The chart above lists my very subjective opinion about the design quality of Deathlord dungeons and their tedium level. As you can see, how well the dungeons are designed tends to scale inversely with how tedious and unfair they are. The newbie dungeon I'm about to enter is something of an outlier; it's not that tedious, but not particularly that well-designed either.
The newbie dungeon is east of Kawa in the mountains. It's a good place to gain levels, especially on the lower floors, as encounters in the overworld aren't as frequent.
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| The entrance to the dungeon can be tricky to find because of the trees blocking visibility |
Like all dungeons, the newbie dungeon is dark. It needs to be lit up with a torch or a spell. Torches have a poor light radius--the AKARI and MOAKARI spells are much better for finding your way. A 1MP cast of AKARI by Shigeko lights the way.
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| First floor of the newbie dungeon. It's mostly empty. |
The first floor of the newbie dungeon is pretty simple. You have to look out for the swamp squares (like Ultima, they're hazardous, and drain HP when you walk on them) but otherwise it's straight forward. Note the purple water in the southwest corner of the map; it's not actually purple in-game, but it's "special" water:
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| This is what happens when you drink from nasty water |
In Deathlord the "Z" key lets you drink things--mostly water, but you can drink acid or lava too if you want (not a good idea). Most water doesn't do anything but there's "potentially beneficial" water and "always harmful" water. When you see light blue water on my maps, it's the former and purple on the latter.
Needless to say, don't drink the bad water in the newbie dungeon. Especially since you have to walk through swamp to do so in the first place.
Encounters in the first level of the newbie dungeon are mostly pretty easy--skeletons mostly, with the occasional zombie. Also there are plenty of Stonebrows, big green faces that are annoying to fight because of their high (I guess low?) AC. It's really hard to hit them so you mostly have to kill them with magic.
An early fight with some skeletons nets me some unexpected treasure:
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| Gauntlets are Medium armor, which means anyone in the party but Tomoe and Frank can use them. I gave these to Yoshinaka. |
Every once in a while in the newbie dungeon you'll run across more dangerous monsters, like ghouls which can paralyze you, or harpies which can disease you. Unfortunately a harpy got a lucky blow in to disease Yoshinaka:
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| I forgot to capture an image of the harpy fight, but you can see Yoshinaka is now sick. That's a Stonebrow there, by the way. |
Certain monsters, like the aforementioned ghouls or harpies, have special melee attacks. Every time they perform a melee attack they have a 50% chance to use their special attack instead of an ordinary damaging attack. If the special attack connects, it doesn't do any direct HP damage (unless it's an instant-death attack) but will poison, paralyze, disease, etc instead. If a monster gets multiple attacks per round this percentage is rolled for each.
Disease is less crippling than paralysis--it prevents healing, unlike paralysis which immobilizes a character and kicks them to the back of the party--but it's still not something you want to deal with. Unfortunately the only thing that can cure disease, other than at a healer, is a third level Shizen spell. So I have to trudge back to the palace, get it cured for 250 gold (not a pittance) and come back before I continue.
This is probably a good time to mention that gold is very precious in Deathlord. It's one thing about the game I think they got right. In most RPGs of the time--Wizardry, Ultima, Bard's Tale, the Gold Box games, etc, gold wasn't really all that useful after the very beginning of the game. In Deathlord, gold is always useful. There's money for equipment--weapons and armor aren't a big expenditure but lockpicks and holy symbols need replacing--but also for food, ships, healing, monster bribes, and most importantly, level-ups. You can get gold from fights, but at a slow trickle--the best source is from treasure chests in dungeons. It gives you a consistent reason to risk dungeons, because you can never have enough.
Back in the newbie dungeon, it's not long before the party finds the stairs down to level 2.
Here it's easy to get stuck if you're not careful, as the stairs to the next level are behind a hidden door. There are two types of hidden doors in Deathlord; illusionary obstacles that you can just walk through, and secret doors that you actually have to actively search for (and not necessarily find on the first try). Anything can be illusionary, but secret doors are only found on "brick" tiles. The shaded tiles in the maps I post indicate either illusionary or secret doors.
Illusionary obstacles are generally easier to find than secret doors because not only do you have to search for the latter, but monsters will path through illusionary obstacles, giving them away. Monsters will not pass through secret doors until you find them first.
