I had a nice, lengthy session of Might and Magic this time, with plenty of progress. Since there’s a lot that happened, I’ll try not to go into details too much.

B-2 Wilderness

Since I explored B-1, B-3 and C-2, I decided to go fill out the blanks and explore B-2 as well. I thought it was going to be a minor area, but it ended up being quite complicated.

There was an ice princess, whoever that is, giving me a riddle in a secret area:

Conqueror of worlds, maker of dreams, the greatest force of all, yet elusive it seems.

At first, I tried with “mind”, but it was wrong, so I got teleported to the west. Later on, I guessed it as “love” and got a diamond key. Even later on, I returned here and got the same riddle again. I answered it again and got a bronze key. I realized I could get infinite bronze keys like this. Since they sell for 250G each, it’s possible to earn money this way, but I’m not sure how effective that is.

• Other than that, I found a message, carved in a tree:

Carved in a tree: 9-9 Raven’s Lair

• I found two extremely tough fixed encounters. One was against a black knight and a group of assassins, while the other was against a lich and a pack of mummies. The black knight (or was it dark knight?) hits for 100+ damage, so I don’t stand a chance.
• The lich encounter cost me a Bracer of Defense, AC4 and a Great Bow +2, because I haven’t been saving my game often enough.
• It was here that I learned what the Time Distortion spell does – it allows me to flee combat, almost always. With that and the clerical spell Surface, future fights and exploration will be much safer.
• Generally speaking, random encounters seem extremely frequent in B-2, far more frequent than C-2, for instance.

Eventually, I got the idea that the Bronze key might open the door below Portsmith and I ended up being right, but this only happened after I got out of Raven’s Lair.

Raven’s Lair, the Warrior’s Stronghold

Raven’s Lair had a nice, simple layout which sort of reminded me of a key, before I fully mapped it. There’s two symmetrical areas in the middle, a web of secret passages to the west, a line of encounters following with a pretty much impossible Rakshasa encounter to the east and a cell complex to the north.

There are two key points in this dungeon:

• A large room holds a ruby which gave me another riddle:

Glass that glitters, rubies that glow, when I twinkle I cast a rainbow. What am I?

My first thought was prism, or something of the sort. It ended up being “crystal”, which was close enough. Luckily, answering incorrectly would simply send me to the next room, so I was easily able to guess it. My reward was a crystal key.

• Raven’s Lair has multiple levels.

There are stair leading down in one of the rooms. Since level one was tough enough for me, I decided not to explore deeper right now. Instead, when I mapped most of the top floor, I got out. I had the bronze key to try out.

Dungeon Below Portsmith, B-3

As expected, the bronze key opened the bronze door. The front area, prior to the bronze door, was infested with orcs and ogres, as I already said. The inner area, on the other hand, was filled with demons. It even says so on the central gate:

Demons in conference, do not disturb.

Other than that, the dungeon had several other things of interest:

• Lots and lots of doors, lots and lots of demon encounters.
• An extremely tough encounter against high level demons in the large central room. Luckily, it can be avoided.
• A set of magical pools which the party can enter to gain an effect.
  • One gave +4 Might to “everyone worthy”, which turned out to simply be everyone. I think it’s permanent.
  • One switched everyone’s gender. Now I have 4 females and 2 males and all of them have very weird names. This would have been useful with the town above, but I didn’t know what would happen, so I didn’t leave the girls upstairs. At least I have 4 girls and 2 guys now, which is a bit easier.
  • One revealed a bag of treasure with a Scimitar+2, which I can’t use because everyone has a good alignment.
  • Two simply poisoned my party or made them sick. I can heal both of these afflictions now, so it wasn’t really an issue.
  

  Dust demons cast sleep and hit for pretty high damage.

That was pretty much it. Other than the demon group in the center, this dungeon is fully mapped and pretty much cleared.

Korin Bluffs Cave, South of Portsmith, B-3

Things changed and I’m stronger now, so I returned to this twisted maze. I got through the traps with simple persistence, since I don’t know of any method to detect a trap before stepping on it. I could now travel more easily, so even getting teleported to C-2, which happened a few times, wasn’t a huge deal.

