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Yet Another Dragon Wars Walkthrough

Version 3.0, September 2023

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CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

This walkthrough is copyright (C) Ben Cordes, 2012–23. It is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v4.0 International License. See link for more details.

All other trademarks and copyrights contained in this document are owned by their respective trademark and copyright holders.

Acknowledgements

At this point, most of the information that I’ve included here is either based on or confirmed by my own research, innumerable playthroughs, and decompiling the binary source files and picking through every bit of code at least once. However, before I did all that, I leaned heavily on the following resources, and I’m indebted to these folks for their work:

I used Andrew Schultz’s walkthrough many times while first revisiting this game and writing this document. His walkthrough, and his autogenerated maps, are available at GameFAQs.

The Classic Gaming page on Dragon Wars was also very helpful, and added information I hadn’t read before on a few items and locations.

Version History

Game Introduction

Dragon Wars is a classic CRPG that stands as the spiritual successor to the Bard’s Tale series and one of my favorite CRPGs of all time. Some would call it “the missing Bard’s Tale IV”, although at this point that’s a complete misnomer since the Bryan Fargo-led inXile Entertainment has released a very successful and very modern BT4 game. Highly recommended. But I digress.

I’m assuming you’ve read the game’s manual and the reference card; they’ll give you the background story (although I’ll recap it for you at the top of the walkthrough and teach you how to move around and do stuff. It’s worth noting (mostly because it didn’t fit anywhere else) that many of the proper nouns in this game (Dilmun, Namtar, Nisir, Utnapishtim, etc.) are taken from Mesopotamian mythology and/or the Epic of Gilgamesh, which provides an interesting backdrop and helps explain the twists on the standard swords-and-sorcery epic-fantasy background story we’re all accustomed to.

You’ll also find a list of spells in the manual, but you won’t need it because I’ve listed them all along with more information than is available there. You should also be aware that there are several red herrings and/or places where the manual is simply incorrect, whether intentional or not.

At the end of the manual is a list of paragraphs. You should be able to find a text file containing the paragraphs online, rather than having to squint at your poorly-scanned PDF manual. These help flesh out the story as you go, and give you some hints and other bits of direction. In the walkthrough I’ve marked the places where the game directs you to the paragraph list with (pxxx), where xxx is the paragraph number. Careful, not all the paragraphs are real! But the fake ones are often funny and worth reading. I’ve listed out which ones are fake in the appendices, if you’re curious.

Managing Save Files

Assuming you’re working with the IBM PC version of the game under DOSBOX, Dragon Wars will keep its data in two files, DATA1 and DATA2. All the data in DATA2 is static, but DATA1 is where your game is saved. So you can back up your save game at any point by copying the DATA1 file to a different name. If you need to restore, quit the game first, then copy a backup file on top of DATA1 and restart. The game itself only offers one save slot, so you can use this trick to have multiple parties, too.

Before you do anything else, make sure you have a backup copy of the game files, specifically DATA1, DATA2, and DRAGON.COM. Make another backup before you enter any new zone; I wound up with two dozen or so backups called DATA1-slave-camp, DATA1-tars, and so on.

If this is your first time playing the game, this is a good time to take the starter party and stroll around Purgatory for a while. Get used to the flow of combat and maybe get your ass kicked a couple of times. You can always start a new game and/or make new characters any time you want. When you’re ready to start exploring Dilmun for real, come back here.

Creating Characters

Unlike many other CRPGs, Dragon Wars doesn’t force you to roll dice, or at least, doesn’t force you to hit the space bar a million times while it randomly generates statistics for you until you get ones that are high enough to make you happy. Instead, you start the game with very pedestrian statistics and 50 character points (hereafter CP) to distribute as you wish among your attributes and skills. This is a far less frustrating way to create characters, and will be familiar to those of you who played Wasteland.

So let’s talk about all the different ways you can spend CP. Throughout this section, numbers in [brackets] indicate the number of CP you need to spend to increase the attribute (or skill) by one level. If there are two numbers (mostly for magic skills), then the first number is the initial CP cost of level 1, and the second number is the CP cost of additional levels.

Attributes

Attributes form the basic description of your character. Newly-generated characters start with a 10 in all primary attributes. All attributes start (conceptually) at zero and go up; higher numbers are always better.

Primary attributes are the ones you can increase by spending CP; the number of CP required to increase the attribute by one point is in [brackets] below. Each attribute has one or more specific effects on your character, but they’re also useful more generally. In some places, attributes can even be (U)sed as if they’re skills; I’ll point out places where this matters later on.

Secondary attributes are derived from your primary attributes and (often) your equipment; you can’t change them directly with CP.

Skills

One of the things that makes Dragon Wars such a classic game is that the designers allowed for multiple solutions to most puzzles in the game. Usually you have the option to fight your way through trouble, but you also often have the choice of one or more skills you can use, and in a pinch, sometimes just using an attribute is good enough as a substitute. This section just explains the [CP cost] and general purpose of each skill; check out General Advice, below, for more specific opinions on whether you should take it or not.

General Advice

Here’s some things to keep in mind when spending CP on your party, both at creation time and whenever you gain levels. Of course you should also feel free to do your own thing and ignore everything in this section. No offense taken.

Party build

Your party has room for seven characters, but you can only create up to four. Empty slots can be filled with NPCs you meet along the way or by casting summoning spells. I always play with persistent NPCs, since you can pick up three of them very quickly (especially if you cheat just a bit), and summoned creatures have a nasty habit of disappearing on you at inconvenient times.

Characters 1–4 in the marching order are the only ones who can melee, so generally you’ll want four fighting folk up front and three spell casters (and/or archers) behind them. Of the NPCs, Ulrik is an obvious choice for the front lines. Louie could swing either way (for a fighter, he’s got a high SPR) but he doesn’t start with any magic skills. Valar is already a great Sun mage. Halifax is a fighter, but he doesn’t appear until super late in the game, and by the time you can pick him up you probably don’t want to get rid of anyone else.

That being said, creating two fighters and two mages is probably your best bet. The next question is, which magic skills should you take? There’s not really a single correct answer to that; every school is useful, but every school can also be skipped at creation time. High Magic has the best early-game zap spells and there’s no way to get access to it without building a PC with it, but you could live without it if you really wanted to. (The Magic College becomes unsolvable, though, and you wouldn’t be able to use the Air Summon shortcut in the Nisir.) Valar comes with Sun Magic and a bunch of spells pre-loaded so you definitely don’t need your own Sun mage, but if you were going to double up on a school, this is the one I’d pick. There are two Druid Magic spells that are literally required in order to win the game, but because of that it’s possible to pick it up in-game for free.

Okay, fine, you’re here for opinions, here’s mine: For a fresh party, I almost always take High Magic and Druid Magic. My High Mage sits in slot 5 with a high DEX, and they get the Gatlin Bow / Magic Quiver combo in the second half of the game. I pick up Valar early to round out the set, and Louie becomes a hybrid fighter/Druid Mage by wrestling Enkidu once he’s ready. Having two PCs that can cast D:Cure All is no bad thing. But this is definitely not the only way to build a winning party.

