Deathlord: Tsumani

Last post I got two more of the Words, bringing my total up to four. At this point I didn't have a clear idea where to go next, but I had a few hints. In Shumi's tower I got a hint that could lead somewhere. In Asagata I got another hint seemingly pointing me to a new area as well. Narawn had a hint guiding me to a Word but that's one of the last dungeons I want to tackle because it's so awful.  A Kaibu in Greenbanks gave me directions to some desert islands but that's a pointless place to go. Lastly some brigands in the Clearview jail gave directions to Tsumani.  Given that Tsumani seemed relatively close, and most of the other hints didn't actually tell you what your destination is, I opted to go there.

Tsumani is an optional continent. It is entirely possible to complete the game without visiting here--there aren't any Words or Items here, nor are there any direct hints about them. It's a tricky continent to navigate because of all the mountains and forests--visibility here is not good. I landed on the east coast, and after wandering blindly through some forests came upon the concealed mountaintop town of Morningfrost.

Since visibility in the forest surrounding Morningfrost is so poor, you could go all the way around without ever noticing it.

Though I didn't mention it before, Deathlord's manual divides settlements into cities, towns, and villages. The larger a settlement is, the more amenities you'll find and generally, the better hints you'll get as well. Morningfrost is just a village, and a small one at that.

As you can see from its map, Morningfrost barely has anything of note. There's a cheap grocer, a simple weaponsmith, and a shield vendor--though notably the shield vendor deals in Large Shields, a rarity. Other than that Morningfrost is just a slew of empty huts, most of them locked. So I started smashing down doors in the hope of finding any information of interest.

Some (actually most) just had peasants or generic townspeople that said nothing of interest...

One had a bunch of hostile Yabanjin who were cut down quickly...

And one even was completely empty!

I wasted my HP smashing down the door for this?

There was one, and only one, point of interest among the peasant homes, the house of Koshi the hunter in the south. Koshi's house was guarded by a hostile pet snow bear, which I dispatched with little trouble. Koshi himself gave me a hint.

Koshi is awfually nonchalant about the fact that I just butchered his pet.

Asking about "South Star," Koshi told me that it might be in Snowraven, and asking about Snowraven, Koshi mentioned that it lies to the southwest. That was about it for Morningfrost--there was one Mahotsukai that mentioned that there was a dungeon to the west but that's about it.

So, it was on to Snowraven to see what I could find--as Koshi indicated, it was on tip of the peninsula on the southwest corner of the continent.

As a town, Snowraven is a more substantial settlement than Morningfrost. It's got a weaponsmith, an armorer, a grocer, a trainer, and a temple. The shops don't have anything of note but amusingly, while the armorer seems to have his stock unguarded and ripe for the taking, it's actually guarded by pit traps.

Ouch.

Of course the only thing I'd be finding in those chests is generic store armor which my party didn't need, so it's a waste trying to loot them.

My initial task here was finding that spot that Koshi mentioned. The first hint here was smack in the middle of the town:

How is Snowraven the "star of the south" when Tsumani is so clearly a northern, arctic continent?

31 squares north and 2 squares west of that sign was right on the edge of town, but searching there uncovered two secret doors:

Not the first place you'd search for a secret...

The Mahotsukai in there, however, was totally worthless--all he did was tell me to find the Lantern, Staff, and Ring, without any indication of where those actually were.

The rest of the town is seemingly devoid of hints--except one Shugenja that gives you a hint about how to get to another part of town:

Since I can cast UKU and walk on water I don't really need to do this, but...

Sailing around the south of town takes you to a passage that leads to the shores of the lake where the island containing the temple is. There you can find a Merman who will give you a hint.

Very nice, I have directions to a new continent.

Of course "Cross Rock" wasn't immediately obvious as to what it was so I asked about that:

I guess looking at the map it's fairly obvious...

Since this was the first time I had heard of the Red Shogun I asked about that too:

Wait, what?

Oddness of an NPC giving you directions to the castle of a person he doesn't even believe exists aside, this is good information--in fact it's the only bit of information worth noting on the entire continent.

