The Knight of Diamonds and Legacy of Llylgamyn

The next two Wizardry games are The Knight of Diamonds (1982) and Legacy of Llylgamyn (1983). Unlike Garriott's strategy to reinvent the engine with each new game, Sir-Tech seems to have followed the old adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." On a technical level, these games are practically identical to Proving Grounds, though of course they offer new stories and areas to explore.

The Knight of Diamonds involves another fetch quest, this time to find the staff of Gnilda, a powerful magical item which formerly protected the City of Llylgamyn from attack. Unfortunately, the evil Davalpus was immune to the staff's power by virtue of being born in the city (the staff's fatal flaw).

Davalpus slew the royal family except for Princess Margda and Prince Alavik, who used the staff and the armor of the Knight of Diamonds to battle the usurper. Alavik was not successful, however, and after the battle all that was left was a "smoking hole in the ground."

It's the player's mission, of course, to get back the staff, but that will mean first procuring all five pieces of the fabled armor. To complicate matters, each of these pieces is a living being that must be defeated in combat. As expected, solving the game means plunging into a dungeon (this time one with only six levels) and battling whatever beasts stand in the way.

Originally, The Knight of Diamonds required that players first complete the first game, the idea being to carry the players over into the new scenario -- an early example of an expansion pack. However, this plan didn't prove financially sound at the time, and later versions allowed players either to load a pregenerated party or to create new characters. Of course, since the dungeons are calibrated for characters of level 13 or more, new characters are very unlikely to survive their first encounter.

The final game of the original trilogy is Legacy of Llylgamyn. The goal this time is to find a dragon named L'Kbreth, whose mystical orb can save the city of Llylgamyn from the recent surge of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Characters could, again, be imported from previous games but were stripped of their experience (they are supposed to be a new generation of adventurers).

However, there is an elaborate rite of passage ceremony by which the new characters can receive a blessing from their ancestors (a boost in stats and skills). Furthermore, they can choose a new moral alignment, which determines what parts of the world they can visit. Perhaps the most intriguing innovation is that the typical dungeon crawler setup is reversed: rather than start at the top and work their way down, the party begins at the bottom of a volcano and must work its way back up.

Sir-Tech's Wizardry series earned a reputation for being difficult and addictive.

Certain traditions carry across all three games, such as Boltac's Trading Post, the Temple of Cant, and odd monsters such as Creeping Coins. Connections such as these add coherence to the series and are quite memorable for those who played the games.

Another interesting bit of lore is Wizplus, a $40 program released by a company named Datamost and released in 1982. Wizplus was one of the earliest commercial utility programs designed to allow players to freely edit their characters as they saw fit, including making them invulnerable.

Sir-Tech came out against the product, arguing that such "cheat programs" interfered with the "subtle balance" they had achieved over "four years of careful adjustment." It seems more of a testament to the game's difficulty, though, that such a product received so much attention in the first place. Sir-Tech went so far as to refuse to honor their warranty on Wizardry disks that had been tampered with using Wizplus.