I am finding the order you do things in is incredibly important.

My last character Smashface, a level 13 fighter skelly (made for the fighter report week on the forums) had to be put down (as a rabid dog) after discovering that he would not be able to obtain the rod of recall which basically hosed him for the rest of the game. He was on his way to completing the antimagic quest, had already done the fortress (barely surviving vs a nigh unkillable boss!!) and had done the maze, the old forest and the cursed/merchants quests. He obtained 2x Hymn of preservation from escorts while losing one escort quest to a suicidal warrior.

After this fiasco, I have decided the order in which this character needs to be built is as follows:

+ Get out of the start-up dungeon. (level 5 after killing the boss waiting near the exit.)

+ Prepare before you leave the start-up dungeon: Make sure to collect enough staves/jewelry to do the apprentice mage quest and complete it on exiting the start-up dungeon. Also try and do a vault if you can find one that has infusions to replace your runes with so you can at least have some defenses while on the antimagic quest. I have found infusions to be incredibly rare outside of vaults, though very infrequently you can find them lying about on the floor.

+ Go get the antimagic quest AFTER completing the mage quest. You might end up having to do the trapped quest early because walking around looking for the apprentice mage can take quite awhile since he spawns within a huge radius of Anglowen.

+ Be sure to get the orb of scrying asap (you automatically qualify since you should have picked up the Cloak of Deception from your dead master's corpse.

+ Do the Trollmire! (be wary of using gifts from escorts yet. You can have them but you can't use them or you will negate the antimagic quest.)

+ Do the maze. It is harder than some of the other starting dungeons but it is slightly more rewarding and you can find some interesting items there on occasion. The Labyrinth boss is not a pushover but if you get a little lucky you should be able to stun him which will give you time to back away from him/heal/regen/etc. Shield Wall x4-5 is essential to keep yourself from being smushed here.

+ Then do the old forest. The hardest part about this are the nests and escort quests. The combination can get you killed if you are trying to keep your escort alive (almost impossible in some scenarios as they are prone towards extreme depression and suicidal tendencies because of some drama in their recent past.)

+ You should be able to do the fortress now, and since you don't need to breath it should not be too much trouble to get to the next level from the water filled parts.

Be ware of He Who Walks (orange (h)orror/wurm) as he can kick your butt even if you are maxed out in shield wall etc. Other than him the level shouldn't be too hard.

The boss below on the other hand is either easy or hard depending on whether you can get him stun-locked. Not an easy feat I found, though I was able to do so readily with a berserker at the start of beta 18.

After capturing the Fortress you should be level 15-16 which is minimally right on time for the antimagic quest (since you can't take it before level 5 as a skelly) though perhaps a bit early. I haven't tried it since I failed with my rogue but I suspect a skelly fighter will have an easier time of it. You might want to do the other two Into the Darkness quests first to level up for better results. The two last monsters I hear are the hardest.

Anyway I plan to follow this on my NEXT skelly fighter in an attempt to make a character report for the forums use.

Well after several weeks I managed a win with a mere 2 deaths both in the final fight. I came close to death so many times during the game that if I had died it would have been just a matter of a few points difference. Many defensive abilities + some luck and occasionally good tactics (or at least not stupid as heck tactics) helped.

The final fight was insane. Earlier, I read something on the forums or here, about doing the orbs at the 4 corners but I didn't quite understand how to work it (There is no real reference in game that I could find and the journal notes were not helpful) so I just went with as defensive a posture as I could muster (Barrier, Providence, Circle of Warding and Sanctity + various heal spells. Totality was very helpful here.) Slowly, I weakened the sorcerers with AoE spells and DOT effects. An enemy DOT finished off one of the bosses for me. (Thanks mr fire U guy.)

Sadly the Sun Paladin died fairly quickly but she accounted for a good amount of damage off one of them. The other was fairly hard to kill and the monsters summoned from the portals were painful but no where near as much as the two bosses. 7500 hps! ouch. The most annoying thing was the mimicry effect, where I cast something and had it cast right back at me.

I think this particular character took me 4 days? to play from beginning to end. I know there is much more to do (spellblaze, elven ruins, one of the eastern quests I didn't complete (Important News?).