The Red Shogun's castle sounds like a good next destination, but there's also a dungeon on this continent to cover first. This dungeon is totally nameless--it's not mentioned in the hint book at all, and the residents of Tsumani refer to them as "some caves that are easy to get lost in." I call this the "Sinkhole" or "Chutes and ladders" dungeon for reasons we'll soon see.

Before I went into this dungeon, I decided my levels might be a little on the low side for some of the upcoming areas so went back to the Fire Giant lair to gain experience--my party now had no trouble surviving in there. At this point levels started coming very slowly--the EXP per level needed raised to 1200 at level 21, and that took nearly a full hour of fighting in the lair to gain. I did get some good equipment from monsters, though--a Do-Maru +2, the best piece of armor that Shuten can equip, and a Powerstaff, the best melee weapon for a Mahotsukai. I still only went to level 22 so I was a few short of being able to cast the final level of spells, but went back to Tsumani to take on the Sinkhole dungeon anyway.

The first floor of the Sinkhole dungeon is less complicated than the rest. It's one large cavern with one notable feature--five sinkholes distributed about the dungeon. Sinkholes are the same as chutes in practice. While exploring this floor, I got caught in the sinkhole in the small room to the south, and in trying to find my way back up, quickly fell through several more sinkholes and ended up on level 4, the bottom of the dungeon.

Getting in here isn't hard. Getting out is the challenge.

The levels outside of the first are especially tricky because they're not as open. The whole dungeon is an up-and-down maze, where to get to some areas you'll need to ascend and descend a whole series of staircases and sinkholes first.

As you can see from the above map, the fourth floor is full of treasure. However, as I had been dumped in the southeast corner, there's no way I could have gotten to it either without use of teleportation spells. I didn't find the illusory walls at this point so went up to the third floor:

Almost immediately after climbing up to level 3 I fell through another sinkhole and was back on level 4. Getting out of the Sinkhole dungeon (or to the treasure) requires painstaking mapping--marking each sinkhole on the map as you climb out, so that you don't accidentally step on them and fall further. Navigating the southeastern quadrant of level 3, I found the staircase and made it up to level 2:

Now I was in the center-south, but going north I fell into another sinkhole--but this one took me to an area that didn't look much like a cave.

Maybe I'm getting somewhere?

After taking care of the ogres and trolls (most of the monsters here are giant-class) I found a treasure chamber, but one of the chests had a poison gas trap that hit the entire party. Trying to restore Shigeko's MP to the point she could cast DONASU on everyone was difficult as the encounter rate was quite high. Eventually I managed to scrounge up the MP, and after going up and down a series of staircases, found myself on the shore of a lake on Level 2.

At this point I was stuck. There were a bunch of sinkholes on the west bank of the lake but they all dropped you at spots that led back to the lake. So I took the shortcut and cast UKU to walk across the water.

The occasional Whorl aside, waterwalking is usually pretty safe. 

Unfortunately UKU only lasts for 10 turns so Frank quickly ran out of MP in the middle of the water. You can't pitch camp on water, so you just have to pass your turns to raise MP. As soon as I cast it though I made an interesting find, a hidden cove with some ships:

There's an illusory passage to this cove, I just didn't find it.

However the ships didn't take me anywhere worthwhile, and I found that I was neither close to any treasure nor could I find the exit. This is one dungeon that, while its structural design isn't awful, is one of my least favorites due to how aggravating it is. It's at around this time I started aggressively looking for illusory walls more, and I managed to find a passage that lead to the main treasure complex on level 4.

Finally I got somewhere!

Those Whorls by the door are actually just decoration. They can't attack you, and you can't attack them either. Going by them I searched the immediate area and found nothing of interest--two small empty rooms and a pit. There was also a door to nowhere:

Guess where I think I should start looking for secrets?

Clearly that had to lead to something so I searched and found an illusion wall into a dark teleport maze. As teleport mazes went it wasn't that complicated, but it was pretty clear that any exits from it had to be secret. I did in fact find a secret door, but it lead to a nearly completely-empty treasure room.

This was unexpected.

This was more than a little odd, because the maps that I made of this dungeon before doing this walkthrough clearly show the chests in this room as not being pre-looted. Despite the maps being based off of C64 tiles, I did make them primarily from the Apple version rather than the C64 version, so this may just be a case of differing versions, or that I'm using bad disk images for this.

