Ultima: Victory!

Having completely the quests given out by the eight kings of "Ultima" (as the world seems to be named in the manual), the next stage of my mission to defeat Mondain was to become a "space ace".  The chain of quest-lines went like this: to confront Mondain I needed a time machine; to get a time machine, I had to rescue a princess after becoming a space ace; to become a space ace, I apparently needed to go into space and shoot down 20 enemy ships.

The obvious way to get to space was to buy a shuttle from the Transport shop in one of the cities.  I had saved my last game just outside Castle Shamino, which is right next to the city of Gorlab.  I can't remember how much the shuttle cost; I just tried to go back and check, but for some reason my air-car has vanished in my saved game, leaving me stranded on an island.  It didn't really matter though, because by that point I had amassed around 40,000 gold, and money worries were a thing of the past.  The shuttle appeared on the wilderness map, one square north of Gorlab.

I'm a rocket man...

After I boarded the shuttle, it gave me a short countdown before blasting off into outer space. I remember from previous times I've played the game that you need to be wearing a Vacuum Suit here, or you instantly die.  It makes perfect logical sense, but as far as I can tell there's nothing in the game that clues you in to the deadliness of outer space (aside from, you know, common sense).  I guess it's no big deal, as long as you've saved your game recently.  It's just a "gotcha" death that results in a quick reload, and any player that's reached this point of the game should already have a Vacuum Suit in their inventory, or enough money to afford one.

Once you reach outer space, the game switches to a completely different style of play.  Ultima isn't exactly what you'd call a cohesive game.  It's cobbled together from bits and pieces of various styles and genres, and is composed of at least three separate games, each with their own mode of play.  Wilderness exploration is different to dungeon exploration, which is different to space combat.  If someone were to break it down even further, it wouldn't even surprise me to find out that the cities, castles and the final confrontation with Mondain all operate under different rules as well.  Garriott could probably have split the three major sections into separate games and sold them on their own, and he might have even made more money that way, but none of those games would have had Ultima's special brand of kitchen-sink charm.

From a modern perspective it does feel odd to be going into sci-fi territory in a fantasy game, and it felt odd when I first played the game 20 years ago, but I wonder how unusual it was at the time.  I've read a lot of Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop gaming stuff from the late 70s, and fantasy/sci-fi mash-ups were all over the place.  The D&D module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, which takes place in a crashed spaceship, was published in 1980.  Even in literature, I get the sense that sci-fi and fantasy weren't quite as separated as they later became.  It's hard to know, having only been about three years old at the time, whether Garriott was following trends or smashing genre boundaries.  In terms of CRPGs, at least, it seems to be more the latter.

After taking off into space, you're given a "top-down" view of the sector of space you're currently in.  Aside from your shuttle, there's also a planet, a sun, and a space station with two other docked ships.  Flying into the planet will return you to the wilderness.  Of the three ships you can fly, only the shuttle has heat shields.  It's supposedly the only one that can survive re-entry, but I wasn't about to test it out and jeopardise my "no deaths" record.  Flying into a sun will kill you regardless of the ship you're flying.  Again, I didn't test it to make sure.

Commencing count-down, engines on.

Every ship has a different amount of Shields and Fuel.  The shuttle has 1,000 of each, but from what I could tell it doesn't have any weapons, so you want to dock at the space station and switch to another.  This can be tricky.  The "Enter" key activates the thrust, which moves you forward; the "/" key activates the retros, which slow your forward movement or move you backwards; the left and right arrows turn your ship around.  As you'd expect there's no gravity, so once you start moving you won't stop until you reverse that movement.  Docking at the station requires pixel-perfect precision; even if you're just one pixel off, you'll crash and sustain damage to your Shields.  It can be frustrating at first, but eventually I was able to eyeball it pretty accurately.

Of the two ships at the space station, one (the slightly fatter one to the left in the image above) has 5,000 fuel but only 100 Shields.  A single shot from the enemy will destroy it, so I'm not sure why you'd ever want to use it unless you're trying to challenge yourself.  The other ship (slightly skinnier, on the bottom in the image above) has 1,000 Fuel and 5,000 Shields, so it's a much safer bet.  Having high fuel is good, as running out leaves you drifting in space forever, but the other ship's Shields are just too low to even consider.

The goal of the section of the game is to find enemy ships and shoot them down.  Finding the enemy is done by using your long range scanner, activated with the (I)nspect command.  This gives you a small text-based read-out at the bottom of the screen, indicating what's in the surrounding sectors.  To travel to a sector, you need to face it, switch to the first-person view with the (V)iew command, then warp by using the (H)yperjump command.  This took me absolutely forever to get right.  I spent ages hyper-jumping, only to find that I hadn't moved at all.  Eventually I figured out that you need to give your ship a little thrust in the overhead view to get it to work; after that I was off, exploring sectors and looking for enemies to destroy.

I found some enemies pretty quickly; they're very obviously modelled after Imperial TIE Fighters from Star Wars (the movie's real name, don't give me none of that A New Hope bullshit).  You'll have to trust me, as the one screenshot I took doesn't capture it very well.  I ran into trouble immediately, though, because I was completely unable to hit them.  Combat happens in first-person view, and is a simple matter of getting a ship into your crosshairs before pressing (F)ire, but no matter how well I aimed I couldn't score a hit.  I ended up running out of Fuel and having to restart, which I guess counts as a death, albeit through no fault of my own.  I did a little internet research, and soon figured out the problem: I needed to run my emulator in Apple IIe mode, not the default Enhanced Apple IIe mode.  With this done, I was happily blasting TIE Fighters to smithereens, and well on my way to becoming a space ace.

Trust me, it's a TIE Fighter.

With 5,000 Shields the enemy ships presented little danger; they only deal 100 damage per hit.  The main danger of space combat is running out of Fuel, so it's imperative that between every one or two space battles you dock at a space station to refuel.  Every time you dock it costs 500 gold, but I suspect this is only a danger for those who go haring off into space as soon as the shuttle becomes available.  I tend to leave it late, at a point when I've got loads of money, so I don't recall it ever being a problem.

I have to say, I'm impressed with how smoothly the game runs its space combat.  The contrast between this segment and the dungeon exploration is night and day.  One takes literal seconds to render the walls between every move, and the other has a smoothly scrolling starfield.  Perhaps there's some trickery involved under the hood (and I'm sure the reduced screen size that you can see above has something to do with it), but whatever Garriott did with this part of the game, it runs really nicely.