Attributes

Strength: Whoever’s going to wrestle Enkidu for Druid Magic needs at least STR 16, which also gets you all the Flails. You’re almost certainly going to want STR 17 in order to use every Sword; if you have it early, consider taking a Greatsword from the Purgatory Arena. STR 18 gets you most Axes and Maces and solves most Strength-based puzzles (moving loose rocks, etc). Ulrik starts with STR 20, which gets you every melee weapon except some Two-handers. There’s one pesky statue near the end of the game that requires STR 24 to move. And if you really want to use the Heavy Sword, you need STR 25. But keep in mind: if your STR is higher than the minimum for a melee weapon, you get +1 bonus damage for every five points above the requirement, so for example if you use a Hand Axe (requires STR 5) with a 20 STR you deal 1d6+3 damage.

Dexterity: I think DEX 20 is generally a good idea, both for the +5 AV / DV and because it puts you solidly in the middle of the pack compared to the enemies you’ll be fighting (for the sake of combat order). You’ll hit first against most “scrubs” and probably go after most “big” enemies. Spending the 8 CP to get to DEX 24 isn’t worth it, although DEX 21 plus the three-point boost from the Universal God is a nice treat before you plunge into the depths of the Nisir. Your spellcasters can start lower and work their way up later, and if you have a Druid mage in the back row it’s not a terrible idea to follow the suggestion in the game’s manual and leave their DEX low so they can cast group-heal spells at the end of the round. (Don’t also make them your Bows specialist, though; they’ll want a high DEX for the damage bonus.)

Intelligence: INT is useful for mages that cast attack spells. Check out the Magic section and look for spells that require an “Attack Roll”; they use INT instead of DEX (and magic skill instead of weapon skill) to calculate the effective AV. Note that zap spells don’t “miss”, they just deal half damage on an unsuccessful attack roll, so don’t sweat this too much. And don’t bother spending any points on your fighters’ INT.

I think the case for Health and Spirit is pretty obvious, right? I like to aim for 20 HP for my fighters and somewhere around 15 HP for my casters, which is generally pretty comfortable. Your casters’ SPR should be at least in the low 20s, and 30 won’t be wasted (especially on your Druid Mage, who’s going to cast a lot of D:Cure All).

Skills

There are lots of ways to build an effective party in Dragon Wars, but the most important piece of advice I have is to lean heavily into Bandage. Set aside one of your PCs to be your medic and don’t let your fighters’ HP stat outpace the medic’s skill level by more than one or two ranks, and you’ll dramatically reduce your dependence on magical healing. That, in turn, will reduce your dependence on Dragon Stones, and you’ll thank me for that later. The downside is your medic won’t have any other skills and might lag a bit behind the rest of the party in attributes, but it’s worth it.

You definitely want to take Lockpick: one rank is pretty much required and three gets you through nearly everything (see Game Mechanics). I recommend building up to Lockpick 3 in time to clean out the second Guard Bridge.

I also strongly suggest one rank in Climb, because you need it to use the well to get from the Mystic Wood to the Underworld and it’s handy in a few other places as well.

One rank in Arcane Lore allows you to use the Transportation Nexus, which is super handy. The Nexus in the Mystic Wood will teleport you randomly to one of the other two locations if you don’t have Arcane Lore; the other two locations simply won’t work at all. Technically Halifax comes with it, but he’s on the wrong side of the world.

You’ll want roughly two of Tracker, Bureaucracy, and Hiding, but you don’t need all three and Louie comes with Hiding so unless you aren’t planning to pick him up for some reason you can narrow that down a bit. Search the walkthrough for more information.

Don’t take:

Let’s talk weapon skills. You aren’t required to have ranks in a weapon skill in order to use weapons of that class. However, your effective AV is a combination of your base AV (DEX / 4), the AV bonus of the weapon you’re using, the AV penalty of whatever armor you’re wearing, and however many ranks you have in the weapon skill. The AV that shows on your inventory screen doesn’t take skill ranks into account, but they’re there. So if you have DEX 20 (AV 5) and Flails 3 and you’re wielding a Runed Flail (+2 AV), the game shows your AV as 7 but you actually have an effective AV of 10.

Think of your AV as a one-for-one bonus added to your to-hit roll, and your opponent’s DV as lowering it the same way. Given the combat mechanics, +1 AV is a 1-in-16 better chance to hit (6.25%), so +4 AV is a 25% bonus. Weapon skills are definitely more efficient at raising your AV than buying four points of DEX, but they lock you into a particular weapon class. Three things worth noting:

There are plenty of good mid-game Maces and Flails, and if you’re after raw damage, Two-Handers may be the way to go. But I found I swapped weapons around too much to limit myself by taking lots of ranks in one weapon skill. Also, there aren’t enough Crossbows to be worthwhile, and the combat mechanics make Thrown Weapons too hard to use effectively.

Fistfighting basically counts as a weapon skill in terms of adding effective AV if you aren’t holding a weapon, but unlike weapon skills it also increases your damage. With no ranks, you punch for 1d4; that goes up to a maximum of 7 ranks (1d6, 3d6, 5d6, 3d8, 5d8, 3d10, 3d12). You could make a pretty formidable martial artist by spending 15 CP on STR 20 and Fistfighting 5; 5–40 damage is better than all but the best late-game weapons, and you’ll absolutely tear through Purgatory like that. The downside is that you can’t Block without a weapon, and you’ll never get the tasty AV or AC bonuses for using weapons.

Side note: I don’t know what genius picked those damage dice, but going from 5–40 at Fistfighting 5 to 3–30 at level 6 and 3–36 at level 7 is pretty dumb.

Finally, we discussed magic skills already, but I didn’t mention skill ranks. Magic skills act like weapon skills when you’re making magical attack rolls, but since a “miss” on a magical attack roll still deals half damage, you may not notice the effects of a higher magical AV quite as much. More importantly, more skill ranks also allow you to put higher amounts of POW into your variable-power spells. Druid Magic doesn’t have any variable-power spells, but does have plenty of zap. Being able to cast higher-point S:Inferno is a big deal though, so I definitely suggest investing in a few additional ranks of Sun Magic.

Sample Characters

Here’s a sample set of starting characters that I took through the game. This will give you an idea of how I build my party, based on the advice above. You’ll see them again in Final Characters, towards the end of this guide.

Name Level STR DEX INT SPR Health
Thog 1 19 20 10 10 15
Skills: Low Magic 1, Climb 2, Lockpick 2
Upgrades: Climb 4, Lockpick 4, STR 20+, Low 3, HP 20
Alex 1 16 20 10 10 15
Skills: Low Magic 1, Bandage 4, Tracker 1
Upgrades: STR 18+, Bandage 10, HP 20
Arthur 1 12 12 13 19 13
Skills: Low Magic 1, Druid Magic 1, Arcane Lore 1, Bureaucracy 1
Upgrades: DEX 13, Druid 3, INT 15, HP 15, SPR++
Valerie 1 10 16 15 16 13
Skills: Low Magic 1, High Magic 1
Upgrades: High 3, DEX 20+, Bows+, HP 15, SPR++

NPCs

The game’s NPCs are in a fixed place and always appear with the same stats and same level, no matter when you pick them up.