Leaving the "empty" treasure room, I went back to the remainder of the complex and started searching for secret doors--off the main hall and the small room with fire in it I did find some real treasure chambers and looted them. Levels were getting expensive at this point, costing 15000+ to level the party up once, so the more the better.

With the treasure chambers looted, I now had to get out of the dungeon. After wandering aimlessly, and even checking my maps a few times, I ran out of patience and invoked the KAERU spell that Shigeko cast before I went into this dungeon, teleporting out immediately.

I'm not proud of it, but I gave up.

After getting out, I went back through my maps and found that there was indeed a way out, but it was up and down so many staircases and through so many illusory walls that I was only able to piece it together by scrubbing through the maps using Grid Cartographer (the mapping program I used to make the maps I'm posting here) to see where each staircase led. I probably could have made it out with a little more effort, but it wouldn't have been easy. Overall the Sinkhole dungeon was a pretty pointless dungeon--just some treasure and a lot of aggravation to get there. Like the rest of Tsumani, it's just fluff.

So that's Tsumani. Next post I'll try visiting that "mythical" Red Shogun the merman was telling me about.

Deathlord: Sirion

Last post I explored Narawn and got four of the six special plot items you need to complete Deathlord: the Crystal, the Sharktooth, the Emerald Rod, and the Sunspear. Speaking of the Sunspear, I experimented with it a bit more and ended up giving it to Shigeko. Previously I had been using it with Yoshinaka, but it just didn't have the consistent damage output that the Katana did. In the process the party got bumped up to level 19, and now I finally have level 6 spells for the whole party.

Shigeko:
ALNASU: Heals a character to max.
KURENZA: A high-damage level-scaling attack-all spell. Is an E-J'd spell for "Cleanser" (and is actually an English loanword) but amusingly enough is closest to "dishwashing soap" in Japanese.
KAERU: A "Word of Recall" spell. Cast it once, type in a word, and then use the Y)ell command to teleport back to the spot you cast. You can only have one KAERU spell active at once. "Kaeru" means "to return" in Japanese.

Gio:
HIARASHI: Powerful mass-damage spell. "Hi"="fire" and "Arashi" = "Storm."
KYOKI: Mass-death spell. Means "Insanity" in Japanese.
TSUKAKUSU: Like the "Hide" ability, only unlike it (or the Kakusu spell), it allows you to move while hidden for several turns. Would be incredibly useful if not for the fact that it only works outdoors.

Tomoe:
KOROSU: Mass death-spell. Means "To Kill" in Japanese.
UNMEI: Kills a single monster with a very high chance of sucess. Means "Destiny" in Japanese.
ARASHI: Powerful mass-damage spell. Means "Storm" in Japanese.

Frank:
UKU: Allows the party to walk on water for a few turns. Means "To float" in Japanese.
MAKAWA: A more powerful version of the KAWA spell, makes monsters flee.
KOTOBA: A powerful mass-damage spell. Means "Word" or "Language" in Japanese.

The level 6 spells are game-changers. All of them are really useful, with the exception of TSUKAKUSU. Most importantly, I now had the KAERU and UKU spells, which are amazing for getting out of dungeons quickly and bypassing obstacles respectively.  With these spells I could finally start mitigating the frustration in the more cruel dungeons.


Before I got lost and ended up on Narawn I was looking for Greenbanks and did that again. Greenbanks is on the continent of Sirion, another continent which is never actually named in the game proper. Sirion itself is one of the larger continents in the game, taking up two "chunks" of the map.

Sirion is actually less a "continent" and more "a compact archipelago." Despite its size, there are fewer points of interest on Sirion than some one-"chunk" continents. There are two towns and two dungeons, but both of those dungeons are Word dungeons, so you need to visit them both. I landed on the western half of the continent, and the first town I found was Greenbanks.

Greenbanks isn't really a town--it's a ruin, much like Yokahama. And much like Yokahama there really isn't much here. The town's been taken over by monsters but most aren't hostile. A few are, though, such as some Ice giants that I found in a locked house.

Ice giants hit a lot harder than Fire Giants, though they seem to die a little more quickly.

