Might and Magic IV/V:Clouds/Darkside/World of Xeen

                   A warning from Sue

I have been playing Xeen for some months now; it's a brilliant
game with enough quests and sub-quests to keep the keenest RPGer
enthralled for many weeks - or, in my case, months.

It took about 5 months for me to complete M&M4:Clouds of Xeen.
Although you can move from one game to the other, I concentrated
on Clouds as the monsters seemed a bit easier to defeat. The
ending was excellent and I transported my characters to the
Darkside to begin M&M5.

The first main dungeon they entered was the Temple of Bark. They
were up to level 22 or so, so they shouldn't have had any problems
defeating the inhabitants. But I noticed that two of the
characters died very easily. Find a trap? Bang - dead.  Hit by a
monster? Dead again. My cleric used Raise Dead to bring them back
to life to save trudging to a temple and using up hard-won gold,
but within a few moves, those two were dead again.  Okay, they
weren't the strongest characters in the party (one was a druid,
the other a sorcerer) but I could see no reason why it was
happening.

Then I checked their stats. Each had endurance of just 1, rating
non-existent. The others were on 29-46 or so. Looking back at
the previous 5 saves, they had dropped during that time from 3 and
7. And (of course!) I hadn't kept any older saves ... they take up
over 600K each so I'd kept overwriting them.

I had a chat to Alex about it, and he was stumped too. He
suggested maybe they were poisoned or cursed and to try the Divine
Intervention spell which cures everything. I did - it didn't make
any difference. I tried training them, then resting. Nope.

I wrote to New World Computing in the States to say "Help!" and
sent a copy of my last save to Alex.  He put their endurance back
to the lower 20s (which is what I reckoned it should have been)
with a hex editor; I didn't like doing that but the only other
option was to ditch those two characters, create replacements and
build those up.

Then, while checking the disk, Alex worked out what had happened.
If you use Raise Dead on a character, when they come back to life
their endurance has dropped by 1. This happens each time you cast
the spell on them. My penny-pinching tactics had backfired; using
Raise Dead too often on them had weakened them, and of course this
meant they died easier and so on.

This downside of using Raise Dead isn't mentioned in the manual
so, be warned. Side effects of other spells, such as ageing the
caster, are (as far as I know!). Don't find out the hard way, like
I did.





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