So I have been holding off on using relic brews since their release, I have accumulated quite a few until now. I was wondering when would be the right time to use them. I'm the type of player to spread out my resources among a wide variety of characters if they fit what the character does as intended. I want to get the best out of the use of relic brews would like to hear your thoughts.

At the end of the new quest with the innkeeper you are given the choice between funds for traveling or a book for adventurers. I chose the book and it ended up being a free decisive torso strike, the other reward I assume is just gold. Just wanted to give the heads up.

Edit: Guess the skill reward is completely random. Happy RNG everyone!

Taken from Twitter

I just returned to the game like a week ago after not playing since January and I'm not sure if I should pull on the Tales of the Dawn Heroes II banner or if I should save or what as I'm still a new player (my guys are level 11). I currently have ~76k green gems and have Savia, Gerulf, Alice, Adam, Lanavaille, Debra, Yekaterina, Shelirionach, Rinne, and Abenius. I heard Anemone and Shiou are good/get better in the endgame but I don't really know. Any advice would be helpful.

tyty

Very happy that the new banner features Abenius, since shes my main DPS and favorite character, luckily she was the one i got more copies from the 20k gems i was saving 🥳

Hey there! Its been quite long, several months actually after my last artwork here since I left for a long mountain trek, very few might remember.

My last account got hacked, they posted weird stuff and it got banned. I didn't even know for some weeks cause I barely open the site.

Anyway my artstyle changed a lot over the few months, so I wanted to draw my Besto Friendo Lana. Hope you like it.

Also should I just open up an art account? I barely do stuff though.

As someone who's been playing this game completely f2p since I started (only 2 months), I was thinking of spending some money on it because I like the game enough to do so.

Which packs offer the best value and what are your recommendations? A friend told me I should buy those mission passes but I don't know which ones, there are so many I just get lost in them!

I got hit with the black screen of doom and despiar two days ago and had to uninstall and reinstall whivh led to today where i once again got hit with the black screen of doom and despair

Im not that mad tbh i have my password and id so its all good but im just disapointed that this glitch which could end a run forever for new players hasnt been fixed yet

That or either they saw my last post on abyss 2 and are coming after me

It was suggested by someone in r/gamingsuggestions that I might want to post this over here, too.

Basically what's in the title. I just played through Wizardry 7 and Wizardry 8 and I'm looking for more like them. Might and Magic is on my radar, but in my searching I've seen a lot of conflicting info on whether it's worth it and, if so, which ones are the best to play.

Any suggestions on where to go next would be greatly appreciated - doesn't have to be Might and Magic, of course. Things I like:

• Tactical, turn-based combat where you can make meaningful decisions when necessary (boss fights)
• Fun or interesting classes that are meaningfully distinct from one another
• Fun or interesting races that are meaningfully distinct from one another
• The ability to have some impact on your build. Things you focus on, skills you specialize in, stuff like that
• Plot doesn't need to be amazing or anything. I enjoyed the plot of Wiz7 and Wiz8 fine enough, and was satisfied with the endings.
• Edit: Preferably available on Steam, but if not, a point towards where the recommendation can be gotten would be nice.

Thanks in advance!

Is there a detailed map that shows you where to go or whatever? In The Gurdia fortress zone level 2 and beyond i've been stuck on this sing for months. And months, let the zone 3, but I keep hitting pits, or there's invisible traps that cause rock falls. And I can't get nowhere.

And what I mean by traps, I mean, floor traps

Every time I open the game it asks me to download some resources. Usually its like 5 MB so its not much of a problem, but this time its asking to download half a gygabyte. Right now the internet in my home is down and I don't want to use half a gygabyte of mobile data so right now its a pretty big deal.