The giants were guarding a small loot cache. There are several loot caches in Greenbanks, some guarded, some not. The biggest cache is in the abandoned home of a necromancer in the southwest. The necromancer himself isn't there, only a large number of skeleton groups--which were no challenge even in numbers at this point for my party. I took a fair bit of damage falling into pits in the room beyond, though, which were especially difficult to find when searching.

There's not much of anything in the way of hints in Greenbanks. My only real goal here was to find the grave that the skeleton in Croyo mentioned. There is one "hint" of sorts, given by a Kaibu in a secluded corridor.

These directions lead to a small archipelago of completely empty islands. 

Back to the task at hand, though--finding the grave the Skeleton mentioned. There's a very large graveyard on the west end of the town, but no indication of exactly which grave is the right one. You just have to search all of them. It turns out the correct grave is at the westernmost tip, and it has a very nice treasure indeed--the Lantern, one of the six special items needed to complete the game.

With the Lantern, I now had 5 out of the 6 items I would need.

The Lantern is a tool that can be used an unlimited number of times, and produces light like a torch. However, the Lantern is less versatile than, say, the Emerald Rod, because there's only one place in the game that it works. When that time comes, it's pretty obvious.

At any rate the only special item I needed left after getting the Lantern was the Ring. As of yet there had been no clues as to its location, only that it exists. With the Lantern my business in Greenbanks was finished so I left. There's a dungeon near Greenbanks, but my party was in rough shape (Shuten in particular needed healing, so instead I opted to go to Clearview, the other town on Sirion.

Unfortunately Clearview doesn't have a healer, so it turned out I was on my own. Clearview is another nondescript town that feels half-finished. There aren't any amenities of particular importance. There's a graveyard, a locked forge with nothing in it, one secret room that leads into the grocer's storage, and a large prison in the northeast. Like all towns there's a smattering of hints, but most of them are not useful. One Shizen gave me directions to the same empty islands I learned about in Greenbanks, but charged me for the privilege. Another Yabanjin told me that the dungeon to the northwest contains a Word--nice, but not particularly surprising news, as that's a pattern with dungeons in general. A group of bandits in the prison yard gave me a real hint though. 

Actual directions to a new continent

There's not much more to say about Clearview. By now you might be sensing a pattern with these Deathlord towns in that they often look nice and have interesting designs, but they're for the most party pretty pointless. It's rare for towns to have an actual theme--places like Demonguard/Malkanth being notable exceptions to the rule. They're empty areas except for a few stores, maybe some treasure and hostiles behind locked doors, and a sea of generic townspeople except for one or two that gives a hint of some sort. Towns are kind of a microcosm for the whole game--a huge world but with places of interest few and far between.

I had to rest the party up and heal with spells, and then headed to the dungeons. The two Sirion dungeons are called the Forest dungeon and the Roomy dungeon in the hint book. I call the latter the Stairs dungeon because it makes more sense and "Roomy dungeon" is a silly name. Speaking of the Roomy/Stairs dungeon, I went there first to get it out of the way. I've covered a fair number of Deathlord dungeons so far, but this is the first one that's truly terrible.

Floor 1

Floor 2

Floor 3

Floor 4

Normally I post maps of dungeon floors individually as I traverse them, but the Stairs dungeon is such a hot mess that I'm just posting them all to try to reduce confusion. For reference, colored arrows (with the exception of the downward yellow arrows on red tile, which are chutes) are teleports to the spot (or sometimes other arrow) of the same color. The direction of the arrow indicates if the teleport is to an upper or lower level.

The Stairs dungeon is almost impossible to map without the use of a tool like Cheat Engine to verify where you are. (Bytes at 01A1C7B5 and 01A1C7BD for X and Y coordinates) To start with, you're dumped smack into the middle of a mass of stairs that spans all four levels of the dungeon.

Stairs block line-of-sight so this is what you'll be seeing for a while.

There is no visible exit from the stair-mass, as it is completely surrounded by solid walls. Some of these walls are illusory, which will get you into the second part of the dungeon--featureless 3x3 square rooms with no visible exits. These rooms too are connected by illusory walls.

You'll be seeing this for a while too.