Combats on the second floor aren't that different from the first floor, though enemies quickly come out of the woodwork. Tougher ones, too, like Kobito and even an ogre:
In fact the spawn rate gets to the point where my party is almost overwhelmed. Miraculously nobody dies, largely because the hit rate of the monsters here is almost as bad as my party's, but all my casters run really low on MP so I decide to pitch camp right here:
This is the best spot on this floor (probably) to camp, though it's not perfect. As previously stated, monsters can and will go through illusionary walls to get at you. However monsters are exceptionally dumb in their pathfinding--they'll always take the most direct route to get to you (including diagonally, which they infuriatingly can move and attack, unlike your party) and can't find their way around obstacles. Unless they spawn to the southwest, they won't be able to find their way around the walls of the cranny I'm in. This time it pays off and I don't get attacked.
You're going to have to rest a lot in Deathlord. Fortunately you can do it anywhere, at any time. So long as your characters have food, you'll naturally regenerate your HP and MP. If you run out you'll get Starving status, but this doesn't actually hurt you, just prevents you from naturally regenerating.
Down to the third level, which gets a little more interesting:
The natural cavern the party has been exploring opens up with a passageway to something else that's more deliberately constructed--a hall with pillars and a central chamber of some sort. This floor is divided into areas, with some cave and some construction overlapping:
This clearly is where the treasure of this dungeon is stored, so the party opens the door to the central chamber and starts looting. I find one particularly nice item in a chest:
It's not a secret weapon that isn't sold in shops (it's quite uncommon to be getting those at this stage of the game) but it's one of the best heavy melee weapons you can buy. I give it to Shuten, but it's not better than the Great Bow he's using now so I'm not going to use it at the moment. There are also three coffins at the end of the hallway--they can have treasures or undead in them, but it's worth trying to check them out...
A vampire. Vampires are one of the deadliest monsters in Deathlord, with a strong double attack, level draining ability (which will outright kill my level 1 characters) and powerful magic spells, like this one that obliterated my entire full-strength party in one shot the instant they opened the coffin. And it's in the newbie dungeon.
The necromancer in Tokugawa I can forgive. You get plenty of warning before you enter his place. I can even forgive sticking a tough fight in one of the coffins--it does seem like an appropriate place for a "boss encounter" thematically within this dungeon. But an endgame-level encounter in a training-wheels dungeon? I save-stated right before opening that coffin since I knew what was going to happen but imagine playing this back in the day and having your whole party wiped out (and saved to disk) right as you're trying to get a feel for the game.
Once again, Deathlord does not fool around.
As you can see from the map, there's another treasure chamber on this level. This is easily missed, and it's only through the inference with that gap in the map that you'd think to look for it. On the other hand, searching every wall for secret doors is not a bad habit to have with this game.
This treasure chamber doesn't have any unfair encounters like the previous one, but it's still not safe:
In addition to having undead monsters in them, coffins may be straight-up empty, or have traps. Chests can have traps too. Pots are safe. At this point I remember to set my party leader to Yoshinaka since his 17 Dexterity is best for trap disarming and I don't want to have to specify him every time I want to open a chest. He'll be worse at it than an actual thief character would be, but Shuten has low Dexterity so is a poor choice for box opening.
On the way out, I meet one of the most amusing (to me) monsters in Deathlord:
"Niatama" is a very E-J name for a monster, "Ni" is Japanese for "two" and "atama" is Japanese for "head." I'm not going to go into the linguistic details of counters and kun/on-yomi in a gaming blog, but needless to say this sounds very awkward in Japanese. More relevant, though, is that a Niatama is not a monster my first level characters want to be fighting. They do a lot of damage, and while probably not enough to one-hit-kill Shuten, they definitely could do in Yoshinaka or Shigeko with a lucky shot. Rather than duke it out, I flee.
There's a strategy to fleeing in Deathlord--only do it with your last character. If you fail to flee, your party immediately loses the rest of its turn. However if you attempt it with your last character and fail, you don't really lose anything since the monsters were just about to act anyway. The rest of the party can attempt to fight, just in case fleeing doesn't work out.
Once the treasure chamber is looted, I run into a stray group of skeletons. Killing them puts Shuten over the magic 200 XP mark.
