Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

We're hurt pretty bad after that fight. We've got to get healed before we risk going into combat again, and it's pretty hard to get anything done without the risk of going into combat. In the box on the left for each character the blue column is endurance. If your endurance is reduced to zero in a fight then you're knocked unconscious. The green column is strength. If strength is reduced to zero you're killed. Endurance recovers quickly. Recovering strength takes much longer and it helps a lot to have some medical attention.

If we were rich we might consider going to the physician, but we can't afford him. We could stay at the local inn and have Yuna use her healing skills to treat us, but that costs money too. So we're going to embrace the 1400s NEET lifestyle and go to the Premonestraten and beg for help. This is a monastery inside the city. Monastic life is a big deal in this era and it comes in different forms. In this case, these people don't want to isolate themselves and live in contemplation as much as they want to do good works.

Aww sweet, we got some nuns to help us.

He's only asking for 1 pfennig to stay here. That's 1 penny, the least he could possibly ask for, so of course we'll pay. In Darklands prices depend on a number of things. Your reputation in the city helps. Bigger cities have higher prices. And the more money you have, the more that you're expected to spend on this kind of charitable contribution. We must be really poor if he's asking for so little.

After a week we're almost completely healed.

Let's see if our loot from that battle is enough to afford any better weapons or armor. We've got a little over 11 groschen. What's a groschen? This game is all about atmosphere so you can't just whip out your credit card and use convenient decimal currency when you want to buy a sword. From the manual:

Money is counted in three denominations: gold florins, silver groschen, and silver pfenniges. Because distribution of wealth and wages were so different, comparisons to modern currency are impossible. In general, florins are very valuable, but are used only in large transactions; groschen are fairly valuable and are in daily use; pfenniges are "small change," important only to the very poor.

(BTW this game's manual is a work of art. If you weren't around in the early 1990s, you have no idea. You would get a game and it came with an entire book that explained how the game works, what the history was behind its setting, and what the developers were thinking when they made it.)

There's 12 pfennigs in a groschen and 20 groschen in a florin. The game is at least nice enough to show us everything's value in the total number of pfennigs while we're shopping at a store.

We don't really have enough to buy anything useful yet. At this point I'm gonna have to do a little grinding. Remember this is a game from 1992 so there was an attitude that games should take a very long time to beat or else you weren't getting your money's worth. I won't make you look over my shoulder while I do this. I'm going to repeatedly go out at night and kill thugs (there's an unlimited supply), sell their stuff, heal, and go through the cycle again. Eventually I'll have enough money to buy a few nice things. Just as important, our characters learn by doing, so the more they fight the more their weapon skills will increase. That makes them more likely to hit the enemy and to parry his attacks.

The music for the secluded grove of trees where you can waste time and move the clock forward. This is important as the world is very different between day and night.

Yeah, it's grinding time.

Next time: I'll come back with a party that's skilled and equipped enough to easily deal with these street hoodlums. We'll have the chance to start getting educated.