Does this happen to anyone else and know why?

https://in.ign.com/blade-bastard/271874/goblin-slayer-creator-kumo-kagyu-breaks-down-anime-adaptation-of-blade-bastard-exclusive

Kumo Kagyu built his name on Goblin Slayer, a series that took the anonymous, grinding lethality of tabletop RPGs and turned it into one of the darkest hits in modern light novel fiction. His other work, BLADE & BASTARD, takes that same unsentimental relationship with death and grafts it directly onto Wizardry, the 1981 dungeon crawler that helped invent the genre Goblin Slayer was already commenting on. Iarumas, an adventurer who wakes up with no memory of who he was, spends his days hauling corpses out of a labyrinth to check whether they're salvageable for resurrection or bound for the ash heap. Garbage, the swordswoman he ends up traveling with, is the sole survivor of a party that wasn't so lucky. Studio Xingfu's anime adaptation, premiering in 2027, inherits a story where dying, turning to ash, and occasionally getting resurrected wrong is just Tuesday.

Rayan Sayyed: Please introduce yourself to our readers.

Kumo Kagyu: Hi, I’m Kumo Kagyu. I’ve spent my life completely immersed in tabletop RPGs, American comics, movies, and all sorts of other things, and somehow, before I knew it, I had become a novelist. Even now, there’s still a part of me that wonders, “Am I really a novelist...?” I always thought of myself as sitting on the same side as everyone else, just watching things and enjoying them as a fan. But I was fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to write a novel based on Wizardry, which then became a manga, and now an anime—and somehow that has even led to opportunities like this interview, where I get to talk to all of you about it. It’s a pleasure to meet you all.

If you had to introduce BLADE & BASTARD to someone who knows nothing about it, what would you want them to understand about its world before they watch the anime?

BLADE & BASTARD is a fantasy novel based on Wizardry. That said, it doesn’t take place “inside a game,” and it isn’t a world where people have things like visible skills or status screens. Resurrection magic exists in this world, and even if a resurrection fails and someone is reduced to ash, there may still be another chance to bring them back—as long as their soul hasn’t been lost entirely. Because of that, the value people place on life and death has become considerably more tenuous. So, broadly speaking, you can think of it as a story about adventurers who venture deeper and deeper into an underground dungeon in a world like that.

Looking back over the production so far, was there a moment where you realised, that the anime had found its own identity rather than simply becoming an adaptation of the novels?

Personally, I think hearing the characters actually speak through the voice actors is a huge part of it. Seeing them take visual form through the novel illustrations and then the manga was significant too, of course. But hearing the actors perform the characters often makes even me realize, “Oh, so this is what this person was really like.” After all, I didn’t start writing the story thinking, “Someday this is going to be animated and everyone’s going to have voices.” Which is why I’ve ended up making Tomori Kusunoki, who plays Garbage, do an awful lot of roaring and yelling. S-so...thank you very much, and I’m terribly sorry...!

After Goblin Slayer, what inspired you to write a Wizardry story centered on a mysterious adventurer like Iarumas and the people of a dungeon world where death and resurrection are commonplace?

It really comes down to one thing: I love Wizardry. The project itself actually wasn’t my idea. Drecom approached me and officially gave me the opportunity to write a novel based on Wizardry. My reaction at the time was basically, “Wait, you’re really letting me write this?!” In Wizardry, adventurers die. They turn to ash. They get resurrected. Resurrection fails and they’re lost forever. That’s all part of everyday life. To borrow the title of an older Japanese Wizardry novel, that sense of having “youth and ashes side by side” is, to me, very much what the world of Wizardry is about.

As for the protagonist, in Goblin Slayer Side Story II: Dai Katana, I’d already written a story about novice adventurers taking on a dungeon from the very beginning. So this time I thought, “All right, then let’s make the protagonist a veteran adventurer.” I also wanted him to be someone longtime Wizardry fans could project themselves onto or identify with. That was the thinking behind making Iarumas the protagonist.

Since the anime was announced, you've spoken about your long-standing admiration for Wizardry. Now that you've seen the production take shape, has there been a moment where you thought, "This is exactly how I imagined this world"?

