Black Crypt: What Genre Was I Playing Again?

So some interesting things happened with food and rest when I started this entry. After a certain amount of water, it started saying my characters were full. Which is kind of obnoxious in more simulationist RPGs, but here it's bizarre. I'm guessing it's here to force you to not just drink water alone, but it seems to remain in place for a considerable length of time.

Resting, on the other hand, is very fast to heal your wounds but not quite as fast to heal your stamina. The game gives zero sign of how long you have left and I sense that if you're in an area that isn't cleared this is an incredibly bad idea. It seems like it's going to take a very long time to restore the meter by any real margin.

Enough of me stalling, it's time to go down a floor. And we're pretty much straight next to that two-headed ogre, because once you head down the stairs there are two doors leading to a large area with pillars. It's not there right away, but I know it's there. I know it. The game even gives subtle clues that something's wrong, a death gem, leather leggings and a pack.

Death gems, as the manual explains, are basically the corpses of your dead characters that you lug around until you can resurrect them. Outside of scrolls, only the cleric can do anything with them. I have a life scroll, which can resurrect a character three times, but it's not supposed to work with the death gems you can just find. Which I confirm after trying it. Probably too difficult to code in a friendly NPC.

The pack has a scroll saying that he died to the double-headed ogre and how he wished he had the Ogreblade. Gotta love that this guy, knowing of his impending doom, just started scribbling on this scroll. I double check upstairs again, but no, I'm pretty much stuck up there, there must be something down here I can interact with. So I carefully look around.

This doesn't really work out, because once I get close enough he can apparently see me in the darkness. I can hear his thudding footsteps, so I run behind the door...which he destroys. I was kind of expecting him to open it, but no, just tear it away. Against my guys he isn't doing too much damage, but none of my attacks are doing anything, so I reload. If only the game had signposted that I need something to fight this thing.

Since the solution to this is either that I missed a switch somewhere on floor 1 or there's something behind the two-headed ogre, I continue to run around the guy on my second try. In one corner of the big open space is a switch next to a pair of chain leggings. This teleports you to an area next to the arena with two one-way walls into it and a path elsewhere.

This hidden area is a maze, complete with a few spinners. I was wrong, despite the obvious screen movement and noise, I got tripped up by them a few times. Not very nice. Unfortunately this area doesn't seem to have much of anything I can actually use. Just a switch which doesn't seem to activate anything and a chest with a few potions in it. Useful for the future, but for now I just have to find out what this switch opened.

After a bit more exploration, I find a newly opened passageway which leads to a plaque on the wall, and another wall which opens. The plaque says "patience is a virtue", which doesn't quite seem right when the wall opens right away. A couple more eyes, starting to get dangerously low on both food supplies and health, and then...another resurrection scroll and a throwing dagger. It does bring my wizardess's supply up to a full bag of spares. The very end of this section has a belt...which is a...belt. It then loops back into the maze.

I wander around some, before trying for the hidden area again, only to find out there are multiple areas hidden behind the walls that disappear. The second doesn't have much, just an eye and some food, but the third. It's here that I get my hands on some fancy new gear, +1 throwing daggers for my wizardess, and a rune which looks like the fighter's symbol. Taking a chance, I used it on my fighter and he got an addition point of strength. Then a key. I think I can find where this goes.

There's actually a teleporter nearby, which I didn't realize was supposed to be a teleporter design, which leads back to a door on the first floor. This, finally, leads to the little area where the Ogreblade is, along with the Necromancer's Guide. A spellbook for the magic user which adds a strength spell, +2 to strength, remove glyph, which removes a glyph in front of us, dispel and freeze, another attack spell. Note, none of these have anything to do with the words necro or mancy.

The fight with the ogre goes better than I expected. Which is to say that my fighter doesn't take any damage and protects the nice and fragile druid behind him. My cleric gets murdered, can't hurt him any, and soon enough the same happens to my wizardess. But the ogre goes down. Fortunately, scrolls of life have three uses of raise dead, perfect for this situation. That gives a resurrected character very low health. I decide this is a good time to start exploring, after giving back the dead characters their stuff and making them memorize their spells again...only for them to quickly die again.

I reload my save and realize, hey, this is a Dungeon Master clone, why am I not doing a combat waltz? This time around I get in a dozen shots without him ever landing one, and this time my guys once again get another level. Man, by the time I get some of these spellbooks, I'm going to be able to use all the spells. The ogre drops another key, this is his sole contribution, and I'm not sure where it goes. Also, the ogreblade isn't hurting me yet, so I'll hold onto it for a while. 

