Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord/Walkthrough

Process

In order to beat the game, you must defeat the evil wizard Werdna in combat, and retrieve the amulet he stole. Werdna resides on the tenth floor, the lowest level of the dungeon maze. Aside from gaining enough experience to reach class levels that actually permit you to survive the trip to the tenth floor and subsequently the final battle that takes place there, there is very little else that you actually have to do. There are, however, a few items that you should collect, relatively early on, in order to access deeper levels of the dungeon more easily.

• You must locate and obtain the Bronze and Silver keys on the first floor. These open locked doors that are found on the second floor. (In the NES version, there is an additional Gold key that you must collect on the second floor in order to open a door on the first floor.)
• There are two statues located on the second floor. However, only one statue is required in order to access a door found on the fourth floor. The other is not needed.
• You must engage in a particular fight and succeed in order to access the path that leads to the Blue Ribbon. This item will authorize you to use the second elevator that leads to much deeper levels of the dungeon without the need to go from staircase to staircase.

The Maze

While the Castle and the Edge of Town allow you to maintain your characters and the party that they are in, the Maze is where the majority of the game actually takes place. It is in the Maze where you will explore, engage in combat with monsters, and obtain experience and treasure that permit your characters to grow in power.

You must have an assembled party of players ready to go before you can enter the Maze. This is explained above in Gilgamesh's Tavern. Once your party has been created and you choose the enter the Maze, you will begin in a camp.

Camping

Camping is something is always done just before you enter the maze, and can be done at virtually any time you are not engaged in combat. While camping, you have several options, including inspecting your characters (press the number of the associated character), REORDER the party, EQUIP your party, and LEAVE the camp to explore the maze.

Inspecting character

Inspecting a character in a camp is a lot like inspecting a character in the Training Grounds; you can see all the vital information about the character. However, in a camp, you have several more options. You may READ your spell books to learn which spells are available to you during the expedition, and cast a SPELL by typing out the name of the spell you would like to cast (or selecting it from a menu). You may USE an item, EQUIP different items, or even DROP one from your inventory. You can also TRADE items, as well as gold, between characters in your party. One exclusive option for Bishops/Wizards is the ability to IDENTIFY unidentified objects. It's not guaranteed to work, especially if your Bishop/Wizard is low in experience, and there's a chance they may curse themselves if the item is in fact cursed.

Reordering a party

Your party is composed of six slots. While exploring the dungeon, the first three slots occupy the front row, while the last three slots occupy the back row. This means that only character in the first row can attack with or be attacked by physical means. Characters in the back row cannot swing weapons at enemies, nor can they get hurt by slashes and bites. However, characters in the back row can cast spells, as well as be affected by spells and other special attacks that have range beyond the first row.

As a result, you should always place your best and most protected warriors in the front, and keep weaker spell casters in the back. When reordering a party, you must enter the current number of the character you want to fill each position. If a character dies, they are automatically placed in the back of the formation. This means that if a character in the front row dies, one character in the back row will be forced to take his or her place in the front row.

Equiping the party

While it's possible to individually equip each character by inspecting them, there are times when it can be useful to run through the equipping of the entire party. This is especially true after creating a party of new character who have just made their first visit to Boltac's Trading Post. Purchasing items is not enough to make them effective; they must be equipped before you go into battle, or they will have no effect.

Exploration

Once you leave the safety of a camp, you will be in the Maze, and be vulnerable to anything that the maze has to throw at you. The screen displays many different pieces of information while you explore the Maze, including the rendering of a three dimensional view of the maze in front of you, as well as a list of some options available to you. As explained above, you may enter a camp at any time when you are not engaged in combat by pressing C. You may also press the O key at any time to toggle the display some windows on or off in order to make the screen easier to read.

Inspecting an area

You may inspect your current location by pressing I. Inspecting lets you look around for any characters who may be dead, or simply lost, and were left at that location. They do not appear on the display, so you must inspect an area in order to find them. In order to find lost characters, you must be close enough to them that you could walk to them without opening a door. Once you find them, you may add them to your party, but you must have enough room for them before you are filled to the maximum capacity of six characters.

Updating your status

While exploring the Maze, you may wish to have your status updated. You can do this by pressing S. This will update the screen with the latest information (and make it visible to your if you pressed O). The game does not do this automatically in many early versions of the game, so if you've been poisoned, you must refresh the display of your status in order to see how many hit points a poisoned character has remaining after taking a number of steps.

Changing message speed

As the game reports information to you, there is a typical amount of time that the game waits before presenting the next piece of information to you. You can speed up or slow down this time delay by pressing T. You can then enter number between the specified range to change the rate at which messages appear. If the game is running too slowly for you, reduce the number. If the game is presenting the messages faster than you can read, increase the number.

Quitting the game

If you are in a hurry to end your game and you can't make it back to the Edge of Town in time, you can press the Q key to quit the game. This causes the game to save your progress. However, when you return to the game, all members of your party will be marked as "OUT". You must then enter the Utilities page and RESTART AN OUT PARTY in order to pick up where you left off. While most things are remembered, the status of certain spells which are supposed to last the duration of your expidition will be forgotten.

