Wizardry: Proving Grounds Of The Mad Overlord

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is the first game in the Wizardry series of role-playing video games. Starting in the town, which is represented only as a text-based menu, the player creates a party of up to six characters from an assortment of five possible races , three alignments , and four basic classes , with four elite classes unlocked once the characters have progressed sufficiently. This consists of a maze of ten levels, each progressively more challenging than the last. The goal, as in most subsequent role-playing video games, is to find treasure including ever more potent items, gain levels of experience by killing monsters, then face the evil arch-wizard Werdna on the bottom level and retrieve a powerful amulet. The game's lack of an automap feature, which had not been invented at the time of its release, practically forces the player to draw the map for each level on graph paper as he walks through the 20x20 dungeon maze, step by step – failing to do this often results in becoming permanently lost, as there are many locations in the maze that have a permanent "Darkness" spell upon the square or a "Teleport" spell sending the player to a new location. In the event of a total party kill, play cannot be resumed; however, a new party may recover the bodies and items of dead adventurers.