The Stack

I’ve figured out how to deal with the Priests of Fung, how to get through their area without loss of life or speculative teleporting (which is both risky and cheaty). It has to do with something that I really thought was a bug.

See, there’s something that I had been thinking of as “anti-magic fields” — areas where you can’t cast spells ¹Except for CALFO, the spell for detecting traps on chests, which is cast from the “What do you want to do with this chest?” menu instead of the interfaces you normally spells from. I’m assuming that this really is a bug., but neither can enemies. It takes away your greatest weapon, reducing you to winning fights with your actual fighters, but also removes the biggest dangers. Level 5 has such a field on an area of magical darkness — the only darkness field I’ve seen in Wizardry III. It’s a combination that makes it very difficult to navigate, as you can’t see where you’re going and you can’t cast DUMAPIC to check your location. You can’t just back out the way you came, because the door into the area is one-way. You can’t even teleport out. The occasional pit trap adds some urgency to the situation. An “ethereal taxi” service has set up shop in several points in the darkness to take advantage of your desperation, offering to whisk you back to town for an exorbitant fee. But it is possible to make it back to the rest of the dungeon, if you keep track of your movements carefully.

Now, here’s the apparent bug: The effects of the anti-magic field don’t turn off when you leave the anti-magic field. (I noticed a spot like this in Knight of Diamonds as well. Possibly it applies to all anti-magic fields.) Once you’ve been in it, you can’t cast spells until you leave the level. But neither can anything else. Remember how the big threat posed by the Priests of Fung was instant-death spells? You can just turn those off.

In fact, it’s even better than that. Priests of Fung, like most enemy spellcasters, always cast spells unless they can’t (either because they’ve run out, or because they’re in a surprise round). Even when they weren’t instant-killing my guys, they were doing tons of damage with reverse healing spells like BADIALMA. Do a little detour through the anti-magic field, and basically all their attacks fizzle. It turns them from the most dangerous things I’ve encountered to the most helpless.

(And on top of that, after doing a few rounds through Fungland, I noticed that the anti-magic field actually begins just outside of the darkness room, letting me streamline the process and not lose my light spell by skipping the darkness. Maybe the darkness and the anti-magic don’t actually overlap at all.)

So, I’ve mapped out all of level 5 now. Do I go on to level 6? Not quite yet: these Priests of Fung provide the most efficient and risk-free grinding yet, and I’m still getting really good equipment drops from them. Once I do a pass without permanently improving someone’s armor class, I’ll consider it.

Is the behavior of anti-magic fields in fact unintentional? I’ve already documented some apparent mistakes that got preserved in this edition, so it’s far from implausible. But I’d like to think it’s an intentional puzzle. The fact that it puts the episode’s first anti-magic field right on the one level where it’s really useful makes it seem like it’s not coincidence. And for my money, this sort of thing is Wizardry at its best: making situational puzzles out of previously-established game mechanics.