Name Level STR DEX INT SPR Health Where?
Ulrik 3 20 17 08 14 15 Purgatory
Skills: Cave Lore 3, Swim 1, Axes 3
Equipment: Hand Axe, Leather Armor
Upgrades: Low Magic 1, DEX 21, HP 20
Louie 2 14 16 16 16 15 Slave Camp
Skills: Hiding 2, Pickpocket 2
Equipment: None
Upgrades: Low Magic 1, DEX 21, STR 18, HP++
Valar 2 11 14 18 16 19 Phoebus
Skills: Low Magic 1, Sun Magic 1
Spells: L:everything; S:Sun Stroke, Heal, Armor of Light, Guidance
Upgrades: Sun 3, DEX 17, SPR++
Halifax 6 21 18 14 14 23 Freeport
Skills: Arcane Lore 2, Cave Lore 3, Climb 1, Swim 2, Maces 3
Equipment: Long Mace, Large Shield, Chain Armor
Upgrades: I never bother taking him in the first place.

Leveling Up

The Dragon Wars advancement system is pretty speedy at first – you can reach level 4 without leaving Purgatory or really trying hard – and quite slow later.

Experience is handed out equally to all party members who are alive (note: this includes Stunned) at the end of a battle. So chances are good that all four of your original party members will continue to level up at exactly the same time for the entire game.

Note that when you hit a new level, the game resets your XP counter to 0, so the number you really care about is “how much more until next level?” If you’re going from level N to level N+1, the formula is (50 x N x N+1)… or you can just look on this table:

Level XP Level XP
2 100 7 2100
3 300 8 2800
4 600 9 3600
5 1000 10 4500
6 1500 11 5500

12th level and all levels after that require the same +6600 xp to advance. So at least the curve stops getting steeper.

Every time you hit a new level, you get 2 CP to spend. Hit (X) and then pick a character to spend them. Note that you don’t have to spend CP as soon as you get them; you can hold on to them (if you’re saving up for a new Magic skill, for instance).

I’m fairly completionist, but when I start with a fresh party I always seem to finish the game at 12th or 13th level. That means you can expect to gain around 30 CP over the course of the game beyond what you start with, including the +5 Irkalla bonus. See the previous sections for more details on my suggested improvement paths for your PCs.

Combat and General Information

Combat Basics

Combat in Dragon Wars uses a turn-based system that will be familiar to fans of Bard’s Tale or most other early CRPGs. On each turn you pick actions for your party, the computer picks actions for your enemies, and then it simulates the battle round.

Turn order is regenerated each combat round; each combatant rolls 1d10+1 (2-11) and adds their DEX. Highest score goes first, etc. If your action executes at a point where it isn’t useful, too bad!

Of the seven character slots in your party, only the first four can attack with melee weapons. Note that this is true even if your melee weapon has a ranged attack, like the Axe of Kalah, or you’re using a Thrown Weapon, like the Boomerang; you must still be in the front four in order to (A)ttack with it. Also, it cuts both ways: only the first four slots can be attacked in melee, so your spellcasters are safe(ish) in the back line. Missile weapons can be used by characters in any slot; note that attack range is determined by the bow, and damage is determined by the quiver.

Party Actions

At the start of each combat round, you’re presented with the options to (F)ight, (Q)uickly fight, (R)un, or (A)dvance. In reverse order, (A)dvance [-2 DV] takes up your whole turn and moves the whole party 10’ closer to their opponents1. (R)un [-2 DV] directs every individual party member to try to flee from combat. (Q)uickfight gives you fewer options than (F)ight`, but either allows you to give further orders to each character individually.

1: Well, actually, it moves all of your enemies 10’ closer to your party, but that’s more or less the same thing, right?

Those individual options are:

At any time while giving individual orders, you can press (Esc) to back out of a menu or skip back to a previous player. You can even back all the way out to the turn menu and change your mind on Fight or Quickfight or Run. After you’ve given an order to every party member, you get a chance to confirm before executing the actions.

Targeting Groups

Once you’ve chosen an action, if there are multiple groups of enemies, you get to pick which group to target. If, when your turn comes up in the initiative order, the group you’re attacking is out of range or no longer has any live opponents, then your action is wasted. So execution order (and therefore DEX) matters!

Attack Rolls

An attack (regardless of source) hits on a roll of 13 or lower on 1d16+2. A minimum roll (3) always hits, and a maximum roll (18) always misses. Odds favor the attacker: all other things being equal, you have a 11-in-16 (68.75%) chance of success on any given attack roll. (If you’re firing multiple arrows, each one is rolled separately.)

Of course, “all other things” are basically never equal. The target number (13) is modified upwards, making a hit more likely, by the attacker’s AV and downwards by the defender’s DV. As a reminder, AV and DV are a combination of:

If you’re casting a spell that requires an attack roll, your “magic AV” is INT/4 (instead of DEX) plus the number of ranks you have in the appropriate magic skill. (Equipment AV bonuses aren’t applied here.) Your opponent’s DV is the same as it is for physical attacks.

Damage Rolls

Your damage die is determined by the weapon, quiver (for missile weapons), or spell you used. Monsters can have up to five different attacks (including weapons and spells), each of which can deal different damage.

If your weapon has a skill or attribute requirement, you get +1 bonus damage for every 5 ranks that you exceed the requirement (round down). This is true regardless of whether the weapon requires STR, DEX, or Mountain Lore. However, if you take seven ranks of Mountain Lore in order to get +1 damage from the Mountain Sword I will personally come to your house and give you a wedgie. Monsters don’t have weapon skills, so they don’t get bonus damage this way.

If you hit with Mighty Attack, roll a bonus 1d4.

The game counts up the number of successful attacks (usually only one, unless you’re using a bow that can fire multiple arrows at once) and rolls the damage die that many times. Bonus damage from Mighty Attack and weapon skills are rolled/calculated once, but applied to each attack that hits. One hit for 3d4 is different than three hits for 1d4 each, because the latter gets three bonuses and the former only gets one. The Gatlin Bow only requires DEX 10, so DEX 20 grants +2 damage per arrow. That adds up when you’re hitting 20–30 times per attack.

When you hit a group of monsters, the game applies damage to the first unhit monster. Once every monster in the group has been hit once (or killed), the bits are reset and you can hit each monster a second time. This is important tactically: it can be hard to kill the first monster in a group, but it should feel easier after that.

When you’re on defense, your armor reduces the damage you take. 1 point of AC reduces the damage per attack by 1, so if you’ve got AC 20 then a monster has to deal at least 20 damage before you even feel it. However, some monsters have a Mighty Attack that ignores armor (instead of dealing bonus damage). Monsters don’t have armor or an AC, but they tend to have much more Health than you do.

Monster Actions

Dragon Wars has a complicated internal system for navigating the actions that monsters within an encounter are allowed to take during combat. I’ll summarize it here, but if you want to see how it works in all its gory detail, you should go check out my decompilation repository.

Monsters pick their action each turn based on their morale, whether or not they’ve been attacked or damaged, and whether or not they’re in range for a melee attack. In the “Bestiary” sections of the map data I’ve listed each individual monster’s possible actions, but for the sake of simplicity I’ve left out any indication of which ones are most likely to happen. It’s pretty common for the same action to exist multiple times in different flavors; the developers especially like changing the damage that melee attacks cause after the monster has been damaged.

For the purposes of this section, here are the combat actions that monsters can take:

One more point about morale before we move on: morale is a function of the monster’s innate confidence level, an extra confidence factor attached to the encounter description (which may be positive or negative), and the average character level of your party. Once the encounter starts, the morale rating does not change. It is occasionally, but far from always, true that a monster with lower morale is more likely to try to flee or call for help rather than attack. But if you’re playing through the game a second (or fifth) time with high-CP characters, don’t be surprised when monsters act differently than they did the first time through.

