Ophidian Dragon blogs his way through the entire Ultima series, from beginning to end.

Monday, March 26, 2007

Ultima V, Day 7

Well, I have ended my first week of Ultima V gaming, and today was quite eventful! I *finally* figured out how to escape Deceit, for starters. I simply cast a Des Por or down spell on level 8! It also occurs to me that I might have needed to push the walls in that dungeon room with the exit ladder...I forgot that command even existed, actually. I did hit the two treasure rooms several more times, gaining lots and lots of gold, huge numbers of gems, and at this point 10 invisibility rings.

My character is extremely powerful, now, due to the combination of Lord British's crown (to stop magic), magic axes (to kill monsters rapidly) and invisibility rings (to keep monsters from hitting me). As a result, I decided to tackle the Underworld--although I did exit through Deceit, I will describe my whirlpool experience first. In short, I sailed my ship into the whirlpool, and made a detailed map of the underground realm. There I also encountered Captain John, who looks like a wizard for some reason, and discovered something I had not realized--John first set foot into the Underworld and the Shadowlords were created by him when he killed his three companions! Wow. Random plot detail filled in! To my dismay, there was nothing else in that area--except an exit to dungeon Despise, whose Word of Passage I don't know. I went back to Britain and asked around, but to no avail. I recall one wizard guy whotold me the mantra; probably he knows the Word.

Anyway, Deceit I knew was the key to getting the shard of Falsehood, so I mapped that area of the Underworld as well. The most notable future is a gigantic set of waterfalls that dumped me (and my magic carpet, for some reason) down onto an island with the shard. I found it through some directions given to me in Cove; that was not the hard part. The harder part was getting out--I had to use the grapple to climb some mountains to do that. Most areas in the Underworld have unclimbable peaks surrounding them, but I found one little lonely hole in them and that led back to the exit. Heh, my trip to the shard would have been shorter had I noticed it earlier! Using that shard, I destroyed my first Shadowlord. The instructions for beating them are quite specific--I had to literally wait until the guy was standing on top of the flame of Truth before I could use the shard, *and* I had to also be directly in front of him. Anyway, one down, two to go--and then I can also fetch British's amulet, which is in their castle and which I talked about before. I presume once they are gone I can get in much more easily!

My third trip to the Underworld was for British's amulet. I followed the nicely written instructions in the game box, and it was pretty fun, although I don't understand why British's party had so much trouble with the enemies in the Underworld. I guess they forgot their magic axes? I followed the instructions and found the amulet, but I am a completist so I reloaded my game and I mapped the whole area! Then I managed to get from the enterence (falling down a waterfall, of all things...) to the amulet in about 25 seconds. Beat that! Then I just had to sail (well, float) back a longer way over some really windy rivers and over a colossal swamp to get back to dungeon Destard's exit. Fortunately getting out of Destard was much easier because that dungeon is not quite so trap-laden. In fact, it looks like a cave and not a torture chamber, as Deceit looked...It's interesting how these dungeons change with each game!

Now I'm back on the surface, recuperating in Skara Brae. I am wondering what the use of other dungeons are--here's what I have so far:

Deceit: Shard of falsehood
Despise: Heads to whirlpool area
Destard: Amulet
Wrong: Shard of hatred
Covetous: ?
Shame: ?
Hythloth: Shard of cowardice

So that leaves two unaccounted for. Unsurprisingly, those are precisely the dungeons I don't have the Words for, lol. Once I fetch the other two Shards, I think I'll take a break and try to find those other words. But there's Shadowlords to kill first! Tonight was about four hours. I am feeling inspired by the game once more!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember the first time I found Captain Johne I was pleasantly surprised. It was not my first time through the game. And though my party was already full I HAD to go back and have him join - it just didn't seem right to me unless he avenged himself.

Also, if you're interested, there's a good fanfic piece that written by A New Breed of Dragon in 1998, Tale of Captain Johne. While I've never been much for fanfic, this one is very well written and has kept true to the U5 story with some mild creative liberty. It's also part of the official backstory to Lazarus.

http://www.biggles2k.com/johne/

Anonymous said...

A thought: If you're interested in a subject and have some cash to spare, you can get some clues by asking a strangely familiar gypsy questions about odd topics. I remember randomly asking questions when I first played and getting quite a surprise at what there was to find out.

Anonymous said...

Hey Ophidian, cool site and cool project! This might become an unofficial walkthrough to the series by the time you're done with it!

You're not on Ultima 6 yet, which means I can still toss a challenge your way: see if you can pass U6 with an absolute minimum of person/creature kills. If I recall correctly, you can pass it and only kill 3 creatures/people, but it's staggeringly difficult to do so.

Ultimate Carl said...

Convenient that those are the ones you don't know! I know it's meta-gaming, but I find I can usually figure out where I need to go next based on the things I know of but with the game has applied no relevance to yet.