A:EftP - Crypt of Drath

[BlueMist]

Where do you find the key to open the marble lock on the locked gate. I've killed everything else on the main floor.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: BlueMist

Where do you find the key to open the marble lock on the locked gate. I've killed everything else on the main floor.

 

It's a fair way from the actual crypt - on a body just before entering the first level of the crypt, there is a note which gives you a fairly good clue as to where the key might be.

 

 

 

You need to talk to Motrax, who is way back in NE Avernum, north of Formello, who will tell you where it is.

 

 

Sorry!!

[BlueMist]

I have talked to Motrax a couple of times without any clues to Drath. I also couldn't find any body's near the Crypt of Drath. Listed below are the keys that I already have. I'm obviously missing something.

 

Bronze key

Onyx key (2)

Diamond key

Iron key

gold key

tin key (2)

crystal key

Black Iron key (2)

 

Thanks for the help!

[nikki.]

Okay, Motrax should tell you about some Empire soldiers from the First Expedition who came to him asking for help; they were, at the time, being hounded by Sliths, and they offered a marble (or stone) key as a reward. He turned them away, and they took their key slightly east of his cavern, where they died.

 

If you ask Motrax about all this (sorry; can't remember the exact dialogue options, but it shouldn't take too long to go through them all), he'll tell you to search the site of an ancient battle. Drath won't be mentioned; he'll just say something about the Empire or the First Expedition. The place you need is an area in the outdoors which you can just walk into and get the key.

 

Edit: these maps are for the original game, but they're still relevant. You can see where the key is in relation to Motrax pretty clearly:

 

[Kreador]

Originally Posted By: Terribly Ernest

Okay, Motrax should tell you about some Empire soldiers from the First Expedition who came to him asking for help; they were, at the time, being hounded by Sliths, and they offered a marble (or stone) key as a reward. He turned them away, and they took their key slightly east of his cavern, where they died.

If you ask Motrax about all this (sorry; can't remember the exact dialogue options, but it shouldn't take too long to go through them all), he'll tell you to search the site of an ancient battle. Drath won't be mentioned; he'll just say something about the Empire or the First Expedition. The place you need is an area in the outdoors which you can just walk into and get the key.

Edit: these maps are for the original game, but they're still relevant. You can see where the key is in relation to Motrax pretty clearly:

Note that if you wander into that ancient battlefield without the conversation with Motrax, you find nothing of interest.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Kreador

Note that if you wander into that ancient battlefield without the conversation with Motrax, you find nothing of interest.

Ah. Good point; I'd sort of danced around saying this, but if you go before seeing Motrax you won't get the key.

[BlueMist]

Thanks again for the excellent help (and quick, too)

[Hexer]

Okay, I'm having a moment of extreme stupidity, and no matter how much I wander around the Crypt of Drath, my brain refuses to kick in.

 

I've made it through levels 1 & 2, but can't figure out what the hell I'm supposed to do on level 3. I just end up bumbling around in the dark until I give up and go back upstairs. I also can't figure out how to get into the room in the NE corner of level 2. I assume that if I can figure out one of these, the solution to the other will be revealed, but right now I'm just lost and confused and want the damn sword already. Thanks.

[Randomizer]

The northeast corner of level 2 is where you fall when you cross the bridge on level 1.

 

The solution to level 3:

 

 

Use the east portal 3 times and then you are in a room with 3 portals and a hidden switch that opens a way to south leading to more hidden switches and Drath.

If you can't tell the rooms apart then just drop different types of food in each portal room.

 

 

Welcome to Spiderweb Software. It's too late to warn you to leave your sanity at the door.

[Hexer]

Thanks. It worked perfectly. Loved the idea about the food, too.

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

The solution to level 3:

 

 

Use the east portal 3 times and then you are in a room with 3 portals and a hidden switch that opens a way to south leading to more hidden switches and Drath.If you can't tell the rooms apart then just drop different types of food in each portal room.