Health and Stun

The most novel aspect of combat in Dragon Wars is the multi-tier health system. Everyone in your party has two sets of hit points, Health (the orange bar) and Stun (the green bar). (Your enemies only have Health; they can’t be Stunned, and therefore can’t return to combat once they’re knocked out.) In general, everything deals twice as much impact on Stun as it does on Health, which is to say that you are far more likely to run out of Stun than you are to run out of Health. If either value hits zero, you become incapacitated (‘stunned’ or ‘dead’, respectively) and won’t be targeted by any more attacks. If you’re still incapacitated at the end of the combat round, you’ll be shuffled to the end of the marching order; if you’re not in combat, the previous marching order is retained.

Dead characters cannot practically be resurrected. It is possible to do so, but it is so obnoxious and tedious that it is never worth your time. You’re better off restoring from your last save game. If you insist on wanting to know how to do it, I’ve left directions at the bottom of this section. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.

After combat ends, all non-Dead characters automatically heal Stun up to full. Health damage is permanent until you heal it. Between combats, the easiest way to restore Health points is to (U)se the Bandage skill. Bandage always works, takes no time (i.e. you can’t be interrupted in the middle of healing your whole party even though it requires multiple actions), and always brings you up to (10+skill) Health. This is why it’s important for your healer to have a skill value that’s (nearly) high enough to heal your fighters. You’ll pretty quickly develop the muscle memory of typing (U)se (#) (S)kill (A)bility (B)andage over and over. If you’re clever when building your party and don’t give your healer any other Ability skills (or any other skills at all), you can save keypresses.

During combat, the only way to heal is through magic. Healing spells work so long as you have living casters with Power. You can also (U)se a Healing Potion, of which you’ll find a few. Healing magic restores Stun as well as Health and will revive a Stunned character. It is totally possible (and often a good idea) to cast a healing spell on a character who might become Stunned during a round. If they are Stunned early in the round, the healing spell will revive them later, and they won’t get shuffled to the bottom of the marching order at the end of the round if they’re still standing. This is why it’s not a bad idea to give your Druid a low DEX: they will act towards the end of the round, and D:Cure All is pretty awesome.

Beware of the effects of magical healing on Health and Stun. As I said before, Stun is affected twice as much as Health, and that’s true in both directions. If you’re in a long, drawn-out battle, it’s quite possible to run out of Stun a couple of times and find yourself dipping into the single digits of Health even after healing back up to near-full Stun. This is how characters die. Keep an eye on that orange bar.

Don’t ignore the party reshuffling aspect of Stunned characters. There’s not much worse than having your primary healer suddenly find themselves in the front line taking melee hits when you really need them to revive a Stunned fighter who’s now in slot 7. Wearing armor doesn’t affect a mage’s ability to cast spells, so I strongly suggest letting your fighters’ cast-off armor trickle down to your spellcasters to boost their AC. It can take a while to shuffle a downed fighter back into the front lines, and you’ll want to be very careful how you manage your combat actions when this happens.

If you find you have to reorder your party in combat (and you will), beware of casting healing spells at the same time. When you choose a party member on which to target the heal, you are actually selecting a slot, not a person. If two PCs swap places before the spell is cast, it will land on whoever is newly occupying that slot. When trying to heal a moving target, consider the relative DEX scores of the caster and the recipient, and cross your fingers.

Resurrecting Dead Characters

If you’re reading this section, then one of three things had better be true:

  1. You’re a completionist, and you’re reading my walkthrough from cover to cover. Welcome, friend.
  2. You heard me complaining earlier about how dumb this process is, and you want to know just how dumb.
  3. One of your PCs died and you screwed up your save files such that you can’t restore from a previous save.

If it’s that last one, I’m going to ask you to seriously consider starting the game over from scratch before we proceed. Regardless, you’re going to have to slog through another few paragraphs describing how terrible this process is before I tell you the actual answer. I have literally only ever gone through this process for the purposes of documenting how to do it; I was already in the Necropolis and someone died from a Ghoul bite, so I figured I’d try it out.

Let’s start with location. In order to resurrect a dead character you have to get to the Necropolis. Technically the Well of Souls is in the Underworld, not the Necropolis, but the building that houses it is immune to D:Soften Stone, so there’s no access without going through the Necropolis.

Of course, the only way to get to the Necropolis is by boat. I suppose you don’t have to have beaten Ugly and his crew and taken his boat from him; you could just bribe him to take you there. Which is good, because that’s a really hard battle even with a full party, and you’re likely to lose somebody in that fight.

If you don’t happen to be on one of the Eastern Isles already, you have to pick up the boat at Smuggler’s Cove. Quag is infested with Murk Trees, and they’re potentially deadly no matter how good your AC is. You have to fight off at least one group of them to get to the Cove, and there’s a non-zero chance that you lose another PC in that fight.

Even if you’ve already cleared the Necropolis once and you’re coming back just to use the Well of Souls, you still have to fight off two really annoying Guardians. And, again, no using D:Soften Stone to skip the fights.

And if for some reason you don’t currently have Arcane Lore in your party — say, your mage with that skill is the one who died — you won’t be able to use the Nexus, so it’s even harder to get to Quag, and you’ll need it to use the Well of Souls in the first place, so you’re screwed anyway. You might as well go pick up Halifax in Freeport; at least he comes with Arcane Lore.

Or just reload your damn game.

Still with me? Okay, here we go:

Combat Strategies

The #1 problem that you will be faced with while in combat — well, okay, aside from actually just staying alive and unstunned — is how to close into melee range with your opponents. The computer, I’m sorry to say, cheats: it knows whether or not you’ve given the (A)dvance order to your party before it assigns orders to the monsters, and if it behooves the monsters to sit and wait for you to advance, they will.

Here’s a particular example: one group of monsters is 20’ away from you. If you (A)dvance, they will choose (F)ight actions. If you go first, you step into melee range, and they get free hits. On the other hand, if you stand your ground and give (F)ight actions, there’s a chance that they will (A)dvance first, and then you get free hits. This is almost always the right idea, even at the cost of a few wasted swings at monsters that are too far away. The exception is if you’re fighting multiple groups, and the distant group has a ranged attack, and you need to close to a certain distance in order to hit them with your ranged attack and/or spells.

I’ve tried to lay out useful strategies for some of the harder encounters in the walkthrough, but really I expect you’ll have a reasonable sense of tactics by the time you leave Purgatory.

Weapon Choice

I find thrown weapons too hard to use to be worthwhile. They work like melee weapons with range, which is to say, you have to be in the front rank to use them2. However, most thrown weapons are single-use, so once you (A)ttack, you have no equipped weapon anymore, and you have to waste your next turn readying a (N)ew weapon. And since they don’t stack, if you wanted to carry (say) a half dozen of them around, it would eat up most of your inventory. The unique ones like the Holy Spear (1d30) seem like they do nice damage, but you’ll only ever find exactly one of them, so once you use it, it’s gone.

There’s a few ameliorating edge cases here: if you use Fistfighting you don’t have to ready a weapon to attack, so you don’t “lose” that intermediate turn. Likewise, the Boomerang comes in a stack of ten. The Trident has unlimited uses and comes back every time you throw it… but you find it around the same time as the Dragon’s Teeth, which are better in just about every way. None of that adds up for me personally; if someone has found a strategy that makes thrown weapons useful, I’d love to hear about it.