This is the first win in any TOME for me so perhaps it isn't quite as hard as it used to be, but for me that is a good thing. I know there are plenty of purists who deem multilife wins to be worthless but it was a challenge for me. I expect my next character to die miserably a lot before I learn how to use it's abilities.

I have been trying to make anthorils for a few days now and keep dying ...I decided the maze would be a mistake to try at first and went with the more orthodox trollmire start but I consistently keep dying to out of depth monsters there. I have noticed that the regular monsters aren't much of a challenge but the ood monsters are usually placed so that I get to a low health and teleport towards them instead of escaping as planned. I am not taking advantage of the normal extra lives since everyone seems to think this is cheating and I wouldn't want to put anyone off their feed.

It could be that I am sick with a cold and that is why I can't seem to play this game correctly at the moment. (My last character died as soon as I started showing symptoms. which is exacerbated by my nature fumble fingeredness.) But I am starting to think this class is seriously under powered. No melee combat ability at all and the spells don't match up to archmage nor do the hymns seem all that effective. (They seemed more effective as random gifts from escorts.)

Speaking of escorts I have noticed they don't seem to show up in the Trollmire at all anymore. (The last 5 characters had none any way.)

Anyway just wondering if anyone has put together play tips for this class yet and or has ideas on how the class could be improved.

I was doing pretty well. Level 21! Archmage Dwarf (who would have thunk it?) Pretty decent equipment Level 5 spells, Decent Magic/Con/Will and not terrible Str/Cun either (from items)... The 4 sections of maze, 6 out of 7 escorts all done.

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Note to self: NEVER do the crypt quest again. Ever. It is pure suicide. Well I managed to probability travel through the sublevels easily enough killing corruption mages then popping out of the rooms and healing/resting in safe places then doing it again. But boy did they almost get me a couple times anyway.

Thankfully that strategy worked enough for me to find the stairs and head down. Managed to get through a bunch of levels.

At the bottom I faced the four (p) acolytes. Thankfully two start off semi hidden by a wall so they can't just blast me to cinders as soon as I enter. However they do managed to kill me before I can kill one. I have 4 lives left. I eventually kill 2 but the demon shows up and after that it is all over. at 900+ hp each acolyte alone was a match for me. 4x + a U is ridiculous. The count down gives almost no time to deal 4k damage within. Needless to say I left another ghost down there along with all the others gathering dust from other players who probably also said to themselves "never again."

Sure glad I didn't even try the Master. Being screwed by Ungodly highlevel Undead would probably have been too much for me.

I did lose one life in the maze (starting zone) before beating it, 1 in the Sandwurm Lair and 2x in the fortress.
I managed to complete an escort quest on level 7 of Daikara AND defeated the (D) boss. This time no scary out of depth monster was around to steal my loot and I found an egg of some interest. Sadly the (S) spiders it summoned were about as useful as bears. :/

Conclusions: It is clear to me that unless I know the strategy for these levels for the character type I am playing I stand no chance at all. The game starts off fairly easy to play once one gets a handle on the changes and the keys etc. But then it rapidly scales off the map. At over 600hp (and 400mp base) I couldn't deal with the end game of the crypt at all. I shudder to think what the areas of the game are like that I have yet to see.

I am imagining to be able to traverse to the east (and survive there) you either need superb luck or the skills of a roguelike diety. Sad really because despite my earlier discouragement I was really enjoying this character and had hopes to develop it to a high level at some point.

I ran into this when I first started, quickly left and never bothered with it again after triggering a few of the monster summons. I decided to check it out again with my current character. I am completely and utterly confused by the "puzzle" aspect of this dungeon and I don't consider myself a neophyte with puzzles (30years of designing and running aD&D/rpg campaigns = some familiarity with puzzles.)

The lines of the poem make no sense. Reordering the lines does not make them clearer. I managed to somehow have one of the "orbs?" turn on instead of throwing mobs at me. But since there is nothing remarkable about that room I have to assume it is just random. Unfortunately going back and touching each of the other "orbs?" does not produce any different results.