Each occupied sector of space has two or three enemy ships, so I had to travel to about eight different occupied sectors to shoot down the required number of enemies.  This involved a decent amount of cautious backtracking, so that I could dock at space stations to refuel in between battles.  Each hyperjump drains 100 Fuel, and flying around within a sector drains it as well, so I was having to refuel every couple of combats.  I considered trying to see if it was possible to kill all of the enemies in space, but I honestly have no idea how big space is in Ultima, or if the enemies eventually respawn, so I thought better of it.  After becoming a space ace I immediately hyperjumped back to the sector with my home planet - I'd been keeping careful track of my movements so that I wouldn't get lost - docked at the space station, switched back to my shuttle, and landed near Castle Shamino.

It was time now to rescue a princess.  I wasn't too concerned, as I'd been able to do it much earlier in the game without too much difficulty.  Rescuing the princess involves killing a jester, unlocking her cell, and either killing or escaping from the guards as they give chase.  Last time I'd been able to outmaneuver the guards, but this time around I wasn't so lucky.  The guards cornered me, and I had to fight my way out, getting pummeled from multiple sides as I desperately hoped that the guard's hit points would run out before mine did.  They did (I had thousands of hp), and when I escaped I was told by the princess that I could find a time machine to the north-west.

It took me a while, but eventually I found the time machine on the island north-west of the fourth continent.  At this point I got a little nervous about whether I was strong enough to battle Mondain, so I went back to Shamino's castle to buy some hit points from him (he was unconcerned by my recent murder of his guards; the status of the castles and cities resets as soon as you leave them).  I got my hit points up to around 20,000.  I still had close to 25,000 gold left over, but I got bored of going through the process of buying more.  Besides, I figured that I was owed some sort of monetary reward for defeating Mondain.

Activating the time machine.

Having loaded up on hit points, I made may way back to the time machine, got inside, and inserted the four gems.  The machine whisked me into the past, where I came face-to-face with Mondain, who was in the process of creating his Gem of Immortality.  (I really cut it fine with this time travel business.  Couldn't I have landed a week or two earlier?)

Witness Mondain, about to get rekt.

The battle with Mondain happens in a top-down arena, using the same controls as in the wilderness.  Flames ignite all around you during the battle; I'm not sure if you can be damaged by them, but if it is possible I managed to avoid it.  Mondain hits hard; he was dealing over 700 points of damage to me with each attack, and managed to get me down to about 13,000 hp before he turned into a bat and tried to flee.

While he was fleeing, I took the opportunity to (G)et the gem.  This destroyed the gem, and dealt around 10,000 points of damage to me.  (I'll never forget that you need to use the (G)et command here, because the first time I played this game I kept walking into the gem and taking damage over and over.  I had to call a friend to get some advice from him, but he couldn't remember what to do.  In the end I just started pressing buttons on the keyboard, until G did it for me.)  There was nothing left to do but kill Mondain in bat form.  I managed to corner him against a wall, and after repeated attacks he was dead and I had won.

Mondain goes down in defete.

As with every game in the Ultima series (including Akalabeth) I was instructed to report my feat.  In later games that instruction tells you to report to Lord British, but here it tells you to report to California Pacific.  Obviously that's not viable any more, but Lord British himself is very accessible these days, so I reported my feat to him on Twitter.

I deactivated my Twitter account yesterday, so that
I can mostly avoid the US election. Interactions like
this are what will bring me back.

I love that Garriott takes the time to do this for people on Twitter.  He's very friendly, seems like an incredibly cool and down-to-earth guy, and is pretty high on the list of people I'd love to have a conversation with over some beverages.

Well, after many years I finally got this blog to the point where I could play Ultima again.  I had to cheat a little by going out of sequence, but I got there.  I have to say, it was well worth it; it might be the most fun I've had with a game on the blog.  It's certainly the most enjoyable of the CRPGs I've played.  As far as the RADNESS Index goes, I expect it to do very well indeed.  I don't think it will unseat Zork at the top, but I won't be surprised if it comes close.

PORTS OF CALL:

This game is a bit too big for me to play through it a second time so soon, and aside from that I'm not doing Ports of Call for the Priority List Games.  I'll play another version of the game when my chronological list gets to 1981, by which time I'll definitely be ready to play it again.  Taking a look at Mobygames, it seems that the only straight port of this version of the game was for Atari 8-bit, released by Sierra in 1983.  That's the version I'll play when I get to 1981.  All of the other ports were for the redesigned version of the game, called Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness, and released in 1986.  If this blog ever makes it to 1986, that's when I'll play the re-release.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: It's tempting to rate this game high for story and setting, because it is Ultima after all.  The thing is, what I'd be rating is barely present in this game at all.  This isn't Britannia, with its rich history and developed NPCs.  It isn't even Sosaria, as it would be named later.  If the manual is to be believed, the world is called Ultima, which at least makes some sense of the series' name for me, finally.  There's no rich history, the world is pretty sparse in its details, and the ultimate plot is to kill an evil wizard.  It doesn't sound that great when you boil it down, does it?

