rather than simply randomizing them. The fact that it chooses to add in an element of randomization anyway, by randomizing the number of points you have to assign, certainly makes it seem like the whole idea was novel and not yet fully trusted.

I recall that 4th edition D&D was criticized in its day for swiping ideas from World of Warcraft. But really, this sort of swiping has been going on for a long time.

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.

I’m probably being too cautious, if such a thing is possible. I’ve got a full roster of 20 characters with experience levels ranging from 3 to 7, and I’m making a point of swapping out the higher-level ones and always having a low-level guy in the back row who I’m training up. If I keep it up, I’ll never be in the demoralizing state of “My A team just got TPKed and everyone else is so far behind them!” — there is no A team, just individuals who are temporarily ahead of the pack.

As a result, I’m getting an extended tour of aspects of the low-level stuff that I kind of skipped over in Wiz1&2 with the help of Murphy’s Ghost. At level 5, your primary spellcasters start to learn third-level spells, which means your priests finally get LOMILWA. Before that, there can actually be secret doors you’re not aware of. Mages, at the same point, get MAHALITO, the first direct damage that affects an entire group, and although I seldom used it at all with my power-leveled heroes in the previous episodes, it’s as much of a game-changer here as Fireball is in D&D. How do you deal with big stacks before you get it? Mainly with KATINO, the sleep spell, followed by your front-row fighters hurrying to slaughter them by hand before they wake up. There are spells to improve your armor class and to unimprove that of your opponents, but I haven’t found them worthwhile at this level — when you don’t have a lot of spell slots, you want to use them on things that can take enemies out of battle entirely, not just give you a relative advantage.

The most absurd result of my craven tactics is an overabundance of bishops. Why bishops? Because bishops are the spellcasting class it makes the most sense to put in your party at level 1. A level 1 mage has two mage spell slots, and a level-1 priest has two priest spell slots, but a level-1 bishop has two of each type. (This was not the case in Wizardry 1, where bishops didn’t start to learn priest spells until level 4. I guess the “legacy” process really does make a difference.) So when you’re in the “send hordes of characters into the dungeon and get most of them killed” stage, it just doesn’t make sense to create spellcasters other than bishops. Before I made level 2, every party I sent down there consisted of three fighters and three bishops. But the fighters, being fighters, tended to get killed, while most of the bishops survived. And because of my policy that anyone with XP is precious and shouldn’t be cast away lightly, they’re still hanging around, slowing down the leveling-up process through sheer numbers.

I’ve mentioned a few times that Wizardry uses nonsense words for spells. When you bring up a character’s spell list, it’s displayed as just magic words, with no indication of what they do (this being instead detailed in the manual with just a few inaccuracies); when you cast a spell, you actually type the magic words in. ¹Unless it’s CALFO, the spell for detecting traps on chests, which can only be cast from a menu. You learn the words and their meanings pretty quickly, at least for the more useful spells. Once you have a sufficiently powerful priest, you begin every delve with a benediction: MAPORFIC, LOMILWA, LATUMAPIC! These three spells improve your party’s armor class, provide light, and identify every monster you encounter, and last until you leave the dungeon or they’re dispelled.

The interesting thing about these words is that they’re convincingly made up of morphemes. There are recurring stems and affixes. Your basic level-1 fire spell, HALITO, is clearly the basis for the more powerful MAHALITO and LAHALITO, and similarly KATINO, the level 1 sleep spell, gives us the group instant-death spells MAKANITO and LAKANITO, even if they do rearrange the letters a bit. DALTO, which does cold damage, only gets up to MA-. MOLITO (electrical damage) doesn’t get any prefixes at all, but the ending -LITO is suggestively similar to HALITO. Maybe, in this fictional language’s fictional history, DALTO was once spelled DALITO. Even if not, the ending -TO always seems to signify an attack of some kind.

Healing spells go DIOS, DIAL, DIALMA — is that the same MA that we just saw as a prefix? — followed by the resurrection spell, which is simply DI, then MADI, which does a full heal and cures all status conditions. Every single spell in the DI chain has an opposite, formed by prefixing it with BA: BADIOS, BADIAL, etc. Priests are generally more useful as healers than as direct damage dealers that aren’t quite as good at it as mages, but the symmetry is pleasing for its own sake. (Although it’s slightly broken by DIALKO, a spell for curing paralysis, which has no corresponding BADIALKO for inflicting it.)

There’s a level 2 priest spell MATU that improves the party’s armor class by 2 points for the duration of combat, and a level 3 spell BAMATU that improves it by 4 points. But wait, doesn’t BA mean opposite?

Strangely, the spell LATUMAPIC, mentioned above, is clearly a combination of pieces from LATUMOFIS and DUMAPIC, which respectively cure poison and reveal your current map coordinates. It’s not clear how those things relate to identifying monsters, but etymology isn’t always obvious.

Mind you, there are several magic words with no apparent relation to to any other: KALKI, CALFO, LOKTOFEIT, ZILWAN. TILTOWAIT, the mage’s most powerful direct damage spell, and KADORTO, the priest spell for resurrecting someone who was reduced to ash by a failed resurrection attempt, both seem to be the names of gods in the setting. More interesting are the ambiguous ones. Is the LOR in LORTO (a priest spell that attacks with conjured blades) the same as the LOR in MALOR (teleport)? I can stretch to see some sense in that, but it would be more certain if there were any other LOR words. Is KANDI, a spell for locating stranded characters, made of KAN + DI? If so, is that the same KAN as in LITOKAN, a fire spell for priests? Every direct damage spell in the game that isn’t an inverted healing spell ends with -TO, except for LITOKAN, which puts it in the middle.

At one point in Wizardry I, and another point in Wizardry II, there’s a room in the dungeon where a little man in a robe sends you back to town by incanting “MAPIRO MAHAMA DIROMAT”. None of these are spells we know — the closest is MAHAMAN, a top-tier mage spell that calls on the gods for a large favor at the cost of an entire experience level, and which could conceivably be the same word as MAHAMA with a different grammatical ending. But the rest is obscure; the only familiar part is the MA in MAPIRO, which could just as easily really be the MAP seen in DUMAPIC. The big problem with these Heaven’s Vault-ish deciphering attempts is that we just don’t have a lot of data to go on. There are just 50 learnable spells in the entirety of Wizardry I–IV, most of them kind of redundant. I understand that there are new spells in V onward, though. That’s something to look forward to.