Phantasie: Lord Wood's Castle

Map of Gelnor

Now that my party is fairly high level, we're all pretty good at swimming. Incredibly good, actually - we can swim for days on end, as each map tile represents a day's travel. Each tile's distance carries a slight chance of somebody sinking, but this only damages that character for 4-5 HP, which at this point is no big deal.

And so, I took this opportunity to revisit my partially mapped areas and fill in the missing ocean terrain. The gulf east of Woodville still has some deep waters where my party can't go yet, but other than that, nothing is especially interesting yet, and the monsters are not troublesome. Black Knights, of which I've fought multiple now, are chumps.

Area 4, "Hobbiton"

North of the gulf, east of Greenville is Hobbiton. Nothing remarkable about the town itself, but close by is the next logical dungeon - Lord Wood's castle.

 

A butler at the door bid me entrance, advising me Lord Wood was not home, and an old captain fought me in his quarters on the bottom floor.

Then, after climbing two sets of stairs, I arrived on a diabolical maze of tiled floor.

 

There's one safe path through to the end, and any deviation from it dumps you down to the ground floor. I eventually found the way through force pathfinding and a whole lot of magical healing and potion drinking, but it took time.

 

At the end, a storage room held some gold, and a clue.

 

In the south, at the bottom of some stairs, is the dungeon.

I went back and circled around the keep before entering the several rooms inside it.

• A magic wave kept me out of a corridor to the east.
• A "messy library with scrolls everywhere" contains no scrolls for me to take.
• Another storage room has a trunk with several items.
• In the barracks, a precious gem is found under one of the beds.
• Robed sorcerers warn me to stay out of the southeast room, and I fight them to get in, where I find nothing but a guest bed.

• Another guest room is guarded by lords and magic users. And a viper. Above the bed is inscribed "JRT."
• Lord Wood's bedroom above that has a walk-in closet where two scrolls are found, and the safe path through the tile maze is inscribed.
  

I was this close to putting off the maze to look for a clue like this.

• Going south from the main entrance is a great hall and kitchen, but nothing interesting in either.
  

Recalling the words of the imprisoned elves, I searched the western wall of the great hall, where I found a secret passage guarded by some ogres. At the end of it are chests containing treasure and a key, which did indeed unlock one of the cells.

Before leaving, I searched the walls in the southwest corner, noting a suspicious amount of negative space in the map, and found a secret garbage chute, where a large number of devils lurked.

The mostly-explored map - I still can't visit the keeper

The trip didn't get me any equipment upgrades, and the experience only leveled up Rasputin and Dennis, but it did fetch four new scrolls (the two found in Lord Wood's closet were duplicates).