I'm bringing more Let's Play! Hold your applause.
We head back to the Baa dungeon of the week. A single Baa acolyte opposes us in the main room, earning a honorary Too Dumb to Live badge. Now, let's tackle the south side.
The south door leads to a short corridor with three other doors. One at each side halfway down the hall, and one at the opposite end. We go straight.
It leads to a slightly twisted hallway with an suspicious statue at a dead end. My psychic powers tell me the statue is important, so we search it and find...another key. Being lazy, I don't look at the name of the key, which is a mistake.
Said key opens the eastern door in the previous hallway, and opening said door, of course, is another monster trigger. More skeletons and another two Baa acolytes wait for us. But like most skeletons, the raised paths confound them to no end, so a little Ring of Fire-ing and a few arrows clean them out nicely.
Unfortunately, one of the skeletons (specifically, a more elite version called a skeleton lord, they're the only ones that do curses), slapped Cate with a curse, which we quickly cure.
Now back to the room we just opened, which seems to be...the temple pantry. Several bags of food, as well as a chest, await us. Toblerone shows off his newfound expertise, and the chest does not explode. Inside is another Bathhouse key. Guess we head back to the north wing and open that other door.
The key works on the other door, and naturally more monsters spawn. We turn around and go toe-to-toe with more skeletons and a single acolyte. There is a second acolyte, but he ran away for some reason.
When the dust settles, we've got two cursed people (Cate and Huaryu), one person afflicted with the fear condition (Toblerone, who is not nearly as brave as we thought), and everyone low on spell points. Time to go pay money to the big temple.
Having done so, we head back inside and kill the lone acolyte who remained unkilled. Now we are able to go loot the chest inside the other bathhouse room (no trap explosions, yay), and get a Store Room key.
So now we have rough idea of the temple layout. West is entrance, north is baths, south is storage, and east is...what we will do later.
Anyway, we head back to the south wing to open the final door. Doing so, naturally, spawns more monsters. One of the skeletons actually manages to figure out how to get to us, and dies doing so. The rest...Ring of Fire says hi.
After killing both acolytes and all but one of the skeletons, we notice the remaining skeleton is doing something odd. It's running away, down the southeast tunnel. Since we were going to have to tackle each of these tunnels eventually, now's a good time to start!
...After we loot the chest in the last room, which contains a...Secret Room Key. Interesting...
I'm not going to go into too much detail about each of the tunnels, because they're all roughly the same. Each ends in a huge cavern that contains a large group of monsters consisting Baa acolytes, skeletons, and/or an old favorite...more giant spiders.
Here's the breakdown, in the order I'm doing them:
- Southeast: Skeletons and Baa acolytes
- Southwest: Spiders and Baa acolytes
- Northwest: Spiders and more spiders
- Northeast: Spiders and skeletons
Our strategy is pretty basic: We kite a small group of skeletons and/or spiders up the tunnels, pumping them full of arrows and throwing down Sparks spells as we go. Rinse, wash, and repeat until almost all skeletons and spiders are dead, then go back into the caverns and kill the Baa acolytes and any leftover spiders or skeletons.
It's not fast or glorious (which Toblerone would naturally complain about), but it gets the job done. Other than one point where my keyboard went "LOL SPAZZ" and started spinning my party in circles (easily fixed by some quick button presses), it went smoothly.
The caverns do introduce three features we will see in later dungeons. First, there are cauldrons, which when drunk from provide permanent one point bonus to either the selected character's Fire or Magic resistances. Which resistance gets boosted depends on the type of brew (Steaming for Fire, Magical for Magic) in the cauldron.
Second, there are piles of trash. These can yield loot when you activate them...but are far more likely to leave one of your characters diseased. Finally, there are the skull piles. Activating these automatically inflicts a character with a nasty status condition such as a curse, or possibly even killing them outright. Do not touch these.
With the caverns complete, all that remains of the temple is the east wing. Will we have what it takes? We shall see...
