Seek Red to the South

I'm doing the three middle tasks in the order that the "figure" at the Standing Stone advises them. So first, heading to Hap where Dracandros has his tower.

Hap is pretty easy to clean: just walked around so much that no more dark elf patrols appeared, then went into the barn where there were only two mages and two clerics with the efreeti. Mages are not really a problem as long as they stick to lightning bolts and not stinking clouds, but the hold persons that the clerics throw around can be an annoyance. What I usually do is disengage from the melee with my fighter types and run to bash the enemy spellcasters.

The caves are pretty cool. There's lot of fighting and they're not at all boring. The dark elf barracks are nasty: 12 clerics in one, 12 magic-users in another. I discovered that stinking clouds are not useful when tossed around willy-nilly because they can block my own fighters from engaging too, so careful planning is the key with them. The magic resistance of the dark elves is annoying but usually enough of them get hit by fireballs or ice storms to avoid a total defeat. The dracolich was almost tough but it never breathed on the same person twice, so I managed to defeat it without casualties. An ice storm had no effect but a flame strike did and finished it off. I suspect it was just luck of the draw and nothing inherent in the spells.

In this task, the sigil gets removed right in the middle, when Dracandros took the party up to his tower with the dragons and all:
After that, there's a choice. In more recent playthroughs, I've started attacking the dragons. It's a lot of XP and it's possible to win. Just slapped enlarges on the best fighters, and haste, bless, and prayer on everyone. For some reason, the dragon slayer sword that was in the caves functioned only in a couple of attempts and not my final one. Still, the final attempt was successful, with only Andreas getting killed, and even then, a raise dead actually increased his hit points, even though his constitution suffered. I have no idea why, but these games seem pretty buggy.

Going down the tower, the dark elf lord at the first stairs is the only interesting battle. I actually didn't manage to hit him once except when the thief got a backstab or when a magic missile went through his magic resistance. That's how I've always beaten this guy: arrange four characters to hack at him, have the thief circle in the remaining four places to backstab on every round, and have the magic user cast spells just in case one goes through.

Dracandros's cohorts are standard fare, but Dracandros himself is something else. I think he has mirror image, minor globe of invulnerability, and fire shield on at least. But it turned out, he had tuned the fire shield against fire, so an ice storm did double damage. In the end, I just disengaged both Andreas and Eugene from the efreeti and dark elves, and had them hack Dracandros down. Eugene got zapped by the fire shield, but it's not like a magic user has enough hit points to take down a fighter with a fire shield. Plus, Dracandros has all sorts of stuff useful to a magic user, so that's one reason why this task is good to do first.

And of course, even though I had taken a female into the party, gotten the assignment from Silk, and killed the dragons and taken their hearts, I forgot to go back to the caves to take the hearts to Silk. Oh well, it's not like I needed more XP anyway. Despite coming back to train in the middle, Andreas and Janna still went over their limits again. But both are now 8th level, which means 3 attacks in 2 rounds, so now my fighting strength is beginning to be at the normal level.