Deathlord - Apple //e & Commodore 64 Party Based RPG

[Philosophical Gamer]

I just posted disk images & info on an old school party-based RPG, Deathlord, on my blog. This game has been a favorite of mine since the 80's and I figured folks here would be interested in it.

It was pretty much an Ultima clone set in a far eastern universe, but the game had some unique qualities which really no other game has had. It was definitely hard-core but was fun. Worth checking out.

 

[MisterStone]

There were some at-length postings about this a while back, and I wrote a simple description of the game at the top of a thread about "the hardest RPG you have played" or somesuch. I also played the Apple II disk images recently, but decided after a few hours that I really just didn't like it... I don't think that I liked it when I bought the original as a kid either, but back then I had so few video games that I wouldn't let that stop me from trying to win it.

To me it is basically just a soulless dungeon crawl with mediocre combat. That wouldn't be so bad, except it came out after such fine games as Wasteland, Ultima IV and V, and so on. I dunno, seemed like a cheap cash-in on a niche market by EA to me...

Still, if you win this, you deserve some kind of hardcore retro-gamer brass balls trophy as a reward or something. Let me know if you actually get that far.

 

[Philosophical Gamer]

To me the charm of the game was precisely that it was so hard, and the eastern theme. So many games are easy to the point where they're not even worth playing, the nice thing about Deathlord was that it was a genuine challenge.

Wizardry 8 on ironman mode was good too.. I wish that more games were made for it to be an actual accomplishment to win. A lot of games, you figure out the system, and you know you're eventually going to win, and then it just kind of becomes, meh, not interested in playing any more.

I agree on Wasteland, it was probably the best game of that era.

 

[Anthony Davis]

I remember buying this game in the local Egghead Software store when I was a kid for my c64.

That game was hard as hell back in the day.

 

[MisterStone]

Yeah... I wasn't implying that it was difficulty that made the game hard, it was that there was practically no interaction (as I recall) with NPCs or the environment. It was basically about finding your way through mazes and fighting monsters. The world map was really big, which was cool, but it was mostly boring and empty except for a few sites. Anyways, I can see the appeal to it, but I must admit that I got sick of it pretty quickly the last time I tried to play. Also, for some reason I kept having problems with town guards attacking me for no apparent reason sometimes. I wonder if the process of using disk images (from cracked versions) might have triggered some kind of copy protection scheme?

 

[Flux_Capacitor]

I remember buying and playing this game for my Apple years ago. I also remember it being insanely hard. I estimate I completed roughly half the game, based on the number of items and words I manage to find. However, I was pretty young at the time, and was probably just blindly stumbling around.

I also tried replaying this recently, using the disk images from HOTU and the AppleWin emulator. I managed to finish up most of the initial continent (Kodan, I believe), but I had problems leaving that area. When I left via boat, after moving a few tiles away from land, the game asked for the second disk image. I put it in, press a key, and the game freezes. I've tried this multiple times, as well as re-downloading the disk images and the emulator. Still, no luck. Not sure what's going on.

 

[Skankster]

Sounds like a glitched copy.

I had this back on the C64, as already stated insanely difficult. It had the old system of "Character dies, game saves" so you basically had to always save on a copy of the disk. Some might regard this as cheating; anyone that has played this thing will know it is a necessary evil.

I never did finish it, so no award for me though I got through the original continent and a couple of the others. I got another game at the time, Legend of Blacksilver possibly, and left 'ol Deathlord to his own devices, completely forgetting I had it.

Did anyone finish it without a hintbook?

 

[DemonKing]

I had this on my C64 but never finished it - my vague recollection is that it was a fairly average Ultima rip-off but didn't hold up against the Bard's Tale and Gold Box games that were available at around the same time.

 

[MisterStone]

I also tried replaying this recently, using the disk images from HOTU and the AppleWin emulator. I managed to finish up most of the initial continent (Kodan, I believe), but I had problems leaving that area. When I left via boat, after moving a few tiles away from land, the game asked for the second disk image. I put it in, press a key, and the game freezes. I've tried this multiple times, as well as re-downloading the disk images and the emulator. Still, no luck. Not sure what's going on.

I think that you could salvage that by making a save state file, then acquiring completely different disk images, starting up the emulator with the save state file, and saving to the new disks... maybe that would do the trick?

 

[newtmonkey]

Someone is working on a "Deathlord Companion" application similar to Gold Box Companion or WhereAreWe. It hooks into the Apple II version of Deathlord (running on AppleWin) to provide a UI, automapping, and bug fixes:

https://github.com/hasseily/Deathlord-Companion/releases

I played around with it briefly, and it works well. However, I don't like how recent versions have started changing how the game plays; it has gone beyond bug fixes and QOL features at this point, and is now becoming some kind of weird mod.