So yeah, the goal is cliched, but without a doubt this is the absolute best "kill the wizard" story that's been presented in a video game thus far.  How many others have you dog-fighting in space and travelling in a time machine? Sure, little of it makes sense.  Why are the princesses held captive?  Where does the sci-fi technology come from?  Why do the princesses hold the key to a time machine?  Who's piloting those ships you have to shoot down in space? You can rationalise this stuff away (and some have), but when you get down to it the details don't really matter, because the world feels so much vaster than anything presented in a game before.  Zork may be more interesting and detailed on a smaller scale, but no game before Ultima has spanned an entire world with multiple cities, castles and dungeons, as well as featuring a trip into outer space.  The details are still sparse, and much of the content is repetitive, but for the time its scope is unparalleled.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: The cities and castles feature plenty of characters: guards, shopkeepers, wenches, bards, jesters, princesses and kings.  The problem is that every city has the same shopkeepers and guards, and every castle has the same jesters and kings.  Interaction with them is also minimal: each type of character exists to serve one purpose and one purpose alone.  (Okay, so the kings serve two purposes.)  The game does better with its monsters, which are plentiful and with a lot of variety.  Unfortunately, only a few of the ones encountered in the dungeons have special abilities; the others are all just sacks of hit points, and the wilderness creatures don't even get unique icons.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Aesthetics: By modern standards Ultima isn't going to earn any plaudits for its graphics, but it looks very good for its day.  Okay, so the wireframe dungeons and the monsters therein are a bit crude, but the wilderness graphics are colourful and attractive. I'd be hard-pressed to find another CRPG of the time that looks as good as this.  Unfortunately there's no sound, aside from the odd beep when a blow is struck in combat.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Combat: In general terms the combat simply involves trading attacks with your enemy until someone is dead, but there's no separate combat interface, so every command is available to you.  As such you can cast spells, flee, or perform any other action that's normally available.  Not that you often need to; combat is rarely difficult beyond the first hour or so of play.  Once you have a few thousand hit points there's not much that can kill you.  Only the lower dungeon levels present a real threat, and that's more due to food-gobbling Gremlins than actual combat.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Mechanics: Ultima does a lot, and does most of it pretty well: wilderness exploration, dungeon exploration, and especially space combat.  It does perhaps use too many keyboard commands; is it necessary to have a command for (U)nlock and (O)pen?  Do (B)oard and (E)nter really need to be separate?  That said, it's pretty intuitive, and after one session I didn't need the reference card open any more.  The only major complaint I have in this category is with the sluggishness of the dungeon routines; it takes ages to redraw whenever you take a step or pass a turn.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: Given that I didn't die once during my play-through of Ultima (I don't count having to reboot because I was in the wrong emulator mode), it's tempting to mark this low.  After all, wouldn't that make it too easy?  It should be remembered, though, that I've played the game before.  I knew at the beginning that I needed to buy food.  I knew how to build hit points, and roughly where to go to advance in my quest.  I also know from previous experience that this game is quite challenging when you're unfamiliar with it.  To its credit, it doesn't have a lot of frustrating areas; only the Gremlins are truly annoying, and they can be avoided.  Ultima gets the difficulty balance about right.  Rating: 5 out of 7.

Fun: I've already said that this is the most fun I've had playing a game for the blog, and I stand by it.  That's probably because it's the first game that provides the type of gameplay that I really enjoy: I like CRPGs with long quests and a world to explore.  Most of the CRPGs before this have been heavily dungeon-based, and quite repetitive.  Ultima provides a lot of variety: if you're sick of exploring the wilderness, hit the dungeons. If you're sick of the dungeons, go shoot some spaceships.  If you're sick of all those, you could try robbing a town, or rescuing a princess. There's no shortage of things to do in Ultima.  Rating: 5 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. How can I not give Ultima the top marks here?  It's one of the first genuinely good CRPGs, it's the beginning of a major series, and it's extremely influential on a global scale.  It could even be said to be the first "open world" game, in its own primitive way.  It's tempting to bust the scale and give it more than 2 points, but I must restrain myself and stick to the rules.

The above categories total 27, which doubled gives a score of 54.  Add the two bonus points, and Ultima gets a RADNESS Index of 56.  That places it second overall, and on top of the CRPG list.  It's 4 points higher than Rogue, which was the only CRPG that I thought it might not beat.  Rogue is very good, but Ultima plays to my tastes a lot more, so I'm not surprised that it scored higher.

NEXT: My next game by Garriott is Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress, which is a disheartening 18 games away.  I must admit to being a little sad when I finished Ultima, and the temptation to go right on to its sequel was a strong one.  It's very possible that I might switch it with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain, just so I can get my fix six games earlier.

As for my next chronological game, that's Kadath, a Lovecraftian text adventure for the Altair, of all things.  My chances of emulating an Altair seem slim, so I'll be playing a port.  There's a later port for the Commodore PET that I couldn't find, and a still later one for the Commodore 64.  I suspect that's the one I'll have to play, so hopefully the differences between the versions are entirely cosmetic.

ADDENDUM: For anyone who wants to learn more about the inner workings of Ultima, I highly recommend the posts by Ahab over at Data Driven Gamer.  He really goes in depth into the code, and extracts pretty much all the data you could want, from all of the game's many modes.  It's excellent stuff.

Ultima: Through Farthest Lands and Deepest Dungeons

Having fully explored two continents, and completed the quests ordained by the kings of Castle Barataria, Castle Rondorlin, the Castle of Lord British and the Castle of the Lost King, there was little for me to do but head off across the ocean once more to find new land.  The third continent I discovered was - like the two before it - based on the same basic shape, with the cities and dungeons located in the same places.  I spent a good amount of time on mapping, even though by this point I had realised that it was pointless.  The only things I absolutely had to find were the castles and landmarks, and with the continents being nearly identical that wasn't hard.  What can I say, I like mapping games based on a grid, and I'll keep at it as long as the process isn't too frustrating.  In the case of Ultima I was far more powerful than the monsters I was encountering, so the mapping was fun.

A map of Ultima's third continent.

I've listed out the towns and dungeons for the previous continents, so I guess I should do it here as well for the sake of consistency.  Here are the towns on the third continent:

• Ponder, on the eastern side of the inlet on the south coast.  (There's a town called Ponder in Texas, which might be the inspiration for this name.)
• Nassau, on the north side of the central bay, not far from the castle. (Garriott grew up in Nassau Bay in Texas, so this is undoubtedly named after that city.)
• Stout, on the shore of the south-eastern lake.
• Clear Lagoon, on the north coast. (Garriott's hometown was in the Clear Lake Area, and there's apparently a Clear Lagoon in Texas City; either could be possible influences.)
• The City of Imagination, at the tip of the inlet near the east coast.
• The City of Wealth, to the north-east.
• The City of Poor, to the north-west.  (Check out that searing social commentary.)
• Gauntlet, in the central forest grove.

The dungeons are named as follows:

• The End.... (complete with ellipses), on the west coast.
• The Metal Twister, in the mountain range to the south-west.
• The Trolls Hole, on the south coast.
• The Guild of Death, on the small island in the centre of the bay.
• The Slow Death, at the tip of the peninsula on the east coast
• The Vipers Pit, which has two entrances: on west of the Slow Death, and the other on the continent's north-west, in a forest valley.
• The Tramp of Doom, on the north coast.
• The Long Death, in the mountain range north-west of Gauntlet.

The first of the castles I located was the Black Dragon's Castle, on the western side of the central bay. The quest he gave me was to "go forth and kill a Liche", so there was definitely more dungeon delving in my immediate future.