It's a tiny bit easier to map these areas than the stairs, especially with the use of the ICHIHAN spell which will tell you your level.  And some of these rooms are filled with pots that have very good treasure--several hundred gold per pot. Several of the illusory walls between these small rooms teleport you elsewhere--often halfway across the dungeon and up or down several levels, but always to an identical-looking spot. In Kawahara's dungeon this was a neat trick to create an "endless hallway" you had to figure a way around--here, it just serves to further disorient the player and get them lost.

It looks like I just took one step through an illusory wall, but I'm actually in a totally different section of the dungeon.

Overall maneuvering around this dungeon is just painful. You also can't afford to cast UGOKU--even if it works, due to the uniform nature of the dungeon's appearance you're likely to lose your bearings and not know where you are after you teleport. What's worse, you can get dead-ended in the Stairs dungeon. Note the southeast corner of the levels, with teleports to lower levels. Once they send you to the third floor, you're trapped--there's no way back out so you either have to use teleport magic of some sort or disperse your party. (Or starve to death, I suppose.)

So, how to get out of this madhouse? If you know what to do, the Stairs dungeon is actually kind of simple. The secret is to go due north the instant you enter the dungeon and press up against the northernmost wall until you go through, which will be on the third level. The room beyond has a chute in the middle, but if you avoid it, the series of illusory-wall-connected rooms leads straight to a long hallway, at the end of which is the room with the Word.

The Word is guarded by vapor demons that can paralyze you, but are not too bad as demons go.

Despite being the "bosses" of this dungeon, Vapor Demons are among the weaker enemies that appear here. Other monsters include Trolls, Dark Toshi, Ogre-Mages, Werebears, Medusas and Gorgons. Those last three are the real killers--Werebears do decent damage and strike three times a round, and Medusas and Gorgons can Stone you. Like many RPGs, Stoned characters in Deathlord are as good as dead characters. If a character gets stoned mid-battle the game saves too, like on character death. There's a level 7 Shisai spell that can cure it, but otherwise you have to find a healer and pay a hefty 750-gold fee to cure it.

Beyond the Vapor Demons was the Word, "Chijoku," which is Japanese for "Shame."

Fun fact--the three tiles north of the party in this shot are outside the boundaries of the 32 x 32 map. This is the first spot where I discovered you could teleport off the map if you're standing in the right square.

I couldn't go back the way I came, though, because the corridor I used to get here has a teleport that moves you one tile to the east, turning it into an "endless corridor" of sorts. Fortunately there's a chute in the southwest corner of this room which dumped me down onto the fourth floor. From there it appears that you're trapped in a small two-chamber area connected by an illusory wall, until you figure out that the illusory wall is actually a back-and-forth teleport between level 4 and level 2. Entering the wall, then immediately turning back will let you out of the loop.

From there I finally made it to the central stair chamber, where I went to the center and waited (since every tile is an up stair) until I left the dungeon. I really should have remembered to cast a KAERU spell before coming in here; that way I would have been able to teleport out the instant I got the Word.

Three words down: FUSHIN, NIKUMU, and CHIJOKU. Four more to go, one of which is on this continent in the Forest dungeon. That dungeon is on the opposite side of the continent, closer to Greenbanks.

The Forest dungeon has its share of tricks and traps, but is nowhere near as sadistic as the Stairs dungeon. The first level is very straightforward once you discover the illusory walls in the central skull chamber. There are some teleports as you can see from the map, but they're set up in such a way that you wouldn't notice them unless you were very meticulously mapping the level, and even then, you wouldn't get lost. The encounter rate here was steady, but nothing too tough--a group of Niatama was the strongest thing I faced. Though there was a warning at the end of the level that this might just be the tip of the iceberg:

Ominous, but it's actually not that bad below.

The second level has a single gimmick that is easy to get caught by initially, but anyone getting this far and used to Deathlord tricks will probably see through it fairly quickly.

Those teleports in the northwest corner will send you to the southeast, making the level appear to be one long corridor that snakes back on itself and returns to the stairs back up. It wasn't too tough to figure out that there was some secret path along the corridor that I had missed, though, and I quickly made it to the center of the coil that comprises this level. I got stuck there longer than I'd like to admit, because I didn't realize that the way further was behind secret doors rather than illusion walls, like the rest of the level. However I eventually figured it out and found the stairs below, to level 3.

