Magic and Runes

Discuss anything about the original Dungeon Master on any of the original platforms (Amiga, Atari, etc.).
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Gavindale Marchovia
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Magic and Runes

Post by Gavindale Marchovia »

A quick question... I know to cast a spell, the player must align a series of runes to summon magic. Here's my question - how goes a player know what runes do what? Is it trial and error, or do we get some sort of scroll that indicate what rune sequences do what..?
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Paul Stevens
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Re: Magic and Runes

Post by Paul Stevens »

A scroll will provide the information you need.

But you need to know the runes' names:
http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/195
will give you a bit of a head start.
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Ameena
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Re: Magic and Runes

Post by Ameena »

The scrolls have the various rune combinations in order to show you how to cast certain spells. The exact spell recipes aren't given in the game manual, so as to allow people to mess around experimenting and maybe figure some out for themselves if they want to, without waiting until they find it written on a scroll somewhere (for example, the scroll with the recipe for probably the most popular attack spell in the game isn't found until about halfway through the dungeon). The game manual does give you the names of all the runes and the things they represent (eg Ful, the one that looks lik a backwards N, is the rune for Fire), so if you have a copy of that, it may be useful without providing full spoilers :).
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slickrcbd
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Re: Magic and Runes

Post by slickrcbd »

It is important to note that not all the spells are explained via scrolls. Some have to be found via trial and error, and it isn't obvious what some of them do at first.
YA IR and YA BRO potions for instance don't appear to do much other than make blue lines appear around all your characters for a short time or one character for a long time, when they help reduce damage from physical attacks.
YA BRO ROS (magic footprints) is easy to miss what it does (especially if you use LO), and OH EW SAR doesn't appear to do anything at first glance.
A word of warning, ZO VEN will waste a flask making a VEN potion. MON ZO VEN is slightly more powerful than MON OH VEN, but it isn't worth losing a flask that you could be using to store mana potions if nothing else. I can't recall if MON OH VEN is equal to MON EE VEN or MON PAL VEN. It's been over 25 years since I experimented by casting/throwing the poison clouds at a wall and the World Wide Web did not exist yet at the time.
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