Into the Wild ...Not!

After the contiguous part, I went across the bay to clean up the three areas there, Kovel Mansion, Wealthy Mansion and the Temple of Bane. All simple and quick hack-and-slash jobs since my maps show where all the monsters to be killed are, and not worth much either.

I thought after that to go look at the kobold cave. Boy, that fight is tough! Three consecutive battles plus one in the king's quarters, with trolls, boars, and evident fighter/magic-users. On the first attempt, I managed to lose in the third one. The second one was going much better, but then the game crashed when a boar got killed by a fireball. It got exactly the 18 hit points damage that it had and then tried to get up, and that's when the game dumped me back to Dosbox with some incomprehensible error message and all the fonts and other settings the same as in the game.

Evidently the game did not want me to mess with the kobolds just yet, and I wanted to get my magic-users to the sixth level anyway, so I thought I'd gather some XP at the graveyard. But the set-piece fights there were so easy (random encounters, not so much) that I ended up cleaning that place completely. One wight got a swing at Andreas, but that's why there are all the scrolls of restoration. I didn't bother to reload as Andreas had just leveled up a few thousand XPs prior.

The last three fights I finished without leaving the graveyard at all. I was all set to leave just before the vampire, but then ran into a magic-user who wanted a piece of the action, so I thought, what the heck, and went to kill the vampire after all. Of course, the magic-user turned out to be a traitor who fought on the vampire's side in that battle... (Well, fought and fought; I finished him off before he got to even act.)

The graveyard is perhaps one of the most interesting tasks in this game. There's a clear progression of the fights getting harder: skeletons, zombies, wights are what you encounter outside. There's a number of battles to win to clean the place instead of just one or two like in some other areas. The spectre and wraith battles in the buildings are too easy, though, with the surprise and all. Pretty much all undead types are present, and with the character levels of this game, it's not just having the cleric turn them. And even so, turning the undead is a bit annoying, since they don't disappear like in the later games, but just start running away.