I believe that the Eternal Darkness
Magick system deserves a special meniton.
Throughout most of the game your best friend is a bladed weapon; there are few enemies that it is worthwhile trying to attack from a distance. This seems a little unbalanced (seemingly normal mortals faced agains unending hoards of painless undead), until you recieve the Tome of Eternal Darkess, an ancient relic allowing you to construct and cast spells.
The Magick (note the redundant new-age 'k') system is perhaps not truly unique, but it is definetly a step towards the dynamic, limitless video game spell system of the future. Which is good.
Spells in ED are constructed from three elements:
- Runes - These are collected as items, or by slaying beasts that are holding them.
- Circles of Power - Runes are mounted in these to construct the spell itself. They come in 3-, 5- and 7-point varieties, which indicates how many runes can be used in a single spell. Unfortunately, you can't use multiple runes to unleash complex spells, any positions after the first three are only for increasing its power.
- Codices and Spell Scrolls - These are not actually necessary to cast a spell, but save you many seconds of experimentation to discover what each rune or completed spell does.
When actually building up a new spell for the first time, you select three meaningful runes, and then fill any availible slots in youre current Circle with Pargon (power) runes.
The first rune may be any of the following:
- Chattur'gha - The red alignment, a mighty worm-god whose power is best directed against Xel'lotath. When directed at yourself, it tends to affect your hitpoints.
- Xel'lotath - The green alignment, a god of decay, powerful against Ulyaoth. This can affect a players sanity.
- Ulyaoth - The blue alignment, can whip Chattur'gha any day. Can be used to recover magic power, unfortunately it uses the same amount to cast that it refills.
- Mantorok - The corpse god's purple rune is a game secret, but once found it enables you to defeat any other alignment with ease.
The
god that you have chosen will call out the runes as the spell is cast. The type of spell is selected with the following:
- Antorbok - Projects the power of a god onto the target.
Bankorok - Uses the magic power involved in casting to protect the target.
- Narokath - Typically absorbs the target.
- Nethlek - Useful only to dispel another alignment's magic, provided it is of a weaker type or Circle.
- Tier - Used in conjunction with the Aretak rune, it allows you to summon a creature depencing on the Circle you have used.
The focus of the spell is then selected, from the following list:
- Aretak - The spell is targeted at, or cast with a creature in mind.
- Magormor - An item will absorb the power.
- Redgormor - The immediate area is affected or utilized.
- Santak - The player's character is affected.
Finally, any unused positions in the circle are filled with
Pargon (power) runes, which seems a waste in what could have been the spell system to end all spell systems.
The game ignores the specific positioning of the runes, and you cannot use duplicates. If you could, the game would offer an astounding 243 combinations, discounting Pargon runes. Even not counting alignment, there are still 81 possible spells. Including the fact that no duplicated can be used, this figure is reduced to 216, or 72 without alignments. Even using the structure I have outlined above, this figure is still a comfortable 20 spells without alignment. Not such a big ask, huh? But, big suprise, you may only cast a dissapointing 12 spells in-game. This is frustrating, especially when experimenting with combinations that should work, such as Tier+Santak, which would assumedly conjure up an illusion of one's self.
In conclusion, the makers of this otherwise great game made a very foolish mistake. The final product would have been a good game without the sanity system. With it, it is a great game. Similarly, a dynamic magic system could have blown the rest of the competition to oblivion.
A seven point, fully decked out Circle with no Pargon runes or repetitions, and not counting alignment, would have offered the player 60480 combinations. Damn.