So about two weeks ago, I started feeling nostalgic over a game that I hadn't played for almost 20 years. The game itself is almost
30 years old, released by the late, great Microprose in 1992 (though I myself didn't get around to playing it until late 1993, after the Air Force sent me to Malmstrom Air Force Base). And its name is Darklands.
Do the arithmetic and you can figure out how long I had Darklands on my computer, playing it from time to time until the fateful day struck when my PC's motherboard fried and took my hard drive with it. The game is uncannily replayable and ever-changing, particularly for its age. Until my first installation of Darklands died with my hard drive, I must have cycled a few dozen new characters through the same party of adventurers, as old ones either shriveled up with old age, shriveled up from curses or debilitating wounds or just plain got themselves killed. The ultimate goal is to defeat Baphomet (archdemon and one of Satan's lieutenants) and avert the Apocalypse. I think that my party must have stopped the Apocalypse from happening about fifteen or twenty times over the years.
Baphomet was pretty persistent about kickstarting Judgement Day, I'd say.
Gamespot once reviewed Darklands and called it "one of the greatest games of all time," and I have to agree with them wholeheartedly. It's not a game that you play through, beat once and never touch again; from what I gather, I'm far from being the only gamer who had Darklands installed — and well-played — for
years. And now, it's on sale at the GOG site.
Check it out.
What makes Darklands unique among computer roleplaying games is the setting: Rather than plunk you down into some complete quasi-medieval Fantasy setting, Darklands takes place in 15th-Century Germany (and a few bordering regions of her neighbors, including the Netherlands, Austria and Poland). True to the time period, the Roman Catholic Church is the predominant power over Europe, the indigenous Pagan folk and their ways are against the wall, pestilence is widespread and the first firearms are beginning to appear (yet, being crude and horribly inefficient hand cannons, are still a century or two away from making bows and crossbows obsolete; the dreaded longbow and the armor-breaching arbalest will continue to rule the battlefields of Europe for the time being).
But yes, Darklands is indeed what one might call a Dark Fantasy setting. How so? I'll phrase it this way: Nowadays, we
know that creatures like gnomes, kobolds, schrats (think "German sasquatches") and dragons never existed. Nowadays, we
know that Europe's old Pagan traditions were entirely separate from the Abrahamic religions — and, though as superstitious as any other religion, were probably not malevolent — and had nothing to do with Lucifer or other Abrahamic bogeys. And nowadays, we
know that the Order of the Knights Templar were convenient scapegoats who were slandered, persecuted and ultimately exterminated by rival authorities who grew fearful of the Templars' political power, covetous of the Templars' considerable assets, or both; the Templars were in no way the Satanic black knights that their enemies said they were.
Darklands takes all of those myths, tall tales, mistaken beliefs and dogmatic propaganda and makes them real, resulting in a medieval Germany that's half-reality and half-fantasy. Miners are being driven out of their mines — and away from their jobs — by angry dwarves, driven to unrest by dark forces below. In the deep forests, witches shape sinister enchantments in their secluded hovels until it's time for them to fly off to their Sabbats at the behest of their Infernal patrons. And in the towers of their well-defended fortress, the Knights Templar ceaselessly work to appease their diabolical lord Baphomet, preparing for the day when they can call him forth into the waking world.
And you, brave wayfarer, can get tangled up in all this and more. Tread warily.
Speaking of brave wayfarers, Darklands' character creation system is also unique and rather dynamic. There are no classes or levels, but instead are a variety of attributes and skills which you groom, either directly (through assigning Experience Points) or indirectly (by choosing the character's origins and professions in the five-year increments of his or her preceding life). In the first stage of creating each character, you choose that character's name, sex and starting Attributes (Strength, Agility, Perception and so on). You can tell the game engine to generate a random name for your character, or you can type in your own; the random name generator is limited to rolling up German names, but there's nothing to stop you from manually entering non-German names like "Gawain of Hastings" (if you feel like playing an Englishman in Germany for whatever reason) or "Lord Chunky McButtpants" (if you're just feeling ridiculous).
(I'm a bit anal-retentive about my German, I guess; whenever the name generator comes up with something like "Hans of Straussberg," I have to go manual and change it to "Hans
von Straussberg" because
there is no "of" in German, dadgummit! I'm a
filthy, ignorant American and I know that!)
Anyway, family background. A noble-born child will have greater Charisma and intellectual skills (the fruits of an aristocratic upbringing and education), while a child born to rural commonfolk will have less Intelligence and esoteric knowledge (including the ability to
read and write, which we often take for granted these days) but greater physical abilities and practical knowledge.
