f13.net forums - DosBox and DarkSun: Shattered Lands

So, I've recently waded into DosBox emulation for old abandonware for the first time. The first game on my list is Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. It's a really amazing old D&D game. What sets it apart first of all is the world. Not your typical high fantasy landscape. The premise is a really dry and arid world, and everyone lives slavish existences, and are forced into gladiatorial combat for the slighest offenses for the amusements of the elites. There are some free villages made up of escapees, but they are almost mythical to the opressed city dwellers, because water is so scarce, and no one has been able to dig a well that lasts for more than a few years.

Anyway, you start by building a party of 1-4 people. Cleric, Fighter, Gladiator, Druid, Psionicist, Preserver (wizard) Ranger, or Thief. There are also a wide variety of races, everything from Half-Giant to insectoid Thri-Keen. In addition, the old rules of multiclassing for non-humans, and dual classing for humans are in play. You begin as gladiators in the slave pens. A scripted cutscene shows a mage getting dominated by a horde of monsters, then, you are thrust into the arena.

My first playthrough attempt culminated in swift disaster. So, I read the manual. On my second attempt I created a Druid as my party leader. This was for two reasons: First, charisma and wisdom are the prime requisite stats for Druids. Having at least a 16 in your prime requisites confers certain benefits, such as more spell availability and experience bonus. Also, a party leader with higher charisma gets better results from parley with NPC's, as well as better dialogue trees, and better chances at your attempts to cajole, intimidate, etc. said NPC's.

A druid is the only class with Charisma as a prime requisite, so I figured if he was going to have high charisma, why waste the points elsewhere on other characters? Also, Clerics and druids in this game have access to the same pool of spells. These spells are divided into spheres of air, earth, fire, and water. There is also the cosmos sphere, a sort of "general" catch-all sphere. In my first run through, I chose a cleric instead of a druid. The cleric's main advantage is that it can wear all armor types, and use weapons that correlate to its sphere (earth-sphere clerics can use wood, stone, and metal weapons while air sphere clerics can only use missle weapons, and so on and so forth).

However, the cleric only has access to cosmos-sphere spells up to the third tier, and after that, only to the sphere of which he subscribes. Meanwhile, a druid has access to all cosmos sphere spells, and also to all spells to the sphere in which he subscribes to. However, he cannot wear armor. Since the great majority of spells are cosmos-sphere, this results in the druid being a "pure" caster-type, whereas the cleric is really a hybrid, with extremely limited advanced spell selection, but with better melee disposition.

So, I had a half-elf fire-sphere druid as the party leader named Duse. Next, I made a half-giant Fighter, and a Mul Gladiator. Mul's are some weird race that look sort of like muscular black demon guys with bald heads. Fighters and Gladiators are pretty similar, the main difference I can tell is that Gladiators receive a -1 armor class bonus at lvl 5, whereas Fighters have slightly better access to weapons and armor. Lastly, I made an elvish preserver, which is basically your standard mage. All classes seem to have access to limited psionic abilities.

Initially, I made a psionicist, because I didn't know what the hell a preserver was. Pscionicist's start out very weak like all mage classes, but are pretty cool. Their main drawback as far as I could tell was that I kept trying to use psionic abilities against non-intelligent creatures, which resulted in failure and the loss of the psionicist's turn. I mean I guess I could eventually sort out every creature that was unintelligent, but I didn't want to bother with it, and also, I was unfamiliar with the psionicist abilities, whereas, we all have a sort of inherent knowledge of typical mage abilities (i.e. magic missile). I know what you're thinking: I made sort of a munchkiny team, especially with two warrior types (fighter and gladiator).

But this game is pretty hard. When you have 10 hit points, you die quickly. Everytime you die, you lose a point of constitution. This weakens your character against saving throws, lowers their HP, and also provides a hard limit on maximum deaths per character. If all characters die, game over. No restarts from a saved checkpoint. Compounding this problem is that, while I wouldn't call monster AI "good" it IS deadly, in the sense that monsters won't just attack the closest character to them, they can and will come after weak characters like druids and preservers.

So, there I am with my little band of adventurers, thrust out into the arena to fight for my life. I quickly dispatched some green humanoids (sligs?) and giant beetles. The crowd threw money down at me. The announcer shouted that it was no wonder those monsters died, they were sick and frail. I had the option of shouting back "you're a great announcer!" or "Is that the best you can do?!" I chose the latter. This time, a pack of wild halflings engaged me. Nearly lost my preserver, but was able to cast entangle on the ground, and get him to safety while the Bash Brothers did the wetwork. Again, the crowd threw money, and this time, I didn't shout back at the announcer. Before I left the arena, I scavenged the dead bodies for a motley collection of a club, a spear, and a pair of boots. I also found a half dead guy strung up to die. I cut him free, and all he could do was gasp for water. I made a mental note to find the man some water, and then headed back towards the slave pens.

I'll leave it at that for now because I have a feeling that no one cares. But my question is this: How do I install the patch? Do I just unzip it inside the Darksun folder? And the patch will be applied next time I mount the folder onto a virtual drive in DosBox? Anyone with familiarity on this subject who could offer some assistance would be well appreciated. Thanks in advance.