I got to the final room and found a wizard named Ranalou there.

I am the wizard Ranalou. Are you here to use the portals (Y/N)?

(Y) Good, inside this room are 6 portals, each of which leads to a castle. The statue of judgement requires you to find one prisoner from each of these castles before you may be found worthy.

(N) Then be gone! (Teleport back to start)

So, now I knew what to do with the two prisoners I found in Castles Blackridge and I also know there are more. I couldn’t find a way to figure out which portal leads to which castle, so I figured it out by trying to use them. Once that task was done, I went back to this “laboratory” and searched for secret areas.

There were a few. I realized the place holds even more Thundranium. I found two more at the end of corridors laid out similarly to the first one. Each had a bunch of encounters and each had a portal trap which took me across the world map. It was annoying, but I got through it.

There was one more, secret portal room with portals leading to each of the five towns. I thought this would be useful when I found it, but later on, I figured out the Fly spell and it pretty much became useless.

There were two small rooms with caged “experimental monsters”. I could beat them with some luck, but I didn’t bother. I guess they belong to the wizard Ranalou.

Why “Korin Bluffs”? Because of what happened in the next section.

B-3 Wilderness

I was here and I just figured out a few spells, namely Fly and Water Walking, so I decided to explore the bay with the later spell. There was an island at the center with a couple of encounters and a lookout point, telling me what I can find in the four cardinal directions:

Atop this peak looking:
N – A cave beyond White Wolf.
E – Large beasts above Wyvern Peaks
S- Distant uncharted isles.
W- A pirate ship beyond Korin Bluffs

So, Korin Bluffs is to the west of the island, so I decided to start calling the cave the “Korin Bluffs Cave”. B-4 will be called the “Uncharted Isles” and C-3 will contain the “Wyvern Peaks”.

I thought the cave mentioned would be in the unexplored area close to White Wolf castle, but it wasn’t. I found a few hidden passages there and ended up in two secret areas filled with random encounters and ending with a teleport trap taking me to the lookout point above. I wasted a bunch of time getting through both, but at least I got a lot of experience, as well as some items and I also managed to pretty much fully map the B-3 wilderness. There’

s only one unmapped tile I have left, but I can’t find a way to enter it, so for now, I’ll assume it’s completely inaccessible.

Mastery

I’m slowly getting into the mindset of the game. I started using spells I have on my disposal regularly, I memorized key sequences so the battles are much quicker and I’m even memorizing spells. Fly, Jump, Water Walking, all of this is becoming extremely useful now. I like that there’s basically no direction for me to go to. I can do things in any order I please, as long as I’m able to survive, but slowly, the story and the game are unfolding in front of me, no matter how I do it. It’s refreshing to experience this type of game design.

Oh, by the way, based on the fly spell, it looks like there are a total of 20 overworld areas in Might and Magic Book One, labelled A-1 through E-4. Right now, I managed to visit five and almost fully map four. I guess I have a long way to go.

Notes

I also decided to change how I’m doing this a bit. The various map formats, their uploading and handling, etc., is taking far too much of my time. From now on, I’ll supplying the final images of maps with notes here, but I will also bee linking to my Might and Magic Book One Google Drive folder, which I’ve made public for viewing, but not for editing (in case we have nasties here). If you want, you can always make your own copies of all the files.

• Might and Magic Book One – Google Drive Maps Folder

If you want my working map files, you can find them at the bottom. They all all Excel files whose names start with Maps. The 0-0 file is a template.

Also, I seem to have made a mistake with one of my previous postings. I somehow got into my head that it’s Blackridge West, when it’s in fact Blackridge South. I’ll make a correction in the final files, but I won’t be changing the posting. I like to keep my mistakes visible.

Related Posts:

• Might and Magic Book One [20] – Game Guides
• Might and Magic Book One [19] – Game Completed!
• Might and Magic Book One [18] – King Alamar and the Fabled Building of Gold
• Might and Magic Book One [17] – Approaching Endgame
• Might and Magic Book One [16] – Sex Change and Ruby Whistles