After origin and childhood comes a choice of occupation for every five years of the character's life prior to adventuring
Not every occupation is immediately available. Some are forbidden to certain family backgrounds; aspire though you might, your peasant girl born to Rural Commoners can
never become a Noble Heir or a Manorial Lord, just as a son of Nobility would never stoop to becoming a Laborer. Others have certain requisites to meet before they become available; in order to unlock access to the mighty Knight occupation, you'll need to have a Virtue of 16 or higher, as well as either an upper class background (read: Nobility or Wealthy Urban Family) or experience in certain martial or ecclesial occupations (ie. a Captain, a Noble Heir or an Abbot). Three of the religious occupations — Friar, Priest and Bishop — are forbidden to women (though curiously, despite what we know about the time period, women
can become Knights), but this is offset by certain saints favoring women over men; more on saints in a little bit.
Each profession will either increase or decrease certain Attributes; for example, becoming a Bandit — tough and swift-footed yet harsh with words — will increase your Endurance and Agility while reducing your Charisma. Each profession will also increase or decrease various skills by a set amount, as well as allowing different amounts of Experience Points to be spent on those skills; becoming an Apprentice Craftsman will raise your Artifice skill by a flat 5 points while allowing you to spend as many as six EPs on Artifice on top of that, for a maximum of +11 to your Artifice for that point in your adventurer's life.
It's typically best to start your character's adventures between the ages of 20 and 30, because for every five years after Age 30, your character's Attributes begin to decay: first the physical ones (ie. Strength and Endurance), and once you're past Age 55, the mental Attributes (ie. Perception and Intelligence) begin to decay too.
Then you just tinker with your character's appearance (small and boxy though it may be) and give him or her a coat-of-arms, add up to four characters to your party, and leap into a world of Germanic adventure! Huzzah!
A "character sheet" in the course of play, listing the character's attributes and skills, and depicting what items you have equipped. If abbreviations aren't your thing, just click on any mini-menu to expand it (so "wImp" becomes "Impact Weapons," "StrW" becomes "Streetwise," and so on).
Skills range from 0 to 99. As usual, the high the number, the better you are with that skill and the greater your odds of success at using it. Skills like Edged Weapons (for wielding any bladed weapons from daggers to zweihanders) are your obvious battle skills. Speak Common is good for fast-talking and convincing people to do what you want, Speak Latin and Read & Write are useful for earning the ears of alchemists, professors, clerics and other scholarly sorts, Healing affects how swiftly your entire party recovers from injuries, and so on.
And mind your encumbrance; your warriors can work just fine with Normal or Heavy loads (though the latter will slow their ground speed), but it's best to keep your thieves and tinkerers at a Light Load; they need to stay swift and mobile. Equipping your nimble, swashbuckling rogues with full plate armor, heavy crossbows and battle axes simply will not do.
Instead of the usual incantation-chanting sorcery from many a Tolkienesque tale, what passes for magic in Darklands comes in two varieties: brewing potions with Alchemy, and using Religious Knowledge and Virtue to invoke saints through prayer.
With Alchemy, you need knowledge of alchemical formulas and the proper reagents. Not all formulas are created equal; some may consume more common ingredients with weaker or more meager results, while others may consume rarer or more exotic reagents in greater numbers to concoct far more potent potions. Higher Intelligence will improve your chances of success (or, at least, averting a disastrous failure), as will having a Philosopher's Stone; the more refined the Stone, the better.
True to form, expect the various reagents to be known by their Old World names: "brimstone" is sulfur, "manganes" is magnesium, "marsh vapor" is methane, "pitchblende" is uranium, and so on.
(Ah, the carefree and innocent years when people could fearlessly handle
uranium ore with their bare hands, right?)
Knowledge of prayers to the various saints can be earned through select people and places, with monasteries, universities and rare, random encounters with holy hermits in the wilderness being among them.
Each saint requires a different minimal Virtue before that saint will even
think about answering that character's prayers; anyone can learn the prayer to evoke Saint Agatha, but if Saint Agatha demands a Virtue of 24 or higher, then your scurvy thief with a measly Virtue of 10 or 15 will be beneath her notice (at least until your thief does enough good for the world to raise that Virtue to 24, of course).
