Ultima V Days 4 , 5 and 6!

Oh man three days of intense gaming to talk about! First things first, this game is GREAT! Oops I said it once or twice before didn't I? Well I'm saying it again, this game is RAD. Loving it!

Now I'm checking out screenshots of my first day and I barely remember what I did. Let's see.

1. I seem to have gotten the word of power INFAMA from the sleepy guy.
2. Learned about the HMS Cape's plans.

DAY I

Oh yes! That's a good story. So here I am learning about the plans so I immediately head to Britain to have a chat with Master Hawkins. Or is it North Britanny? I think it's North Britanny. Whatever.

Here I am and I realize that Hawkins is the merchant and merchants don't speak! I'm a bit perplexed at that revelation so I ask the little dude in his shop about it and he tells me that the master lost his plans! WHAT! Now I'm panicking a bit because no one seems to know where the damn plans are! I decide to loot the place just in case the bastard left them in his own shop and there they were, in a desk at the end of his shop! Whew!





So what else did I do? Oh darn that's the day I went to Blackthorn's castle! I had gotten the badge from that crazy woman on her island and I felt ready to try my luck at the crown. Armed with the badge and the carpet I headed for the castle. It was actually quite easy overall since the guards would leave me alone after I told them the password of the oppression. I just headed up until I reached the crown, grabbed it and then made my way down, freeing a poor soul in the process. Oh and I paid a visit to Blackthorn and he recognized me! He tried to kill me but luckily I have the almightly power of the quit and load which I promptly used!

What's up with that corridor filled with doors anyway? Who built that? :| Oh wait I know who did, I met a dude in some prison who told me quite proudly that he was the one who built Blackthorn's fortress with pit traps and all. He told me "If you fall, think of me HAHAHAHAHAH ROFLMAOOMFGBBQ". Luckily that wasn't much of a problem on my trusty carpet!

























Wait why wasn't I using the carpet in most of those pics? Am I an idiot or what? Maybe I just didn't want to look 'suspicious' you know? Imagine you're a guard in the castle of Blackthorn and you see six idiots crammed on a carpet flying around, what would YOU do? Yeah, exactly.


Next I decided to tackle this "Scepter problem". I first went to Minoc like Natreg told me to and investigated the skull keys. Someone in the Lycaeum told me that she had gotten the keys from a man named Shenstone. So what do I find? This shenstone is the merchant running the weapons shop in Minoc! DARN! Another merchant! So once again I panic and go ask his smith about the keys which he doesn't know anything about. I check out his place and I can't find any keys. Now I'm wondering what the hell is going on and all of a sudden I see him leave. Now that's not necessarily weird because in Ultima V, NPC's take breaks from time to time. But as I was watching him go he suddenly left the path and headed into the back of the town. That was weird. I followed him and saw him next to a tree, CHA CHING. Searched it and found some keys! Thanks Natreg!












Now it was time to get that sceptre. Following the instructions given to me by Sir Sean I went all the way down the bay of lost hope, or the lost hope bay, whatever they want to call it, and climbed those mountains. Didn't take me long to find what I was looking for, however I got a bit more than I bargained for..













The shadowlords are in the houuuse! DAMN! Okay that ain't good! On top of that there's like a gazillion bats flying around. After whacking a couple on the head I enter and find myself face to face with the 'fearsome' deamon Balinor. I didn't think he was that fearsome but eh to each his own! So he asks me this question which sounds like "What is round like a cup and as tall as a house?" and I'm like, what? The first thing I thought about was a well but that ain't as tall as a house, so I answered LOL and he attacked me. I thought I could take him on but he possessed my avatar and then it became a pain so I reloaded my game. Then I thought about it a bit.

There must be a way to stop possessions? How? And it just came to me that the Crown would probably do the job, it's supposed to stop every magical attack right? And indeed it did! And this time I answered 'well' like I first thought and that was also the right answer!

But that greedy SOB attacked me anyway! No big deal he got it and good too!








Next was grabbing that friggin scepter. Now there's a shadowlord west, north and east and they all come out ready to rumble. The scepter is over some pits but that isn't a problem since I'm on my carpet. The problem here is to get the scepter without getting attacked by the 'lords. After a lot of trial and error I managed to do it! I also found out the hard way that if you get attacked by a shadowlord while you're holding the scepter they take it back! But I won't let that happen, not with my trusty quit and load!










It's strange that the third shadowlord hadn't yet come out when I got the scepter. Maybe he got stuck? That poor bastard hahahaha thanks dude loved the help!





