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In 1981, a game was published. It was called...



Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. This game shook the computing world and changed the face of gaming forever. All modern cRPGs can trace their ancestry back to this game, from Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy to Pokémon. It all began here...

I'm bored. I'ma do an LP, and you guys are gonna help.

My goal is a simple one. I'll build a party based on suggestions from you guys, and then I'll take that party through The Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (I), The Knight of Diamonds (II), Legacy of Llylgamyn (III), and Heart of the Maelstrom (V). I'm skipping the fourth game because it's a completely standalone title, and also on account of it being stupid hard even by Wizardry standards.

For the record I've beaten the first game once already, but the other three will be new territory to me. I'll be learning this along with you.

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A basic rundown



The unnamed castle town contains everything an adventurer party could ever need. Gilgamesh's is where you assemble and manage your party, the Inn is where you sleep to heal and level up, the Temple is where you can be healed of paralysis, petrification and death for an exorbitant fee, and Boltac runs the item shop. The Training Grounds is where character generation takes place, and finally there's the dungeon itself.



We'll have to start by making us some adventurers.



You pick out a race and an alignment, and then finally...



The stat screen. Your starting stats are determined by your race, and then you get a certain number of bonus points. I'm not sure what the formula here is, but I think it's 1d6+4, then that again if you get a 10. The hard limit is apparently around 60, but I've rolled dozens of times and I can count the number of 20s I've seen on one hand, and the 30s without my hands. I just roll until I get 17 or so, which is more reasonable to shoot for.

The stats themselves are pretty standard stuff, although they only start giving tangible bonuses when they get quite high, and penalize you for having them too low:

• Strength influences your weapon damage, obviously, but it also affects your to-hit chance for some reason.
• I.Q affects the rate at which you learn Mage spells. It doesn't influence their damage, and doesn't seem to influence the success rate of status-effect spells either, so this becomes less important once you know the entire Mage spellbook.
• Piety, similarly, affects the rate at which you learn Priest spells and does little else.
• Vitality gives you extra hit points when you level up, and directly correlates to the chance that resurrection will work on you. It's pretty much the god stat for that reason.
• Agility doesn't affect your to-hit chance or AC here, but it does still give an initiative bonus so it's pretty important. It also affects your chances to identify and disarm traps, so it's extra important to Thieves.
• Luck is used by all of your saving throws, so it affects your ability to resist status effects and instant-death attacks. Considering how many of them this game will throw at you, you'll need a lot of Luck to survive.

Races are the Tolkenian standard:

• Humans are slightly above-average across the board except for their bad Piety, with an extra bonus to Luck.
• Elves have high IQ and Piety and also good Agility, but bad Luck and Vitality.
• Dwarves are actually pretty cool here; they get good Strength, Piety and Vitality, with drawbacks only to Agility and Luck.
• Gnomes are great. They have good Piety and Agility, and no significant drawbacks.
• Hobbits are kinda useless. They have low Strength and Vitality, but high Agility and very high Luck.

And typical D&D classes (with requirements):

• Fighters hit things really hard. (11 Strength)
• Mages blow things up. (11 IQ)
• Priests heal, Turn Undead, and make good backup warriors. (11 Piety, can't be Neutral)
• Thieves are useless in combat, but you still need one in your party if you don't want trapped treasure chests (read: every treasure chest) to blow up in your face. (11 Agility, can't be Good)
• Bishops learn both Mage and Priest spells, but veeeeeeeeeeeery slowly. It's faster just to take a Mage or Priest to level 13 and then class change them if you want every spell on one character. Bishops are still useful for their ability to identify items, though. (12 IQ, 12 Piety, can't be Neutral)
• Samurai are basically Fighters that have slightly lower HP in exchange slooooooooowly learning Mage spells. Also, the best weapon in the game can only be used by them. (15 Str, 11 IQ, 10 Pie, 14 Vit, 10 Agl, can't be Evil)

Keep in mind that it's only feasible to get a Samurai on a fresh character if that character is an Elf, a Dwarf or a Gnome.