As a rule of thumb, the higher the saint's Virtue requirement, the more powerful the saint's miracles. You need a Virtue of at least 30 to summon Saint Damian there, and he'll heal all of your Endurance but only a point or three of your Strength. Saint Ita is another healing saint; you need a whopping 85 Virtue to summon her, but she'll heal
all your wounds! No one can bring you from "almost dead" to full health like Saint Ita can! So call on Saint Damian if you have a few nicks and scrapes, but always try to save some Divine Favor for those near-death experiences that only Saint Ita can fix licketty-split.
(Saint Damian and Saint Cosmas are also a nice two-for-one deal; if you learn about one saint, you can learn about the other. Instead of instant healing, Saint Cosmas temporarily raises one person's Healing skill by a heady amount. So Damian's your man for mid-battle healing, but Cosmas is the one you need for mending your entire party's wounds while you're camping and recuperating from the battle later that night.)
Calling down a saint will consume a base amount of the invoker's Divine Favor, plus any extra Divine Favor that you want to add on to improve the odds of the saint answering your prayer. Divine Favor naturally replenishes itself at about a point a day, but you can speed things along by tithing to churches and other houses of worship, praying during periods of rest, or attending ceremonies like Mass and Holy Confession. Virtue can be permanently raised with
huge tithes and donations, as well as by doing certain righteous and holy deeds (like destroying Satanic altars or curing plague victims).
Many saints will give temporary boosts to your skills (ie. Saint George will improve all of one adventurer's skills with weapons and horse riding), some heal wounds and some imbue certain uncanny powers (ie. Saint Giles gives you money if you're poor, Saint Margaret can effectively make you fireproof and Saint Lazarus can save you from "certain" death).
Watch for opportunities to meet with people in positions of political and/or financial power; they often have quests that you can undertake. Rewards for completed quests may include money (often several Florins), special items, increases in local reputation (or even Europe-wide Party Fame), alchemical formulas and more!
Here is your F6 menu; it includes your overland map, the time of day, your location and your current money. The overland map not only helps you get where you need to go (important help for those quests) but it also shows your local reputation in various cities. Never underestimate the power of reputation; if a city's gates are barred at night, a Local Hero can easily persuade the guards to let the party in, an Unknown wayfarer will probably be turned away until morning, but a Hated party will meet with a violent rebuttal for daring to approach the city at all!
A random event in the wilderness. What choices you make will result in different outcomes and may draw on certain skills (such as Woodwise, for attempting to drive those wolves away before they attack).
The wolves weren't so easily deterred, alas. Fighty Time ensues.
(Hold the E key to get a little insight into your enemies. Wolves are tough, but their teeth aren't very good at penetrating chainmail or other metal armors.)
Another random encounter, this time with brigands.
Expect
lots of robbers, brigands and other scoundrels to accost you, more frequently if you're walking along one of Germany's many roads. Some of them are accompanied by evil alchemists and will have empowered weapons and armor. And if you're intruding on the territory of a raubritter (or robber-knight, a once-noble knight fallen into the ranks of villainy), you may frequently encounter bands of his men intent on collecting "tolls" for their lord, usually rather forcefully).
If you have ranged weapons equipped, whittle the bad guys down before they close for melee. And don't forget your tactics and your various modes of attack: A for standard Attack (balanced in both offense and defense), B for Berserk (all-out attack, but reckless and with lower defense), P for Parry (the opposite of Berserk: high defense, low offense) and V (for well-armored enemies; you aim your attacks at chinks in the enemy's armor, but at the cost of attack frequency). So if you have the weight of numbers, you can hasten a battle by drawing an enemy's wrath with a Parrying defender, then flank that enemy with one or more Berserkers.
The best part of any battle: the post-victory loot!
Yes, the Wild Hunt from the old Pagan myths is alive and well in Darklands (though in this context, they're Hell's hit squad,
not the Old Gods' army of justice). My party dodged Herne the Hunter
this time, but he
shall return.
(...but my party can take him. That's why I haven't bothered to learn prayers to Saint Columba yet: beating up the Wild Hunt is fun and profitable! Why deprive myself of that?)
Different saints can have different results, even in the same event. Here we have a Pagan site, but the witches are gone, leaving their beasts to guard the place. Praying to Saint Aidan will drive the wolves away, while praying to Saint Hildegard will reveal the time and location for the witches' next Sabbat. If you have the time and the Divine Favor, do both; otherwise, you'll either have to kill the wolves or find another way to the Sabbat so you can break it up.
...and here's one of those raubritters I was talking about.
Raubritters can be very dangerous enemies. If you killed any of his men on the way to his castle, he might defend his territory fiercely. Otherwise, you can coax him into inviting you in as a guest, with either a glib tongue or the right saint's intervention. Why batter your way into his castle if you don't have to?
