Mangar's Tower Level 5 mystery square (spoilers)

Marco · Post by **Marco** » Mon Dec 10, 2007 11:05 pm

On the 5th level of Mangar's Tower at 8N, 10E is a square that registers as "special" to sorcerer sight. The disk drive runs whenever you stand on this square, but nothing ever happens there. This is the square 2 steps north of where the boiling pool teleports you, 2 steps south of another special square where you encounter with 4 specters guarding the corridor to where you use the silve shapes.

I recently rediscovered the maps at www.bardstaleonline.com which state there is rarely an encounter with liches on this square. I've never seen this (or liches, for that matter), and I've run back and forth over the square hundreds of times in the Apple ][e, ][GS, and PC versions (I'm next going to try it with the C64 version, now that I have a decent emulator). I've also tried things like visiting it with no equipment, active spells, or bard songs, just in case something was inhibiting the encounter from happening.

Has anyone ever discovered what this square is all about?

Marco.

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 2:19 am

Wow. not sure what to make of it. I never beat BT1, though did get into Mangars tower but was ages ago. Possibly a "safe haven square"? No monster attacks? Sit for a while and let your mage's spell points regenerate?

Marco · Post by **Marco** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 2:29 am

It's definitely not a safe square. I happened to be playing around with it earlier today, and I had plenty of random encounters while I was hanging out on the square. Nor is it a spell point regeneration zone (though my characters regenerate spell points anyway because they're armed with Mage Staves.

Marco.

dragonbait · Post by **dragonbait** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 2:39 am

ahh well. not sure then. maybe the forum keep (Brian the Fist) might know.

Brian the Fist · Post by **Brian the Fist** » Tue Dec 11, 2007 5:56 pm

dragonbait wrote:ahh well. not sure then. maybe the forum keep (Brian the Fist) might know.

Sorry, but I do not have the slightest idea.

Horpner · Post by **Horpner** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 12:53 am

Sorry for the necro-post.

On the Amiga version, that square crashes the game. Do not step there!

Brian the Fist · Post by **Brian the Fist** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 9:22 am

dragonbait wrote:ahh well. not sure then. maybe the forum keep (Brian the Fist) might know.

Sorry, but I do not have the slightest idea.

Darendor · Post by **Darendor** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 12:29 pm

There's also a square on level 3 of Harkyn's Castle that has no apparent effect: 17N, 4E.

It registers as "Something special is near..." but when I stand on it, nothing happens. It's not a preset encounter, not a Hitpoint/Magicpoint regenerator (or leech), not a spinner, not Smoke in my eyes...

All I can think is that it was a clue that was later removed from the map prior to publishing but the marker indicating it as a special square was left in by mistake.

Horpner · Post by **Horpner** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 1:39 pm

Interesting. That square is not marked as "special" at all in the Amiga version. Your theory seems solid.

Personally, I've never found a magic square that regenerates spell points. Anybody got some of them marked that I can go stand on, just for... you know... a slight enhancement to my Tales of the Unknown experience?

Darendor · Post by **Darendor** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 2:19 pm

Absolutely. Level 1 of Harkyn's Castle: 11N, 15E. Magic point regeneration square.

Brian the Fist · Post by **Brian the Fist** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 2:31 pm

Darendor wrote:Absolutely. Level 1 of Harkyn's Castle: 11N, 15E. Magic point regeneration square.

Confirmed.

Horpner · Post by **Horpner** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 4:34 pm

Darendor wrote:Absolutely. Level 1 of Harkyn's Castle: 11N, 15E. Magic point regeneration square.

Thanks!

That was... pretty cool actually. I was starting to think these squares didn't exist.

Darendor · Post by **Darendor** » Wed Jan 21, 2009 11:51 pm

I had a bit of a brainstorm...

Notice how this square only has the drive run when you walk onto it from the north and not the south? Well it seems to me that the game is checking the party for something acquired after you've gone over this square.

So, I propose spellbinding Mangar into the party using the Spectre Snare and seeing if that has any effect. There is a clue after all that says "The Spectre Snare can bind the mightiest of foes", and whom else is supposed to be more mighty than Mangar himself?

It's worth a shot.

Horpner · Post by **Horpner** » Thu Jan 22, 2009 11:42 pm

I decided to take a crack at this problem on the original, Apple 2e version of the game.

Unfortunately, I'm not in the mood to start over from scratch. So I needed to hackz0r my own characters, or find some pre-made ones. I couldn't find any decent characters on the web. In addition, none of the top sites have character editors for the Apple ][e version. More on that below.

I took me forever to figure out that Copy ][+ contains a usable sector editor, and then I needed a .dsk dumping facility to figure out where the characters are stored (I used dsktool, a nice Ruby program).

And then... Unlike in all the other versions of Bard's Tale, Cranford implemented some sort of sneaky checksum system on the character disk. If you make modifications, the game refuses to load the resulting block of data.

However... Cranford's efforts were for naught. If you load a character by loading a *TEAM, the checksums aren't checked, and all your evil manipulations come true. Next, you save the hacked character back to disk and Cranford helpfully writes the proper checksum for you. Bwa-hahahahahah!

So... I ran out of time, but soon I'll be pounding Mangar again.

Darendor · Post by **Darendor** » Fri Jan 23, 2009 4:13 am

Keep us posted on your efforts!