The remaining two classes have requirements too high to get with a fresh character, regardless of race. I'm just listing them for completion's sake, these aren't available except via class-change later on.

• Lords are this game's Paladins. They can do everything a Fighter can do, and they also get Priest spells and the best piece of armour in the game. (15 Str, 12 IQ, 12 Pie, 15 Vit, 14 Agl, 15 Luck, must be Good)
• Ninjas are awesome death machines. They can use almost any gear in the game, but they can also go all martial-arts and not use any equipment at all. They can also identify and disarm traps, although not as well as a Thief, and they can even instant-kill an enemy on a critical hit. (17 everything, must be Evil)

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So here's how suggestions work. Give me a race, a class and an alignment, and I'll make that character and slap your name on it. If you want to dictate anything else about your character, like how to distribute their stat bonuses, I'll do my best to see it done. A party has a maximum of six characters, but it is possible to beat the game with less.

Party:

• Endless Sea, Level 6 Evil Gnome Samurai
• Stella, Level 7 Neutral Hobbit Thief
• Victin, Level 6 Evil Elf Bishop
• Anura, Level 6 Evil Elf Priest
• Gurt, Level 7 Evil Dwarf Fighter
• Susie, Level 6 Evil Elf Mage

Regardless of alignment, I really wanna see a Gnome Samurai. That sounds just absurd enough to be hilarious.

Let's go for a Hobbit Thief (Neutral), try and keep Agi Vit and Luck about even.

Yes, I'm being mean... but we need a Thief, and may as well have a lucky one. Yes, I do realise that this means most of the stat points will go into Vitality, but sometimes... yeah.

I honestly think that Gnomes make the best Samurai. You need a bonus of at least 18 to hit the minimum on Elf, Dwarf and Gnome, and of those three Gnomes will have slightly higher Luck at the end of it. I got a roll of 19 here, so I put the extra point in Strength.



I don't remember what the exact roll was, but the important stats are all up very high. 17 Agility is apparently enough for a Thief to have a 100% success rate at identifying traps, although I have known them to occasionally fail at even at 18, the maximum.

Hmm... Maybe an evil elven bishop? With agility as a dump stat, since elves already have a slight bonus to it anyways? (What are the effects of alignment in the game, by the way?)

I put IQ slightly higher because Bishops learn Mage spells first, only branching into Priest spells around level 4 or so.

As to your question, Good characters will refuse to party with Evil characters and vice versa, although there's an easy workaround for that. Neutral characters will party with anyone. Certain events can change alignment between Good and Evil, but Neutral characters are stuck Neutral forever. A lot of the best equipment in the game can only be used by Evil characters, and there's some decent stuff that's Neutral-only. Good characters don't get anything special.

Also, according to the manual:

Good characters are really good. They go out of their way to help old ladies cross the street.

Neutral characters take life as it comes. They would help an old lady cross the street if they were travelling in the same direction.

Evil characters are self-centred, and always want to know "what's in it for them." Evil characters help old ladies cross the street for a small fee.

The monsters in the maze are another level of Evil. They'd help an old lady halfway across the street.

I got a chuckle out of that. ^_^

Welp, since no-one else seems to be offering more characters, I'll have to make do as-is.

Okay one more.



Because no adventuring party can last long without a healer.

----

Now, there's one other thing I ought to sort out before I set out, and that's how closely I should stick to the "intended experience". Re-rolling characters for high bonuses means I've already violated it in a small way, although probably not in an unforeseen way. Basically, I have three options:

• Easy: I can use every exploit that isn't outright hacking. This includes restart exploits, which means shutting down the emulator to avoid auto-saving before things like characters dying.
• Normal: I can use the typical exploits, like re-rolling characters, but no save scumming. If a character dies, I rez them regardless of the side-effects.
• Hard: Playing the game completely straight. I'd have to remake all the characters with the first roll I got for them (which means making Endless a Fighter instead unless we get lucky).