Having said that, these gameplay changes only began being introduced with version 1.1.1, so someone looking for a more "purist" run of the game just with QOL features could probably stick with 1.1.0 beta 6.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

I wasn't implying that it was difficulty that made the game hard,

It is difficult because of the user interface. These I,J,K,M moving keys are maddening. I tried remap the keys but then I could not type spell names.

Can you ready/equip armors? Or only put into the inventory?

Two geekz are needed to finish this game. One ordinary player is not enough.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

What about joytokey to map movement and a few keys to a gamepad. I've had pretty good results with it and it leaves the keyboard the same to type spells. More or less it just shortcuts keys for gamepad input.

https://joytokey.net/en/

 

[agris]

FYI there’s a remaster using original assets with an improved ui
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/deathlord-relorded.142139/

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

FYI there’s a remaster using original assets with an improved ui
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/deathlord-relorded.142139/

Unfortunately, that does not work for me, crashing at startup.

 

[agris]

FYI there’s a remaster using original assets with an improved ui
https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/deathlord-relorded.142139/

Unfortunately, that does not work for me, crashing at startup.

The developer, rikkles is active here. I expect that he’d like to dig into that

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

How can I level up? I have a "+" at the name of the characters. I am at the Academy in Tokugawa. There a merchant is here. Orate to or what?
Edit: Never mind. I have to Orate-then-Buy.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

In order to earn a share of experience, a character must do something "useful":

• landing a hit in melee; a kill is not necessary, but a miss is not enough
• casting any spell
• trying to cast a spell but failing because you're out of POW
• casting a spell and then hitting (Esc) to cancel

Is it enough to hit Esc only once per battle?

 

[rikkles]

Hey there. I wrote Deathlord Relorded. Yes you need to cast-escape once in Deathlord. I got rid of this garbage in Relorded. Why is it crashing on your machine? What are your specs?

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Hey there. I wrote Deathlord Relorded. Yes you need to cast-escape once in Deathlord. I got rid of this garbage in Relorded. Why is it crashing on your machine? What are your specs?

Windows 10

Faulting application name: DeathlordRelorded.exe, version: 1.0.7.0, timestamp: 0x653bc89a
Faulting module name: ucrtbase.dll, version: 10.0.19041.3636, timestamp: 0x81cf5d89
Exception code: 0xc0000409
Error position: 0x000000000007286e
The process ID that caused the error is 0x19c0
Start time of the application causing the error: 0x01da6b2fa896f83a
Path to the application causing the error: C:\Users\attil\relord\DeathlordRelorded.exe
Path of the module causing the error: C:\WINDOWS\System32\ucrtbase.dll
Report ID: 2a539954-7dcd-4111-a9a7-aa4d87ee6d96
Full name of the package causing the error:
The relative application ID of the package causing the error:

 

[rikkles]

What video card and screens size?

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

What video card and screens size?

ATI Radeon 5750
1920x1080

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

Which is better armor?
Haramakido +4 AC
or
Yoroi +6 AC -2 TO HIT?

crpgaddict keeps saying that Deathlord has Wizardry combat system. But it has not. Actions are not queued in phase based combat. And not depends on speed in combat who is next.

 

[rikkles]

i think the Radeon driver is messing things up. Try this:
Open your personal Saved Games directory, and go to the Deathlord Relorded subfolder. There should be a file "DeathlordRelorded.conf". Open it in Notepad and modify the entry "noEffects: false" to "noEffects: true".
Run the exe again.

 

[rikkles]

Which is better armor?
Haramakido +4 AC
or
Yoroi +6 AC -2 TO HIT?

crpgaddict keeps saying that Deathlord has Wizardry combat system. But it has not. Actions are not queued in phase based combat. And not depends on speed in combat who is next.

Use the Yoroi. At some point you’ll be maxing out on to-hit.

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

i think the Radeon driver is messing things up. Try this:
Open your personal Saved Games directory, and go to the Deathlord Relorded subfolder. There should be a file "DeathlordRelorded.conf". Open it in Notepad and modify the entry "noEffects: false" to "noEffects: true".
Run the exe again.

It does not work, anyway I had no "noEffects" entry.
Now the conf file is:
{
"applewinScale": 1.0,
"diskBootPath": "Images\\Deathlord Boot Disk.woz",
"diskScenAPath": "Images\\Deathlord Scenario A.nib",
"diskScenBPath": "Images\\Deathlord Scenario B.nib",
"hdvPath": "",
"logCombat": true,
"removeFog": false,
"scanlines": true,
"showFootsteps": false,
"showHidden": false,
"showMap": true,
"showSpells": false,
"useGameLink": false,
"video": 3,
"noEffects": true,
"volumeSpeaker": 2
}