Some saints allow you to see into the hearts of other people. Here, a quick prayer to Saint Gabriel (everyone's favorite Archangel of Revelation) compels the raubritter to lay bare his true intentions.
He's a robber-knight. What did you expect? Free puppies and foot rubs?
I chose to spend the night because I
always choose to spend the night. You can stumble across treasure chests in the raubritter's castle that way, and I'll rarely say "No" to more loot!
Time to go roving through the raubritter's castle, huzzah!
Hello again, sir!
My, Grandma, what a big sword you have! And full plate armor from head to toe...Max Schöner came fully loaded!
(I got a few Florins for his salvaged armor at the nearest marketplace. That was nice.
)
Another noble quest leads my merry band to a long-forsaken crypt in the wildlands. Getting in and grabbing the relic is easy enough.
Getting
out — through a host of the awakened undead — is marginally more difficult.
But I forgot to take a screenshot of the skeletons giving battle, so you get another pic of some brigands instead.
Sometimes, you stumble across a woman in a cottage with some wolves. Sometimes, she's just an old widow minding her own business, so leave her alone. Other times, she turns out to be a witch, and she'll start throwing potions at you while her wolves try to kill you.
(Potions of Eater Water are basically really corrosive acid. I hate it when witches pelt me with Eater Water! Tears my armor right to tiny bits!)
Defeat the witch and you come to another big multiple choice. I always make her abandon witchcraft and take up penance for her sins; it's usually good for a permanent Virtue increase.
Don't pick the first option; not meaning to spoil anything here, but let's just say that the witch has a
very unfavorable idea of what "the rest of your life" means!
While you're out wandering the wilderness, keep an eye out for hamlets like this one! Their smithies usually pay a bit more for whatever you have to sell, and the Divine Favor recoveries from taking Confession at the hamlet's church are
massive; half a day in the confessional can easily lift someone up from 0 Divine Favor to a perfect 99! You can also buy horses through the old woman's house, and the schulz sometimes has quests for you as well. Too bad you can't earn some money by taking up odd jobs while you're staying in a hamlet; apparently they already have more people than workplaces.
But always make your choices shrewdly; injustices can cost you! If you barge into that hut in the woods and the "witch" turns out to be an ordinary widow (usually because you acted on an assumption and didn't check your target first), your whole party will lose Virtue. Same thing if you march into a good and decent hamlet and accuse the schulz of harboring a Satanic cult; expect God to kick you right in the Virtue if you do that.
So why does that option exist? Because some hamlets and their citizens
aren't good and decent, of course! Before you go pointing any fingers, do a little groundwork and ask a few questions to see if the local yokels have thrown in with the Dark Side of the Force. If the schulz quotes the Serpent who tempted Adam and Eve, he's probably a Satanist. If the priest serves moldy Communion wafers, tells you to torture an animal to death as penance for your confession and honors Simon Magus — the sorcerer who once challenged Simon Peter the Apostle to a "faith-off" and lost terribly — as a saint, oh, yeah. That hamlet is Satanic out the wazoo! Either call the schulz out or spend the night at the old lady's house; either way, be ready for a skirmish, because diabolical cults don't take too kindly to goody-goody outsiders!
So you've beaten back a few hordes of enraged, xenophobic, blasphemy-shouting Satanists, and now you're at their unholy worship site. How do you give the place a thorough purging and kick all the evil out?
Well, if your party has someone who's really buff with Religious Knowledge, just have him or her carve up the altar's unholy symbols
just right so it's not consecrated to the Devil anymore. If any alchemists in your party have whipped up a Potion of Transformation, just lob it at the altar; that stuff's like Kryptonite to dark forces. If you're in cahoots with a saint who's all about stomping demon butt, just call that saint in. If you were out wandering around and you found some holy relic (like one of the nails that the Romans used to stick Jesus to that cross, or whatever), just set it on the evil altar and let it go to work.
But if all else fails — and if you can't find it in yourself to let such blasphemy go unanswered — then you're just going to have to yell prayers at that altar until the demon who hangs out there gets sufficiently annoyed and comes out to tell you to shut up.
...case in point:
Ooh, he looks pretty tough.
...but not as tough as me and my merry band! Bring it on, hornface! You kick like an epileptic fruit bat!
Have at you!Anyway, feel like giving Darklands a try yet?
Subject: Re: Play This Game, You Must. 
Fri Sep 22, 2017 10:06 am