I'd say no save-scumming, myself. I don't know how the game handles TPKs, and might be inclined to allow reloading if the game doesn't handle them, but not for a single character death.

Either Easy or Normal is okay for me, I guess. Just no Hard, we already have our characters

@Stella: TPK means you have to create and level another party and send them in to haul the original party('s bodies) out to be rezzed (or just looted, since rezzing has side effects and you have a new party now). This is a pain because you have to remember the exact square that they died on. The exception is if you miscalculate a teleport and end up inside a wall; they're completely irretrievable then so the game just saves you the trouble and deletes your characters outright (which has happened to me a few times).

So I'll be playing on Medium. This means I can't reload the game to before a fight if someone dies, and it also means I can't backup my save before levelling up to try for good stat boosts (more on that later). But I will be using "ingame" exploits, number one being rerolling characters, and I'll get to number two very shortly.

But first, because I don't want to party with only four characters, I'm going to use some open source Metagauards to fill out the ranks a little:



Our fabulous mascot Gurt the Lime Man will be our second melee warrior, this time a pure Fighter. And my very own Susie the Timeline, subject of that other LP that I didn't get very far in seriously I should redo that someday will bring up the rear as our Mage.

First things first. A new character starts out with no items, but a little bit of gold that the manual says they probably won in a lottery or something. This can be used for initial gearing up at the shop.



For most of the Metaguards, their equipment is fairly cheap; Susie only needs her staff and robes, Victin and Stella deck themselves out in leather and small shields, and Victin and I use maces while Stella makes do with a short sword. The only real expense is the breast plate that I can wear as a Priest. My tower shield isn't that bad.

Fighters and similar types are another matter. Their longswords, tower shields and helmets aren't too bad, but they can wear plate armour straight out the gate. Problem is, even with the party pooling it's resources (which can be done with one button! The wonders of 80's gaming technology!), there's no way I can afford even one suit, let alone two.

Enter exploit number two! Remember two paragraphs ago, when I said "A new character starts out with [...] a little bit of gold..."? Well, our thief has a con lined up...



Put them all into a party, pool the gold on Stella with that handy button, and delete the characters. Free gold. It should be noted that the shop has even more expensive items available, but what I have is plenty good enough for starting out with, and I don't have the patience to deck out the characters with the absolute best stuff the shop has. Copper Gloves, for example, cost 6000 gold and only decrease your armour class by one (yeah, decrease; this is based on 2E D&D, so you start at 10 and go down).

And with all that done, here's the party as it stands now:





Next time, we'll finally take this team down to the first level of the dungeon! It is said that the most dangerous parts of this game are the very end... and the very beginning. Will we have our first death before we even get to level up? Pity me, because I'm the one who suffers if we do.

Note: This update is particularly image heavy, since this is where I explain the basics of dungeon crawling. I probably won't have to use this many images again, since I'll be skipping over this stuff in the future.

It's finally time to go on an adventure! But first, I need to introduce you to our third exploit. Remember when I said: "Good characters will refuse to party with Evil characters and vice versa..."?



This is how you get around that. There is a feature in the game for retrieving characters that are stuck in place, either by throwing away the key to a certain room while they were inside it (which I've actually done a couple of times) or for when they die. It's possible to send in another party to retrieve them. It's a bit more complicated than it sounds, since you need to add the stuck characters to your party, which means you need to send down an incomplete party so you have room for them, and you need to make the run at least twice to pick them all up, and arrrrrrgh I'm glad I never actually bothered doing all that.

But that same system can be used to get around the alignment restrictions. Just drop the evil characters in the dungeon...



...reset the game, make a second party of the good characters, drop them in the dungeon...



...inspect the starting square do find your "lost" evil characters, and add them to the party!



I guess this counts as a restart exploit since this could never be done without an emulator; shutting down the emulator is like cutting the power to the computer, and it's tedious enough to just start the game back up every time this is done. Still, we have a mixed-alignment party, and so we have no choice. For now.