Afterwards I checked out my notes and saw that I was lacking the names of the shadowlords of falsehood and hatred. Someone told me that a deamon who knew a lot about the shadowlord of hatred was living in the eastern desert so that's where I went. As I was told, a deamon was living there...farming crops? Right. Without much prompting he told me the location the shard of hatred and the name of the shadowlord, which is ASTAROTH.







I'm not sure what happened next but I found myself in the basement of LB's castle looking for the armorer. I found a suspicious locked door to the south and decided to check it out. Oh my, it's a treasure chamber! I opened a few chests and picked up a magic bow and some other great goodies but then I thought that I shouldn't be doing this, I'm supposed to be the avatar and all that crap so I stopped did a quit-load. Let me tell you that my viewpoint on this matter changed dramatically the next day :)








I finished the day by going back to Jhelom to talk to that confused mage. The first time I talked to him I couldn't learn anything from him but this time I had the idea to talk to him backward like he does to me. It worked :|





That's it for day 1.

DAY II

The first thing I did is get some nightshade, as you can see. I never looked for it in Ultima IV so I wasn't sure where to look but my instructions were to look for the "most forested spot in spiritwood" and I found it quickly.





Then I decided to equip myself a bit better, bought a bow for Gwenno and a crossbow for Iolo and headed out to complete some shrine quests. I did the one for spirituality which gave me a nice +1 boost to every stat and then headed to the codex to do the one for humility. Oh man was I in for a surprise. This is what it looked like:





My runic isn't so bad these days so I managed to translate it all. It told me how to enter "the core of the world" from Shame. Right. I think the codex took some good stuff before I got there.


And then, THEN, it was finally time! Time to enter my first dungeon! Woohoo! I was ready to hate again but it wasn't to be! The dungeons are...well I wouldn't say amazing, but much much better. They're detailed and actually look like caverns and not..you know, bunch of grey stuff. I'm loving the details, even the monsters look good!









One thing I found strange is the total lack of rooms in the dungeon, which was Despise btw. I went down the floors quickly and then at one point on the eight level saw a ladder down. I thought oh hell there's a 9th level!?!

Oops...








The underworld! Finally! Man I was really happy to finally reach it however I was a bit scared since Natreg told me it was pretty much a hell on earth. I decided to go further in it just to check it out, you know, a little bit. I fought some spiders, some rats, ran around a bit, and then faced a party of mongbats. They killed me in like, 30 seconds. I did a quit-load, same thing, killed me in 30 seconds. I thought "Holy hell if I'm not good enough to fight mongbats imagine how I'm going to fare against stronger monsters? I'm getting out of here!".

It is at this point that I decided to drop this whole holier than thou thing. Heck my equipment was awful and I had NO money. Look at at first dungeon screenie, I have EIGHT GOLD PIECES. I mean come on now! So I headed up the dungeon and went straight to LB's castle, down the ladders and to the treasure room. I looted that room lord knows how many times. I would loot the room, get out, get back in, loot it again, repeat about 10 to 15 times. I was fed up with being a weakling. And you know what? It worked beautifully. I managed to buy magic axes, plate mail and magical shields for all of my characters. Only Mariah couldn't wear the plate because she wasn't strong enough so I gave her chain. The only bad point is that now when LB appeared he would tell me "You have strayed far from the path of the avatar, come back before you are lost forever!". Oh well. I'm not sure how to come back yet but I guess giving money at shrines is a good start.


Now after equipping myself with the best stuff money can buy I thought "Okay, let's complete that notebook". I still had to find the name of the shadowlord of falsehood so I headed for the lycaeum, but I somehow stumbled on something pretty strange..:






You gotta love that name!


Once I got to the Lycaeum it didn't take me long to find the person who knew about the shadowlord of falsehood or should I say FAULINEI? Mouahhaahah!

At this point what else was there to do than plunge in another dungeon? I decided to hunt down the shard of cowardice so I headed south to Hythloth. Oh my, the amount of detail in the dungeons is incredible! Hythloth looks completely different than Despise! I absolutely love that attention to detail, it makes the game much more immersive and it allows me a minimum amount of liberty in movement since I can recognize my surroundings much better than I could in Ultima IV.






I have to admit that I got lost a few times, hythloth is a pretty complicated dungeon. But after a bit of trial and error and a lot of gem viewing (with a lot of quit-load afterwards) I managed to make my way to the underworld. Once I got there, I viewed a gem and saw a weird volcanic formation to the north. I also noticed that I was basically stranded in the middle of nowhere. Then I remembered what the keeper of the flame of courage told me, which was that I would need to cast a specific magic many times to reach the shard. At this point it was obvious that the spell in question was blink.

So I blinked northward to check out that lava, swam right to the middle and searched and HOLY CRAP I found the mystic armors and weapons. I guess I was so excited by that discovery that I didn't take a screenshot which is kind of lame but oh well. I didn't equip the swords because they're short range weapons but I equipped the armor on everyone. Yay!