Tracking your progress

Movement through the maze is described in the controls section of Gameplay. With each step forward that you take, a new event or scene may play out, although a majority of the spaces in the game are uneventful. While you explore the Maze, it is highly recommended that you track your progress for yourself on a sheet of paper or graph paper. Due to some traps in the maze like teleport locations, it can be incredibly easy to lose your place in the maze and become eternally lost. When you enter the maze, you arrive in the southwest corner of the first floor, facing north. Note that each floor is exactly 20 x 20 units in size, and a magical field surrounds the maze so that if you are permitted to travel off one edge of a map, you will arrive on the opposite side. For example, if you travel south off the bottom of the map, you will arrive on the north side of the same column.

Mapping Aids

Experienced explorers rely on certain tools to assist them in their travels through uncharted regions of the maze. The priest prayers of light MILWA and LOMILWA permit your party to see deeper into the dungeon than you can without the aid of added light. They also make secret doors more detectable. Secret doors are doors which do not always appear in front of you when you look right at them (although they may appear in your view every now and then.) Teleport traps may completely disorient you and make tracking your progress much more difficult. Mages can lend a hand by casting the DUMAPIC spell. Doing so causes the mage to know the exact coordinates of the party with the maze, in the format of number of squares east and number of squares north from the southwest corner of the maze, and number of floors down from the Castle. In addition, you are provided with the current direction your party is facing.

Combat

Whenever you explore a section of the Maze, there is always the possibility that you will stumble upon monsters. Some of these encounters are random, some of them are prearranged and always take place in the same location, and some locations simply have a higher than average likelihood of having an encounter. Some monsters are friendly, and you are given the option to leave them in peace or attack them anyway. In some cases, you may surprise the monsters and be given a free chance to attack before they can gather themselves and defend themselves. In other cases, it may be you who gets surprised, and must suffer through one round of combat without the option to counterattack.

Once combat begins, you are shown a graphical view of a monster, as well as a list of monsters that you are fighting against. You will not always be able to immediately identify the monsters at first. Sometimes you must successfully kill one before you know what you're really up against. A higher I.Q. allows you to properly identify monsters quicker, and the spell of LATUMAPIC will also help you discern which types of monsters you are facing.

Combat proceeds in rounds. At the start of each round, you are given an opportunity to provide instructions to each of your active (not paralyzed, sleeping, or dead) party members. After all members have been given an instruction, you may press Enter to authorize your party to fight, or press B to take the instructions back and start them all over. Combat proceeds until all of one side is either defeated or runs away. The following is a list of the available instructions:

• FIGHT: This option is only available to party member who occupy the first three positions and therefore are in the front row. This is a physical attack where you swing your weapon at one enemy in a group in an attempt to wound or kill them. This is the default selection of a party member in the first row (press Enter).
• PARRY: By choosing Parry, you are emphasizing defense over offense. Parrying reduces the chance that a monster can hit you. This is the default selection of a party member in the second row (press Enter).
• DISPEL: A unique option for Priests/Clerics, as well as high level Bishops and Lords, they can appeal to their deity for the power to turn away unholy creatures who have risen from the dead to attack the living. The degree of success depends on the level of the character performing the action, as well as the strength of the monster. Note that monster who are dispelled don't provide the party with experience points.
• SPELL: Upon choosing this option, you are asked which spell you want to cast. If you are playing a computer version, you must type the name of the spell you wish to cast, or at least enough letters of the spell to distinguish it from any other spell you may be casting. You will then be asked who the spell should target if more information is required.
• USE: You can choose to use an item in the middle of battle, like a potion of healing, or a magical scroll. You can even use certain weapons or armors in battle to determine if they have special properties that produce magic effects.
• RUN: A good option to choose if you feel the odds are not in your favor, running away isn't always guaranteed to work. If you succeed, you will escape combat and find yourself in some other portion of the Maze. If you don't, the monsters will attack you for one more round before you can try again.

If you succeed in defeating monsters, the surviving members of your party are awarded with experience points. Note that obtaining enough experience points to reach the next level does not automatically advance a character to that level; they must escape the Maze and spend a night at the Inn to advance. Your party may also find a stash of gold which is evenly distributed among each survivor, or they may find a treasure chest. Chests must be carefully examined before being opened.

Treasure Chests

It's generally true, although not always the case, that a chest is booby trapped to keep unwanted handed out of them. When you find a chest, you can choose from a few options.

• OPEN: Choose this option if you feel that the chest is safe to open. You must choose a player to open the chest. If the chest is trapped and has not been disarmed, the player opening the chest will suffer the consequences of the trap. Other players around him or her may also suffer.
• INSPECT: You can take a look at the chest in an attempt to identify any traps. There is a small chance that you might set off the trap while you inspect it. Although anyone can inspect a chest, Thieves are the only people who can inspect with any degree of accuracy.
• CALFO: If you want a more assured way of checking a chest for traps, and if you have a character capable of casting CALFO, you can use this spell which has a 95% chance of accuracy.
• DISARM: You can attempt to disarm a trap if you think you know what a chest is trapped with. You must enter the name of the trap that you are attempting to disarm. If you choose wrong, you will likely spring the trap. Even if you choose right, there is a chance you will fail, and a smaller chance that you will spring the trap, but you may try as many times as you like. If you succeed, you will automatically open the chest. Once again, only Thieves have any real chance of successfully disarming a trap.
• LEAVE: Leave the chest behind, forfeiting whatever contents it contained.

If the chest is opened, the gold in the chest is distributed evenly among surviving members of the party. Items, however, are provided to one particular person in the party at random. However, they can be redistributed to others in a camp.