Below the Abbey: update 3.549 (changes since 3.534, the update on itch.io before this one, including the last Hollow Grasslands quests and the way down to the Deeper Hollow)

The Hollow Grasslands: the last quests, and the way down to the Deeper Hollow

• Once the party has found all four books and the grassland language can be understood, Aldous Wend, the wizard in Exsce, has something more to tell it. 
• This starts a chain of three main quests, shown with the other main quests, and each one starts by itself when the last is handed in.
• The Corruption in the Deep (first quest): find Old Lilac in Glorm. She hangs from the roof of the plaza, silent, until the party comes with the wizard's errand. Speaking to her hands the quest in. Reward: 200 gold and 900 experience. Aldous reminds the party where to find her if it asks again ("Be polite to her. She is very old, and she is not well.").
• Jelly for the Moth (second quest): Old Lilac is weak, for the corruption is in the air she breathes, and she cannot fly so far. She asks for 6 jars of royal jelly from the hives, taken from the bag when they are handed in. Reward: 400 gold, 1,400 experience and a potion. In return she tells the party that the gate lies under the bell tower of Nibb, in the north, sealed since the first king, and that Bulb can find it from above and is strong enough to carry the party down.
• The Whale's Errand (third quest): Bulb, a great pale whale on a bulb of warm light, will not speak until the party comes from Old Lilac. The hive creatures round the gate are too thick for her to fly through, so the party must kill 8 creatures of the hives (any grubs, wasps, golems, swarms or bosses of the hives count, and the count starts from when the quest is taken). Reward: 600 gold, 2,200 experience and two potions.
• When the third quest is handed in, Bulb gives the party a coil of silver thread: a magic map. From then on the map of the maze draws a thin, glowing, dashed line of everywhere the party has walked. The party is told of it the first time it enters the maze.
• Ask Bulb to carry the party down ("Climb on, little ones. Hold the fin and do not look down.") and she lifts it higher than the towers and flies north to the old gate under the bell tower of Nibb, which swings open on its own. The party arrives at the bottom of the Deeper Hollow, at the door in the south of the maze, and the message reads: "The air is thick and sweet here, and the walls are black with something that moves." The party can go back up through the same door at any time.
• What waits below is no longer a short stretch of cavern that ends at a plaque. The Deeper Hollow is now a huge maze of two hundred by two hundred squares, with eight towns, danger zones, secret doors, coloured keys and gem doors, a quest for every town, the Underlevel under it, and (since this update) thieves, burning spheres and shops. The Hollowed Warden sits in the great atrium at the top of the maze, in the Black Hall, and the last of the twelve town quests is to kill it ("The Warden in the Dark"), so the maze can breathe. A plaque beside the Black Hall still marks the end of the road for now.

The thieves of the maze

• Four thieves wander the Deeper Hollow, one in each quarter of the maze. They keep out of the towns and the danger zones. Each shows on the mini map as a red mark with a dark hood, so he can be seen and avoided.
• When the party is near and carrying gold, a thief creeps up behind it along the passages, one square at a time, taking the shortest way through the corridors. He only starts creeping when the party is within about fourteen squares.
• If he reaches the square behind the party, the party gets about a second and a half to turn round. Face him in time and he is caught: he draws a knife and a real fight begins. Fail to face him and he takes up to 500 gold from the party's purse, then runs off with it. After running he is out of sight for a good while and then goes home.
• A thief in front of you does not creep. If the party turns to face one that is within three squares in a clear line, the fight starts at once.
• Kill a thief that is carrying the party's gold and the gold falls and goes straight back to the party ("The thief drops 500 gold. It is yours again.").
• A Thief, Ranger or Assassin in the party hears a thief coming and says so, once, when he is about eight squares away: "A thief is near, be on guard."
• Each thief lives in a lone house in a clearing of his own quarter. Four houses in all, each a different picture, clear of the towns and the danger zones. Whenever the party comes near a house, its thief is at home, standing at the door. When the party goes away he wanders again.
• Knock on a thief's door and talk, and he tries to talk the party out of accusing him: three different excuses for each of the four thieves. Keep to the accusation all three times and he gives back every coin he stole from the party. Waver ("Maybe I was wrong") and he sends the party away, and they can try again. A thief with nothing of yours just chats, and treats an accusation as a rumour. Or draw a knife on him: he grabs a knife and the fight is on.
• If the party has killed a thief, his house is empty and a chest stands by the door, holding some of his own gold plus anything of the party's he still had.
• The people of the maze mention the thieves in their gossip.

