ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Hi,
Playing my best char in this so far. Finished the trollshores and the thieves trapdoor (was I meant to save that NPC, he died, but it says quest complete). Found the wizard who wants staves.

So instead of dying on the skeleton dungeon (which happens alot) I decided to try the old forest. Got to the bottom, and there was just a lot of animals and a pink #. But no sign of the big lake etc that was mentioned in the bits of paper I found. Is that all there is to it, or will I need to come back later with a quest.

There is no big lake (sadly). The pink # (and the stuff he drops) is what you get.

You complete the quest even if the NPC dies, but if the NPC lives, you get something nifty afterwards.

If you do not like the Tower, there's a maze to the west that might be more to your liking, then possibly head into the tower after that (at which point it should be quite easy).

The big lake mentioned in the journal pages is the one on the worldmap surrounded by trees next to the entrance of the Old Forest.

The old forest is certainly way easier than any place with skeletal mages.

Dying to something you can't even see manathrusting you sucks.

If you have solid HP, that's not necessarily the case. After the first manathrust, you duck behind a wall and wait for them to come to you. I could see how they might be lethal if you were running something like an magic-elf archmage, though.

1) You might be in a corridor, unable to get out of the line of fire at all.

2) You don't know which way the manathrust came from, so you aren't sure which way to dodge, even if you are able to do so. You end up hoping to (dark)god you guess correctly.

If you're watching your character on screen you do know which direction the manathrust came from.

If you blink, you don't. Or if you're like me, you're looking at the minimap and the general area you're moving toward on the main map, not at the @ sign.

Then there's some sort of flashing light somewhere.

So you try to figure out what happened.

You look at your HP, and see that you've been hit by something. No idea what.

So you look at the last few lines of [LOG] in the lower left. If you're lucky, you'll have a manathrust report there, and then you'll at least know that you were hit by a manathrust.

If you're not lucky, then you have to open a terminal window, fgrep LOG logs/YourName, and review the output to try to reconstruct the chain of events.

And that's why you have to edit src/main.c and make sure the line buffering is NOT commented out.

OK, now (beta 18) there is a lake.
I take it I'm going to need some means of breathing underwater before tackling this. There's enough air to get to the first stairs, but the next level is all underwater, so I fled. Guess I'll have to wade through the old forest again another day.

Depends, really. Air bubbles are planned for a future version, but for now:

1. The top level (lake surface) is exactly what it looks like.

2. On the second level, the up and down staircases DO count as having breathable air... but there's no guarantee that the down staircase is close enough to reach before drowning.

3. The third level is full of breathable air (and some scary monsters).

If you're an archmage, Phase Door/Teleport/Probability Travel are your friends. I've heard some people are trying that with a high-level (controllable) Phase Door, I did it with Probability Travel. Having Vision and Arcane Eye really help, too.

If you're not an archmage... pray that the down staircase is close enough to the up staircase that you can reach it . Or try and find a magic item that lets you breath water (I've found 2 so far, ever).

Good luck! Hopefully this'll help.