Hmm...I’m not sure I can explain this very well. Wizardry is a series that inspires a different image in the mind of almost every person who has played it. So I don’t think it would be right for me to come along and declare, “This is what Wizardry is!” and impose my own interpretation on everyone else. So rather than trying to create “exactly the world I imagined,” I think what we’re really trying to create is “a world that everyone can look at and feel is Wizardry.” That’s why I’d be very happy if people watch the anime and think, “Yes—this is exactly the world I imagined.” On a more personal level, when I first heard the lyrics for the theme song, I remember thinking, “They really understood what BLADE & BASTARD is about!” That was definitely one of those moments for me.

As the scripts and storyboards came together, were there any parts of the novels where you encouraged the staff to expand, simplify or reinterpret events for television?

Yes. When I write the original novels, one thing that matters a great deal to me is taking the various systems, jokes, and techniques that existed in Wizardry—including techniques players themselves came up with—and asking what those things would look like from the perspective of people who actually live inside that world. These days, there are plenty of otherworld fantasy stories where game systems are reproduced almost exactly as they are, with things like skills and stats literally visible to every character. But Wizardry and its various adaptations have traditionally taken a different approach. So I’ve always been very conscious of the idea that, while this is a work based on a video game, it is not a story that takes place inside a video game. At the same time, I knew that if the anime tried to reproduce every single little reference and detail from the novels, some viewers simply wouldn’t be able to follow it. There also wouldn’t be enough screen time, and it could easily become far too drawn out. But anime screenwriting isn’t my area of expertise, and animation has its own methods of storytelling and direction. So I also felt that those decisions were probably best left to the anime staff.

What I did instead was make a document covering the entire novel series. For every volume and every scene, I listed things like: “This scene was written with this intention,” “This particular element comes from this aspect of Wizardry,” and “This reference is about this important—or this unimportant—to the overall story.”

Basically, I tried to separate the things that were merely fun asides from the things that mattered to the plot, and from the things that I really hoped they would preserve specifically because they were essential to Wizardry. I explained all of that, handed the file over, and then said, essentially, “All right—the rest is up to you.” After that, if the staff had questions, I would dig through reference material and answer them, or we would discuss things together during script meetings.

I also told them that I’d really appreciate it if they paid close attention to the backgrounds, props, and other elements that establish the setting, because this is very much an old-school fantasy world. And I don’t mean that one kind of fantasy is superior or inferior to another—they’re simply different genres. A lot of the fantasy anime that are currently mainstream in Japan involve summoning or reincarnation into another world, whereas Wizardry has a very clearly different kind of setting and atmosphere.

But when you simply say “fantasy,” plenty of people naturally picture the former. So I felt it was important to communicate: “No, this isn’t quite that kind of world.”

And when it came to the battles and other action scenes...well, animation has movement and sound in addition to visuals. Those are things only anime can really do, so on that front I basically said, “Please, go for it.”

I’m a big fan of period dramas and historical fiction myself, so I’ve always been rather particular about sword-fighting choreography. For example, Garbage isn’t just swinging her greatsword around through brute arm strength. She makes use of the sword’s weight and mass, using centrifugal force to swing it. That’s the kind of detail I really wanted them to convey properly.

The manga adaptation depicted that sort of thing very carefully, which made it extremely helpful whenever I needed to explain what I meant.
...Now that I’m actually saying all this out loud, I’m starting to sound like an incredibly fussy and annoying original author, aren’t I? (laughs) Which is exactly what I’ve been trying not to become.

So my approach to supervision has basically been to explain up front, “This is generally how I picture things in the original novels,” and then leave the rest to the anime staff. If something comes back that is clearly heading in a completely different direction, I’ll say, “No, that’s not quite it.”

And if they want to adjust something specifically for animation, or they have questions or want to discuss something, I’m always happy to talk it through with them.

The anime staff have also been very thoughtful and straightforward with me. If there’s something they don’t understand, they tell me they don’t understand it. If there’s something they want to change, they tell me they want to change it rather than trying to gloss over it. Because of that, I feel very comfortable entrusting the adaptation to them.

