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1992-05-07
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Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge
A Review by Mark Bylander
Bane of the Cosmic Forge, while a continuation of the Wizardry series,
requires absolutely no knowledge of previous games. It is a very enjoyable
role-playing game. Its plot makes up for the EGA-only graphics.
The first thing to do in Bane of the Cosmic Forge is character generation.
This is very simple and straightforward, but it will take hours to create
a set of decent characters. To get any of the impressive characters, you
have to keep "rolling" characters until you get a "bonus score" of, say,
17 or higher. Maybe one in ten or twenty characters will be acceptable
by this criterion. I have found that a Ninja is an excellent character--
my Ninja has almost as many kills as my big spell-casters. Bards are
extremely useful, especially at the lower levels.
Characters can belong to many races and classes:
Race Description
==== ==================================
Human Bipedal mammals of genus homo
Elf Magically inclined and lithe
Dwarf Stocky and pious
Gnome Magically inclined and short
Halfling The consummate thief
Faerie Tiny! (A Faerie mage will have 1-2 hit points)
Dracon Part dragon, breathes acid.
Lizard Man Tough and reptilian
Felpurr Bipedal cats
Rawulf Bipedal dogs
Mook Mysterious and Mystical
Class Description
========= ===================================================
Fighter Me stomp. Me kill. Me strong.
Thief Picks locks, Picks pockets, Disarms traps, Hides.
Mage Lots of damage causing spells.
Priest Lots of support spells, and a few damaging as well.
Bard Mage spells, Thief skills, and magical instruments.
Alchemist Lots of acid and poison spells. Cannot be silenced.
Ranger Fighter with alchemist spells and scouting.
Bishop Mage and Priest spells.
Psionicist Mental spells. Many immune, others go insane.
Valkyrie Fighter with Priest spells. Female.
Lord Fighter with Priest spells.
Samurai Fighter with Mage spells and funny weapons, crit hits.
Ninja Critical hits, Thief skills, Alchemist spells.
(For some reason, can't use some Alchemist spellbooks)
Monk Thief skills, Psionicist spells.
After selecting race, class, and sex, you will get your "bonus score".
I recommend that you not keep a character with less than a 16 or 17 bonus
score. This will lengthen the rolling process, but will yield better
characters in the end. After this, you will receive some skill points
to distribute. There are many different weapon skills, and these will
increase dramatically just by using a weapon. My Lord has 100 in Sword and
I have never put a point into it. (Of course, he just switched to a hammer,
and has about a 15 in it.) Physical skills include Scouting (which will NOT
increase automatically), Music (available only to bards), Oratory (enables
spellcasters to pronounce their spells--not needed for Alchemists), and
Thieving skills. The three thieving skills are Legerdemain (Picking pockets),
Skullduggery (Picking Locks and Disarming Traps), and Ninjutsu (Hiding).
Academic skills increase automatically (except the spell-casting skills), but
very slowly. Academic skills include Mythology (identifies monsters),
Artifacts (how to use those wands), Scribe (how to use a scroll), and the
spell-casting skills of Thaumaturgy, Theology, Theosophy, and Alchemy.
Spell casters should probably put most to all of their points in these
skills as well as in Oratory.
After creating your characters, you will enter the castle. The graphics
are adequate, but not incredibly impressive. The game does not support
256 color VGA. If you have an Adlib card, you will hear various footsteps
and random dungeon sounds. These sound pretty good, although in combat
some of the monsters' musical themes get fairly annoying. Combat in Bane
is similar to that in the Bard's Tale series. You input all of your
combat commands, and then the computer computes initiative and adjudicates
the combat. Your desperate HEAL WOUNDS may occur too late in the round to
save your front-line fighter. An undead monster may go incorporeal before
you can hit it with your DISPEL UNDEAD. Combat can get tedious if a lot
of the monsters have missile attacks, as you must watch the missile come
toward you for each of these monsters. After a combat round, the monsters
may start changing their positions. This can be extremely annoying,
especially in encounters like 1 ghost, 1 zombie guard, 1 zombie guard,
1 zombie guard, and 1 zombie guard. Since the ghost casts spells (SILENCE
is helpful!), the zombies will decide to move up, taking 30-45 seconds of
shuffling.
The spell system is pretty good. There is a fairly large selection of
spells, and 4 main types of spellcasters. Based on my experience with
a psionicist, I would recommend having a plain Mage somewhere in your
group. The Psionicist's spells fail to affect monsters much more often
than plain Mage spells do. I have a Bishop, who is a very nice character,
but who is only able to cast only low level spells, since he learns both
Mage and Priest spells. On the plus side of Psionicist spells, however,
is the fact that they will often leave a monster insane, which usually
prevents it from attacking you. Alchemists cannot be silenced, so are
useful in that respect. It will be a long time before you meet a monster
capable of silencing you, however. At first level, your mages will
probably be using a lot of ENERGY BLAST, while alchemists use ACID SPLASH,
psionicists use MENTAL ATTACK, and priests use HEAL WOUNDS (or MAKE WOUNDS).
Each time you go up a level, pure spell casters will get a new spell, provided
that they have sufficiently advanced the requisite spell-casting skill.
Make sure your spellcasters use most of their bonus skill points in their
spell-casting skills and oratory.
The plot line is fairly interesting, although there are long stretches of
hack and slash involved as well. You are looking for the Cosmic Forge,
which is some sort of magic pen which writes reality. On the way, you
learn of the Evil King and his lover Rebecca and the mad Wizard Xorphitus.
There is a lot of mapping to do in this adventure! I have found that it is
easy to advance in the plot quicker than you have advanced your characters,
which can make combat difficult. Most of the time this is little problem--
if you get ahead of yourself, go back and try some random encounters.
I have been told that at one point late in the game, it becomes impossible
to turn back, so be careful. I recommend that you save often, and that you
refrain from resurrections for the most part--you can restore a game by
using <QUIT GAME--NO SAVE> followed by <RESUME SAVED GAME>. There are
two main reasons to avoid resurrections. First of all, resurrections
drain vitality from your characters, and secondly, resurrection magic items
can be sold for large amounts of gold. Queequeg (the first NPC you are
likely to meet) will buy the Amulet of Life for about 18000 gold! The
Sword of Striking which you find early on is a +2 to hit weapon which does
1-8 points of damage. You will also find a Heraldric Shield sometime in
your first few hours of play. This shield gives a two point bonus to the
armor class of the person using it. You probably should not invoke it until
you are 5th level or so--when invoked, it vanishes, but increases its user's
strength by one. Later, you will find a green parrot. IDENTIFY marks it
as cursed, but if invoked, it increases your charisma by one. I noted no
ill effects of the object.
When I first started playing, the disarm section mystified me (until I
looked it up in the manual), so I'll give a short synopsis of this procedure.
When you come to a chest, you'll choose <OPEN>. You can then have each
character examine the chest. You will get a list of letters, some red and
some green. The green letters are definitely in the name of the trap. The
red letters might be in the name of the trap. Red asterisks mean that one
of your characters has determined that another character's red letter was
incorrect. The letters of the trap name are anagrammed. The spell
DIVINE TRAP is very useful for disarming. If, for instance, you had the
this list of green letters -- RFYA EEEBF ONEL -- you would select "RAY
OF ENFEEBLE" from the list of traps when you try to disarm it.
Despite some shortcomings in the combat area, I have thoroughly enjoyed this
game. You can expect many hours of play to complete it. (I personally have
not yet finished--I'm wandering the River Styx, which seems to be too
difficult for my characters right now.) The graphics are adequate, but not
stunning, and the sound is good. I highly recommend this game.
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