Ultima V - help given and wanted! Sent in by Ray and Jo Green @~Last issue, I included a late plea for help with Ultima V on a @~slip with the disk. No info has been forthcoming so I will now @~reproduce the original letter from Ray and Jo Green in the hopes @~that someone, somewhere can help. If you can, please write to me @~and I'll pass it on. We had successfully completed Ultima IV on the Sega some months before, so tended to expect to carry on with the same party. Our own character had been a Mage, so we had been unaware of Mariah. We couldn't port a character across (different format) but had worked out the question system by trial and error in IV so followed the same rules in answering the questions. We collected Julia and Jaana fairly quickly and then were persuaded to take on Gwenno. We refused Geoffrey a few times as Ray had rather taken against him in Ultima IV - too susceptible to sleep spells and no magic. We hadn't - for some reason - equipped them all with magic axes at that point, and when I tried exchanging him for Gwenno we found his extra strength was a great help - especially in sea battles. We were finding problems staying too long away from Britain because of renewing our arrows and crossbow bolts - we try to keep our fighting to a comfortable distance. We had discovered all the islands but hadn't got the grapple so, although we knew of the hill forts, we couldn't get in. We made a few sorties into Blackthorn's Castle, always having saved the game, and always having to throw that part of the game, so we knew about the crown. We didn't like having our party chopped up so we obtained the crown by parking ALL of our party except our main character in various inns and sailing single-handed for Blackthorn's Castle. He got thrown in a dungeon where he armed up the Barbarian and the pair of them grabbed the crown and ran for it - using a powerful time stop scroll found in Blackthorn's bedroom at the last bit. The Barbarian was a very useful fighter on the return voyage, he actually was killed towards the end of the voyage but we resurrected him and parked him up at one of the inns - he's still there. We had found that we couldn't resurrect anyone killed in Blackthorn's dungeons, which is why we used the single-handed raid technique. We only discovered about the black badge later. We had found the grapple and met up with Dupre. At last, we thought, so we spent some time parking someone up at an inn so we could go back for Dupre. Alas, unlike in Ultima IV, he has no magic, so we eventually swapped him back for Geoffrey who was a lot higher in hit points by then. We started on some dungeon exploration and in between tried to sort out the Windmere riddle. We gave Thrud the password of the Resistance several times, and always ended up with a jewelled shield and an extra crossbow - the crossbows were quite useful being worth money, but no-one wanted the jewelled shields and we couldn't find that they were useful. Periodically Thrud would plead with us not to hit him! We found it all pretty unpleasant. We hadn't met the Skara Brae chap so we kept killing or dodging Elistaria's demons and not getting too much out of her. Then we read some hints in a magazine and learned about the Oppression password. We followed the trail to Skara Brae but refused to give the name of a resistance member so ended up without the password. However, as we had read the password in the magazine we tried it on Elistaria anyway and got the badge in case it came in useful. By now we had been round all the shrines - some more than once. We had seven dungeon words of power, so we started on the dungeon explorations. Just occasionally, for maybe two days, we had found difficulty in trading. The shop prices weren't printing on the screen and the transactions were ending in our being thrown out - even out of Iolo's own shop! However this was always a passing phase and Ray blamed it on some kind of Shadowlord influence. We spent a long time trying to map the star movements and work out a logical sequence of progressions of Shadowlords from town to town but gave up in the end. We have now spent quite a long time unable to buy anything in shops. We came back from one dungeon loaded, sold a lot of extra armour, mixed up a load of spells and went back to restock with reagents - nobody will sell! This has gone on for quite a long time. Meanwhile we got the Master Ultima book - the hint/clue book has been unavailable since January - and decided we had to swap one of our fighters for Mariah, because on the dungeon and underworld bits we need some decent magic points. Our party is therefore: JAY Level 7 Avatar SHAMINO Level 7 Fighter IOLO & JULIA Level 6 Bards JAANA Level 6 Mage MARIAH Level 3 Mage We also have various characters cluttering up the inns around the landscape - Geoffrey, Dupre, The Barbarian and Gwenno. We have the crown, sandalwood box, black badge, telescope and sextant. Quite a lot of potions we don't know how to use yet. Low on reagents but fairly well off for food and other equipment - including gems. We tend to economise on gems by saving before using them to map out areas and then restarting from the saved position. We've also got lots of useless jewelled shields and no jewelled sword in sight. Are either of them any use, anyway? HELP!!! How do we keep on the right side of the local traders? We can't remember if we helped ourself to anything we shouldn't anywhere - but it wasn't recently. Lord British keeps appearing occasionally but apart from healing and putting characters up a level, all he ever says is the bit about 'well-armed art thou, o enlightened one'. In IV he used to nag us on particular issues. Are we killing things we shouldn't? Not giving enough at the shrines? (We give 100 or 200 each visit). We are finding the high moral tone a bit difficult to live up to, I think. Any help would be appreciated.