The moment after I wrote that, I find the door. Which I could swear I didn't see before, but it was under threat of a dangerous foe. There's also another area with a door, which I'm guessing was destroyed. There's only a teleport scroll there. The locked door has an eye which deals a surprising amount of damage, but otherwise isn't special. Really hoping there's going to be another regular enemy at some point. Plenty of stuff, better armor, magic bracers, magic crown, and oh, a rune wall. I click on it randomly.

Oh, shoot, was one of those things cursed? Wait...is this copy protection? It's one of the spells. It is, and it's blocking the path down. I still take the opportunity to fill my party's rest meter, which surprisingly doesn't remove full status. I forgot that I just found another spellbook, Prayers of Orlin.

There are two spells I can't use yet, healing 2, self-explanatory, and God's Fury, high level damage spell. The two I can use is Chant of Orlin, a scaling attack spell, 2-8 +2 per level past 3, not sure if that's going to be the most useful spell, and create food. Which creates food. I'm a perpetual motion machine now, baby!

Floor 3, at least what I can access, has a lot of information and a lot of doors I can't enter. One needs a key, another is a strange gold design, but two others are just closed without a switch. There are lots of notes warning me about the unseen, which based on a slight flicker of the sprite when they attack, are giant centipedes. One note says they only attack if you have weapons, another says to come back with a mask of true sight, and either way, I see no point in aggravating them. Floor 4 is right there. Oh, and there's a ring of location that I gave my cleric. 

Floor 4 starts with a noise and as I approach the passage, I try to get a sideways view. Then this thing steals my druid's bow. I'm glad it wasn't an important weapon. I go through my currently prepared attack spells and it goes down after most of them. No damage, but that could be because my fighter is now an iron wall of defense. By the time something can hurt him, everyone is screwed.

Around the corner is what appears to be another teleporter and a niche with more stuff. A Hopeblade, which I give to my fighter. The Ogreblade hasn't drained his health, but better safe than sorry. The worrying part is the continued noise and a potion of cure poison. There's another enemy, this one hangs out on ceilings but doesn't seem too tough. Another one of those neat little hangers that Raven loves so much.

There's another scroll here. This tells me that in the nest of thieves, the skull glyph is an illusion. Okay, I feel like this is a bit early to tell me that when I have no idea what I'm supposed to be worried about. And then I realize what the problem is in both respects. The hanging enemies poison you, but worse, as if there's something worse than poison with only one cure, is that the nasty-looking goblins can leave before you kill them. My massive assault on the first one was sheer luck, if it goes away that's just it, that weapon's gone until I find out where they leave them. Those hangers ain't going to be kind to me.

Now, there is an option I can do, two actually, fakeout weapons and just not having one out, but I'd prefer to try the overwhelming force technique again. And, you know what? That's not working out for me. I either got very lucky with the first one, or there's some heavy randomization with enemy stats. I think I'll need to just wait out a full selection of attack spells and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, the hangers are poisonous. I got in another fight with one, I won, but if they poison you, it's over. Poison doesn't wear off on its own, you need to cure it. There's only one cure so far, and that's not even enough for one fight. I repeat, that's not even enough for one fight. One of my two guys needs to completely avoid getting hit, which as much as I liked it, still applies to my fighter, he just isn't going to die in a fight unless he gets really worn out or gets poisoned.

Since I'm done here either way, I look up in the guide when I'm going to get the spellbook with a cure poison spell. I couldn't find it, but I saw the maps of this floor. It's very complex and I'm not looking forward to it. I had to look up one on Lemon Amiga, which says it's floor 10. This last part was clearly the training wheel section, because the difficulty has jumped up. I may have to go back up if water is truly its own thing and not tied into food.

My completed map of floor 2.

There are a few other things I've noticed this session. While reading the guides, I found out that the false scroll bit is applying to the text scrolls, not the spell scrolls. I actually think this is neat, that some scrolls are full of false information, that's probably what the life-stealing bit was. I like this, I'm not going to use the spell to reveal if its true or not. The other is that I don't seem to need the read rune spell to read the walls. Not sure what it's actually for.

This Session: 2 hours 20 minutes

Total Time: 3 hour 20 minutes