This being an old game, it has old graphics. For example, we walk down the corridor to our right and come across a door:



We enter, and are ambushed by some monsters.



Luckily our armour holds; most of them fail their attack throw and miss, but one of them gets a lucky blow on Endless and takes 2 HP. Good thing I re-ordered the party to put the heavy hitters at the top of the list!

See, the characters in the first three positions are considered in the front row. These characters can be targeted by an enemy's physical attacks, but are also able to launch such attacks themselves. The last three characters are in the back row, safe from physical attacks (but not special attacks like magic), but can only cast spells or use items.

Placing Gurt and Endless at the top was obvious, and myself in the number three slot since priests have the next-best armour and weapons after the specialized fighters. Unfortunately putting Stella in the back row leaves her unable to do anything until I get some items for her. Victin and Susie at least have their magic.



Now we have to decide what to do. Gurt and Endless should obviously go on the attack. As a priest, I start out with the "heal" spell Dios and the "harm" spell Badios, neither of which is a good use of a spell slot right now, so I'll attack as well. Stella will just have to parry for now. Victin and Susie, however, have a more interesting option. Both of them have the Halito spell, a fireball which does 1d8 damage to a single target (the same as a longsword), but a better use of the spell slot would be Katino, the "bad air" spell. This targets an entire group of enemies and attempts to puts them to sleep, making them unable to take action and also makes them take double damage from physical attacks. This spell is the jewel first level mage spell, and remains useful for the entire game.



The spell name has to be spelled out to use it, and while you can check which ones they know in the status screen, the actual effects are only listed in the manual. A little bit of old-style copy protection.



I'll have my fighters all attack the first group. You can choose which group of monsters you want to attack, but not which one individually. Susie and Victin will cast the sleep spell on one group each.



I'm not sure how I'm stabbing anything with a mace. Apparently all the different attack types have their own to-hit and damage modifiers, but which one you actually use is random.



Dammit Lime Man!



Susie and Victin manage to sleep every target in their respective groups, meaning no counterattack happens this turn. However...



It doesn't stick. The number beside each group in brackets is how many are able to fight, and the entire second group managed to shake off the spell at the end of the round.

During the second round, I have Susie try to re-sleep the second group and set Gurt to finish off the lone survivor of the first group while Endless and myself make a dent in the second. It works out, and in the third round Gurt finishes off the final monster of the second group, which someone finally identifies as an Orc (the first group were probably Kobolds).



Yay!



And this is where Stella shows us why she's here. This part of the game moved too quickly for me to get a lot of screenshots, so apologies for that. Anyway, opening the chest outright is a very silly thing to do. Calfo is a second level priest spell that can identify traps with about a 95% success rate, which is useful for getting a second opinion later on, but for now my only option is to have Stella inspect the chest. The other characters can too, but they have a much higher chance of getting it wrong or springing the trap by accident.

Stella believes that the trap is a Poison Needle.

And so we have her disarm the trap I think it is, trusting her judgement on the matter.



She fails it three times, and accidentally triggers it on the third attempt.



And so Stella is now poisoned, which will cause her to lose health over time.



But tripping the trap also disarms it, so we still get our loot. Gurt gets the "clothing", an unidentified item, at random, and the rest of the loot translates to 48 gold, which the party splits between them. I don't know whether the game rounds the gold up or down to get an even split or whether the monsters are worth a certain amount of gold each to begin with.



We have one wounded and one poisoned. Best to get the hell out. But before we make our exit...



I use up my own spell slots, which will be replenished when we re-enter, to heal any damage the party sustained.I can't cure Stella's poison yet, but I can heal the damage she took from it before going back up. Posion is healed automatically upon returning to town, the only status effect for which you'll be so lucky.

That wraps it up for today. Our brave adventurers rest from their short but exciting first dive into the adventuring life, possibly rethinking their career choice. or maybe hungry for more. Next time I'll be doing the activity this game introduced that the entire RPG genre now runs on...

