Arena, Part XII: Beginning the Labyrinth

Well, I do have an update, though a small one. I’ve entered Labyrinthian.

The entry halls prompted some interesting though so far rather vague flavor text in the form of clues etched into the walls and floors:

I haven’t even solved the mysteries of door number one yet, though. I’ve only been slowly probing Labyrinthian. It’ll probably continue to be slow going–I might plug away a little bit at a time, and even a month from now I might not have a huge update. But it’s going. So far the enemies haven’t been too challenging for the most part–mostly spiders and wolves. I did encounter a room with snow wolves, and one room with hell hounds. The snow wolf room was challenging. The hell hound room was laughably easy: I fell from a high space into a hole, the hell hounds were in the room above the hole, and one of the hell hounds fired a fireball spell that eradicated them both. I didn’t have to do anything at all.

I’ve also encountered an interesting glitch. I used Passwall to get through to some stairs leading to another level. I could go through the wall and go up the stairs, but at that point I could not move except to turn around and go back down the stairs. Once back downstairs, I could not move except to turn around and go back up the stairs. I could not break free even with jumping and levitating. I lost some progress loading an earlier save. I won’t try to break a shortcut into stairs again. They basically function as a portal to take me to another dungeon layout, after all. Maybe entering backwards breaks something.

This reminds me that I encountered another big glitch back in August. I don’t think I mentioned it then. It was the Insufficient Memory error, which forced a crash to desktop. Loading resolved the issue. It’s not exactly an unknown issue with the game, either. Game-crashing bugs: now that’s classic Elder Scrolls.