And this is why they call it the Forest Dungeon, I suppose. It's the quickest level ever if you want to just straight bypass it, as the stairs down are immediately next to the stairs up. There's a sign that says "You have entered Dankbark Forest, No Axes Allowed!" in between the two levels, though there's no significance to the sign as far as I can tell. This level is really just for flavor. There's no real compelling reason to stay here. The encounters here are mostly woodland creatures of sorts, like  evil trees, centaurs, and unicorns, the latter being the most dangerous, as they hit quite hard.

Evil trees aren't particularly difficult to kill, but there are quite a lot of them.

The "goal" of sorts in this level, if you can say it has one, is to find your way across the stream to its eastern shore. There isn't any boat of sorts to get you across. I just did it the easy way and had Frank cast UKU so I could just walk over the water. But if you aren't high enough level to cast that spell, or don't have a Genkai in your party, you can get to the eastern shore through a hidden teleport on the west side of the level. However the "reward" for making it across is just a sign that doesn't even give you a pertinent hint:

Uh...OK I guess?

Having explored the level thoroughly, I descended the staircase to level 4.

Level 4's trick is deceptively simple and simultaneously fiendish. In fact it's so bad that after wandering around for 15 minutes checking every wall for illusions I caved and consulted my map. Looking at the above map, you can see its trick--when descending to this level, you start on the tile with the up stairs, and naturally move to the south to explore the level. Rather than do that, you have to immediately walk through the illusory wall to your north as soon as you descend. It's not obvious at all--and mapping the level, the "gap" where the down staircase actually lies is so small you'd be forgiven for thinking there was nothing there.

Level 5 had some magic water in it, something I hadn't encountered for a while. I got a few stat boosts out of it but not many; several of my characters had multiple 18+ stats at this point making it all the less likely that any given drinking of magic pools would do any good. I also got attacked quite a lot by Dark Toshis here. Dark Toshis I had encountered in the Stairs dungeon; they aren't that hard, but appear in numbers and can poison the party. Shigeko's MP started running really low curing poisoned party members, to the point I had to rest.

The trick to this level is to do something you'd normally be conditioned not to do--walk into the acid. It will teleport you into the enclosed northwestern chamber, which has the stairs downward, and a lone door that serves as a teleport you back to the rest of the level if you need to backtrack.

Open doors into nowhere are frequently teleporters in Deathlord.

Also of note on this floor is an enormous treasure hoard--in fact it's the ENTIRE treasure hoard of this dungeon. I found it but only looted a little, as I was close to max GP at this stage. Later when levels start costing more and more to gain I'll probably come back here to restock.

The teleport on this level goes to the same-color dot on level 5

Level 6 is why the Forest dungeon is often known as the Chessboard dungeon--it's laid out like a giant chessboard, except instead of black and white you get brick and flames for the squares. HITATE spells come in handy here. Also the enemies here have a chess theme, and appear in great numbers.

Rooks and Knights are the only pieces that attack though.

Rooks and Knights are dangerous--Rooks can Stone you and Knights are even worse since they can drain levels. And they hit hard. Fortunately they always appear solo, so the combined assault of the whole party can usually kill them before they get a chance to act. You just need to make sure you strike the first blow.

After wandering aimlessly on the board for a bit, I discovered the secret door in the center of the south wall and entered to find the Word of this dungeon.

This one...is weird. The word itself, 抑制, means "inhibition/restraint/hold back." I'm really not sure what they were going for here, as in comparison to all the other "dark/sinful/negative" Words in the game, this one is thoroughly neutral. I've got two guesses--one is that they were looking for something like "repression" in a dictionary. The other is that this is supposed to be some sort of greed-associated "sin" that got mixed up, as "yoku" by itself can mean "greed." It's just a wild guess.

Getting out of the Forest dungeon was much easier than getting out of the Stairs dungeon, because this time I remembered to cast KAERU and just yelled my codeword to get out.  But even if I hadn't, getting out wouldn't have been so bad--the spiral on level 2 aside, there isn't a lot of backtracking to do.

I now had 4 words and 5 items--about 2/3 of the things I'd need to tackle the Deathlord's home base. However the remaining areas I still needed to go to are some of the most challenging in the game. It only gets harder from here on out.