On the north side of the bay was the Castle of Olympus, where the king told me to "go and find the sign post".  This was a little less mythically epic than the other quests I'd been given, but I'll take my stat boosts where I can get them.  This continent has two landmarks: the Southern Sign Post, and the Sign Post.  The first of those is found on the east coast, and is connected to the mainland unlike its island-based counterparts on the previous two continents.  The Southern Sign Post features the Latin phrase "omnia mutantur" ("everything changes"), and gave me a boost to my Charisma.  The Sign Post, found on a mountain-ringed island to the north-west, was the object of my quest. It's Latin phrase is "ultima thule", and it gave me a boost to Stamina.  As with the other "landmark quests" I'd completed, the king of the Castle of Olympus rewarded me with a bonus to Strength when I returned to him.

Finding the Sign Post.

(A quick note about the phrase "ultima thule".  In ancient times it referred to the northernmost location mentioned in Greek and Roman literature, and later on it became a phrase representing any land beyond the borders of the known world.  It's difficult to guess where Garriott got the phrase from, but the Edgar Allen Poe poem "Dream-Land" does feature the phrase, as well as the line "Out of Space - out of Time".  It seems a likely connection.)

I did my Liche-hunting in the dungeon known as the Guild of Death.  The dungeon is located on a small island, but by this point I wasn't worried about the consequences of dying.  I'd accumulated enough hit points that I could survive pretty much anything the dungeons could throw at me.  I mapped my way down to level 7, found and killed a Liche almost instantly, and made my way back to the Black Dragon's Castle.  The king rewarded me with a blue gem, and the following hint: "the princess will help a space ace through time!".

Fighting a Liche.

That last hint was the one that I needed to piece everything together.  From hints obtained while drinking at the bar I knew that I needed to travel back in time and stop Mondain from creating his gem of immortality.  One of the kings had told me that I'd need a time machine to complete my quest, and another had told me that I needed four gems.  I'd found three of the gems, but no sign of the time machine. Now, with this new hint from the king, I knew that I had to rescue the princess in order to find it.  I'd rescued her before, but had received no special reward beyond gold and experience points.  To get that special reward I needed to become a "space ace", which the barman had previously told me required going to space and killing at least 20 enemy spaceships.  I now had three specific tasks: obtain the fourth gem, go to space and become a Space Ace, and rescue one of the princesses.

The third gem, and a vital clue.

I didn't feel ready to go to space yet, so I skimmed across the ocean in my air-car to the fourth continent.  This continent still uses the same template, but it's a little more broken up by rivers and the ocean.

The last continent!

Again, for the completist in me, I must list out all of the towns and dungeons.

• Dextron, on the western inlet.
• Gorlab, near the castle at the centre. (This is obviously Balrog spelled backwards, although in Ultima it should probably be spelled Norlab.)
• The City of Lost Friends, on the west coast of the northern section.
• The City of the Turtle, to the south-west.
• Bulldozer, on the east side of the southern bay.
• The City of Magic, near the south-eastern lake.
• The City of the Brother, on the island to the east.
• Wheeler, in the central forest grove. (This is another one that could be named after a town in Texas.)

And the dungeons:

• The Morbid Adventure, on the small island near the centre.
• Spine Breaker, to the far north-east.
• The Skull Smasher, on the north coast.
• Dungeon of Doom, in the mountains north-west of Wheeler.
• The Dead Cat's Life has two entrances, one in the mountains west of Wheeler and the other on the island in the southern bay.
• Dead Man's Walk, on the west coast.
• Hole to Hades, at the top of the southern peninsula.
• Free Death Hole, in the labyrinthine mountains to the east.

This continent's landmarks were the Grave of the Lost Soul, and the Eastern Sign Post.  The latter of these - found on the small island to the north - was very unhelpful, simply saying "go east to go east" and providing nothing in the way of a stat boost.  The Grave of the Lost Soul was the object of the quest I was given by the king of the White Dragon's Castle.  Entering it gave me a boost to my Stamina, and the Latin phrase "vae victis" ("woe to the vanquished").  As expected, I got a boost to my Strength from the king upon my return.

Oh yeah, visiting graves is a real helth-booster.

The last castle I located was the Castle of Shamino, a welcome surprise.  Shamino goes on to become one of the more well-known NPCs of the series, but at this point he's another alter ego of Garriott himself (Shamino Salle Dacil being his name in the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group of medieval reenactors and inveterate drunkards who bash each other with sticks).  Shamino gave me my final and most difficult quest: to slay a Balron.  (They were called Balrogs in Akalabeth, but here they get a rebranding.  A similar things happened to Balrogs in Dungeons & Dragons after some words from the Tolkien Estate, so I figure the same happened to Garriott or he was exercising caution to avoid any legal action.)

For this quest I had to delve all the way down to dungeon level 9, where the strongest monsters dwell.  I chose the Dungeon of Doom for its close overland proximity to the city of Wheeler, and as usual I set about mapping all of the levels along the way.  Everything was going very smoothly, until I had to spend some extended time on level 7 and 8.  On my last visit I'd only stayed around long enough to kill a Liche, but this time my desire to map everything led me into conflict with my most hated enemy of all: the dreaded Gremlin.

Seriously, fuck these guys.

Anyone who's played an early Ultima already knows what I'm talking about, and some of you might remember them from my coverage of Akalabeth, but goddamn do I hate Gremlins.  They don't target hit points, but instead on a successful hit they eat half of your food.  It doesn't matter how much you have, they'll eat half of it, and it only takes a few hits before things start to look grim.  Ultima gives you no leeway whatsoever in regards to food; once your food counter reaches zero, you're dead.  I had a number of very close calls while mapping levels 7 and 8, the closest the game has come to killing me so far.

What made this even worse is that I went to the
Magic Shop first by mistake.

While exploring level 8 I started to get annoyed with how many hits it was taking to kill the enemies, so I took some time to buff my stats by visiting various landmarks: I still needed to boost my Stamina, Charisma and Strength.  The first two were easily done by repeatedly visiting the Grave of the Lost Soul and the Southern Sign Post.  Strength was a little trickier, as it required completing a quest and returning to the king.  I spent a good while going back and forth between the Grave of the Lost Soul and the White Dragon's Castle.  Eventually, I managed to get all of my stats up to 90.  The manual claims that these scores can be raised to 99, but if there's a way to do it it's not by visiting landmarks or completing quests.