The burning spheres and the Sunfire Blade

• Six huge burning spheres roam the Deeper Hollow, painted pictures of balls of roaring fire: molten orange, white-hot yellow, crimson, blue, green and one with a dark cracked core. They never enter a town, and they stay within about forty-five squares of where they began.
• They show on the mini map from far off as big orange rings, so they can be seen coming and avoided.
• A sphere that notices the party (within five squares, in sight) chases it, but it misses a step one round in three, so it is slower than the party walks. If the party gets about nine squares away it loses them and goes back to wandering. Close enough to touch, it attacks.
• Cinder, the ember warden of Gildmere, asks the party to kill all six. The quest counts spheres killed before it was taken. The reward is the Sunfire Blade, 12,000 gold and 60,000 experience.
• The Sunfire Blade is a level 65 sword: 234 to 342 damage, bosses take 30% more from it, and it costs 8,000 gold.
• Each sphere drops a level 70 weapon the first time it is killed. See below.

Weapons

• A new level 70 tier of six weapons, one from each sphere, each with a long description and stronger effects than anything before: Molten Greatblade (sword: a foe under 40% health takes four times the blow, bosses take 60% more, wounds bleed), Whitefire Warhammer (mace: four blows in ten stun the foe, the ground shudders), Crimson Cleaver (axe: each blow carries on to the foe behind, half the hits leave a bleeding wound), Bluefire Longbow (bow: shoots seven squares, arrows pass through, half the time a second arrow follows), Verdant Flame Staff (adds 90 to spell power, bosses take 60% more, foes reel dazed) and Cinder Dagger (a foe under half health takes four times the blow, most wounds bleed). Each needs level 70 and costs 10,000 gold.
• Their damage is 265 to 370 (staff 125 to 175).
• The weapon curve was reworked. The four level 28 boss weapons (Hollow Scepter, Veilpiercer, Crownbreaker, The Duke's Gavel) keep their full damage and now cost 2,500 gold each. Every ordinary weapon from level 30 to 64 hits harder than them: about 3.4 times the old damage at level 30, easing down to 2.6 times at level 50, 2.9 times for the odd ones above. Then 10% was taken off the damage of every weapon of level 30 and above.

The Underlevel

• The Underlevel is far darker. The walls are old black-brown brickwork covered in claw scratches and dried blood, in two different brick patterns. The floor is near-black stone. The air is close and almost no light carries: torches and lanterns now help only a little,.
• Twenty new painted creatures live there, replacing the old insects and grubs. Ten black slime monsters (a tall dripping humanoid, a puddle of many eyes, a tentacled ooze, a slime spider, a slime serpent, a screaming-maw blob, a slime hound, a slime holding a screaming skull, a many-armed horror and a great mass with dozens of eyes) and ten demonic horrors (a maggot demon with many mouths, a headless crawler with eyes in its chest, a skinned hound, a centipede with a human face, a split-jawed ghoul, a horned spider demon, a tentacled eye horror, a leather-winged imp, a pile of fused skulls and a spined bone beast). Every one has red glowing eyes. The bodies are darkened to near black and the eyes glow, so in the dark most of what you see is red eyes.
• Ten demon-insect bosses wander the corridors, far apart from each other: a mantis, scorpion, beetle, wasp, centipede, spider, moth, locust, fly and cicada demon, painted as a cross between a demon and an insect. They show on the mini map as orange rings and move like the spheres: they chase slower than the party can walk and lose it if it gets away.
• The ladders between the maze and the Underlevel are now a single ladder with plain stone above it, instead of two ladders stacked one on top of the other.
• The bites of the new creatures leave poison, bleeding, fever and stings, plus the old shaken and grave rot.

