Deathlord: The Black Isles

Last post I visited Tsumani, a mostly pointless continent with one tidbit of interest--directions to the Black Isles, the home of the "Red Shogun." That's where I headed next.

This counts for one of Deathlord's 16 "continents" but as you can see it has pretty much nothing on it but the Red Shogun's palace, so I went there.

Whether you enter the Shogun's palace from the south or the east, you have to follow a road through a dense forest to get to the entrance, where a sign warns "Citadel of the Red Shogun, Intruders Beware." The place is a bit foreboding, with Smoke Demons acting as guards and various types of evil creatures wandering around. Still, nothing in the publicly-accessible areas is hostile. The Shogun himself wasn't particularly hospitable.

The Shogun is flanked by Golems, which are pretty tough in a fight.

Prior to doing my usual "break into every locked room" routine I do in towns, I talked to the townsfolk--nobody had anything of particular interest to say except for a Kichigai that told me to talk to Malakorr, a wizard that lives in the forest outside of the citadel. While searching for his house, I came upon a Shizen that gave me a good hint:

Asking further, the Shizen said I would need to sail around the citadel to get there.

Good information, as looking at the map of the area there doesn't appear to be any dungeon at all on these islands.  A little bit beyond the Shizen I found Malakorr's house proper--it was locked, but after breaking down his door, he gave me a critical hint after I paid him.

Now this is the sort of hint I was looking for.

It would appear as if the Ruby Ring, the last of the six items needed to complete the game, was here in the Shogun's palace. Malakorr also said that the ring provides protection to fire--it has the same effect as HITATE when used, and has unlimited charges.

The first place I looked for the ring was the Shogun's private chambers in the east wing of the palace. His chambers were guarded by a party of hostile Golems. Golems in Deathlord are very nasty--they have a decent number of HP, hit harder than virtually any non-boss monster in the game (often 60+ HP damage per strike), and their attacks have a chance to instantly kill a character when they hit. With enough defensive spells I beat them with minimal losses though.

The Shogun's chambers themselves didn't have much of interest in them, but I found a secret room there which led to a cellar. That cellar was a trap. It did have a lot of treasure in it, but as soon as I cast a light spell, I immediately fell into a pit and was attacked by four groups of Golems.

At lower levels these fights mean certain death.

Figuring this was all I'd have to deal with, I let my casters loose with the best spells they had--four mass-damage spells per round made short work of them, though my MP was on the low side by the time I was done. Exploring the treasure chamber, I discovered I was a bit too hasty as even more Golems attacked:

This could be more difficult than I had expected..

Though my MP was depleted, I fared better than I expected--the Golems had a harder time than I would have thought hitting me. They also didn't successfully kill any characters despite hitting them a lot--I suspected as much earlier, but I'm almost sure now that with increased party levels, certain monsters have a lower chance of their instant-kill attacks working. Other ailments, not so much, though--paralysis and poison seem to be just as easy to get hit with regardless of level.

After taking care of the Golems, I looted the entirety of the Shogun's vault, which, despite the number of chests, was not that rich. No Ruby Ring, though, so I returned to the upper level to explore the south wing of the palace. The first place I ended up was the Shogun's prison, where I was attacked by the Smoke Demon guards. The only hint I got out of the prisoners was from a Mahotsukai, who mentioned that another prisoner mysteriously escaped. So I searched the walls of the cells for secret doors, and found one:

This might come in handy later...

The passageway just led out of the palace, though, and had no secret doors along it as far as I could tell, so I returned to the main hallway. At the end of that hallway, I found an immobile, non-hostile Golem blocking a magic wall.

Death alone will get him out of the way.

There's no secret door to let you past the Golem, so you seemingly only have one choice--attack and kill him, turning all the palace guards on you at once. There is an alternative though--to cast UGOKU and hope to randomly teleport past him. Unlike trying to teleport inside the magic walls that block the Emerald Rod, the room beyond the Golem is sizable so it's not totally out of the question to teleport in there. I, however, had no such luck, and so did things the hard way and killed the Golem.

Using the Blue Crystal to get past the magic wall, I was in a seemingly empty room--but the Mahotsukai that was in the room with me told me to search the walls, so I did, and found a secret door. Beyond the secret door was a single chest containing the Ruby Ring.

In addition to its HITATE effect, the Ruby Ring has a -2 AC bonus--good for a front-liner.

I now had all six of the special items needed to complete the game. I still needed three more Words, though, and in the immediate future I needed to escape the citadel, whose Smoke Demon and Golem guards were now out for my blood. (and would remain that way should I ever return) Rather than fight may way out, I slipped out the back through the secret passage in the jail--I had to fight one hostile Smoke Demon group but that was it.

Now, I could have just left the Black Isles, but there were those hints about a dungeon behind the Shogun's castle, and I wanted to investigate. (The sign on that empty island southeast of the citadel's island also hints at it.) However, if you look at the map of the island, you can see that there's nothing behind the Shogun's castle at all--just a single tile of woods. There doesn't appear to be anything there--you can't search in Outdoors areas and there's nothing special visible. However, you can directly Enter the mountain tile north of the Shogun's castle, and there's a dungeon there.