Without something like emulation and Cheat Engine, that little plus sign is the only indication that your characters are gaining any sort of experience. It shows that the character in question is ready to level up. Note what you see on Shuten's status page:
The "+1" indicates that Shuten has enough experience to gain one additional level at a trainer. As Shuten continues to accumulate experience, this value can go up to +2--but after that, he'll stop gaining experience altogether until he goes for training. So it's a good idea to train as soon as you see the plus signs appear.
There's something else I forgot to do in the central chamber. Note those two light blue water squares on the map. These are "good" (usually) water squares, and you can sometimes get beneficial effects from them.
The benefits are random; you can gain a stat, have your HP or MP refilled, or even have your character's sex changed. This time I get lucky and Gio gets a point of constitution for each of them. I was actually hoping for a little more STR or DEX for her (I want to swap her out for Shigeko in the front row) but this will do!
Speaking of these pools, it's not that uncommon to get lots of stats from them like this early on. If and when you start maxing out your natural stats it gets harder--if you've got a human with 18 in all of her stats but one, you'll have to drink from a lot of pools before you get lucky enough to roll an improvement in that remaining stat.
This isn't ordinary for dungeons in Deathlord; usually they fill out the full 32 x 32 area allotted to them (actually dungeons are a little more nuanced than that, but that's for a much later post, once I gain the teleport level spell) so such a small level is a surprise.
At this point the party is weakened and low on HP so they go straight for the surface. On the way they get ambushed from all sides, mostly by skeletons and stonebrows. By the time they reach the exit they've all been pushed over the threshold to reach level 2. Somehow I've gotten out of the dungeon without a single death, and with nearly 5000 in gold. So it's back to Tokugawa to train my party and equip the party a little better than they were before.
Dutifully save scumming my level-ups, my party now has double the HP, except for Gio who has a little more since that extra CON she got in the vampire's crypt lets her get an extra HP per level now. Level-ups in Deathlord are nicer than a lot of RPGs at the time--the difference in power is palpable. Not only HP-wise, but with the rate you start hitting stuff.
However even level 2 isn't really adequate to tackle anything new yet, so it's back to the newbie dungeon to grind up another level for the party. It comes surprisingly quickly, at only another 200 XP per character. I'll enjoy this while it lasts--later on it will take a lot more effort to gain levels.
On the way out, a chance encounter with an Ogre nets me an exceptionally nice find:
Remember how I said earlier that it was extremely rare to find a secret weapon that's not sold in shops? The Giantslayer is one of those, and a really great Light weapon. Had I brought a thief along with me this would tie for the best weapon they could equip. It does 2-13 damage, gives you an AC bonus of -1, and has a special attack flag that I believe gives it bonus damage to giant-class enemies. It goes to Shuten as he needs the AC bonus more than anyone. I'm not going to swap out his Great Bow just yet--that does 2-9 damage and strikes twice in a round. But if I see any giant-class enemies approaching I'll probably test the Giantslayer out.
Back in Tokugawa, the party levels up again--this time training costs more than double what it did last time. It's still not really enough to take on Kawahara's dungeon under the palace yet, but we do have some new spells for our casters:
Shigeko (Shisai):
MOTU: Paralyzes 1-3 monsters. Doesn't seem permanent like when you get paralyzed though. Derives from the Japanese word "Motsu" which means "hold," (though in the sense of "be in possession of")
DOSOI: Slows poison; halves hit point loss for characters with the TOX ailment. Not really useful. Is likely a portmanteau of "doku" and "osoi", the Japanese words for "Poison" and "Slow" respectively. Still a little E-Jish as "osoi" is an adjective not a verb.
TSUIHO: Banishes undead, like a Holy Symbol. Derives from the Japanese word "Banish."
Gio: (Shizen):
KINO: Barkskin, another AC bonus spell. Not sure where this came from but "Ki" is "tree" so probably that.
DUNASU: Basically Nasu for Shizen. Dunno where the Du comes from.
MOYA: Basically the same as the first-level Genkai spell KIRI. "Moya" also means "mist" in Japanese, though a less thick one than "kiri" does.
Tomoe (Mahotsukai):
CHIKARA: Boosts party melee damage. Means "power" in Japanese.