I got myself into another dilemma at about this point: I could no longer buy weapons or armour.  My Reflect Suit had been eaten by a Gelatinous Cube, but when I returned to town to buy another one I was told that I couldn't carry any more stuff.  I tried dropping and selling some things, but it still didn't fix the problem.  All I had left armour-wise was a Vacuum Suit, which I equipped before realising that I might have made a mistake.  You see, the Vacuum Suit is vital for space travel in Ultima.  Vital as in you die if you haven't got one.  If I lost this one, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to buy another one, and if that was the case I'd have to start over.

When I returned to the Dungeon of Doom, I used Ladder Down spells to quickly move through levels 3 and 4, and avoid all Gelatinous Cubes.  Once on the lower levels, I noticed that I was dealing more damage, and that the monsters were doing less to me in return; my stat boosting had paid off, albeit in a small way.  The monsters on level 9 were still doing around 250 points of damage per blow, so I didn't want to stick around for too long.  The second monster I fought on level 9 was a Balron, and even with my stats boosted it took absolutely ages to kill.  I'm lucky nothing else snuck up behind me while I was fighting the thing.

The blank stare of evil.

With the Balron dead, I zipped out of the dungeon and returned to Shamino. He rewarded me with a white gem, but unlike the other kings he didn't have a hint for me.  Instead, he allowed me to take 9 items from his stores.  I made straight for the Armour room, and came out with a few Reflect and Vacuum Suits, so I needn't have been so worried about my inventory problems; for whatever reason, I had no problem adding items to my inventory here.

With all four gems in my possession it was tempting to press on and complete the game, but instead I ventured back into the Dungeon of Doom to check out what other monsters roamed the lowest dungeon levels (and also to confirm that dungeon level 10 is the lowest depth).  The monsters found on dungeon levels 7 and 8 are as follows:

• Liche. A disembodied head, as I described in my last post.
• Wandering Eye. A beholder stand-in that thankfully has no special abilities.
• Tangler.  A kind of weird amorphous creature, I'm not even sure what it's meant to be.
• Wraith. Does a lot of damage, but seems to have no special abilities.
• Gremlin. I've described their food-stealing abilities above. Possibly my all-time most hated RPG enemy.

These monsters are on level 9 and 10:

• Invisible Seeker.  They don't have any special abilities, but as the name says they're invisible. You have to guess where they are to attack them.
• Mind Whipper.  Aside from looking pretty rad, I suspect that these stand-ins for D&D's Mind Flayer drain Intelligence.  I'm not completely sure, but I did notice that my Intelligence score had been lowered after this dungeon foray, and they seem like the most likely culprit.
• Zorn. A stand-in for the D&D Xorn. Xorns eat gems in D&D, but in Ultima they have no special abilities.
• Daemon.  Tough, but with no special abilities.
• Balron.  Even tougher, but also with no special abilities.

Not gonna lie, this guy looks pretty dope.

A baggy-shirted Daemon.

That's its mouth on top of its head, if you're wondering.

The most accurately depicted monster in the game.

I did press on playing after this, but I'll end the post here.  My next goal is to head into space to become a Space Ace, which involves Ultima inexplicably becoming a 3-D space combat game.  I mentioned before that this game is wild, didn't I?

Ultima: Dungeon Fundamentals

Having explored two of the game's continents, I had been given a number of quests by the kings of four separate castles.  I'd yet to complete two of those quests.  The Lost King, residing on the first continent I explored, had told me to "go now and kill a Gelatinous Cube".  On the second continent, the king of Castle Rondorlin said that I needed to kill a Carrion Creeper (a pretty obvious stand-in for D&D's Carrion Crawler).  I was getting a little tired of mapping the wilderness - a probably side-effect of noticing how similar the two continents are - so I decided that now was the time to mix it up with a bit of dungeon exploration.

Now that I think of it, the game doesn't tell you anywhere that these monsters are found in the dungeons.  I'm being guided by knowledge from previous play-throughs, so I know where to go, but someone unfamiliar with Ultima would be completely in the dark here.  I'm trying my best to approach this game from the standpoint of someone who hasn't played it before, but it really is impossible. The best I can do is try to call out these moments when I notice them.

I left off my last session near the castle of Lord British.  The nearest dungeon was Montor to the north-east, so I chose that one to explore.  I suppose that Mondain's Gate to Hell is actually closer, but it's also across the ocean, so I ignored it.  I'm not sure what happens when you die in this version of Ultima, and I don't want to risk being stranded on an island without my air-car.  So Montor and its easy overland route seemed like the safe choice.

A dungeon exploration screenshot from an earlier session.

The dungeons in Ultima run off a similar engine to Akalabeth, albeit one that seems to run much slower.  The view switches from the tile-based overhead view of Ultima's wilderness exploration to a first-person perspective.  Movement uses the same keys, with Enter moving forward, the "/" key turning you around, and the left and right arrows turning you in the appropriate direction.  If you leave the keyboard alone for a few seconds a turn will pass, so it's kind of in real time.

Every dungeon level has the same basic layout, with the only impassable walls being those shown below.

The major difference between each level is the position of the various doors and secret doors.  As with Akalabeth, a door takes up an entire square on the map, which I always find confusing at first.  Adding to that confusion is that the doors are sometimes replaced by chests or impassable force fields when you transition between levels. The ladders up and down between levels are always in the positions marked above, with up and down alternating from level to level.  The only exception is on level 1 where the ladder up is in the bottom right corner.  This all makes dungeon navigation fairly trivial, although I've still been diligently mapping the levels.  Here are some examples from the Dungeon of Montor:

Brown squares are doors and blue squares are
secret doors. P denotes an open pit, while T is a
hidden pit that dumps you to a lower level.

Monsters roam the levels in a seemingly never-ending supply; I don't think levels can be cleared out like they could in Akalabeth.  Combat involves trading blows with the (A)ttack command, as in the wilderness, but there are additional tactical concerns.  You can be surrounded on four sides, but you can also use positioning to your advantage, and fire at monsters from a few squares away if you have a missile weapon.  Speaking of which, it seems that the bug from Akalabeth that allowed the player to fire through walls has been eliminated.

Killing monsters rewards you with gold, as well as experience.  Any experience earned in the dungeon gives you double that amount in hit points when you make it back to the surface.  Grinding on the first few dungeon levels can net you a lot of hit points, but at around level 6 I found that I was losing more hit points than I earned.

Each grouping of two dungeon levels has it's own set of monsters, some of which have their own special abilities. I'll run through those that I've encountered so far.

