Harehunter

You are correct in that. It has been quite awhile since I played any of the Exile games; I had hair on the top of my head back then . Playing and mapping the Avernum games has taken up a lot of time. I really need to get back into the BoE games I have downloaded. I still think it is cool to have at least a round or two of complete invulnerability in situations where there are multiple spell-casters (picture Exile 2, Garzahd's throne room). A round of 3 Major-Blessing followed by a round of 6 Avatar just before you charge into the room gives you a good advantage. Alorael is definitely correct, in that Avatar, should you use it, must the last buff you cast, because the Invulnerability wears off in two or three rounds.

You provoke an interesting thought. With a party of six high level priests (3 fighters, 3 mages), such as I tend to use, your combination of blesses is doable in one round. The power of multiple blesses is often underestimated and the bless effect of Avatar is minimal. I would always have to Bless Party on the next round, but by then my fighters would have closed with the enemy while taking zero damage. Now I need Haste, Magic Resistance, Invulnerable, and Martyr's Shield to complete the spell. I would not use Martyr's Shield at all if it were not part of the Avatar. Of the other three attributes, Haste is the only one of major importance. Multiple Blesses will provide about 90% of the protection of Resistance and Invulnerability (+ protection, + defense), while giving a great boost to your own attacking skills (+ %hit, + damage). BTW, I call my party The Mad Monk Squad. They all start out with L3 Priest, with the front 3 adding skills for combat and the other 3 starting out with L3 Mage. By the end of the game, all 6 PC's reach L7 Priest, 3 as strong fighters and 3 L7 Mages. Tarl Kudrick's BoE scenario Tatterdemalion really challenged me. I had gotten used to playing with multi-skilled PCs, and he forced me to play with a homogenous group. Well worth playing in all three roles.

Oops, I did make a mistake. BoE originally came out with grey cave floors. Someone backported the E3 terrain to it. But I know that the cave floors in E1 and E3 are blue/green and E2 came out originally with gray. I have the original install of E2 and I have uploaded the Windows BMP files to Harehunter's Haven. You may have to change the address to get rid of the trailing '/'.

Actually, the Wound spell is unblockable. That is one reason I trained my fighters in Priest spells. Wound worked better than archery. Of course, having all 6 PC's able to cast Heal etc helped a lot. But the main reason for training your fighters in Priest spells was getting the Avatar; bless, haste, protection, invulnerability, all at once. You can only cast Avatar yourself, so the only way a fighter can achieve all the benefits would take several rounds of spell casting and potion drinking before you even get started.

I stand chastened. I thought it was relevant to both threads. What I started out to do was try to link to my other post; but I was also doing work, ran into a snag, and in frustration, I took the cheap way out by cut and paste. It won't happen again.

My very first computer RPG was Castle of the Winds. It had two parts, very primitive graphics, and a very simplistic story line. Then Exile (I) came out. The game engine was better, 6 PC's instead of 1, but the best part was the interaction with non PCs and a complex story line. I still have all three Exile episodes loaded on my machine. I also have backups of them, and backups of my backups (Paranoia is a healthy attribute for DBA's). The graphics for E1 were, what I considered, the basis. When E2 came out, the gray cave graphics were not as pleasing to me, since I had gotten used to the bluish/green floors of E1. Also the character icons were changed and looked cartoonish to me. Then someone mapped the E1 graphics to E2. I still have two copies of E2 on my box, one using the graphics published with the game, and one with the E1 graphics. I can share the graphics files if you want. When E3 came out, it went back to the E1 graphics as its basis. BoE also uses the E1/E3 graphics for its base. Then Avernum came along and everything changed... Personally, I liked the 6 PC scenario of Exile to the 4PC version of Avernum. You could split into three teams to better clear an area. And I really miss Avatar and Divine Thud. With all 6 PCs trained to L7 Priest, it was a deadly force. Anti-magic fields were especially useful against powerful magic users like Garzahd or the (ugh!) Rakshasi; take away their only strength, and they are vulnerable to physical attacks.

My very first computer RPG was Castle of the Winds. It had two parts, very primitive graphics, and a very simplistic story line. Then Exile (I) came out. The game engine was better, 6 PC's instead of 1, but the best part was the interaction with non PCs and a complex story line. I still have all three Exile episodes loaded on my machine. I also have backups of them, and backups of my backups (Paranoia is a healthy attribute for DBA's). The graphics for E1 were, what I considered, the basis. When E2 came out, the gray cave graphics were not as pleasing to me, since I had gotten used to the bluish/green floors of E1. Also the character icons were changed and looked cartoonish to me. Then someone mapped the E1 graphics to E2. I still have two copies of E2 on my box, one using the graphics published with the game, and one with the E1 graphics. I can share the graphics files if you want. BTW in the cave A Very Peculiar Place, there is a button that says that the graphics were of Jeff and Mariann in their best SCA garb. When E3 came out, it went back to the E1 graphics as its basis. BoE also uses the E1/E3 graphics for its base. Then Avernum came along and everything changed...