YOWAMERU: Reduces enemy damage. Means "weaken" in Japanese.
KOWA: Makes a monster flee from battle. If an enemy flees, you still get experience for it so effectively this is an instant-kill spell. Derives from Japanese "Kowai," which means "afraid."
Frank (Genkai)
NIKKO: Provides light in dungeons. Means "sunlight."
NIJIN: An AC bonus to a single character. I think this derives from "Nijinda" which means "smudged/stained". I.E. they were looking for "blur."
MEKURA: Dazzles an enemy and pulls them out of the fight. Essentially a death spell. Means "Blindness" in Japanese.
This is a nice boost--none of these spells are amazing, and it's not until the casters learn the level 3 and 4 spells that they'll start really coming into their own, but the additional support will help.
There are a few loose ends in the other towns to take care of--next post I'll tie those up and start to take on the caverns under the palace, the first "real" quest and significant dungeon of the game.
This is probably a good time to mention that gold is very precious in Deathlord. It's one thing about the game I think they got right. In most RPGs of the time--Wizardry, Ultima, Bard's Tale, the Gold Box games, etc, gold wasn't really all that useful after the very beginning of the game. In Deathlord, gold is always useful. There's money for equipment--weapons and armor aren't a big expenditure but lockpicks and holy symbols need replacing--but also for food, ships, healing, monster bribes, and most importantly, level-ups. You can get gold from fights, but at a slow trickle--the best source is from treasure chests in dungeons. It gives you a consistent reason to risk dungeons, because you can never have enough.
Back in the newbie dungeon, it's not long before the party finds the stairs down to level 2.
Here it's easy to get stuck if you're not careful, as the stairs to the next level are behind a hidden door. There are two types of hidden doors in Deathlord; illusionary obstacles that you can just walk through, and secret doors that you actually have to actively search for (and not necessarily find on the first try). Anything can be illusionary, but secret doors are only found on "brick" tiles. The shaded tiles in the maps I post indicate either illusionary or secret doors.
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| Walking through the illusionary wall |
Combats on the second floor aren't that different from the first floor, though enemies quickly come out of the woodwork. Tougher ones, too, like Kobito and even an ogre:
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| Two enemies at once--there can be a lot more, but this early in the game it's hard to face them back-to-back |
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You're going to have to rest a lot in Deathlord. Fortunately you can do it anywhere, at any time. So long as your characters have food, you'll naturally regenerate your HP and MP. If you run out you'll get Starving status, but this doesn't actually hurt you, just prevents you from naturally regenerating.
Down to the third level, which gets a little more interesting:
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| It's not just a cave down here... |
This clearly is where the treasure of this dungeon is stored, so the party opens the door to the central chamber and starts looting. I find one particularly nice item in a chest:
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| Not a bad weapon... |
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| Haha just kidding, of course it's not worth trying to check them out. |
The necromancer in Tokugawa I can forgive. You get plenty of warning before you enter his place. I can even forgive sticking a tough fight in one of the coffins--it does seem like an appropriate place for a "boss encounter" thematically within this dungeon. But an endgame-level encounter in a training-wheels dungeon? I save-stated right before opening that coffin since I knew what was going to happen but imagine playing this back in the day and having your whole party wiped out (and saved to disk) right as you're trying to get a feel for the game.
Once again, Deathlord does not fool around.
As you can see from the map, there's another treasure chamber on this level. This is easily missed, and it's only through the inference with that gap in the map that you'd think to look for it. On the other hand, searching every wall for secret doors is not a bad habit to have with this game.
This treasure chamber doesn't have any unfair encounters like the previous one, but it's still not safe:
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| A bolt trap--as traps go, this could have been a lot worse. |
On the way out, I meet one of the most amusing (to me) monsters in Deathlord:
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| Behold the terrible |
There's a strategy to fleeing in Deathlord--only do it with your last character. If you fail to flee, your party immediately loses the rest of its turn. However if you attempt it with your last character and fail, you don't really lose anything since the monsters were just about to act anyway. The rest of the party can attempt to fight, just in case fleeing doesn't work out.
Once the treasure chamber is looted, I run into a stray group of skeletons. Killing them puts Shuten over the magic 200 XP mark.