Dungeon level 1-2:

• Ranger. A fairly weak enemies with no special abilities.
• Skeleton, ditto.
• Bat.
• Giant Rat. They seem a little stronger than the other enemies on these levels.
• Thief. Not that strong, but on a successful hit they will steal one of your unequipped weapons. I lost most of the weapons I'd acquired at the Pillars of the Argonauts in this manner.

Dungeon level 3-4:

• Giant Spider.
• Viper.
• Cyclops.
• Orc.
• Gelatinous Cube.  This monster will dissolve your armour on their first hit.  They can also be difficult to see at times, being depicted as a transparent square, which fits their D&D abilities really well.

Fighting a Gelatinous Cube with a coffin in the foreground.

Dungeon level 5-6:

• Ettin, a kind of two-headed giants cribbed from D&D.
• Minotaur.
• Carrion Creeper. These guys are depicted graphically as crawling on the roof. This doesn't stop them from being blocked by hidden pits though.
• Mimic.  They are graphically identical to treasure chests.
• Lizard Man. They remind me of the absurd power levels you can reach in Akalabeth by transforming yourself into one of these monsters. Whenever I fight them here I like to think that I'm fighting an adventurer who has done just that.

Dungeon level 7-8:

• Wandering Eye.  They look similar to Beholders from D&D. They don't have any of the special abilities from D&D thankfully. In future Ultima installments they'll be known as Gazers.
• Liche.  They're depicted as floating heads.  I suspect that Richard Garriott was thinking here of D&D's demi-lich, which is a lich that has decayed to the point where only its skull is left.

I haven't explored any deeper than level 7, and I didn't stick around on that level for any great length of time.  I have no idea how deep the dungeons go.  I suspect ten levels, although the dungeons in Akalabeth were theoretically infinite.  I'll probably have finished dungeon delving in my next post.

In addition to monsters, there are coffins and treasure chests that contain gold.  I haven't encountered any traps on the treasure chests, but sometimes when I open a coffin there's a monster inside.  There are also pits.  Some are visible, and you can walk over them freely, or use them to drop down to a lower level.  The ones that are invisible will dump you down to a lower level without warning, but you can find them by using the (I)nspect command from one square away.  You can also avoid them by carrying rope and spikes, which can be bought at the weapon store.  I've noticed that these hidden pits only ever appear in the spaces between two impassable walls, so they're pretty easy to find.  Monster won't walk over them (even the monsters that can fly or crawl on the ceiling), so that's another way of figuring out where they are.

Some squares contain force fields, which look like laser barriers and are impassable.  You can't shoot through them either.  I gather that these force fields can be created by characters with the Create spell, and likewise gotten rid of with the Destroy spell.  I don't have access to either spell, so my only recourse is to go around them.

A Carrion Creeper behind a force field. The square I'm in has
a ladder going up, viewed from the side. You can't (K)limb a 
ladder unless you're facing it.

It didn't take long for me to complete my first quest; I had loads of hit points, and Gelatinous Cubes are found on level 3, which isn't too deep.  Along the way I did some mapping, and tested out a bunch of my new weapons.  The Triangle (a type of magic sword) worked here, and did quite a bit of damage.  For some reason it hadn't worked for me in the wilderness, I'm not sure what's going on there.  After a bit of experimentation I went back to my trusty Blaster, which does high damage and can be used at range.

At first I was pretty much impervious on the first few levels, probably because of the Reflect Armour that I was wearing.  That changed after I fought a Gelatinous Cube, and my armour got dissolved.  I was taking about 50 points of damage per attack on level 3, which isn't much when you have a few thousand to spare, but I decided not to stick around.  I had some other suits of armour, but for some reason the (R)eady command doesn't give you the option to put armour on when you're in the dungeon.  I'm not sure if this is a deliberate choice, an oversight, or a bug, but it's pretty annoying.  As soon as I left the dungeon I had to go to Paws and buy a new set of Reflect Armour.

Upon returning to the Lost King to report the completion of my quest (presumably with a handful of dead Gelatinous Cube as proof), I was rewarded with a red gem.  I was also told that I would need four more gems to complete my quest.  Four gems, four castles, and I suspect four monsters to hunt down...  Sounds simple enough.

I returned to the Dungeon of Montor, intending this time to find and kill a Carrion Creeper.  I decided to load up on spells along the way.  There are eleven spells in the game, but I haven't done much experimenting with them at the moment.  Four of them I wasn't able to buy: Destroy, Create, Blink, and Kill; those are restricted to Wizard characters.  (This pretty much guarantees that I'm going to play this game as a Wizard when it comes up again in my regular chronology.)  I bought ten each of the remaining spells, but the only one I've got much use out of so far is Ladder Up.  Casting it creates a ladder that leads to the dungeon level above, or to the wilderness if you're on level 1; it's a handy quick escape if you get into trouble, or find yourself lost.  I gather that spells can fail on occasion, but I've already juiced my Wisdom and Intelligence scores up to the point that my spells always work.

Back in Montor, I made my way down to level 5, skipping through levels 3 and 4 quickly so that I could avoid having my armour dissolved.  I had a bit of mapping trouble this time.  As I noted above, the dungeon doors are sometimes replaced by coffins, chests or force fields, and before I realised this I got completely turned around and lost.  I actually had to use a bunch of Ladder Up spells to escape and get my bearings; the monsters on the deeper levels can do in excess of 100 points of damage per hit, which really adds up.  I haven't died in this game so far, and I plan to keep it that way, so I made a quick retreat from the dungeon before going back a little wiser in terms of my mapping skills.

Defeating a Carrion Creeper

Despite getting lost I had managed to kill a Carrion Creeper, so I flew my air-car east to the second continent to see the king of Castle Rondorlin.  He rewarded me with a green gem, and another hint: I would need to use a time machine to beat the game.  I knew this already from hints acquired while drinking at the pub, but there's a good chance that a player might get this clue first.

Being rewarded with a green gem.

I guess I'm about halfway done with the game: I have two more dungeon quests to complete, and two more continents to explore, which I expect will take up the bulk of my remaining time with the game.  I'm still enjoying it, although the sluggishness of the dungeon loading is starting to wear on me.  I came into this game determined to map every square inch of it, but I'm wavering in that goal where the dungeons are concerned; there are an awful lot of them, I don't know how deep they go, and I don't even know if they're randomly generated or the same from game to game.  If anyone is aware of how Ultima's dungeons are generated I'd appreciate them letting me know, because I'd rather not expend any effort on further pointless mapping.