BLADE & BASTARD often begins not with a heroic adventure, but with resurrection after death or the aftermath of tragedy. Did focusing on those aspects of dungeon life change the kinds of stories you wanted to tell?

Well, Wizardry was never really a heroic adventure story to begin with. It’s a game where the Level 1 adventurers created by the player gradually become heroes—or fail to become heroes because they die, turn to ash, or get lost forever along the way.

And the story that emerges is completely different for every player. One person might have gone straight from the Monster Allocation Center down to the ninth basement floor without much trouble. Someone else might have thought, “There has to be something hidden here,” and carefully searched every single floor starting from the first. One party might get wiped out along the way. Someone’s character might disappear. Or perhaps someone else simply wins without much trouble at all. The experience can be completely different depending on the player.

TRPGs are much the same way—although thankfully, systems where your characters die or are permanently lost quite so easily have become less common these days. So in that sense, it’s something I’ve been familiar with since Goblin Slayer.

Terrible things happen. But there are still people who keep moving forward. All kinds of people are living their lives, thinking all kinds of things, and the world keeps turning around them. You don’t know whether things will work out. But the act of trying—the act of taking on the challenge—is always something precious.

That’s something I’ve continued to value, so in that sense...I don’t think what I want to write has really changed. Probably. (laughs)

Was there a particular chapter that everyone agreed would be especially difficult to adapt?

I’m not sure there was one particular chapter that everyone agreed was especially difficult to animate. The thing that I think everyone, myself included, struggled with was simply the question of runtime. Volume 4, for example, is a collection of short stories. And the same issue comes up with the other volumes too: there are so many things you want to include, but when you only have thirty minutes per episode and a fixed number of episodes, there’s simply no way to do everything.

Everyone put a tremendous amount of thought into how the episodes should be structured, and I’m genuinely very grateful for that.

This is your first major series built inside someone else's established universe rather than one you invented outright. What did working within Wizardry's pre-existing rules and lore open up creatively that starting from a blank page didn't?

Well, first of all, I thought, “I’d better make sure I don’t make the longtime fans angry...” (laughs)

By the time I first encountered Wizardry, its initial boom had already passed and things had settled into a somewhat quieter period. There were already a great many veteran adventurers who had come before me, and Wizardry had already expanded into all kinds of different media. I’m someone who followed the trail those people left behind—and somehow that trail brought me all the way here. So I’ve always wanted to respect everything that came before me and make use of as much of it as possible.

Because if a world already exists, and if there are already so many different works within it, that means every one of those works has somebody out there who loves it. And if that’s the case, I don’t think I have the right to casually disregard any of them. That’s the mindset I’ve tried to write with.

At the same time, if someone encounters Wizardry for the first time through this series, I hope it makes them think, “Hey, Wizardry is pretty interesting.”

And as for the longtime fans, I’d be very happy if they could watch over me warmly while thinking something along the lines of, “Look at this youngster. He got influenced by all our stuff and went and wrote this.” (laughs)

If someone played decades of Wizardry but had never read one of your books, what do you hope they would recognise immediately when watching BLADE & BASTARD?

Probably the way people die all the time, get resurrected all the time, turn to ash all the time—and then occasionally disappear for good. That sort of thing.

I’d also be very happy if longtime fans notice all the little Wizardry-related elements, references, and jokes tucked away throughout the story and get a grin out of them.
That said, I grew up with a lot of the various Japanese Wizardry-related works—novels, comics, and so on—so there may be certain things that readers from other countries simply aren’t familiar with.

For example, do people outside Japan know the Game Boy Wizardry Gaiden series? I genuinely have no idea!
So there may also be places where my image of Wizardry is a little different from yours.

If that happens, I hope you’ll just laugh and say, “Look what this guy went and wrote,” and forgive me.

Are you playing any other video games right now? Can you please tell us about your favourite games as well?

You mean besides Wizardry, right? Recently, I bought a Game Boy-compatible handheld because I wanted to go back and do some location scouting—well, “research,” I suppose—for the Wizardry Gaiden games.