Doesn't look like an entrance, but it is.

This is an 8-but-not-really-8 level dungeon known as the "Hidden" dungeon in the hint book but I call it the "Doors" dungeon. I hate the Doors dungeon. There's only one dungeon in the game I think is worse, but this one vies for the distinction. Its design is terrible and it serves only to aggravate the player. A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's the map of the first level.

Yes, it really is as bad as it looks. Greyed-out doors are "false" doors, and purple doors are "real" doors. (By the way, if you're wondering why I colored the doors purple in these maps when they're white in-game, it's because in the Apple version they're purple, and I think they look nicer that way)

Immediately at the entrance there's a sign.

Great, there's a word here--I have to finish this horrible place.

Before I dive headfirst into an explanation of the pain, I should probably explain my maps to this confusing place in advance. Colored arrows are hard to make out on these maps, so I'm marking teleports themselves in blue, and their destinations in red. Capital case letters teleport to the corresponding lower case letter. If there's a number in front of a capital letter, it says what level it teleports to, e.g. "5A" teleports to "a" on level 5. I'll be doing this for a few other dungeons with really complicated teleport schemes.

Even if you have a high-level Yakuza and a lockpick for each character, you're probably not going to get through this dungeon without smashing down a lot of doors, because your picks are going to break eventually. You can't go back to the surface to buy more, either, because all of the doors you've opened will lock themselves when you return. You have to do this in one trip. Oddly I seem to remember that the Apple version saved the state of the doors when you left and returned, so this may be one bit of obnoxiousness particular to the Commodore version or the images I'm currently using.

Even without a lockpick, you can figure out which doors are real

The key to this dungeon is to use the trick I alluded to in a previous post--whether or not you have a lockpick, attempt to pick a door open before you smash it down. If it says "No Lockpick!" you know you've got a door that you can (theoretically) smash down. If it says "Nothing there!" instead, it's a false door, and smashing into it will get you nowhere.

I didn't remember the exact layout to this dungeon, only vaguely remembering that I needed to move to the southeast corner, and that's actually enough to mostly find your way. The only obstacle other than the doors was the occasional group of Evil Spirits, but aside from a few lucky shots that paralyzed someone, they were pushovers. Eventually I made it to the teleport in the southeast that took me to floor 2.

Great, more of the same. This dungeon is designed in such a way that the "teleport" actually makes it seem like the first two levels are just combined into one big level. However I couldn't make a map of the two joined together because the west end of Level 2 would end up overlapping the east end of Level 1. That's probably a design oversight, but I'm sure it frustrated mappers without tools like Grid Cartographer back in the day.

Level 2 was more roundabout than level 1, but it--and the rest of this area of the dungeon for that matter--wasn't really hard per se, just very, very tedious. Shuten did a decent enough job of smashing down doors and with the occasional ALNASU spell and resting to heal him it wasn't particularly taxing to proceed, just very slow going. After a seeming eternity of smashing down doors I found an area with 9 already-open doors in a square.

This looks different...

The central door in that square teleported the party down to level 5. You might ask what happened to level 3 and 4--strangely enough, in this dungeon they apparently don't exist. You can teleport there with a spell that I didn't have yet, but the both levels appear to be blanketed in fake doors with no "real" ones. I'm guessing the developers might have initially intended the door maze to take up four levels instead of two. If that's the case, I'm glad they didn't, because two door maze levels is bad enough.

The above map is not, in fact, level 5--it's levels 5 through 8 stitched together into one massive hallway. The hallway is, for all intents and purposes, an endless hallway going northwest as the extreme northwest end of level 5 teleports you back to the extreme southeast end of the same level. Levels 5-8 are connected by teleports that make it appear you're in one contiguous hall--starting at the northwest on level 5, then going to level 8, level 7, and lastly level 6. The extreme southeast end of level 6 has a teleport that puts you back at the beginning of the dungeon. There's also another "infinite corridor" in the middle; once you pass that spot, you can't return to the "top" half of the wall.

The stitched-together map above isn't entirely accurate. While it "appears" to be one single hallway, it's actually four separate hallways, each with its own northwest and southeast corner. You can, theoretically, get to those corners with judicious use of teleportation spells, but there's nothing in any of them.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're going to need to be searching for secrets in the walls of this hallway so that's immediately what I started doing. First I found an area with magic pools--Shigeko drank them and gained a point of Constitution--enough that she should be getting an extra HP per level. The next area was a series of very rich treasure chambers with pots in it, which topped out most of my characters' gold levels.

This is an astounding amount of gold for a pot.

In one of the treasure chambers I found an illusory wall that led to a nasty trick.

That's the Word in this dungeon...but you can't get to it this way.

The portcullis in the above image is fake. You can smash into it as much as you want but it will never open. It looks like this is the way to the Word, but it's not. It also looks like an area you might be able to teleport into via UGOKU if you're lucky...but that won't work either. This is an unusual area, because the tile my party is standing on is on the extreme west edge of Level 8, and I'm looking through the portcullis to a location on Level 7.