Before I finish up, I wanted to mention that I accidentally found the game's "attract mode", or demo, or whatever you want to call it.  Ultima uses two disks, one of which has the game and other of which has the information for your character.  If you boot from the second disk it launches the demo, which runs through a quick game intro showing off its various modes. I was hoping this might have given some extra backstory, but it doesn't.  It does have this radical skull, though.

This would make a great tattoo.

I suspect that this screen is used when a character dies, but because I'm so frikkin awesome at Ultima I haven't seen it yet.  I think I'll be able to keep it that way unless the monsters on the deeper dungeon levels get really tough, or I screw up when I go to space.  A "no deaths" run would make me feel pretty good though.

Ultima: Knowledge, Lasers, and Alcohol-Related Disasters

At the end of my last post on Ultima, I'd just finished exploring the first continent.  I'd been tasked by Lord British with finding the Tower of Knowledge, and my plan was to continue exploring the wilderness in the hope that I'd stumble across it.  I didn't have to wait long; I struck out east from my starting location and found the Tower of Knowledge on an island north-east of the continent.  I entered the tower, and was given a bonus to my Intelligence.  (Entering the tower also gives you the message "turris scientia magnopere", which is pretty much latin for tower of knowledge.)

Completing my quest for the Tower of Knowledge.

With my quest somewhat abruptly completed, I made my way back to Lord British's castle.  Rather than sail all the way around I decided to land on the east coast at the City of Grey and travel overland.  Along the way I stopped in Paws, and being flush with gold I bought a cart to travel in.  After some experimentation, I figured out the differences between walking on foot, using a horse, and using the cart.  Walking uses 1 unit of food per two steps, riding a horse uses slightly less than that (sometimes it takes 2 steps per unit of food, and sometimes 3), and the cart uses a unit of food per 3 steps.  So the cart is the most efficient method of overland travel.

From Paws I went to see Lord British, and he rewarded me for completing the quest with a +5 bonus to Strength.  I spoke to him again, hoping for another quest, and was told once again to seek out the Tower of Knowledge.  So I went back to the tower, got another Intelligence bonus, and returned to Lord British. He awarded me with more Strength, and once again tasked me with finding the Tower of Knowledge.  Is this really all that Lord British does in this game?  Grant you some strength bonuses for a pretty simple quest?  It's a far cry from his future role as the series' central NPC; here he's just one of many kings, and perhaps not even the most important of them.

Lord British's sole contribution to the
fall of Mondain.

I had plenty of money, so I decided to test out what would happen if I offered Lord British some gold. As I suspected, he rewarded me with an increase in hit points.  I gave him 90 gold (the most possible), and got back 135 hit points in return.  After a few rounds of this I had over 600 hit points, which I decided was plenty to continue my wilderness exploration.

Before heading off across the ocean though, I stopped in at Paws again and went to the pub.  I wanted to get some more rumours, but the first one I got was hardly helpful: "Bub, you best know this is a great game!"  Yes Richard, we know.  The second clue I got, after a few more drinks, was much more enlightening:

"Bub, you best know that over 1000 years ago, Mondain the wizard created an evil gem. With this gem he is immortal and cannot be defeated. The quest of --Ultima-- is to traverse the lands in search of a time machine. Upon finding such a device, you should go back in time to the days before Mondain created the evil gem and destroy him before its creation. If you do this, you will save the universe and win the game!!!"

Bub, you best know that I can break the fourth wall.

It's a little weird to be getting this vital plot information from a bartender, and even weirder for said bartender to completely break kayfabe by talking about "winning the game".  And unless there's a piece of documentation I've missed, this is the only place where Ultima tells you about its plot.  Despite being the big bad guy of the first game, Mondain seems to be a bit of a non-factor in the present day.  None of the kings mention him.  I guess all of the monsters infesting the countryside and the dungeons work for him, but Mondain himself is nowhere to be seen. It would be cool if you could find him in the present day and fight against him in his invincible form.

I also wonder how this fits with the plot of Akalabeth, where Mondain is said to have already been defeated by Lord British.  Did British drive Mondain away at some point, before Mondain made a comeback?  Or is Akalabeth technically set between Ultima I and II?

Now with an actual motivation, I returned to my frigate and set off across the ocean to the east.  It only took me about 30 "steps" until I found land, a small island with another landmark.  This was the Pillar of the Argonauts, and when I entered I was reward with... a dagger?  Hardly the most useful of treasures, but I kept it anyway.

A little further east I came to the coast, and started exploring in an anti-clockwise direction, stopping at cities and dungeons when I found them.  To the south-west of the continent I found an island with another landmark, the Pillar of Ozymandias.  Entering this gave me a quote from the poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as a bonus to my Wisdom score.

The cities I found on the second continent were named as follows:

• Owen, in a forest grove near the west coast
• The City of the Snake, in a bay to the south-west
• Linda, on the south coast
• Wolf, on a south-east peninsula
• John, in a bay near the east coast
• Arnold, on an island near the middle of the continent
• Gerry, on the east coast of the north-western region
• Helen, on the west coast of the large north-eastern island

Aside from the cities of the Snake and the Wolf, I suspect that Garriott was namechecking friends and family here, or possibly people who helped him work on the game.  I know that the code for the overland tile graphics was done by Ken Arnold, which accounts for one of the city names.  His parents were named Owen and Helen, which accounts for two more.  I'm sure Garriott scholars can fill me in on the rest.

I also found the following dungeons:

• The Labyrinth, near the west coast
• Where Hercules Died, south-east of the above
• The Horror of the Harpies (there are two dungeons with this name, one south-east of Where Hercules Died, and the other on the large north-eastern island)
• The Gorgon's Hole, on the south coast
• The Dead Warrior's Fight, at the tip of a peninsula on the east coast
• Advari's Hole, on an island near the middle of the continent
• The Savage Place, on the maze-like island to the north
• Scorpian Hole, to the north-west

I also found two castles, the Castle Barataria (on the central island) and the Castle Rondorlin (on the mainland north-west of that).  The king of Castle Barataria tasked me with finding the Pillar of Ozymandias; easily done, since I already knew where it was.  The king of Castle Rondorlin wanted me to find and kill a Carrion Creeper.

At this point I'd pretty much fully explored the continent.  Here are the two continents side-by-side.

Two remarkably similar continents.