2: Having dug through the code, I’m convinced this is an off-by-one bug caused by a “greater-or-equal” check that should have been “greater than”. If the back rank could use thrown weapons, I’d happily have my mages throw Bombs at nearby groups and then go back to casting spells without the need to ready a (N)ew weapon.

In the early game, missile weapons are kind of nice because you can get additional attacks from your back row, but managing an inventory full of arrows gets annoying fast. Most quivers don’t do very much damage, although you can exploit the Bridge Bug to acquire infinite Grey Arrows. On the other hand, the Gatlin Bow / Magic Quiver combination is amazingly deadly; you’ll likely do more damage with that combo than any melee weapon all the way through the end of the game. My advice is to get bows for your back row as soon as possible (the Purgatory Arena, for example). Stop collecting arrows whenever you get sick of managing them, you find that your mages have better things to do, or you just need to free up the inventory slots.

Melee weapons with ‘reach’ (i.e. a range greater than 10’) are incredibly useful. You don’t have to do anything special to activate the ranged attack; simply (A)ttack a group of enemies that is more than 10’ away (but hopefully closer than the maximum range of your melee weapon) and you will attack as normal. Note that some reach weapons do different damage at distance than they do at 10’; see the weapon tables. I found that I often prioritized having reach over a weapon that did more damage at 10’. You may have different preferences or combat styles.

Also remember that some armor and weapons have additional magical actions that can be useful in combat. (U)sing the weapon during a combat round will activate the spell on your turn. For example, if you use the Druids Mace in combat, it casts D:Cure All, which coincidentally is the best group-heal spell in the game.

Attack Styles

I mostly just use normal attacks. All other things being equal, 1 point of AV translates into a 6.25% chance to hit, so Mighty Attack is a 25% penalty for +1d4 damage (average 2.5 HP), which probably isn’t worth it – if you’ve got a high-enough AV that you’re going to hit even at -4, you’re also likely doing enough damage that the bonus doesn’t matter. And since you can’t see your opponent’s Health, you don’t really have enough information to know when it might be useful.

Disarm is handy in one or two places that I’ll mention in the walkthrough. A successful Disarm deals 1 HP, but some monsters are immune and there’s basically no way to tell which ones — it will look like your Disarm works, but behind the scenes the monster just shrugs it off. Rude. (My Bestiary lists will tell you, though.)

Similarly, Block is useful in a few places against really powerful single opponents (like Namtar), if you’re facing opponents with really high AC, or if a mage winds up in the front four while you shuffle a stunned fighter back up. The nice thing is that it always works (on the first attack), so long as you’re carrying a melee weapon.

Moving

Here’s a pro tip that can help you shuffle your party quickly during a combat turn. You already know that you assign actions from front (slot 1) to back (slot 7, at most). When you tell a character to Move, their destination slot is immediately memorized. But, of course, character actions are only resolved during the combat turn, and that mostly happens due to DEX ordering.

Let’s say your party is Alice, Bob, Charlie, Dave, Eric, Frank, and Grace, arranged in slots 1-7 respectively. If you tell Dave to Move Behind, his ultimate destination is slot 5. Very little will change this. When Dave’s turn comes up in the order, he will swap with whoever is in slot 5. Maybe that’s still Eric, or maybe not, but regardless, Dave will move to slot 5, even if he isn’t still in slot 4.

Now, if you also told Eric to Move Behind, then his destination is slot 6. Eventually (assuming everyone gets to move and no one becomes incapacitated), the result is that Frank will (eventually) wind up all the way forward in slot 4, followed by Dave, then Eric. You can use this trick to propel someone from rank 7 to rank 1 in one turn, if you’re willing to spend your entire turn having everyone in the party Move Behind. (Hey, at least it grants +1 DV.)

Things get more complicated if you mix moving Ahead and Behind, though. Given the original party order, if you tell Charlie to Move Behind and Eric to Move Ahead, what happens? Well, it depends on whether Charlie or Eric go first; you might wind up Dave-Eric-Charlie, or you might wind up Eric-Charlie-Dave. I don’t recommend trying to play with this one in a serious fight; the results will be hilarious (note: not actually hilarious).

Game Mechanics

Attribute checks: There are several points where the game will check the value of an attribute as if it were a skill. Like skill checks, the vast majority of these are pass/fail: for instance, a statue requires STR 23 to move it, and if your STR is below the threshold there’s nothing you can do about it. However in a few places the check is more random:

In these cases, the game rolls a random number and compares it to your attribute; if the roll is lower, you succeed. In principle, this means that having a higher attribute value is useful for its own sake, but in practice there’s rarely any real penalty for failure. Just try it a couple of times until it works.

Lock picking: There are two types of lockpick checks. Locked doors are pass/fail; if you have enough ranks you unlock the door, and if you don’t, you can’t. There are some level 3 locks you’ll want to be able to open, and a few level 4 locks as well but you can go around those.

Locked chests work differently: if your skill is higher than the difficulty rating, you open it immediately. If it’s equal you have a 95% chance of opening the lock, and if it’s lower that goes down to 90%, 85%, 80%, 75%, 70%, 60%, and 50% if your skill is 7 or more ranks lower. In practice, the hardest chest in the game has difficulty 5 so even Lockpick 1 has a 75% chance of opening it, and again, there’s no real penalty for failure.

Dealing With Loot

The first thing you need to know about Dragon Wars is that there is no random loot (with the exception of the gold that you pick up off some Guards). The location of every object that you can pick up is pre-programmed and never changes. Combats do not drop random objects. I admit this reduces the replayability of the game a bit, but it also makes writing a walkthrough much easier.

Like many CRPGs of the era, the game’s economy is kind of broken. Money is basically never an issue. Sure, you start in Purgatory as a bunch of penniless paupers, but who cares? The Arena will give you everything you need to get started. From then on you should have no problems keeping yourself well-funded. I ended the game with almost $60,000. Inventory management becomes a huge headache if you try to keep and sell everything. If you find yourself with more than $10,000 in cash, you should feel free to start dropping stuff instead of hanging onto it to sell.

You also have the option of not picking up things in the first place. When presented with a chest, if you leave some things behind, they are likely to stay there and you can come back for them later (at least until you leave the map). Don’t worry about accidentally “leaving” a chest in order to shuffle your inventory around; just hit ESC once or twice and the chest should come back. There are a few exceptions to this rule, which I’ve tried to note when I found them.

The game generally does a nice job at providing equipment upgrades at the right time, instead of forcing you to buy them. I’ll have you farm enough gold to buy your first round of equipment in Purgatory, but that’s optional. After that you might not buy another piece of armor or weaponry until Freeport, which is almost two-thirds of the way through the game.

When you do go to sell stuff, you can largely sell anything anywhere for half of its purchase price. The most useful places to sell things are the Purgatory Black Market, the Byzanople Siege Camp Black Market, and the Mud Toad souvenir shop. Several items have no purpose beyond their resale value; when in doubt, see the list of Unique Items. Keep in mind that selling something is similar to discarding it – once it leaves your inventory, it’s gone. You can’t buy back a unique item, even from the shop you sold it to.