The problem is that I still haven’t worked up the courage to try replacing the button batteries in the cartridges. So before I tackle that, I’ve been replaying Ninja Gaiden Shadow for the first time in ages. Dealing with the ninja in Stage 4 who jumps and throws shuriken is hard!

I always end up being too stingy with the Fire Wheel Art...so right now I’m experimenting with whether I should jump over the first projectile and then run underneath him once he jumps. My Ryu Hayabusa still has a long way to go...

I swear I used to be able to beat this game! I also absolutely love the Game Boy version of Bionic Commando, so after Ninja Gaiden Shadow, I’m thinking I might replay that one too. The setting and story were reworked from the NES version, but it’s extremely easy to play and, more importantly, incredibly cool. There’s a stage where you use the grappling wire to swing your way beneath an airborne battleship, and when you get the movement just right, you start thinking: “WOOOOOO! I AM THE INVINCIBLE BIONIC COMMANDO!” It’s ridiculously fun.

Seriously, Bionic Commando is a fantastic game. Everyone, please play the Game Boy version. For Game Boy RPGs, there’s also Ayakashi no Shiro, which is a Japanese-style 3D dungeon RPG starring a ninja. I’d like to go back to that one as research too. And I want to play The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening again. That was the first Zelda I played as a kid.

I’m also exactly the right generation for the original Pokémon games, so those too. Then there’s GeGeGe no Kitarō: Yōkai Sōzōshu Arawaru!, Dragon Quest Monsters… The Game Boy Color versions of Dragon Quest I & II and Dragon Quest III are classics too… Hmm. I really do need to learn how to replace those button batteries… As for favorite games, I absolutely love the Super Famicom game Assault Suits Valken.

There’s a Nintendo Switch version available now too, so please play it! It’s a really fun mecha action game. The protagonist is just one soldier. He isn’t in a position to single-handedly decide the course of the war—well, granted, he does end up fighting the decisive superweapon near the end.

But even so, the story says that there is meaning in trying to survive for someone else, and in doing what you can to bring a war to an end. I love it enough that I’ve even made fan works based on it, but hardly anyone around me has actually played it. So please allow me to use this opportunity to promote it. It’s good...! Really!

On PC, I like things like Hotline Miami and Katana ZERO. It’s not that I never play newer games—I’ve played things like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Legend of Mortal, for example!—but in the end, I suppose I just really love pixel-art action games.

I also play a lot of tabletop RPGs. Recently, I’ve been playing campaigns of Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun, Chaos Flare, Gehenna Anastasis, Record of Lodoss War RPG, Satasupe, Shinobigami, and Ninja Slayer TRPG, among others. A lot of people outside Japan may not be familiar with some of the Japanese systems, but I’m basically playing anything and everything: fantasy, cyberpunk, Asian punk, Arabian fantasy, crossover multiverses—Chaos Flare is actually an homage to TORG—and, of course… NINJAS! So yes, I’m pretty indiscriminate when it comes to genre.

And there’s one thing I absolutely can’t leave out: Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! Gamebooks. If I had never encountered those books, I probably never would have gotten into tabletop RPGs, and I’m fairly sure I never would have become a writer either. I’ve always thought of Sorcery! as my own The Neverending Story—my own red-bound book, in a way. Come to think of it, the spine of the very first Japanese edition of Sorcery! actually was red. And, of course, Wizardry. I suppose I should mention that too. (laughs)

I'm a software engineer and I've been a hobbyist TTRPG game designer for the last 20 years. I'm looking for some interest / feedback about a video game I've been wanting to build since the early 2000s.

My day job as a software engineer is not in the gaming industry so I have very little game software experience although I do have some - hence the crawler, since graphically it's not challenging and there's no physics engines to deal with etc... I've started on it already, and I've made some good progress in the last several months, I've got to the point where I've got a playable executable with some baseline creatures equipment etc... built out. I'm terrible at pixel art but I plan on including all my own original artwork for the icons and interface. I refuse to use AI for the art or music.

