One Last Thought on Legacy in Wizardry

In a previous post, I described the possibility of legacy admissions in Legacy of Llylgamyn: that if you want characters with all of the honor marks for successfully completing scenarios, the best way to do it would be to make new characters to do all the dangerous parts, then use them to chaperone the legacy characters through relatively-safe high-XP grinding, letting the descendants of those who did great deeds in the past reap the benefits of other people’s work.

Having now been through the ending in Wizardry III, I see it’s even better than that. You can get your legacy characters the mark for beating the game without ever sending them into the dungeon at all. When a party returns from the dungeon with the Orb of Earithin, they receive the victory mark, but you also get to select up to six other characters from the roster to mark too. Presumably this was intended to support the “one good party and one evil party” style of gameplay: if you used two parties to get the stuff you need to win the game, it seems a little unfair for only one of them to get the honors. But since the game lets you share the honors with anyone you want, even if they didn’t do anything, you have the option to be unfair in other ways.

Wizardry II does something similar: the endgame, which is more ritual than challenge, has to be done by one character entering the dungeon solo with a complete Knight of Diamonds outfit. When they emerge with the Staff of Gnilda, they get to bestow honors on companions who helped them — but there, the ones you pick get a different mark than the one who actually did the ritual. If you really want a character with every single mark, you’d have to complete Wiz2 twice, once to give that character the Knight of Diamonds mark and once to give them the helper mark. But you can still minimize the involvement of the character who’s getting the marks, and thus minimize risk to them. If your designated hero character can survive dungeon level 1, your worker characters can hand them all the pieces of the costume and send them off to do the ending.

You pretty much have to get your mark from Wizardry I honestly, though. The only way to do it there is to come out of the dungeon with the amulet, which you can only get by defeating Werdna, and which you don’t get to keep afterward. And sure, there are ways to do that with a character who hasn’t actually fought Werdna. They could die in the dungeon and get picked up and resurrected by a victorious party on their way out. But there’s really not much reason to do that, other than exploit for exploit’s sake.

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