What I eventually ended up doing to deal with the goblin thief and poison crawler issue was to just wait and give myself plenty of attack spells to blast them to bits. Once again, there's a bit of DNA that Shadowcaster got, waiting before advancing further. Only this was much more abstract. Taking out one, going back to a safe spot and doing something else while it runs off to the side until a spell regenerates, repeat until I'm prepped for the next one. In something like a couple hours of total time spent, I got this far.
There are, of course, multiple options to this. I got fooled into thinking I couldn't sneak past the invisible enemies by just dropping my weapons and there's a spellbook with cure poison in it there. There's a trick I'm not quite getting yet. It could be that I've hit on the safest and also most boring way to get through this. Yes, for the crawlers, I can use arrows and knives to fill out the damage, but that isn't going to help me against the goblins. Even compared to those obnoxious guys in Dungeon Master, these guys are a pain to fight.
So beyond the usual objectives, I found a plaque on the wall which told me that I needed to find the water of four fountains in order to continue. It's possible that the game is going to be cruel and force me to get water from two fountains earlier on, then two down here, but I'm hoping these are just puzzle items rather than waterskins I need to sacrifice.
The primary floor is such that each little section of the map I take feels like immense progress even if I'm barely moving. So much so that I start to get trouble when I go away from the door I've been using as a stopper, the crawlers don't go through it, so I can safely use it for kiting. At which point I find I've cleaned the area out and can now go hunting for stuff. Beyond some food, there's a scroll of cure poison, a key and a switch.
The switch opens a path to this. Neither dispel magic or remove glyph does anything, so I decide that it's best to just return later and instead focus on the key. There are a lot of doors this key could go in. A lot of doors. Fortunately I've already cleared the area out, so it's just a matter of hoping there isn't anything else around. This leads to a hallway with a button behind a barrier. The button reveals a switch which opens a hallway with a pit downward. No points for guessing what I'm supposed to do.
At the bottom is a small hallway with a teleport to exactly where I was. There are no hidden buttons or switches, just the teleport. The pathway back is blocked off. I look around the upper hallway, a loud thumping sound happens when I stop just before the pit, but happens again if I step off that area. The actual answer, which I had to look up, is that there's a hidden button which closes the pits. Definitely wasn't hard to find even after being told. This leads to a portal, a key and another scroll of cure poison. I'm actually doing pretty well now.
This key, despite how several locks all have the same design, only opens one door, a room with a niche and a water fountain. The niche contains another helmet, some bracers of agility and a waterskin. Which is not so obviously the item I need in that little area where water from four fountains needs to go. At which point I don't know what to do until I realize that one switch now seems to open another area, which allows me to go further.
This leads to a rather strange pressure plate puzzle. At first I assume it's a sequence I need to press to get out through a door, but when I do that I only reach an area with a switch. A bit further experimentation allows me to go back to the area I was just in...which has a pillar blocking the way out. So it's more than that. I mess around for a while, then look up a walkthrough. Naturally, this doesn't do it like I'm starting from a ruined playthrough, but from scratch. I reload an earlier save, which thankfully isn't too far back, and end up doing it exactly as written in the walkthrough. It still doesn't work.
So I check the guidebook to confirm what's going on. It isn't 100% accurate, sometimes they'll spawn a ceiling crawler, but it does tell me that the pressure plates down here don't have anything to do with what's going on upstairs. I check that walkthrough again and think that it means I've got to do it fast...but it actually just neglects to mention that there's an invisible pressure plate in one part of this area which then allows me to get out. Here I am thinking the game is cruel in an unwinnable sense and instead finding out the game is cruel because it's hiding things in obtuse ways! I even reloaded to try to do it fast and right.
This spawns another switch, in the same area as the last bunch. Even if they're disappearing afterwards, it's still cluttered. This opens up another area with more crawlers and...oh, it's dark. I got slaughtered the first time because the light spell hasn't been helpful the entire time, and now it is. It gets worse, because the spell only works within the dark and for some reason it's only three tiles here which are dark, so walk out and it deactivates. This isn't going to be annoying later when it's actually important.