All of the other hint guides I’ve seen basically tell you to horde Dragon Stones as if they’re the most precious resource on Oceana. I find this advice ridiculous, but that may be because I put so many points into Bandage that I’m not as reliant on magical healing. Because there are several spots where you can regenerate Power without using a Dragon Stone, I really only need them for deep dungeon dives. Also, you’ll find Dragon Stones all over the place, and even if you don’t, most of the good shops have them for sale and money will never really be an issue. So use a Stone whenever you want and don’t worry about stuffing your mages’ inventory full of them. Make sure you always have a handful, and if you can’t remember where the last stash was, buy a few more.

Weird Stuff

Some random notes I’ve collected on my journeys through Dilmun…

I mentioned this already under Health and Stun, but I find the “target a slot, not a party member” thing to be very strange and also very annoying. “Hey, you’re not Thog!”

If you pay a healer for healing — and I’ve pretty much never done it except to test it out for the purpose of writing this guide — the game will automatically pool all of your gold with the first PC. Dragon Wars stores a character’s gold haul in a four-byte number, meaning they can carry around $4.3 billion before something bad happens, so unlike some other games I could name (cough Deathlord cough) this doesn’t have any sort of destructive effect. It’s just a little confusing the next time you go to look for who has all the gold in the party.

There are a few maps that allow you to use D:Soften Stone to pass through the ostensible “outer” walls of the map. If the map doesn’t have the “wrapping” flag set (i.e. Kingshome Dungeon, Dwarf Clan Hall) this allows you to go wandering so far off-course that the automap stops drawing anything. If you keep moving far enough in one direction, the map will eventually wrap around and you’ll find the opposite edge of the map, like Columbus trying to find India. Since the X and Y coordinates of your party are kept in 8-bit registers, this seems to happen at 256 steps. You won’t find anything interesting out there except the odd random encounter, so this is more of a curiosity than anything.

If you’re running around inside the outer walls of Purgatory, and you encounter some King’s Guard, and you run away, the game dumps you back at the start square as if you’ve been “captured” again. (At least it doesn’t take all your inventory and gold.)

When you see a low wooden fence, you can often cast D:Soften Stone on it. The fence goes away, but nothing else changes. If you weren’t able to move through/past the fence before, you still can’t.

Game maps reset whenever you leave them… mostly. In particular this means that any wall that you Soften regenerates if you leave and come back, and most “fixed” encounter points will reset as well. But I said “mostly”; certain fixed encounters are “unique” and you only get to do them once (Humbaba, Mystalvision, etc). Once you plug the leak (or repair the statue of Lanac’toor) in Mud Toad, it stays plugged. Starting a new game, of course, resets everything about the game state (but not about your characters).

Speaking of unique encounters that shouldn’t reset, Dragon Wars mostly does a good job maintaining story continuity. If you kill Mystalvision in the Nisir, he can’t be found in Phoebus (which means you can’t get back into the Phoeban Dungeon). But occasionally things happen that don’t make sense; events repeat themselves, dead people come back to life, etc. One example: if you win the battle in Byzanople and then go back to Phoebus, Buck Ironhead is still there and you can still enlist in the army. You’re sent to the Siege Camp again, which is empty.

Of course, you could also interpret these “inconsistencies” as examples of how the developers wrote in multiple solutions to almost everything, including the problem of navigating between islands. You can “enlist” in Phoebus and get transported to King’s as many times as you want, so if you find yourself without Arcane Lore, you can still reliably get there. The ferry between Lansk and the Old Dock gets expensive but also solves this problem, and of course you can always come up from the Underworld through the Dwarf Clan Hall… but only once you’ve repaired the statue and figured out that D:Soften Stone works. Forlorn, Sun, Lansk, and Quag are all connected by bridges, which may require you to beat up and/or bribe a lot of guards but at least it can be done.

There are lots of duplicated items. Most of the time they’re identical, but sometimes they aren’t. This is a function of the fact that item data isn’t stored centrally, it’s copy-and-pasted into each individual board where the item appears or can be used. A few examples:

While we’re on the subject of inventory, there are a handful of items that inexplicably have spells attached to them, but they come with no charges. Did you somehow figure out that the Magic Chain you get in the Necropolis can cast M:Zak’s Speed? Of course not. Well, it can, but only if you cast S:Charger on it first.

And speaking of strange uses for S:Charger, for some reason the Dead Bolt can be refilled as if it were a magic item. It’s the only quiver that this works on, but the fact that it shows up in the Necropolis means I can’t quite tell if this is a bug or if the developers intended for it to work this way. Internally it has similar bits set to the Magic Quiver, but that one ‘recharges itself’.

If you’re playing on a PC, the item beneath the statue on the Old Dock is a PS/2. If you’re playing on an Apple emulator, it’s a IIgs. It does the same thing either way, including granting +4 AC if you equip it.

Final note on inventory: keep an eye out throughout these documents for Easter Eggs. In my exploration of the decompiled data files I found a number of references to items, encounters, skills, spells, etc. that exist in the code but aren’t referenced in a way that allows them to show up in-game. I’ve included reference points for your entertainment, for the sake of completeness, and quite possibly just to show off a little bit since I’m pretty sure there’s some stuff here that I’ve never seen in anyone else’s guide.

In Lanac’toor’s Lab, if you take the stairs back up to Mud Toad, the statue of Lanac’toor is mysteriously broken again. As soon as you take any move (including checking the automap or turning), the statue reforms. This appears to be a side effect of how the game keeps track of which parts of the statue you’ve returned.

The code that runs when you leave a map usually uses your current location and/or facing to determine where to send you. In most places this works the way you’d think, but the developers took a few shortcuts and made some “well it’s gotta do something“-type decisions. For instance, if you leave the Bridge of Exiles to the E you end up on King’s Isle (on top of a party of Goblins), and if you leave to the W you end up on the Isle of the Damned. But what happens if you leave to the N? You’re on a bridge; there’s only water on the Dilmun map to the N of here. So they drop you on the same place as if you’d left to the E or W, but (crucially) without changing your facing. The problem here is that if you exit to the N on the E side of the bridge you wind up in a fight, and if you run away from that fight, you’ll turn around and run S, striaght into the water. You can’t walk on water, of course, so the game turns you around and moves you forward onto the square with the fight…

The spinner trap in the Tars Underground has a similar problem. It changes your facing without redrawing the viewport, which means the next time you step forward, the game engine (which looks at the viewport to determine what’s in front of you) decides that you’re allowed to step forward even though you may very well actually be facing a wall. Poof, you’ve just ghosted through a stone wall. Even better, if you wound up facing S there’s a fight there. What do you think happens if you run away from that? I won’t spoil it; try it for yourself.

There are also just a few flat-out bugs: exit Purgatory to the N and you’re on Forlorn. Turn around… and Purgatory isn’t behind you, it’s 2W of you. (Of course, who actually leaves Purgatory to the north?) Even better, if you walk all the way around to the NE corner and exit to the E, the game doesn’t differentiate between walking E and swimming E, so you wind up on the south side of Purgatory Bay near the refresh pool. There’s a similar bug when you leave the Pilgrim Dock on the Isle of Salvation.

Things and Stuff

What good would an RPG be without stuff to collect? I find that Dragon Wars strikes a nice balance between needing to pick up a bunch of items for plot reasons, having a few items that are completely useless and have no value, and plenty of things in between. It has its down sides too, though: for instance, it’s impossible to determine how much damage a weapon does. (At least nothing is cursed, so you can determine AV and AC modifiers through experimentation.) The other “gotcha” is that it is possible to collect and then throw away certain items that are essential to particular plot lines and can never be recovered once discarded. The good news is that you can always reset the game state, at the cost of losing all your progress, equipment, and gold. But that’s your only choice if you throw away the Golden Boots by accident.