 

 

Is this ever alluded to in-game? It's probably a fairly big oversight if not...

[Randomizer]

I think it's hinted at Avernum 2 in a similar place, but I don't remember if there ever was for Exile/Avernum 1.

 

Jeff did adjust things so there are subtle differences in the rooms with the placement of the hidden switch and whether it opens a door to the south. The first time I went down there the rooms were exactly alike.

[Soul of Wit]

Yes, you can tell the rooms apart by the locations of the hidden switches. The dropping the food trick goes back to Adventure on the DEC PDP-10 (1976). Jeff references Adventure in this game, when he uses "twisty passages" in a description.

[Wanderer]

I'm still having trouble with this dungeon despite the help from Randomizer above. I've followed his directions but I still end up in the room with the pathway to go back up the stairs. I fear I am in the wrong one of the three rooms. How do I find the right room? Also, its difficult to find one's orientation in the dark here but I assume that when I land in the rooms that I am pointing north. Correct?

 

Thanks.

[Fael]

Here's the can't fail, don't have to remember/recognize anything method:

 

 

1. Go through the first teleporter (the one off the stairs up). This takes you into the series of rooms with no exits and three teleporters.

2. Walk around the perimeter of the room until you find a hidden switch. Press it.

3. Walk around the perimeter of the room again looking for passages that have opened up. (The one you want is in the north wall; the one in the south doesn't go anywhere interesting. However, feel free to explore any you come across just to be sure.)

4. If you didn't find Drath, go through the east teleporter (that would be the one on the right wall).

5. Repeat steps 2-4. Do that enough times, you'll end up where you need to be.

 

[Triumph]

Edit: sniped!

 

Hmm.

 

Make sure you start with very portal you encounter on the third level. When you enter it, go to the portal toward the east ("east" is toward the lower-right corner of your screen). Enter that portal. Just to be extra cautious, check the room you end up in for hidden switches. Assuming no new path appears, repeat this (go to the portal to the east, and check for switches again). At this point, you should find a hidden switch that opens the way further to Drath. I thought I recalled only using the eastern portal twice in a row, not three times as suggested above. If that doesn't, go ahead and use the eastern portal a third time.

 

As a slightly related note, I believe holding the TAB key will, among other things, display the current directions.

 

Does this help?

[Soul of Wit]

Originally Posted By: Wanderer

... I assume that when I land in the rooms that I am pointing north. Correct?

Yes, you are facing North each time. The only time that you are not is if you (by random portal usage) find your way back to where you came in.

 

 

 

Just enter the portal on your right (East) three consecutive times. Then press a hidden switch on the North wall (there's only one available at this point.) The correct tunnel will open.

 

[Wanderer]

Thanks all. Somehow I got stuck on this one.

[Demseinwetter]

I'm feeling incredibly stupid about this: But I can't figure out how to get anywhere. I have the Stone Key, I collected from the Battlefield, I just seem to have no idea where to put it.

As soon as I tumble down the bridge, I get to explore that second level a bit but I have no idea how to open the gates to the south, which I presume I have to... I'm sorry, but I'm feeling enormously stupid about it and after wandering around the dungeon for hours, my party is becoming suicidal.

[Randomizer]

Go back to the upper level and look for a hidden switch near the bridge.

[Demseinwetter]

God! Thank You! You've saved me weeks of my life!

[Ociporus]

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit

...The dropping the food trick goes back to Adventure on the DEC PDP-10 (1976)...

Hey, I used to be a system manager for a DEC 11/70 from 1985 to 1989. The primary language used on it was BASIC. It was a fun system to manage at the time...a whole 4 MB of RAM and 2 100MB hard drives. Every user's job was allocated 64K. Sounds like a joke now when a typical laptop has 1000x more RAM and 5000x more hard drive space than that whole computer system had.
----
Sorry for taking the discussion onto a totally different plane. Most users of this forum would be shocked to hear that a computer could actually function on so little resources considering what personal computers ( and macs ) have today.