That was it for Day 2.

DAY III

I got curious about the transferring my character to Ultima VI. I knew that I could transfer either my Ultima IV or V character so I wanted to check it out. Transferring my Ultima IV character results in the same guy I got in Ultima V, 25 in every stat and 999 experience points.

However, transferring a character from Ultima V is much more lucrative because the transfer keeps the stats point for point. At that time I had 30 STR, 29 INT and 29 DEX and that's the character it gave me in Ultima VI. Impressive! However the game still divides the total amount of experience by 10 so although that character had better stats he was at a much lower level. There's not much I'll be able to do about that because I'm not reaching 9999 experience points in Ultima V for sure. I'm not even sure I'll be able to reach level 8, that takes 6400 XP and I'm at like 3300 at the moment. When I realized how much of an advantage it was to transfer my Ultima V character over my Ultima IV one I started to set my avatar as the active character in combat, allowing him to be the only one killing monsters. Obviously I can't do that with stronger monsters but it works wonders with the weaker ones.


Now remember when I said that I couldn't beat mongbats during my previous trip to the underworld? Well guess what, I still couldn't beat them! At first that really bugged me because here I was, fully decked out with armors and weapons and I can't be these little critters. I didn't have a choice but to look for applicable spells in the spell book. The first one I tried was Tremor but since these guys fly it didn't do crap to them. I mixed a couple of level 8 and 7 spells only to find out that I can't use spells from a level higher than mine and I was level 6 at the time.

So what was a guy supposed to do? I mixed a confusion spell and it worked pretty well, the mongbats started killing each other and all. However I was worried that it was taking some experience away from my guys since if they're killing each other we're probably not getting any of that XP.

So I looked again in the spell book and saw a sleep spell. Now I hate sleep spells, I've always hated them, always found them useless and retarded in every RPG I've ever played. But this was a MASS sleep spell...sort of interesting. And oh man the results were astounding!









I'm never doubting sleep spells again!


Did I mention that by that point I had already found that shard? Yeah, I was blinking around and fighting and I ended up finding the shard. Wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be, it was simply about viewing a gem, seeing where to go, placing myself correctly, blinking, quit-load and then doing it perfectly without having to view a gem or waste any blink spells. Rinse, repeat.








The hard part was coming back. Somehow the way I took to get there didn't seem to work that well to come back so I had to found another way. I was also running out of blink spells but luckily quit-load saved the day once again!

Now you can imagine that as soon as I got back up to Britannia I headed straight for Serpent's Hold. I wanted to destroy that shadowlord as soon as possible! And I did! Went right up to the flame, called out his name, waited until he was RIGHT on top of the flame and used the shard! BYE BYE!









After that I again looted the treasure room in the castle and filled my pouches with reagents, food and pretty much everything else. When I was looking for Karma tips on the internet I found out that I can press CTRL+K to see my Karma level out of 99. I was at 5. Giving 100 gp to shrines raises my karma by 1, when I'm ready to go save LB I'll gather like 9500GP and give it all to a shrine, case closed.








Then came a fun bit. You know in the expedition journal LB talks about a waterfall east of spiritwood. I decided to see if I could also use it to get into the underworld. Seems I can! I was looking for the waterfall in the middle of night when I couldn't see much and I fell into it and into the underworld! I knew that the amulet LB had was still where everybody died so I followed the journal right up to the amulet. I'm not sure what the amulet does yet, it probably has a very specific function of which I learn more about later.








The fun part about this was getting out! I fell down the waterfall so how was I supposed to get out of there? Now the thing about the underworld is that it corresponds to the overworld map, so I thought about it a bit and looked at my map and realized that I was probably pretty close to Destard so I looked for it but couldn't find it at first. I got lost for a while then came back to the burial ground, retraced my steps upward, was blocked by the waterfall, realized there was another path to the left of there, managed to go back up and finally, on a gem, I saw the entrance of a dungeon.






I hiked my way there and as I thought, it was the entrance to Destard. I opened the entrance with a word of power and saved my game, ready for another day of adventuring. Next time I boot up Ultima V I have a dungeon to climb, I just hope Destard isn't too hard, some dungeons can be pretty savage.

College is starting on wednesday so I don't know how it'll affect the blog. Most likely the posts will be much shorter and with fewer pictures. This one took me a good 2 hours to write, I'm not writing 2 hour long posts while in college that's for sure.

P.S: I started this blog post a 7:14PM and finished it at 11:15PM. Now I didn't work on it non stop for four hours, but I know I spent the last two on it. Kind of shows you how much time these things take. I really have to cut down a bit, this is crazy.

See you later!