Field Report from Skara Brae

 My campaign through Tales of the Unknown Volume 1: The Bard's Tale, beautifully remastered on the XBox One, continues onward, with my party stepping foot in Baron Harkyn's castle this afternoon, leaving behind the undead masses back in the Catacombs for some above ground action. This felt like a good time to check in.

Here is how I am playing: I am checking the automap against my ancient hand-drawn maps for accuraccy (more on that later) by mapping out every square on every level. So far, this has seemed to be enough to keep level with what I am fighting. When exploring a level, I take every fight that comes my way (unless I'm on the way out in a rush), and in levels between the current one I'm exploring and the exit, I skip fights.

My party has levelled up enough that my magic users have learned all their available spells, so now it's all about levelling them up to get more hit and magic points. Loot is scarce in this game, and it seems like forever between weapon and armor upgrades at first. The pace picks up though, by Catacombs Two, and now my bard has a good supply of fire horns and my whole party has been upgraded one way or another.

It turns out my old maps were less comprehensive than I thought, but the majority of the misses are traps that I did not detect before, because at this point in the game your mage should be keeping you levitated at all times.  I hovered right over them in my previous visit without setting them off, so they were not marked as traps until this playthrough. 

A big miss was on Catacomb One where a dead end hallway I had mapped was actually two small rooms, the last with a message on the wall pertaining to the game's story. That was embarrassing! And there was something on the town map that I did not have noted, in a small southeast section of buildings guarded by stone giants.

I could not remember why this neighborhood was closed off, so I checked every building, and in one of them was an NPC basically saying that we were in a trilogy (of threats to Skara Brae/games). Was he there on those floppy disks 35 years ago? I have no record of it.

I have also come to realize that I was maintaining a perception for the last 3 plus decades that I was maybe only halfway through the game, but if my suspicions are correct, I was actually only one level away from the end of the game back then. My maps get even sketchier, less refined, and wholly incomplete the closer to the end they get.

Dragons have started showing up, and there is little defense against their breath. It comes down to a roll of the dice as to which spell or bard instrument can shut them up before they can get off more than a few of those attacks. Dopplegangers, too, which "jump" into your party if there is a slot and imitate one of your crew until you kill them both. Fun stuff!

The good news, in summary, is that I'm actually having fun with all this again, and feel no desire to quit or take another three and a half decade break. I'll check in again when I've got something more to report.