[Soul of Wit]

Originally Posted By: Ociporus

Hey, I used to be a system manager for a DEC 11/70 from 1985 to 1989. The primary language used on it was BASIC. It was a fun system to manage at the time...a whole 4 MB of RAM and 2 100MB hard drives. Every user's job was allocated 64K. Sounds like a joke now when a typical laptop has 1000x more RAM and 5000x more hard drive space than that whole computer system had.
----
Sorry for taking the discussion onto a totally different plane. Most users of this forum would be shocked to hear that a computer could actually function on so little resources considering what personal computers ( and macs ) have today.

Continuing off-topic...

What those computers lacked in specs, they more than made up for in square footage.

I was working with Data General minicomputers during that timeframe. The book The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder, is recommended reading for anyone interested in the pre-microcomputer (you know, pre-PC) era.

On a nitpick note, a Mac is a personal computer. It's just not a PC. Silly acronyms.

[Randomizer]

I remember my college roommate getting his first personal computer, an Apple II+ with the memory upgrade to 48 kB main board memory.

[Student of Trinity]

I used to write home-made games for our TRS-80 Model III, which had no hard drive at all. Just 16 kB of RAM, and a cassette player. Literally an ordinary cassette player, with 'record', 'play' and 'pause' buttons, and a microphone.

 

Cassette players were things about a thousand times bigger than an iPod, and to a first approximation they did nothing. We pretty much kept them in our houses just to raise the air pressure, by displacement. They could play or record the little magnetic tape reels that were held inside plastic cases that were themselves about ten times the size of an iPod, called cassettes. They were good at breaking.

 

The computer was about a million times bigger than an iPod, and to a first approximation it also did nothing. At least that meant it didn't need a fan. Its CPU was a Z80, which was a bit smaller than an iPod, but still it did nothing. I think its clock rate was Soon.

 

Our cassette player connected to the computer via the headphone jack. We stored our programs on cassettes, and loaded them into memory one at a time to run them. You could also just play the cassettes. They sounded all whistley. It was really annoying, but it helped to turn the volume down really low. None of our programs took up a whole cassette by themselves, so it was important to look at the tape feet counter in order to know where you were saving a program to, once you had written it, and then to know where to find a program to run it. The filing system consisted of little scraps of paper with things like "MY PRGRM 32", "GAME TRY 137" written on them. If we lost one of the scraps of paper, we had to just try to load the whole cassette and see what we got. That might take half an hour or more; the cassettes held 45 minutes per side, and they uploaded at playing speed. If your brother had forgotten to rewind the cassette or zero the counter, and recorded his "CALCUTOR" program over your "COOL GAME" program, you could pound him. That would be more fun than the game, but it wouldn't bring back the game.

 

There was no mouse. There was a keyboard.

 

But we liked it.

 

On the other hand, you can judge how easily pleased we were by noting that we thought a simulated 'Beerhunter' game was pretty cool. You took turns typing numbers from 1 to 6 until somebody got the one representing the shaken bottle, and the screen went white. The graphics were primitive, but the gameplay was, to quite a good approximation, nothing. And that's how it was in the good old days.

 

 

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Snip.

Man, I remember when my brother and I were given my dad's old Amstrad CPC464 which we'd found in the attic. Our cassette deck was internal, and we were lucky enough to have the colour monitor rather than just the green.

I was never very good at writing programs or games, I guess I was too little, but I was excellent at being the annoying brother who would erase my older brother's work. Poundings and tale-telling were common. I think the best thing he ever managed to do was a racing game which he didn't really write himself anyway, we discovered; he'd copied it out of an old magazine he'd find with the computer, because for some reason, computing magazines would dedicate pages upon pages to BASIC code.

I think I have a cassette with

on it somewhere (though it will probably not have weathered time as well as I have, though I think I spent the most time playing

. <3

[Fael]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I used to write home-made games for our TRS-80 Model III, which had no hard drive at all.