So I guess I am stuck on this. :/

Decided to try another Shalore Archmage and I am finding some of the talents to be really bad. Displacement shield for instance is complete waste of a slot it seems. It has a huge cooldown time, lasts only one shot no matter how small and is consistently a wasted turn.

More when I encounter them.

Well after spending a good part of the day playing my last character "Hopeless" (aptly named) I died a whole lot of times at once in the daikara dungeon. After that it was really just over for me. I did manage to kill Ranth but had to flee without looting the body because a more dangerous monster awaited in the wings. (Some super nasty undead spell caster, sort of like a Skelly Mage if it had access to all spells and was able to cast something horrendous each turn.)

So that's it for me for awhile. No more TOME until it tones down a little. The frustration of having spent all that time to get a character to level 20 to have him die repeatedly to scaling/power issues is ridiculous. But I blame myself for that as I know I am not a good player even though I have played most of the bands and have extensive experience with both strategy and roleplaying games. Good players seem to sail through the challenges like a breeze and have no problems dealing with anything that I consider unfair or impossible. Even so I hope the game does begin to accommodate those who are not hard core power gamers.

Some comments on the game itself:
a) The UI is dramatically improved from previous versions of t-engine, however some of the things one expects in a band are missing or hard to find. A lot of the hot keys are unmapped which means less functionality. In that same vein the user command box on the lower right could stand to be done a little more efficiently, allowing more than 12 commands to show there with up/down arrows. All in all however this area of the game is just A++.

b)I really love the way the game unlocks different things at different stages and how each achievement is recorded and given some emphasis. The documentation (in game) could stand some work, but overall while not being linear it still gives the player a good idea of what to do next which is imho important in a game this large where you can stumble and die at nearly every opportunity. One thing that would be nice is if the game warned you when you are about to make game changing decisions like ignoring the thief/merchant quest (because you are afraid it will bug out like prior versions) only to discover it never comes again. (Well it never did for me and I spent some time attempting to get by walking randomly around the world map.)

c) The house while hard to accomplish is a deft touch. Giving the player a base is probably one of the biggest things you can do to tie them into the game.

d) The escort quests are stupid hard, unless you get lucky and the & is near the entrance AND the npc @ doesn't idiotically charge the nearest badass and die while your @ is engaged with 3 other badasses. It does help in certain maps to have unpassable channels but I had one quest in this last character where the escort died from collateral damage by a baddy. In fact in the last stage of Daikara the Boss was waiting 5 steps from the entrance in an unavoidable path so the NPC really had no chance at all even though I rushed the boss. In another instance in the same dungeon I suicided twice (killing the enemies around him while taking a beating) to keep the @ alive only to have him kill himself on known traps. :/

d) the game seems to favor spellcasters/ranged attackers at least in terms of monsters. Only a few melee monsters are really challenging much past their half level point. Spellcasters seem intensely dangerous beyond their typical threat level (ie: skelly mages vs skelly warriors.) Archers are likewise deadly without apparent reason. Yes we can go to "realism" because many games do but I feel that gaming isn't fun if that is the crutch we always rely on to make things more "challenging." That said killing them does give a certain satisfaction akin to crushing roaches, irl.

e) one of the nastiest effects in the game is the confuse spell. Not just because it does terrible things to the character but because it screws with the UI and makes using the mouse nearly impossible which I personally detest in games. I prefer to not be actually blinded/confused/stunned by the games I am playing letting my avatars take the brunt instead. After all I am not the character...

Anyway I hope you all have fun improving this. For now I am out...Happy New Years!

Not too complicated to use though in writing the .bat file (its been 20 years or so since I last bothered with .bats) I think I got one of the path's wrong because I got a message to that effect from the command shell though it does not interfere with the running of the program.

The error I am hoping to reproduce seems somewhat random so it might not come up at all. I am trying to get it to crash again on entering the name of a new character. So far it has happened twice now but no indication of why in the stdout.txt file and nothing at all in stderr.txt.

Blah my dwarf Wyrmic finally hit level 10 and then got into the unknown tunnels quest and is now stuck. Seeing as how I had to lose about 20 previous characters to get one to level 10 in normal mode this is frustrating indeed. Hopefully the saves will be usable in this next version.