That is what inspired this little tale: http://www.hasenjs.byethost33.com/EEE/doomguard.html

That is true, but if you concentrate your attacks against one split, you will wear it down so that the splits from it are weak enough for your mage/priest to kill. Bless and Haste heavily, and keep your backs to the wall to minimize how many DG's can attack you.

I haven't had time to do the page by page walkthrough, but I did manage to scrape this much out. http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/Avernum6/Items6.html

Hopefully this sheds a little more light on the topic: http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/Avernum5/Items5.html I haven't gotten around to filling out the narrative, much less the index, but I did manage to squeak this out.

Thanks for the tip. Hopefully this is more stable. The only vulnerability I have is against the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.

By the way, I forgot to mention; arm and train your magic users to at least a level 4. I found out in Exile II how frustrating it is to be attacked by null bugs, and your mages are totally useless and defensless. And don't forget about the dreaded doomguards.

Thanks Alorael. I moved the image to Facebook and it is more consistent. I suspect that my websiter server, being a free account, just isn't fast enough to deliver the picture all the time.

This is a bit off topic, but what is the trick to setting my avatar? I go to the profile page, click the radio button for the URL, put in the url, and click submit. I check my profile then and sure enough my avatar is there. Then I come back later and it is gone! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over.

As I recall (off the top of my bald head), there are three ways to gain skill points: 1) Knowledge brews, Wisdom crystals 2) Gaining experience points (XP) 3) Completion of quests which give you extra XP XP are gained mostly by killing the enemy characters. The amount of XP earned depends on the Level stat of the enemy character, which is then distributed among your PC's. One trick with this process is that a greater percentage of the XP goes to the PC that actually gave the killing blow. If you let your fighters do most of the killing, then your magic users will end up falling behind in XP, and therefore in Skill points. Also note that your base stats in Health points and Spell points are dependent on the level of your character, which in turn is dependent on your XP. If you use strictly specialized characters, then your poor priest will not have the opportunity to make the killing blow, and will therefore fall behind in the XP/Skill point count. (That is why I never played with a pure mage/pure priest combination. All my magic users are trained equally in mage and priest skills.) The term 'leveling up' implies that you will purposely not kill an opponent with your strongest character, so that your weakest player can get a shot at it. That way your weak character will get the lion's share of the XP, allowing him to catch up with the rest of the party. It can be very frustrating when you get into the higher levels of monsters to find that you need a well balanced party, but you keep losing one of your magic users quickly because he is too weak. I think I remember that that is how it works. I hope this helps.

I am happy to oblige. I already have her original version scraped and uploaded, ready to be linked if the need should arise.

My most sincere apology to Rache. It is sometimes difficult to determine gender from a website name. At Aloraal's urging, I will provide the 'completed' version of Rache's website, with the link preserved to her own page. I give all credit to her for providing the framework.

I wish to contribute my two cents to the game. I have maps galore at Harehunter's Haven http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/

Just wanted to stick my two cents worth in regarding the maps. You can get them at my website Harehunter's Haven http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/

I just got into this discussion when I got an email from Derek Plote. I had scraped the website and was holding onto it in case something like this happened. I have loaded it up on my website Harehunter's Haven (http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/), at least until I get a request from Silver to take it down.

I kind of miss the 6 PC setup in Exile. It made it easy to split into multiple task forces to clear a level. My favorite group was 3 fighter/priests (Avatar is a really effective spell on your combat troops), and 3 mage/priests (They really need the protection from Avatar). The fighters would charge the room, stopping short lob a volley of Divine Thud against the bad guys, followed by the mage/priests who spam Anitmagic Cloud on the enemy magic users, making them completely ineffective until the fighters can swarm them and take them out. That was about the only way to take out Garzahd (Exile 2), who was flanked by a couple of (ugh!) magic-immune Rakshasi.

I just tried to contact Rache again re. his Avernum 3 pages, and got an undeliverable email back. He has not touched his website since April 2003, 8 years ago. Silver's site is even older and was last touched September 2001, 10 years ago. I hate to use material created by someone else, but I also hate to see incomplete material or the loss of such good work that can still be of value to other people. I would seriously like to get some feedback on this. I have scraped many websites because I feared they would be lost, and indeed, many are no longer to be found on the internet. They still exist in my private library, but they do no good to the rest of the internet community.

I got a head's up from Derek about Silver's site being down. I have a copy of Silver's website, with a complete, annotated version of Avernum 2. While he is getting settled into his new server, I will temporarily mirror his site at http://hasenjs.byethost33.com/. If you are out there Silver and you want me to take it down, let me know at hasen@flash.net, and I will happily comply. I tried to contact you once to give you my work on the Avernum 2 pages many months ago, but I never got a reply. By the way, I also have completed, for myself, Rache's Avernum 3 pages. I don't know if I should post these either. I would appreciate feedback on these since the original authors don't seem to care about completing their work.

All this talk of projectile weapons has me wondering about 'X' and his anvil experiments.