Shops in the maze

• Every kind of shop the rest of the game has now works in each of the eight maze towns: a weaponsmith, an armourer, a magic seller, a general trader and an inn, forty more people in all, on top of the shops that were already there. Each is a named person from that town (such as Brand, the weaponsmith of Hedgefoot).
• The weaponsmith sells the basic weapons and a rotating selection of better ones from level 15 to level 50. The armourer sells the basic armour, two full sets of the iron, ember or void armour (a different pair in each town) and a few better single pieces. The magic seller sells scrolls, rings, staves and draughts of mana. The trader sells torches, lanterns, food, herbs, potions and lockpicks. The inn rents a bed for 60 gold: it heals the party and feeds it. It also sells food.

The maps

• The Deeper Hollow map is redrawn as a hand-inked medieval map, painted at five times the old sharpness. Soft watercolour washes colour each biome and run into each other, passages are inked in wobbly rounded pen lines instead of a grid of squares, the walls are hatched with short pen strokes, clearings have tufts of grass, flowers and pebbles, atriums have ferns, rooms have scattered flagstones and ponds have ripples and lily pads.
• Trees on the map are now painted: an oak, a yew and a bell-shaped tree with golden blossoms, and a fountain, instead of green dots. Painted pictures also mark the thieves' houses, the dock and steps of the water passages and the huts of the towns.
• The thieves' houses are on the map, each with its name.
• The water passages are on the map. A dashed blue line joins the two docks of each canal, with reeds at the docks, and a pond marks each flight of steps down into the Drowned Maze. Three new buttons show the watery passages in full: Vine (the Vine Canal), Croc (the Croc Canals) and Drowned (the Drowned Maze), each drawn in water-blue with pools and reeds. They also work while you are standing in those levels.
• Standing on a woken teleport stone and opening the map, every other woken stone is ringed in blue on the whole map and on each quarter. Tap a ringed stone to travel to it.
• The Underlevel map is far more sinister: near-black and blood-red parchment, blood pools and spatters, claw scratches, crossed bones, skulls and watching eyes, a dripping red title and a bloody frame, with the ladders glowing so they can still be found.
• The key on the map lists the thieves' houses, canal docks, steps into the water and the water routes.

The mini map

• A plus and a minus button beside the mini map zoom it in and out. The minus can zoom out a long way (about four times).
• Burning spheres, demon bosses and thieves show on it in the maze and the Underlevel as described above.

Music

• The Underlevel plays Dark Cavern Ambient (CC0, Paul Wortmann).
• The Deeper Hollow maze and its boat canals play Paranoid Truth (CC0, Tsorthan Grove).
• The Hollow Land and the Hollow Grasslands play Searching (CC0, yd) when you are outdoors.

Areas and gates

• Go to area now lists the Hollow Grasslands, its four beehive dungeons (the Hush, Droning, Amber and Queen's Hives) and the Drowned Maze, the Vine Canal and the Croc Canals.
• The gate between the Hollow Land and the Hollow Grasslands now goes both ways. A spiked gate on the ledge of the Hollow Land leads down into the Grasslands, as the southern gate of the Grasslands leads back out onto the ledge.

Other

• Discarding an item in the inventory now asks first: "Discard (item)? It will be gone for good." with Discard and Keep it buttons.
• The little pet creatures wandering the maze and the clouds drifting through it were not moving at all. They move now, slowly, and the clouds only ever drift over open floor, never through a wall.