Grinding!

That UI is making my head hurt. @_@

First things first: upon returning to the safety of the town, the first thing we must do is sort through the loot! We have... one piece of clothing.

Now, I don't normally take Bishops in my party. They learn new spells much more slowly than the pure casters, and as the game goes on and magic becomes increasingly more important, they get left behind by the Priest and the Mage.

HOWEVER, I always roll a Bishop as a seventh character to leave behind in the inn, because the item shop charges far too much money to identify things for you and a Bishop has the innate ability to do it for free.



...it takes a few tries.



But their level doesn't affect the process, so even a level 1 Bishop can identify endgame items.

What we turned out to have was... a robe. A normal, non-special robe just like the one Susie's wearing. It sells for a tiny price. And honestly, getting any loot at all on the first floor is unusual. You're not raking in actual gear upgrades until at least the fourth floor. No, we're grinding exp here.



Fun fact: Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, got the idea for the iconic Slime monster from playing this very game!

But on the third battle, tragedy struck:



I got a little overconfident. I was low on health after they ambushed us, and then they finished me before I could heal myself. In retrospect, I should have had the mages sleep them as an extra precaution. Although there's still no guarantee that that would have helped. Wizardry is a harsh mistress.



And then Stella fumbled the trap afterwards, just to make things worse. Dead characters are automatically sent to the back of the list, bumping the next character into the front lines. Stella saw some actual combat, briefly. Anyway. As previously mentioned, poison heals automatically upon leaving the dungeon. For death... we need to visit the temple.



The reason the party is so small here is because dead characters get kicked upon returning to town, so I had to remove the Good party members before my Evil self could be added. There was enough money on just those characters to afford the fee. A level 1 character isn't expensive to raise.



But there were side-effects. I gained a year of age and lost a point of vitality from the exchange. Yeah, you age in this game, which is why you want to avoid being resurrected wherever possible. Older characters are less likely to gain stats when they level up, and more likely to lose stats. Yeah, stats can go down when you level up, and frequently do.

It gets worse.



Sleeping is how you level up and regain hitpoints, but it ages your character in the process, and drains your coffers to boot. Which is why I do all my healing with spells, which are fully replenished whenever I re-enter the dungeon. You still need to sleep in order to level up, but The Stables are free and only consume one week of your life to use, which is negligible since characters will probably never go over level 13.



...not a good level-up for Stella. This is another point where save-scumming can be tempting, but I'll hold off on that.



The rest of the level ups are a mixed bag. None of my back-row characters got more than one hit point despite having better hit dice than that, but in one of the game's rare mercies, it'll keep track of the average HP that someone for your level and Vitality "should" have, and provide a bonus if it's too far below that average. Although it'll also penalize it if it's too far above the average, which is probably to stop characters that have changed classes from dominating everything (they return to level 1, but keep their old HP total).

Wait, this game is where Slimes come from? :O

(Also, Horii was the one who came up with them? I would've thought it'd be Akira Toriyama, since he's in charge of character and monster design for Dragon Quest games.)

Wow... that's...

So... to quote a friend: "Welcome to X-Com, may I take your order?" except it applies to quite a few more games, it seems...

And welcome back! I've been doing a little bit of offscreen grinding and gotten every character up to level 3.



Susie and I have reached our second caster level and learned a few new spellls:

• Milwa: "Light", a level 1 Priest spell. Extends my visibility by two, and allows me to see hidden doors. Unfortunately it wears off fairly quickly and uses up a spell slot that I should, at this point, be reserving for healing spells.
• Matu: "Blessing", a level 2 Priest spell that reduces the party's AC by 2 for the duration of a fight. It only lasts for one fight, most of which should be over before the enemy gets a chance to strike at all, so it's best saved for prolonged encounters.
• Montino: "Still Air", another level 2 Priest spell. This one attempts to silence one group of enemies, preventing spellcasting. Needless to say this spell is pure gold against enemy casters, especially later on when magic becomes much more central. It's also really annoying when they use it on you.
• Mogref: "Body Iron", a level 1 Mage spell that reduces the caster's AC by 2 for the duration of a fight. Considering mages should be on the back lines at all times anyway, this isn't very useful. Endless might find some use for it once he starts learning magic I guess.
• Dumapic: "Clarity", a level 1 Mage spell. It's an out-of-battle spell that tells you your exact map co-ordinates. Handy indeed if you get lost.
• Dilto: "Darkness", a level 2 Mage spell. Raises an enemy group's AC by 2. Not very useful in most situations, but there's one coming up where it's handy...
• Sopic: "Glass", a level 2 Mage spell that reduces the caster's AC by 4. Mogref's big brother, and useless for the same reasons.

Victin also has the level 1 Mage spells, but his caster level rises every 4 levels, not 2 like the pure casters. We're now confident enough to leave the first corridor and take a look around the rest of the floor. Maps courtesy of this guy, whose walkthrough is also proving very helpful.



Not a complicated floor (it gradually gets worse). (0,0) is the entrance and exit from the dungeon, and I've been grinding in the three closest rooms to it. As for that big grey area in the north and south...



It's a dark zone.



You can't see where you're going while in it. You have to rely on the maps. It also has the annoying side effect of instantly ending any Light spells you have active. I'm not going to be exploring it very much. Instead, I'll head up to the hidden room at (13,18).



You may be wondering what kind of lore that statue might be referring to. The answer is that same as that for the other weird statues on the first two floors:

None whatsoever! They're just there to be weird. But if you search...



You find a silver key! Now it does have a purpose, which we'll get to. Instead, we'll head along the horizontal central corridor, through that one-way door, and looking ahead...



...that doesn't look like the dead end the map says it is.



...what?

Y'see, this game has teleport tiles. You do not get informed that you've been teleported, and looking at such a tile gives the appearance of it's destination. Makes mapping these dungeons yourself a massive headache. You may also notice that the middle door on the map also teleports you right back to the central room.

Andrew and Robert are laughing somewhere.

The doors to either side of this, however, make the trip worth it. To my left...



Bronze key get! And to the right...



These are special enemies. They appear on the final floor as regular encounters, but they're not very dangerous even here. They only attack for 2 damage at a time. The problem is...





They have -3 AC. Even with Dilto hitting them is pure luck of the draw, and even then they have 10d10+10 HP. They're magic-resistant as well, so no fireballs. It takes a very long time to kill these guys. So why bother?



THIS. These guys are our Metal Slimes. In fact, they're better. They don't run away, and you can force encounters with them. This game only has one non-repeatable encounter, and it's not this one. This room is our Peninsula of Power Levelling. It's entirely possible to just grind here to level 13, skip to the last two floors to grab powerful item drops to gear up, then just fight the last boss. Bam, done.

I'm not gonna do that. But it's not real Wizardry unless you do some grinding here.

This really IS Dragon Quest-y as hell.

I have power-levelled everyone to level 6, which is good enough for the next few floors. But before I do the next proper update, I decided to get the updated spell lists out of the way in this mini-update. So:

Victin got his second Mage caster level at 5, so he can now use the level 2 mage spells I mentioned in the last update. He also got his first Priest caster level at 4, so he can now act as our backup healer. In addition, both he and I have completed our level one spell lists with:

• Porfic: "Shield", lowers own AC by 4. Despite being a level 1 Priest spell, it's exactly the same as a level 2 Mage spell. It's also nearly useless.
• Kalki: "Blessings", lowers the entire party's AC by 1. A smaller version of Matu, and not generally worth using as it uses up a spell slot that could have been used for a heal.