Notice anything?  If you turn the second continent on its side and flip it, it's exactly the same layout as the first, with some ocean thrown in to mix it up a bit.  Even the cities, dungeons, castles and landmarks are found in the same places.  I wonder if this was done due to laziness or expedience, or if it was a clever way of getting around memory limitations?  I know there are books out there that go into the creation of the series, I really need to get my hands on one.

After visiting Castle Barataria, I went to the city of Arnold right next door, and discovered that some new methods of transport were available: an air-car and a shuttle.  I was definitely not feeling ready for space travel yet, so I didn't buy the shuttle; I wanted to hold off until I'd fully explored the world I was on.  I was more than ready to buy an air-car, though, and it was every bit as great as I'd been hoping.  Not only was it capable of skimming across the ocean, but it could also go on land; its only restriction was an inability to fly over mountains and forests.  It also had lasers, which were more powerful than my frigate's cannons.  I abandoned my frigate, and set off in my new air-car, with an icon that looked suspiciously like Luke Skywalker's X-34 landspeeder from Star Wars.

Using a Star Wars vehicle to shoot lasers at a Scottish cryptid.
This game is bananas.

It's a shame that the documentation of Ultima is so open about the game's space travel elements.  It's one of the biggest sections of the manual, and there's a space shuttle right there on the front cover.  Otherwise, there's no mention of the various technological weapons and modes of transportation that are eventually introduced.  I mean, the mash-up of elements in this game is still buck-wild, but I feel like they would have been even more effective if they weren't signposted so heavily.  I guess Garriott had to put the space ship control instructions somewhere though, and at this stage of video game development it wasn't going to be in an in-game tutorial.

I hit up the Pillars of Ozymandias to complete the quest I'd just been given, and along the way I also checked out the Pillars of the Argonauts again.  This time I was rewarded with a mace, a slightly better weapon than the dagger I'd been given last time.  Castle Rondorlin is very close to the Pillars of the Argonauts, so I decided to test a theory, shuttling back and forth between the two to see what I would get.  Sure enough, every time I visited the Pillats of the Argonauts I was rewarded with a stronger weapon, from regular stuff like swords and axes, to magical items like wands and amulets, to sci-fi stuff like light swords, phazors and blasters.  Eventually I had acquired a full complement of weapons, and when I wasn't shooting my enemies with the lasers on my air-car I was firing at them with my blaster.

Every weapon in the game.

There were a few weapons I couldn't use, though.  The wand, staff, and amulet had no effect; either I need to be a different class, or they're used to cast spells somehow.  The triangle, said in the manual to be a type of magic sword, also didn't work.  Not sure what's going on there, unless it's also restricted by class.

After that I went to a town to check out what armour was available, and was happy to see that Vacuum Suits and Reflect Suits were on sale.  I bought one of each, and equipped the Reflect Suit.

Having just cheesed my way into the best weapons in the game, I decided to do the same with my stats.  I started with the Pillars of Ozymandias, going back and forth between there and the City of the Snake until I got my score to 90.  The higher your score is, the lower the bonus you receive; by the time my score was in the 80s I was only getting 1 point per visit.  The manual says that the maximum attribute score is 99, but once I got to 90 I the bonus I was getting per visit was +0.  It's possible that multiple visits might be required at this point to raise a score by 1, but I was satisfied for the moment.

I then returned to the first continent, and did the same thing at the Pillars of Protection and the Tower of Knowledge, raising my Agility and Intelligence respectively.  This time I tried alternating between the two landmarks rather than visiting cities in between, and that worked; it also made the process quite a bit faster.  Three of my six attributes were at the maximum possible score (or near-maximum, if 99 is possible).

I was getting towards the end of my session, but I thought I'd stop back in at Paws to get some more pub rumours.  The first one I got was either a question or a warning: "Bub, you best know to watch the wench?"  I tried a few more times, until I finally found out the hard way the consequences for drinking too much: I was seduced by the wench, who stole all of my gold.

Is the the first CRPG where you can sleep with a prostitute?

This was a potentially fatal disaster.  I only had about 100 units of food, and nothing to buy more with.  It was a bit late at night for me to want to go grinding for gold in a dungeon, so I succumbed to the lure that every Ultima player eventually falls foul of.  It was time for a bit of theft and murder.

I went to the food store to try the (S)teal command.  It only worked when I was behind the counter, which is to say that it didn't work, and I was caught red-handed.  A couple of the guards gave chase, but with my new weapons and armour I took care of them.  Then I murdered the shopkeep, and made a few dozen attempts to steal some food.  None of them were successful, so figured that this was a bust.  It was time to try something else.

In my last post, I'd heard the pub rumour that the princess would offer a great reward to anyone who rescued her.  There's a captive princess in every castle, and a jester who wanders around singing about their possession of the key; to pull this off, I'd have to get the key from the jester, open the princess's cell, and escape from the castle without getting killed by the guards.

I was wary of taking on so may guards though, so I did a test run, fighting the guard at the entrance to the Castle of Lord British.  I killed him, but it cost me far too many hit points; there was no way I'd survive if I tried to fight my way out.  Instead, I decided to make a mad dash for it.  At first I tried the steal command near the jester, but that didn't work.  There was nothing else to do but murder the poor soul, and take the key.  Then I high-tailed it to the cell with guards in pursuit, and let the princess out.  She followed me as I raced out of the castle, soaking up hits as the guards attacked me while I fled.  Thankfully the guards weren't all that good at boxing me in, and I had more than enough hit points to make it out.

Making a mad dash for freedom.

Upon escaping from the castle, the princess rewarded me with 3,000 gold, experience, and hit points.  These were exactly what I needed to get out of my cash-strapped predicament, and a potential death by starvation.  The rumour I'd been told had suggested that I'd get an extra reward if I was 8th level or higher.  I'd already reached 9th level by that point, but I didn't get anything extra.  I remember that the princess is the one who gives you the time machine, and I thought that's what would happen here.  It didn't, and now I suspect that there are other things I need to do first.

My sweet, life-saving reward.

All told that was a pretty fruitful session, with the aim of the game revealed, one continent fully explored, three of my stats maxed out, the best weapons and armour obtained, and a princess rescued.  I almost came to disaster near the end, but those are the moments that make success all the sweeter.  Next time around, I think I'll do some dungeon exploration, I have quests to kill a Gelatinous Cube and a Carrion Creeper, and it's about time I got to it.