My first computer was a Mac Plus, but I just read this post to my wife, who's first computer was a Trash 80, and she can't stop laughing. Thanks for the memories!

[Kreador]

Yes, I first learned programming on TRS-80 Model Is and Model IIIs. That was back in the days when Radio Shack (for those who don't know, the RS in TRS stood for Radio Shack) sold electronic supplies for building things like radios. They did also have 5 1/4" floppy drives for the TRS-80s.

 

In a closet here I also have an old AB Dick word processor that used the 8 1/2" floppies. The main processing unit case is large enough that Steve Jobs could have been buried in it with a lot of iPods.

[Yuna Corne]

Given that Apple had the thinnest, lightest CEO out of any computer company, being able to fit him in something isn't a good measure of size any more.

[Student of Trinity]

Too bad it wasn't just because he made a cooler silhouette that way.

 

We never did upgrade our TRS-80 with a floppy drive, but later we got a Commodore 128, which was a bizarre up-sell from the Commodore 64. Its main selling point, apart from having huge tracts of RAM at 128K, was having a second CPU. Not so it could be faster, but so it could dual boot CP/M. I'm not sure 'boot' makes sense for these machines, because they didn't have operating systems, just a hardwired BASIC interpreter. Evidently the second chip had a hardwired CP/M interpreter instead. We never used it.

 

The C128 actually did something. It had some quite entertaining games that had somewhat appealing graphics and interesting features. It had a word processor that was actually a step up from the electric typewriter because you could format text, and edit without using white goop. Soon we got a 5-1/4" floppy drive for the C128, and got rid of the cassette player. Life was good.

 

Then the locusts came, and we lost everything. No, sorry, that was another story. But I never wrote any programs for the C128. It was too hard, because too much was possible. I wouldn't have been satisfied with anything less than a fancy game that looked as good as the ones we bought, but I didn't have the time or skill to make anything like them. I've never really done any programming since then, apart from Matlab files. One of my brothers has a much better sense of color and design than I do, and he made a beautiful puzzle game on the C128 that I really liked. Unfortunately we lost it somehow. If he recreated it now as a mobile app he might make some money.

 

The TRS-80 was so primitive that I could get just about the best possible out of the machine, with a few hundred lines of BASIC. I even learned enough assembly language to write some simple machine code subroutines for moving sprites around and detecting collisions, so I could call these from a BASIC program and get a game that ran at decent speed despite being interpreted rather than compiled. I got an assembler, which itself had to be loaded onto the computer by cassette — and it took several cassettes. But my machine code sprite-mover routines could then be saved separately to cassette, and loaded into high memory before loading the BASIC script.

 

Only my brothers and I really played my games, but we actually did play them a fair bit for fun. I think my best one was a very simple one that was quite a lot like Doodle Jump, now that I think about it. I never tried to write anything but games. What else was a computer for?

[Soul of Wit]

She's got huge...

 

...tracts of RAM.

 

 

Trinity, your prose is appreciated, even if no one states so explicitly.

[jmack979]

Apologies, I'm a newb, but I can't figure out how to reveal spoilers on this forum. I really need to know where to find the stone key, and it looks like the above users gave some helpful tips for that, but when I click the "show me" button nothing happens. I tried other threads, and I can't get any show me buttons to work. I tried firefox and safari and my iphone for good measure, and I get the same problem with all three. Is this something that happens to old show me buttons, or am I missing something? If the content is lost, any help would be much appreciated on how to find the stone key! I've talked to Motrax so many times and nothing seems to lead to a mention of a battlefield. Help!

[Lilith]

Yeah, it's not anything you're doing wrong. We migrated over from older forum software and pre-migration spoiler tags were broken in the process. They can be fixed, but it requires manually editing each post individually -- I've gone ahead and done that for the ones in this thread.

 

Anyway, the conversation path that leads to Motrax telling you about the stone key involves asking him about the First Expedition.