Some notes about these tables:

Magic

In Dragon Wars, spells are associated with a school:

You’ve probably already noticed that throughout this document, when I refer to spells, I prefix it with the first letter of the school. That should make it easier for you to remember who’s got what spell, unless you decided having two Sun mages in your party was a good idea.

Spells don’t have any concept of a “level”, so as soon as you gain your first rank of the associated skill, you are eligible to learn every spell in that school. (The Miscellaneous school only requires Low Magic.) To learn a spell, you simply have to find and (U)se a scroll with that spell on it. Presuming you have the right magic skill, you have now learned the spell and can cast it whenever you want.

Of course, there is no random loot in this game and everything is in a predetermined position, so you’ll find scrolls when the game decides to give them to you, and not (much) before. I’ve listed the location of every spell scroll in the table so you can get a rough idea of when you’ll be able to learn the spell. That doesn’t include spell grants, like the Druid spells you learn by wrestling Enkidu. More details are in the guide for each area.

To cast a spell you must have enough Power to pay the cost. Some spells are variable cost, which means you can pick how many Power points to spend on it. The maximum cost is double the number of ranks you have in the associated skill, so a caster with Sun Magic 3 can cast up to a six-point S:Inferno.

Spells are roughly sorted into the following types:

This is close to, but not quite the same, as the game’s distinction between “Combat”, “Heal”, and “Misc” categories.

Zap and Debuff spells require an attack roll per target. This works similarly to a melee attack roll, but you use INT for your “AV” and your magic skill in place of a weapon skill. Defenders get to use their normal DV. The basic roll (1d16+2) is the same, and you’re still trying to roll equal or below a target of 12 + your skill ranks + your AV – defender’s DV. The game only rolls damage once, but any target you “miss” takes half damage instead. The damage the game reports back to you is the average across all your hits and misses, so you have a sense of how effective you were… but not a very good one.

One more weird tip I’ll leave you with: it looks like scrolls are single-use, because they don’t have any charges listed next to them. However, once you reach Freeport and acquire S:Charger, you can use it to add additional “charges” to a scroll. (Just make sure you have two charges, because each time you use it one charge will go away, and the scroll will disappear as soon as the charge count reaches zero.) Probably the most interesting use of this hack is to pass Lanac’toor’s Miscellaneous Magic scrolls around your entire party, but on a second playthrough you could also use it to replicate everything else… like S:Inferno.

Walkthrough

Moved to its own page for length, but here’s a table of contents:

Appendices

Now that you’ve beaten Namtar – actually, you can do this any time you want – you can start over by reloading the game and indicating at the prompt that you want to (B)egin a new game instead of (C)ontinuing your old one. You keep your party as-is, including character levels, attributes, spells, and any NPCs you’ve picked up, but (as happens when you get dumped into Purgatory) not including any of your equipment.

The reason I didn’t mention this until all the way down here in the Appendix is that you can pretty easily cheat by recycling the +5 CP Irkalla bonus as many times as you like. All you have to do is start a new game, work your way over to the Apsu Waters, visit Irkalla’s Realm, and step over the rail. It’s a good way to get magic skills for your front line fighters; one trip gets a skill point in Low Magic, two more trips equals your first skill point in Sun Magic, and seven high-point S:Infernos will go a long way. You can build up extremely strong “level 1” characters from nothing this way and just breeze through the first half of the game.

Otherwise, every map (mostly) resets every time you leave it, so the only other thing that starting a new game does is reset all the global state bits (looted chests, unique encounters like the Humbaba, etc). If you drop a unique quest item, though, this may be your only choice.

Note that some state bits are actually kept on the character, not on the game state. So you can only receive the blessings of Irkalla, Enkidu, and the Universal God once. And once you’ve swum your way out of Purgatory, you’ll always be a friend of the Slave Camp.

Final Characters

Here are some stats for my party after defeating Namtar for the last time.

Name Level STR DEX INT SPR Health AV DV AC
Thog 13 25 24 13 13 20 15 6 35
Skills: Climb 4, Lockpick 4, Low Magic 3, Swords 2
Equipment: Heavy Plate, Silver Gloves, Dragon Shield, Dragon Helm, Mage Ring, Freedom Sword, Dragon Tooth
Magic: Low: all
Alex 13 24 24 13 13 20 10 6 29
Skills: Bandage 10, Tracker 1, Low Magic 1
Equipment: Dragon Plate, Gauntlets, Magic Shield, Dragon Helm, Golden Boots, Dragon Tooth
Magic: Low: all
Ulrik 13 23 24 13 17 20 10 6 30
Skills: Cave Lore 3, Swim 1, Low Magic 1, Axes 3
Equipment: Dragon Plate, Gauntlets, Dragon Shield, Dragon Helm, Lucky Boots, Dragon Tooth
Magic: Low: all
Louie 12 21 24 19 19 18 13 6 26
Skills: Hiding 2, Pickpocket 2, Low Magic 1, Druid Magic 2
Equipment:Magic Plate, Gauntlets, Magic Shield, Black Helm, Lucky Boots, Magic Ring, Dragon Tooth
Magic: Low: all, Druid: all except Brambles
Valar 12 14 23 22 23 19 10 5 22
Skills: Low Magic 1, Sun Magic 3
Equipment: Magic Chain, Magic Shield, Gem Helm, Spell Staff
Magic: Low: all, Sun: all
Arthur 13 15 16 19 30 15 14 4 14
Skills: Low Magic 1, Druid Magic 3, Arcane Lore 1, Bureaucracy 1
Equipment: Magic Chain, Shield, Black Helm, Mage Staff
Magic: Low: all, Druid: all except Whirl Wind, Invoke Spirit; Misc: Zak's Speed, Kill Ray
Valerie 13 13 24 19 24 14 6 6 12
Skills: Low Magic 1, High Magic 3, Bows 1
Equipment: Magic Chain, Shield, Helm, Gatlin Bow, Magic Quiver
Magic: Low: all, High: all except Earth Summon

The lowest-level characters with which I’ve ever beaten the game (without multiple Irkalla runs) were 12th level. Experience level, of course, is basically irrelevant to the game except as a means for gaining CP, so you could alternately call those 77 CP (50 + 5 + 2 x (12-1)) characters.

Decompilation

Much of the contents of this guide are based off of work I did to rip apart, decompile, and reassemble the data files from the IBM PC version of Dragon Wars. If you want to peek over my shoulder and see what I did, you should check out my GitHub repository. There’s a fairly extensive doc/ directory in that repo with notes on the data format, and the Gradle file can be used to generate a number of jars that will decompile the data files for you.

I’ve also written up more extensive notes for each board alongside hand-drawn maps based on that decompliation work in the maps directory; you can check those out for more spoilers, or just use the maps.

The Speed Run

Dragon Wars is a fairly non-linear RPG; you’re not really restricted in what order you visit the various cities and dungeons, except that in some cases if you try to go to one that you’re not sufficiently equipped for, you can find yourself stuck and unable to get out of where you are. But that’s why you’re backing up your save files, right?

My walkthrough touches every location and tries to tell the game’s entire story, but you certainly don’t have to do all of that in order to win. If all you’re interested in is getting through the game with the minimum amount of work, then this section is for you!