Behind the darkness is another puzzle. There's a barrier, so I cast dispel magic on it. Doesn't work, neither does remove glyph. (I have no idea what's special about the second spell, but it's going to do something eventually) There are buttons on either side, neither of which do anything obvious. The pillar blocking the path out permanently moves afterwards, but I'm not sure that's related. Nothing else is fixed, so I end up looking up a walkthrough again. Oh, one of the buttons removed an anti-magic field. I didn't realize that was something you could use to defend against dispel magic. Doesn't work that way in other RPGs.
This gets me another key which opens up another fountain. There's a nice shiny new mace and a waterskin, but no more keys or anything. I go back to the area with the four doors and place the second waterskin. Nothing new pops up. I'm perplexed until I realize the mace's name is Sightgiver. Thinking this is something I can use against the invisible enemies, I go back up only to find myself once again troubled by invisible enemies. Sigh...
The answer is that another lever popped up. This is getting to be obnoxious level design, it's just a long path that loops in on itself a dozen times when it could have been just a bit more open. This leads to an area with five barriers, behind three of which are enemies. I dispel one, take the enemy behind it...only to find out when I turn around that all the barriers were dispelled at once. Nice. There's another key and a switch, allowing me to advance further. Among my loot is a +1 longsword (Is that better than my previous weapons?), potions of cure disease and at the next fountain, a +1 bow.
The next area is easy to find, because the switch is near the level entrance. A winding path for once, leading to a small fork with switch with a plaque on one side, a button activating a teleporter on the other. Telling me that when I activate the switch that I should move quickly to go inside it. This leads to an area with the final key. A wall drops down when I get close, but when I'm one tile away, it disappears. There are niches in the wall. It takes me longer than I would have liked to figure this out, but I'm used to strange solutions, put items in the niches, the final one of which will retract the wall. Finally, the fourth water skin. Also, a potion of cure poison and invincibility.
This takes me to a room I was previously in, which now has two blue gems in a niche. The Eyes of True Sight. Aha, this must allow me to advance against the invisible enemies. Only, I can't equip them. So what can I do? It must solve a puzzle, that strange door on that floor! That works, and I then can go into a room in which I have to find the true path. AKA, guess or risk damage or teleportation. Oh, well.
Now I have the Mask of True Sight and the spellbook Cult of Magic. Which is for my wizardess. Reminder, I'm still waiting on a second for my druid, and she gets two additional spellbooks. The spellbook has, Haste, "Battle at a quicker pace", which I guess means decreased recovery time, Mind Strike, damage, Death, a lot of damage, but not until we're level 8, and dispel illusion, destroys false scrolls. Which I'm not using. Well, let's go take out some of those previously invisible enemies!
Oh...they're still invisible. Why? Because my wizardess, who I gave the mask to by happenstance but it turns out she's the only one who can use it, is supposed to be the leader right now. Why that's the only way it works, I don't know, but at least she isn't about to get slaughtered by an enemy because of it.
I liked them better when they were invisible. These guys are annoying, it's hard to hit them and it's hard for them to hit me. When they do though, they hits like a truck. Still, they're less troublesome to fight than the thieves and crawlers simply because they don't cause any nasty status effects. They also run away if they get too injured, which I foresee causing some trouble.
This is where I'm going to stop for now. This is going slowly, which I admit is annoying. This session in particular felt like one constant stream of being stopped by something I wasn't expecting. I just don't understand dungeon crawling as much as I'd like, so I assume I'm just not as good at this as I should be. Either this week or next week, I'll interrupt this for a look at
Spear of Destiny, but otherwise we're probably going to ever so slowly see this one until the end.
This Session: 3 hours
Total Time: 6 hours 20 minutes
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