The Lost City Of Drez'Brae

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Darendor
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Location: Red Deer, Alberta, Canada

The Lost City Of Drez'Brae

Post by Darendor »

In the fall/winter of 2012 I was messing around with trying to find a way to create a Bard's Tale Construction Set, if you will, for the C64 version of Bard's Tale I.

This endeavour was based on the work of people like ZeroZero, Twoflower, Horpner, and others from this board and a few others.

I decided a few days ago to dust off the WinVICE emulator and revisit the 4 bonus dungeon levels I managed to add to the Wine Cellar/Sewers. It was honestly like finding 4 hitherto undiscovered dungeons, because I had long since lost the original documents I created as reference when programming them in and I no longer remembered 80% of what they consisted of.

I mapped out the 4 levels, and decided to post the maps online for anyone curious. I never had much feedback aside from one e-mail from someone named Brian who asked me a few questions about the project.


So if anyone is curious, here are the 4 levels underneath the Sewers of Skara Brae:

Drez'Brae 1: http://imgur.com/a/hczjK
Drez'Brae 2: http://imgur.com/a/WaSRt
Drez'Brae 3: http://imgur.com/a/t5tuN
Drez'Brae 4: http://imgur.com/a/W7Boo











-----SPOILER ALERT------------









If you're wondering how to access Drez'Brae, head to 9N 5E on level 3 of the Sewers and jump down the portal.


A few afterthoughts/notes/commentaries after 4 and a half years:
- I surprised myself mildly when I discovered I had altered the Wine Cellar dungeon to add a single text special near the stairs heading down to the first level of the Sewers.
- I don't blame anyone for giving up after reaching the cathedral boss fight on Drez'Brae level 2. 20 Soul suckers is a bitch. And to think I was going too light here...
- On Drez'Brae level 4 ("O o n's F") you will encounter portals leading down. Attempting to go down these will crash the game, as there is no 9th dungeon level. I suppose I ought to have removed these, but I was attempting to recreate level 3 of Oscon's Fortress from BTII as accurately as possible...
- And finally, the apocalypse that wiped out Drez'Brae's inhabitants and decimated their undercity was.... a Saturday night Texas Hold'em poker game (yes, I mis-spelled it as "Taxas", sue me) for Roscoe, Kylearan, and Mangar behind held in a timeshifted/planeshifted version of a dungeon that wasn't even written yet. If anyone's curious, the reward for simply walking in and causing them to leave is... 900,000,000 experience and gold pieces. That should bring most characters to about level 455 or so, give or take. Levelling up a character after this takes about 10 minutes of holding down the respective character's key on the keyboard (while in the Review Board of course) with the emulator running at some 1300% speed.


This was a proof of concept project for me. I remember I had to do a fairly vast amount of work to alter the event files to accomodate my additions and manipulate the dungeon files - renaming them and all that. It took some 3 months from beginning to end.

Anyways, you could build a stupidly powerful mega-party off of the "poker" event for importing into BT II or BT III. Or just wander around BT I destroying everyone/everything.


Oh, and the e-mail address provided in the accompanying "README" file with the ZIP is no longer valid.
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Flanimal
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Re: The Lost City Of Drez'Brae

Post by Flanimal »

Thanks for all of that information Darendor.
I did download your modified Bard's Tale files on the 18th Demember 2016, but I gave up on it after wandering around Skara Brea and the Wine Cellor without finding any differences.

Had I known that I was one level away from a set of new Sewer levels then I would have continued and would most likely have replied to you with feedback and most likely questions regarding the tricky puzzles. I probably never would have solved the puzzles by myself.

I wonder, did you disable the spells APAR and PHDO for any of these levels, or did you allow powerful characters to cast such spells? I notice on some levels that there are squares surrounded by four walls with no door. If it wasn't possible to teleport or phase door into these squares, then I would forever have wondered if there was something there. Thinking about it, I suppose that I could have investigated this with SOSI.

Anyway, I enjoyed looking over your maps and in my mind imagined playing them through. I appreciated that I could do this quickly rather than spend hours actually playing though the levels on WinVice. ;)

Thanks for this closure. :)
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Darendor
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Re: The Lost City Of Drez'Brae

Post by Darendor »

Flanimal wrote:Thanks for all of that information Darendor.
I did download your modified Bard's Tale files on the 18th Demember 2016, but I gave up on it after wandering around Skara Brea and the Wine Cellor without finding any differences.

Had I known that I was one level away from a set of new Sewer levels then I would have continued and would most likely have replied to you with feedback and most likely questions regarding the tricky puzzles. I probably never would have solved the puzzles by myself.

I wonder, did you disable the spells APAR and PHDO for any of these levels, or did you allow powerful characters to cast such spells? I notice on some levels that there are squares surrounded by four walls with no door. If it wasn't possible to teleport or phase door into these squares, then I would forever have wondered if there was something there. Thinking about it, I suppose that I could have investigated this with SOSI.

Anyway, I enjoyed looking over your maps and in my mind imagined playing them through. I appreciated that I could do this quickly rather than spend hours actually playing though the levels on WinVice. ;)

Thanks for this closure. :)

There's the one text clue I placed in the corridor leading to the stairs down in the Wine Cellar. "Beneath the sewers," or something like that...

Anyway, it seems I forgot to place a couple of special markers on the actual maps, oops. Getting forgetful in my old age.
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Darendor
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Re: The Lost City Of Drez'Brae

Post by Darendor »

Flanimal wrote:I wonder, did you disable the spells APAR and PHDO for any of these levels, or did you allow powerful characters to cast such spells? I notice on some levels that there are squares surrounded by four walls with no door. If it wasn't possible to teleport or phase door into these squares, then I would forever have wondered if there was something there. Thinking about it, I suppose that I could have investigated this with SOSI.
I disabled APAR and PHDO on all 4 levels. I wanted people to actually have to grind their way through and find all of the devous(ish) traps I put in.

As for closed off areas on all 4 sides, there's literally nothing in them. I wanted to avoid dead-ending the party. The closest that anyone can come to that is wandering into a 10' x 10' room with a single door that has a spinner in it - you'll eventually face the door and be able to exit (or you can just teleport up to Sewers 3 if you like).

Actually, I just realized. The 20' x 20' room that has the "stay the f%^& out!!" note on the door is in fact a no-way-out trap. Assuming you run from all 4 ridiculous encounters in there (or beat them), the door in is 1-way. APAR is the only escape...

But yeah whatever. Was neat going through them again. I was hoping to fool people going through the final level with the special that emulates disk I/O failure, but I guess if you're on an emulator it doesn't work quite as well. :roll:
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