Meanwhile, Susie and I gained our third caster levels:

• Manifo: "Statue", a level 2 Priest spell that inflicts paralysis on a group of monsters, leaving them unable to act for a while. Between this and the sleep spell from the mages, I can completely shut down a particularly troublesome encounter if I have to... if I manage to go first, and if the spells hit every target between them.
• Lomilwa: "More Light", a level 3 Priest spell. An enhanced version of Milwa, this one extends my visibility by three tiles, lets me see hidden doors, and never wears off. It shares slots with other useful spells, but the fact that I only need to cast it once alleviates that issue (although it's still cancelled by entering a dark zone).
• Dialko: "Softness", a level 3 Priest spell that heals a party member of sleep and paralysis. That's one less status effect I'm relying on the temple to cure!
• Latumapic: "Identify", a level 3 Priest spell that will tell me exactly what one group of monsters actually are. Not as useful as it sounds, I can usually infer enough information from the enemy sprite.
• Bamatu: "Prayer", a level 3 Priest spell that lowers the entire party's AC by 4 for the rest of the fight. This one's actually worth using in tough encounters even if they're going to be short, for example, against an enemy with a chance to instant-kill.

Maddeningly, I'm still missing a useful level 2 Priest spell, Calfo, which identifies the trap on a chest with a 95% success rate. This would leave me less reliant on Stella if I think something feels off.

• Mahalito: "Big Fire", a level 3 Mage spell that does 4d6 fire damage to an entire group of monsters. This is Susie's first "fuck you all" spell, and she'll be getting lots more in the future. Unfortunately I can only cast it twice per outing at the moment, so I should save it for when I really need it.
• Molito: "Spark Storm", a level 3 Mage spell which does 3d6 electric damage to a group of monsters. No monsters resist electric damage, but not many monsters resist fire, so it's usually better to use Mahalito instead.

Oh yeah. Lest I forget, Endless got his first Mage caster level as well!

GET BACK

I CAN CAST A SPELL

Second floor!



Not actually exploring all of that, because there's only a scant few points of interest on it. First of all is (08,12):



If you don't have the Silver Key from the first floor, this message will appear and you'll be shoved back to where you were previously. If you were dumb and dropped the key while on the far side of that message, well... you're trapped forever. But getting past it gets you to the key at point (18,09):



The Bear Statue. The second point is at (08,07):



You need the Bronze Key to pass through here. The large space in the south that this leads to has this key at point (12,04):



...I have no idea what Andrew and Robert were smoking that day. You get the Frog Statue here.

(04,11) and (04,12) both need one of the statues to pass through. This leads into an annoying dark zone, hiding one last treasure:



This gives you the Gold Key. Now, you'd think that since the Bronze and Silver Keys each lead to one animal statue, both of which are in turn needed to reach the Gold Key, that it would unlock something really important.

It doesn't. The Gold Key is completely useless, as is the Bronze Key and the Frog Statue. There's a point on Floor 4 that requires the Bear Statue to get past, and I suspect that it was originally meant to be the Gold Key. but eh.

I forgot about the area in the right, on row 11, but it's just an introduction to the idea of pit traps. The three squares leading up to it playfully warn you to watch your step, and then you fall into the trap that looks just like any other "special" square. Doing so damages your entire party. The game's really nice to introduce them like that, since there are lots more on the next floor.

So yeah. Not much to this floor. Couple other interesting things happened, though:



A couple of new enemy types. Creeping Cruds are magic-resistant and inflict poison sometimes, but my AC is too high for that to be much of an issue. Zombies are another problem, since they can paralyze. Undead in this game are often the toughest enemies on a given floor, but both I and Victin can Turn Undead, possibly killing them outright in one shot, though monsters destroyed that way don't drop exp or gold. Might be a better use of my turns, since my strength stat is so pitiful that I can't really keep up with Gurt and Endless, who are often dropping one monster per turn with their massive hits.

You may also notice that by that last battle everyone except Stella has turned evil. This is because I've been attacking every "friendly" monster group instead of letting them pass; those Zombies were friendly in fact, and attacking them was what finally made Endless snap. No more alignment problems for me!

"Creeping Crud"? Really? :/

Also, figures I'd turn evil sooner or later. xP