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Video Game: Exile

Exile was a series of Fantasy RPGs created by Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software. They remain available

as shareware for older computers running Mac OS Classic or 32-bit Windows. (Exile III was also ported to Linux by a third party.) The four games were later remade as an isometric 3D series called Avernum, which added a fifth, sixth, and seventh installment.

The eponymous nation is a vast network of caves to which the surface world banishes its criminals, dissenters, and misfits. In each game, you play a team of Exiles swept up in conflicts between the people of Exile, their nonhuman neighbors in the caves, and the cruel Empire that rules the surface.

Exile: Escape from the Pit (released in January 1995)
Exile II: Crystal Souls (released in November 1995)
Exile III: Ruined World (released in January 1997)
Blades of Exile (released in December 1997)

Not to be confused with the third installment of the Myst series, or a completely different Exile created in 1988 for the BBC Micro.

This RPG series displays the following tropes:

Actually Four Mooks
The Archmage: Several.
Artifact Collection Agency: The Cult of the Sacred Item.
Asteroids Monster: Slimes and Doomguards.
Automaton Horses
Anti-Magic
Anti-Magical Faction: The Anama.
Bag of Sharing: Averted. Everyone has their own inventory (limited by number, rather than weight as in Avernum), and you have to be adjacent to pass stuff along in combat.
- Exile III introduced the weight mechanic.
Bandit Mook: Gremlins steal your food.
Beneath the Earth: Exile itself.
Bonus Boss: In the first game, there are six dragons, and one of them has to be killed in order to beat the game. Each of the others tells or gives you something that is also necessary to beat the game. Once they've done that, though, you're free to kill them and take their loot. (Later in the series, Motrax does die, but it wasn't the player who killed him.)
Border Patrol: In Blades of Exile, if the player reaches the boundary of a custom scenario in the overworld, they will be unable to go any further, and a message will tell the player so.
Cat Folk: The Nephilim.
City Guards
Collection Sidequest: The seven crystals, the five (or four, but that's not as good) brooches, the four syllables of the password, the six pieces of mold to get into Erika's tower free—and that's just Exile I!
Crapsack World: A globe-spanning totalitarian empire that summarily dispatches the "eccentric" and "awkward"... into a violent penal colony where a nasty death lurks around every corner!
Cult: The Church of the Anama.
Dialogue Tree: Of the hyperlink variety, in Exile III and Blades. The first two games had you input keywords (of which the game ignored all but the first four letters). This led to bugs, like being able to say "divulge" to the talking statues long before you'd met Erika, and "Icarus" to the Scimitar before you knew to say it. The later games have the same input system and the same potential for abuse, but obvious conversations can happen faster by clicking on text.
- This led to NPCs having a stock response for keywords they didn't have a response for. Each town had one that all its inhabitants (except for some notable exceptions) used, although some pairs of towns had the same one. (In Exile I, for example, Fort Exile's was "I don't know about that", and Fort Duvno's was "You get a questioning look". In the Tower of Magi, it was "You receive a blank stare", consistent with the apprentices not being allowed to speak. The GIFTs? "You're silly!")
The Empire: What the surface world is called.
Not the Empire of Something, or the Something Empire. Just the Empire. It's understandable. There's no need for elaborate names when there's only one game in town.
Enemy Summoner
Event Flag: "Stuff Done Flags".
Fantastic Drug: Skribbane.
Fantastic Racism: The Empire hunts down damn near everything that isn't human, and has succeeded in wiping out at least one race of sentient humanoids.
Fantastic Slurs: There are various derogatory nicknames for the non-human races, plus the human residents of the Empire, Exile, and the Abyss who all hate each other.
- Those in the Abyss, who are basically Exile's truly dangerous criminals, call all other Exiles voles. Empire jerks do so love to call Exiles worms, though.
First Time in the Sun: The beginning of Exile III.
Flower from the Mountaintop: A quest given by a dryad.
Game Maker: Blades of Exile.
Giant Spiders: They're also intelligent, friendly, talking and have cute, high pitched voices.
- In the third game, there are Giant Cockroaches, too.
Golems
Goshdang It To Heck: In the first game, there's a sound effect shouting out "darn" or "dang!" if you fail to pick a lock.
Hellfire: Quickfire.
Inconveniently Placed Conveyor Belt: The golem factory is a maze of these.
Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Features a lot, especially for minor vendors. Because of how the game stored NPC conversations, it was a lot easier to have one conversation come up all the time. If a vendor or similar character wasn't inexplicably identical, it was a good, though by no means infallible, clue that they had special wares and/or plot significance.
- Humorously justified for one particular set of IIIs in Exile III: evidently, they're all siblings, all trained by their parents in the same craft (toolmaking), and all named "Merry" because their parents were horribly uncreative.
Invisible Monsters: Guardians and Black Shades.
Involuntary Group Split
Invulnerable Horses
Kleptomaniac Hero: You. But NPCs only care about some items.
Last Chance Hit Point
Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards
Living Statue
Lizard Folk: The Slithzerikai.
Luck Stat: Put points in it and you have a chance of "lucking out" of death. Max it out and you will essentially never die.
Mage Tower: The Tower of Magi.
Money Spider: Yes, but "gold" isn't standard currency.
Moon Logic Puzzle
Nostalgia Level: The Tower of Magi is pretty much the same (and very awesome) in every game. Until it gets destroyed by demons in Exile III.
Oddly Shaped Sword: Waveblades.
Our Liches Are Different
Our Wights Are Different
Outrun the Fireball: Quickfire.
Party in My Pocket
The Password Is Always Swordfish: In Blades of Exile, the password to enter a cave full of giant gnats is... "gnats".
Petting Zoo People: The Nephilim, Nepharim and the Slithzerikai to name a few.
Planet of Steves: The Giant Intelligent Friendly Talking Spiders are all named Spider.
- At one point in Exile III, you need to drop the name of a GIFT chief to get access to him. As mentioned, they're all named "Spider". This, depending largely on how fast it took you to twig to it, was either a brilliant or horrid idea.
The Rashomon: Different NPCs who have been in Exile since early on in its history tell you different stories about those early years. Notably, Erika claims to have invented the light-giving fungus on the cave walls, whereas actually it was just there when they arrived.
Reforged Blade: The Demonslayer.
Riddle Me This: Exile II has a dungeon that is supposed to test your mind. In addition to several puzzles are many riddles.
- Which were omitted in the Avernum II remake in favor of more "normal" puzzles that fit directly into the gameplay.
River Of Insanity / Inevitable Waterfall: Exile II has a section where your party must cross over a series of underground waterfalls, each one taking away some of your food. Eventually, a really big waterfall will make you lose all your remaining food, forcing you to scavenge (usually fighting off monsters along the way) or face starvation. It's also worth mentioning that there are no shops or training avaliable along the way, and no way to identify the items you find (and you probably won't have enough space to take everything you find). Oh, and the caverns you pass are full of dangerous monsters...
Sealed Evil in a Can: Grah-Hoth in Exile I.
Shareware: "Suddenly, the Shareware Demon appears!"
Shoplift and Die
Shout Out: Exile III has towns populated with Trainspotting and Babylon 5 characters.
Solo Character Run: The maximum party size is six, but slots can be left empty as the player sees fit. (In fact, the instructions suggest that you try making one "really powerful character" and seeing how far you can get.)
Sssssnaketalk: The majority of the Slithzerikai.
Stock Sound Effects
Sufficiently Advanced Alien: The Vahnatai.
Suicidal Overconfidence: Averted. Monsters can flee unwinnable battles.
Super Drowning Skills: You can't swim, and if your five steps of hovering run out when you're above water, you drown. (But you can walk on lava!)
Swamps Are Evil
Take Your Time: Very, very averted in Exile III.
Translator Microbes: In Exile II, the party acquires this (or the equivalent) by completing a Vahnatai initiation ritual. This makes them able to understand and read Novah, and makes random Vahnatai stop attacking them.
Updated Rerelease: The first two games were redone to incorporate graphics and mechanics from the sequels.
Video Game Cruelty Potential: In the first scenario of Blades of Exile, you visit towns that are being devastated by a curse. The water is undrinkable, crops are being wiped out, entire generations of children are dying, and life in general is a living hell. Feel free to ransack their houses of everything they have left.
Video Game Remake: The Avernum series. And now the first part of that hexalogy has been given a remake...
Warp Whistle: The Amulet of Returning.
Wizard Needs Food Badly: Food rations are required as your party eats periodically.
You All Meet In A Cell: Or a colossal subterranean prison realm, anyway.
- Subverted somewhat. It's at least implied that your party met shortly before being thrown in. You meet everyone else in a cell.