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| Shuten has only 2 EXP now. |
The "+1" indicates that Shuten has enough experience to gain one additional level at a trainer. As Shuten continues to accumulate experience, this value can go up to +2--but after that, he'll stop gaining experience altogether until he goes for training. So it's a good idea to train as soon as you see the plus signs appear.
There's something else I forgot to do in the central chamber. Note those two light blue water squares on the map. These are "good" (usually) water squares, and you can sometimes get beneficial effects from them.
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| Most of the time you won't know what the "dizzy" sensation is until you check your stats |
The benefits are random; you can gain a stat, have your HP or MP refilled, or even have your character's sex changed. This time I get lucky and Gio gets a point of constitution for each of them. I was actually hoping for a little more STR or DEX for her (I want to swap her out for Shigeko in the front row) but this will do!
Speaking of these pools, it's not that uncommon to get lots of stats from them like this early on. If and when you start maxing out your natural stats it gets harder--if you've got a human with 18 in all of her stats but one, you'll have to drink from a lot of pools before you get lucky enough to roll an improvement in that remaining stat.
There's only one more place in this dungeon to explore--as you can see from the map, there are some illusory walls in the east end of the cavern leading down one more dungeon level. However this final dungeon level is quite underwhelming:
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| Yes, that's really it for this level. |
At this point the party is weakened and low on HP so they go straight for the surface. On the way they get ambushed from all sides, mostly by skeletons and stonebrows. By the time they reach the exit they've all been pushed over the threshold to reach level 2. Somehow I've gotten out of the dungeon without a single death, and with nearly 5000 in gold. So it's back to Tokugawa to train my party and equip the party a little better than they were before.
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| 106 GP for a level is cheap. By the end of the game it'll cost thousands of GP to go up a single level. |
However even level 2 isn't really adequate to tackle anything new yet, so it's back to the newbie dungeon to grind up another level for the party. It comes surprisingly quickly, at only another 200 XP per character. I'll enjoy this while it lasts--later on it will take a lot more effort to gain levels.
On the way out, a chance encounter with an Ogre nets me an exceptionally nice find:
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| Finding a weapon this good this early is unexpected |
Back in Tokugawa, the party levels up again--this time training costs more than double what it did last time. It's still not really enough to take on Kawahara's dungeon under the palace yet, but we do have some new spells for our casters:
Shigeko (Shisai):
MOTU: Paralyzes 1-3 monsters. Doesn't seem permanent like when you get paralyzed though. Derives from the Japanese word "Motsu" which means "hold," (though in the sense of "be in possession of")
DOSOI: Slows poison; halves hit point loss for characters with the TOX ailment. Not really useful. Is likely a portmanteau of "doku" and "osoi", the Japanese words for "Poison" and "Slow" respectively. Still a little E-Jish as "osoi" is an adjective not a verb.
TSUIHO: Banishes undead, like a Holy Symbol. Derives from the Japanese word "Banish."
Gio: (Shizen):
KINO: Barkskin, another AC bonus spell. Not sure where this came from but "Ki" is "tree" so probably that.
DUNASU: Basically Nasu for Shizen. Dunno where the Du comes from.
MOYA: Basically the same as the first-level Genkai spell KIRI. "Moya" also means "mist" in Japanese, though a less thick one than "kiri" does.
Tomoe (Mahotsukai):
CHIKARA: Boosts party melee damage. Means "power" in Japanese.
YOWAMERU: Reduces enemy damage. Means "weaken" in Japanese.
KOWA: Makes a monster flee from battle. If an enemy flees, you still get experience for it so effectively this is an instant-kill spell. Derives from Japanese "Kowai," which means "afraid."
Frank (Genkai)
NIKKO: Provides light in dungeons. Means "sunlight."
NIJIN: An AC bonus to a single character. I think this derives from "Nijinda" which means "smudged/stained". I.E. they were looking for "blur."
MEKURA: Dazzles an enemy and pulls them out of the fight. Essentially a death spell. Means "Blindness" in Japanese.
This is a nice boost--none of these spells are amazing, and it's not until the casters learn the level 3 and 4 spells that they'll start really coming into their own, but the additional support will help.
There are a few loose ends in the other towns to take care of--next post I'll tie those up and start to take on the caverns under the palace, the first "real" quest and significant dungeon of the game.
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