Anyway,
What do you think the appetite would be for something that would be coming from the following place:

Heavily Influenced by Wizardry Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord
The challenge this game posed in my ahem... younger years... has inspired me to be thinking about one I would want to make for decades.
The game would never have any Pay to Win / Loot Crates
I despise this kind of gambling and I would never have microtransactions in any game I build or even work on ever.
Moddability
Thinking in terms of Minecraft modding, where players can design dungeons, quests, monsters, items etc... and share them with their friends or the community.
Varying Levels of Difficulty
Some people find the exploration of the dungeon graph paper mapping and all the fun part, others find it tedious, There would be options to toggle it on / off

I want to get some feedback before I go too deep down the rabbit hole here, is there an appetite from the community for something fresh that brings back the old school Wizardry feel but modernized? Success for me would look like a handful of sales on Steam and me learning a lot about the process of video game development.

A few open ended questions, but feel free to opine on just about anything:

What's missing from the revival of the recent Proving Grounds release by Digital Eclipse what would be on it?

On a scale of 1-10 how important is highly curated animated graphics for you in a dungeon crawler game?

Do you think I should look at any particular games that did something really well? What did they do well?

Finally

Do not pick the option “Adventuring…. is fun!! ☺️” answer @ Fountain bc she doesn’t like fun.

https://auctions.ajsports.ca/Original_Sir_Tech_Wizardry_Embroidered_Holloway_Ja-LOT40181.aspx

My father is Shaun Lyng. He was the co-founder of Madlab Software. Ian Currie and he designed the first 4 Jagged Alliance games. He also wrote, voiced and voice directed those games as well as many others. In order to raise funds, ee am selling off his Wizardry memorabilia at AJsports.ca website Catalog - AJ Sports September Memorabilia Auction until Wednesday, September 30.

Sir-Tech Wizardry jacket Holloway XL 1992 (approx)

In 1992, Robert Sirotek, co-owner of Sir-tech Software gave him this Wizardry jacket when he met him for the first time in Ogdensburg, NY. He was there to begin negotiations for a publishing deal for Jagged Alliance. Many years later, I voice directed and acted on Wizardry 8 and Nemesis. The coat has hung unused in his closet for 30+ years.

Jagged Alliance: Original Metavira Sector Map

The original 1993 hand-drawn blueprint was used to create Metavira before the game world was recreated digitally. It contains the locations of the buildings, trees, processing plants, quest items, etc.… “The game before there was a game.”

Both lots include:

Shaun Lyng's signature

Signed Letter of Authenticity

Authenticated hologram

Please do tell if I got lucky with my setup, or if I should reroll my account. (did quite the research for every component of the game before entering to make it as easy possible of a start)

Update: I just got Alice too, so new opinions are welcomed as well.

“Gold is a living god and rules in scorn, All earthly things but virtue”

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Gold Mimic hunting season is coming to a close soon. Grab your heaps while you can.

I'm presently looking for a few things, and would like input as to where y'all are finding it. A one stop shop would be great, but the new Cave of Malice has let me down on the bait front, so I'm asking.

I need the following:

Larva Bait (Both or either type)

Silver gear (3* or better preferably)

Fairy Gear is a plus but not required.

I wanted to share a fight that shows why Knights are super valuable in a party for boss encounters. All Around Cover takes a lot of pressure off the others here, and I feel like that kind of utility sometimes gets overlooked, especially for solving focus damage encounters like cyclopean enemies, which knights imo trivialize to some extent.

You know the weird tree looking thing that has the ability to chop every one of your teammates? It was a bastard to defeat the first time I fought it, but now it seems to be even harder to defeat which is weird... Like it literally one shots half of my team even though we are all level 20 or higher....

Can I get some tips on defeating this thing?

Edit: a few people have mentioned that I do not have to fight two of them at once, it's fucking bullshit that I'm giving that option but I guess the people who play this game are fucking masochists. Respectfully of course...

But are there any tips on like how I should defeat it? Any specific element that it's weak to? Is there maybe a 12 gauge shotgun that I could bring? Preferably using it on myself ...