In theory, the only object that you literally cannot win the game without is the Golden Boots. It’s impossible to get into the Nisir otherwise. So, head to Mud Toad and plug up the leak, then visit the temple to get the Boots. First problem: if you’re starting from scratch and don’t already have a complete collection of spells, you need a copy of D:Create Wall to plug up the leak. That’s easy enough to acquire from the Lansk Undercity, which is accessible from the Underworld.

Okay, so we get the Golden Boots. Then we climb Salvation via the Underworld, use the Boots to jump the chasm, fall into Nisir, and track down Namtar. Problem number two: you can’t actually navigate the Nisir if you don’t have D:Soften Stone. That requires a trip out to Freeport, and that requires you to kill Ugly and his crew so you can steal his boat.

Furthermore, once you actually find Namtar, I’m still not entirely convinced that it’s possible to develop characters strong enough to defeat his army. You can’t block breath weapons no matter how much armor you have. So in practice, you’re going to need the Brood Queen’s help. That means a stop at the Lansk Undercity for the Dragon Gem, stealing the boat, and navigating Dragon Valley.

And frankly, it’s just not practical to try to beat the game without any equipment at all. You’re going to get hit in battle and there’s no way you have enough Health to absorb all that damage without a bunch of armor. And if you don’t have any good weapons, you’ll need an infinite supply of Dragon Stones to power seven strong Sun Mages blowing S:Inferno all over the place.

So what I’ve assembled here is a “fastest practical” route through the game, assuming a pre-filled party of seven characters. We’ll shoot for AC 20 or higher for the front line plus the Dragon Teeth, Gatlin Bow, and Magic Quiver. I’ll skip the Sword of Freedom because it’s a long quest, and you probably won’t miss it. On a good day, this run takes me about an hour. If you tried, you could collect another ~10 points of AC for each character in your party, but I called this “the Speed Run” for a reason.

  1. Purgatory
    • Acquire stupid weapons for everyone so you can at least Block.
    • Use the Apsu Waters to enter the Underworld.
  2. Underworld
    • Get the +5 CP bonus (optional).
    • Get the Slicer and the Rusty Axe (optional).
    • Go up to the Mystic Wood.
  3. Mystic Wood
    • Wrestle Enkidu (optional).
    • Swim for The Ring.
  4. Phoebus
    • Rats/Dogs treasure room, NE: Magic Plate
    • Guarded treasure room, NW: Plate Mail, Magic Shield
    • Let Mystalvision throw you in the dungeon.
  5. Phoeban Dungeon
    • Magic Mouth treasure vault: Magic Quiver, Magic Ring
    • Let the dragon destroy Phoebus.
    • Take the Mystic Wood well to the Underworld to Lansk.
  6. Lansk Undercity
    • Heal the dragon to get the Dragon Gem.
    • Buy a copy of D:Cure All for your newly-minted Druid (optional) and D:Create Wall if you don’t have it already.
    • Take the ferry to King’s Isle or backtrack up through the Mystic Wood and take the Nexus.
  7. Kingshome Dungeon
    • Get knocked out by the guards in the NE corner of King’s Isle.
    • Use D:Soften Stone to skip all the fights, if you can.
    • Find the Treasury: Gatlin Bow, Black Helm, Mage Ring, Throw Mace
    • Take the stairs up to Namtar’s bedroom.
  8. Kingshome
    • Meet Namtar (optional).
    • Go N into the halls and E to the treasury: Magic Chain, Lucky Boots, Pole Arm
    • Take the Nexus to Quag.
  9. Yellow Mud Toad
    • Fix the wall and get the Golden Boots.
    • Take out the Militia: Barbed Flail, Lucky Boots (optional)
  10. Smuggler’s Cove
    • Slaughter the crew, get the boat and a suit of Heavy Plate.
    • If you don’t have D:Soften Stone already, take the boat to Freeport and buy a copy there.
    • Take the boat to Sunken Ruins.
  11. Dragon Valley
    • Get the Dragon’s Teeth.
    • Meet the Queen and use the Dragon Gem.
    • Armor in the SW: Dragon Helm, Dragon Shield, and Dragon Eyes
    • Take the boat back to the Cove, the Nexus to the Mystic Wood, and the Well to the Underworld.
  12. Salvation
    • Scare the Underworld fairies and climb the stairs to Salvation.
    • Guarded chest to the W: Dragon Plate, Dragon Helm
    • Use IQ and Climb, then cross the chasm with the Boots and fall.
  13. Nisir
    • Use “The Swamp” route to reach the final teleporter; this costs you three castings of D:Soften Stone plus a light spell, a compass spell, and whatever other buffs you like to have running.
    • Use the Dragon Gem to kill Namtar’s army.
    • Kill Namtar three times.
  14. Magan Underworld
    • Run the Endgame.

Everything else is just gravy, but here are some other big ‘quests’ you can do.

Master Mages of Dilmun

On a second play-through, this trip is only really useful if you missed some spells or if you’re trying to train up a mage in a new magic skill (High or Druid).

  1. Kill Ugly for his boat.
  2. Collect the four parts of the statue of Lanac’toor. The Arms are in Tars Underground and easily accessible from the Underworld. The Legs are held by the Order of the Sword in Freeport and the Trunk is in the Guardian room of the Necropolis, both of which are straightforward once you have the boat. The Head is in Snake Pit.
  3. Reassemble the statue in Mud Toad for access to Lanac’toor’s Lab. Find the Spectacles and the Miscellaneous Magic.
  4. Once you have the boots, get the Enkidu Totem from the Mystic Wood, use it to cross the Scorpion Bridge (or fight the Scorpions, ow), and go to the Magic College.
  5. Solve Utnapishtim’s puzzles for a bunch of High Magic. Take the Soul Bowl to the Mystic Wood for a bunch of Druid Magic.

The Sword of Freedom

Again, I don’t think there’s much point to doing this on a second play-through; the Dragon Teeth are marginally better when fighting Namtar because you won’t get a ton of 10’ melee attacks against him anyway. It might help to have forty 10-point S:Inferno castings if you’re trying to beat his army without the Dragon Queen’s help. But the +3 attribute bonus from the Universal God only works once per character, not once per game like the +5 CP Irkalla bonus.

  1. Get the Mushrooms from the Mystic Wood.
  2. Kill Ugly to get the Jade Eyes and his boat. Go to the Necropolis and feed the mushrooms to Nergal for the Silver Key.
  3. Visit Irkalla on the Isle of Woe to release her and get the Water Potion.
  4. Go to the Sunken Ruins, use the Potion, and get the Clam with the Skull of Roba.
  5. Use the Eyes to get into the Clan Hall, restore the Dwarves, give the Skull to the smith, then go back to the Isle of Woe.
  6. Have the Universal God bless the sword to enable S:Inferno.

Fake Paragraphs

The paragraph booklet was a common technique for expounding on the story without filling up the game’s data files with lots of text… although Dragon Wars has plenty of that. In the days where photocopiers were expensive and digitizing manuals to publish them online wasn’t an option, a book of paragraphs also served as something of a copy-protection mechanism.

But the game designers also wanted to make sure you didn’t just read the paragraphs from start to finish and learn all the clues you’d need to beat the game. So they included a bunch of fake paragraphs. Out of the 147 paragraphs in the booklet, here’s a list of all the fakes; anything I don’t mention here is actually referred to in the game somewhere.

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