In my post where I visited the Troll Hole I mentioned that dungeons in Deathlord consist of a 64 x 64 tile area divided into four 32 x 32 quadrants. The quadrants are (usually) divided by walls to keep you from just walking off the edge of one floor and into another. This is one of those rare occurrences where you can directly see from one floor into the next. And that's why you can't teleport in with UGOKU--because it's technically on another level.

Heading back to the main corridor, I searched for more secrets while getting assaulted from all sides by monsters--mostly Dark Toshi, but also some new enemies like Couatls, Sphinxes, and Djinnis--none of them particularly tough. I also ran into Ghosts, a nasty undead creature that drains levels. The worst thing I ran into, though, was in a coffin within a "treasure room" I found.

Not good.

Undead Ronin are one of the toughest non-boss monsters in the game. They do lots of damage but more importantly, insta-kill party members with more regularity than just about any other monster. The only undead that could theoretically outclass them are Liches, who have powerful death spells--but Liches appear alone whereas Undead Ronin sometimes show up in groups. I managed to kill this one off before it took anyone out, but I ignored the rest of the coffins in case more showed up.

After leaving the coffin area, I found one more treasure chamber with chests and some mimics, but there wasn't as much treasure there as in the pot room. I did find a Golden Crown from a fight on the way out, a very nice piece of armor I gave to Gio. Despite being a caster, Gio now had a better AC than anyone else in the party at -9. (It still didn't keep her from getting hit a lot)

I couldn't find anything else, though, and reached the end of the corridor. Thinking to search it from the beginning, I teleported back to the start of the dungeon and worked my way down again--and that was much, much harder than the first time through. With the doors in the upper floors opened, I didn't have to navigate the maze, but the spawn rate of Evil Spirits went through the roof and they paralyzed my party with frustrating regularity. Finally I made it back down and, remembering to cast ICHIHAN this time to determine my level, searched Level 7 with a fine-toothed comb.

Success!

In one of the mimic chambers I found a few secret doors, which led me to the other side of that portcullis I had found earlier, and the dungeon's Word.

"Degeneracy" in Japanese.

Only two more Words to go. I had forgotten to cast KAERU to get out, unfortunately, so had to get out the old-fashioned way. Fortunately the end of the corridor was near so I was able to teleport back to the first level and get out of this horrible dungeon quickly.

Oddly enough the Doors dungeon didn't seem as bad as I remembered. It's still an awful, awful dungeon, but I remember getting hopelessly lost in the corridors after the doors area, and that particular section of the dungeon wasn't that bad to navigate once you realize secret doors and illusion walls are what you need to find. Still, the Doors dungeon is a perfect example of how terrible and sadistic Deathlord dungeons can be.

By the time I was out of the dungeon, I had gained enough levels to finally get the last remaining spells in the game. They were:

Shigeko:
SHINSEIGO: A mass-death spell that has a very high success rate. An E-J'd attempt at "Holy Word." More like "Holy Language" though.
MOINOCHI: A powered-up version of INOCHI--resurrects a dead character to full health with no Constitution loss.
YAWARISHI: Cures petrification. Is a portmanteau of "Yawarakai" (soft) and "ishi" (stone)

Gio:
KONRAN: Attempts to confuse all monsters--works like paralysis but has a higher chance of success. Is Japanese for "Confusion."
KOMARU: Is the equivalent of the Mahotsukai UNMEI, kills a single creature with a high chance of success. Is Japanese for "To be troublesome/cause difficulty." (I'd say "being dead" qualifies for that)
DRUINOCHI: Identical to the Shizen INOCHI. Resurrects, but with 1HP and a point of Constitution loss.

Tomoe:
TOKI: Freezes all NPCs and monsters in place for 10 turns. Is Japanese for "Time."
UNPAN: Teleports the party directly up or down 1-4 dungeon floor(s). Is Japanese for "Transport," but in the sense of "Transport an object to its destination."
TAIYOHI: Does extremely high damage to all enemies. "Taiyo"="Sun" and "Hi" = "Fire."

Frank:
HONIGERU: Another "escape from battle" spell, but works much better than NIGERU and MANIGERU.
YUREI: Causes hostile creatures to ignore the party for 10 turns. Works anywhere. Is Japanese for "Ghost."
TSUKIHI: Does extremely high damage to all enemies. "Tsuki"="Moon" and "Hi"="Fire."

These spells are huge, especially Shigeko's depetrify/resurrection spells and Tomoe's UNPAN spell. UNPAN is so incredibly important for dungeon navigation that it alone justifies having a Mahotsukai in the party. I'm doing the dungeons in Deathlord the hard way--going through them level-by-level--but most sane gamers will want to take the UNPAN shortcut to either bypass the worst of the obstacles or get out easily.

That does it for the Black Isles--next post I'll investigate some of those other hints to new locations that I talked about at the beginning of my Tsumani post.