The Destiny Stone and Lagoth Zanta

Discussions and help for Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight
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Horpner
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The Destiny Stone and Lagoth Zanta

Post by Horpner »

My party has finished mapping The Destiny Stone, solving the last Puzzle Snare and finally defeated Lagoth Zanta and his 60 ridiculously overpowered Balder Guards.

They never counted on the ridiculously overpowered Destiny Knight!

The last dungeon is quite easy compared to the previous one. One of the levels is nearly empty, even. Some big name monsters start showing up on the last level. I spell-bound a Wizard of Wacum, since I understand they cast MAMA every round of combat. On the other hand, that's not really all that excellent by the time he finally shows up.

Bizarrely, I beat the game before ever actually earning all the spells in the game. Two of my Archmages earned their 7th level spells from the massive XP bonus for winning. That isn't to say I couldn't have gotten them earlier if I'd wanted--power-leveling is easier in this game than ever before. Some might even call it an exploit!

All levels of the Destiny Stone make heavy use of the strange SESI neutering effects of "Something odd..." The range of SESI and SOSI is lowered to 1 square every time you stop on one of these, and you step on lots and lots of them in the Destiny Stone. However, it's no big deal because there isn't really much of interest to find. The emptiness of level two is... amazing.

The final Snare was pretty good. I finally found out if the final clue in the BTII manual is actually useful. Oddly, I never correctly answered one of the riddles in the snare, but won anyway. I'm still puzzling over that one. Natch!

Having a Destiny Knight in your party is pretty fun. Basically, his power is that he can't be killed. This turns out to be just the power you need in order to beat Lagoth Zanta. In one last FU to the silly battle mechanics of this game, Zanto fell to the funny old MEME, DEST combination.

This game is, in general, better than the first one. In particular, magic is far more balanced. The most powerful items in the game are actually necessary to win. On the downside, my collection of items was powerful enough by the last dungeon that I virtually never needed any spell other than SCSI.

Finally, this game was way more fun than I remember. I was just too impatient or distracted to solve the puzzles or map some of the more dastardly dungeons when I was a teenager. I'm really happy I played it again, and finally mastered it.

The Thief of Fate awaits! It's going to be really tempting to start over with new characters, what with the finally useful rogue class, and being able to create ladies. I'll have to figure out what to do.

I've never completed Bard's Tale III, either.
Death and drek? WTF?
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Darendor
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Post by Darendor »

I don't suppose you took a tour of the off-limits area of level 3 of the Stone?
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Marco
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Post by Marco »

Years ago I started on a project to make some detailed maps of BT2, like I did for BT1. However, I was a bit daunted by the second level of Destiny Stone, because that giant empty area seems to be chock full of "something odd" squares, antimagic areas, spinners, and silent areas, not to mention the fact that it's mostly dark as well. In short, royally painful to map out thoroughly, and I was so daunted by the prospect that I ended up giving up on my BT2 maps long before I even got to the Destiny Stone.

However, the fine work you've done with the BT1 maps gives me a lot of hope. How easy will it be to apply the same tools to BT2?

Marco.
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Horpner
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Post by Horpner »

Hey, Marco.

You're getting a couple of different areas confused, I think.

On the first level, there's a large, square-ish area in the south-east that's full of every kind of cruddy dungeon feature imaginable. The only help is that it's not dark. Even so, it takes a long time to map, and I despaired of getting every bit of notation correct, and in the end I'm pretty sure I didn't.

The second level is basically big empty darkness puncuated by just a handful of little rooms. But the darkness really is empty. There were three unimportant messages that I found, but other than that just a bunch of "somthing odd" tiles. It took a long time to map just from sheer vastness, but it was really simple to deal with. There was a lot of combat, but I was running from nearly every battle as I was eager to finish the game, had all the best equipment, and didn't really need any more XP.

I don't know if it'll be worth it, but farming Lagoth is the greatest power-leveling there is. That battle sure takes a long time, though.

Also, I looked at a couple of walk-throughs and verified that solving the riddle I missed just teleports you to a slightly more advantageous location--although since I had the Pipes of Pan, a Nospen ring, and Sgmt 6, it really didn't matter to me that I had to walk through a little darkness and over some hot coals a few extra times.

Cranford is a little bit too fond of a certain type of literal-minded riddle-making. On the other hand, when he tried something else, like with the rock-paper-scissors snare, he tended to get strange. Carnford's strange poetry and weird use of language is a big part of the atmosphere of both of the first two games. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF ROTE ACTIONS? Well, if you keep at it long enough, you'll win THE DESTINY KNIGHT!

Oh, I wanted to mention that a goofy-looking King at the end made an unwelcome appearance. Why didn't he keep Kylearan around to "help", as he had in the last game?
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Darendor
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Post by Darendor »

Horpner wrote:Oh, I wanted to mention that a goofy-looking King at the end made an unwelcome appearance. Why didn't he keep Kylearan around to "help", as he had in the last game?
I suspect Michael Cranford's Bard's Tale III would have been titled "The Castle of Candarr", and that is the king...a bit of foreshadowing you see.
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Post by Horpner »

I have one more question.

So... the Sage is Lagoth Zanta. WTF?!? Sure, the Sage is a money-grubbing jerk, but why does he do any of the crap he does? Just for his own amusement?

Maybe he was a suicide, and creating this quest for my party to solve was his Ultimate Kevorkian machine.
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Post by Darendor »

Horpner wrote:I have one more question.

So... the Sage is Lagoth Zanta. WTF?!? Sure, the Sage is a money-grubbing jerk, but why does he do any of the crap he does? Just for his own amusement?

Maybe he was a suicide, and creating this quest for my party to solve was his Ultimate Kevorkian machine.
He used to be a member of the Review Board until one day he was caught stealing from the trust fund and was therefore expelled from the guild....
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Post by Ether »

Horpner wrote:I have one more question.

So... the Sage is Lagoth Zanta. WTF?!? Sure, the Sage is a money-grubbing jerk, but why does he do any of the crap he does? Just for his own amusement?

Maybe he was a suicide, and creating this quest for my party to solve was his Ultimate Kevorkian machine.
I would say, like most evil wizards, he was at least border-line psychopathic, and wanted to see people die in one of his puzzles. Being the Sage provided a good cover for this, not to mention that it was a pretty good plot twist.

In my hopes that EA will not only remake the game but allow me to help do it (I know, I know, I have a better chance of winning the lottery), Lagoth defeats the previous Destiny Knight, but the Destiny Wand is broken in the process. Lagoth is unable to reunite the Wand and gain the power of the Destiny Knight, so he uses the party to reunite the Wand so he can try again.
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Thank You [Horpner] and [Darendor]!!

Post by Id Attrib »

Hey Guys, I don't know if you still get e-mail from messages at this board, but just wanted to say a quick "Thank You" for sharing all the info you two did!! I just finished Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight via DOSBox 0.74, and your [Horpner] various details helped me tremendously!! I don't know if I would have found the patience to finish the game otherwise =)
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