Video Game / Fate

"Will you tempt Fate?"

FATE is a Diablo clone developed and published by WildTangent. From its humble beginnings as a single game, FATE expanded into a series encompassing two different storylines across four games:

• FATE (2005), the first game, follows an adventurer and his pet who had arrived at the town of Grove, a resting spot for travellers heading beyond, through the Dungeon Gate. The adventurer's arrival coincides with the emergence of a monster residing deep within the dungeon who threatens to envelop the town with its evil influence. The adventurer is thus given a task to travel down the dungeon and slay this monster.
• FATE: Undiscovered Realms (2007) continues the story of the adventurer who, after slaying the evil within the dungeon on the outskirts of the town of Grove, is hailed as a hero by the town's inhabitants. During the celebrations, an old man arrives, speaking of undiscovered realms and a temple located below the dungeon, containing the Book of Fate that he claims will save the town of Grove from a new evil. The adventurer escorts the old man to the temple, where it is revealed that the Book of Fate kept these realms safe from evil. The old man promptly reveals that he was this new evil and steals the book after knocking the adventurer unconscious. The old man's attack creates portals to two other realms, and both are now in danger of being overwhelmed by the influence of this new evil, Kaos. The adventurer is then tasked with recovering this book by defeating two of Kaos's minions before confronting Kaos itself and retrieving the Book of Fate.
• FATE: The Traitor Soul (2009) effectively serves as an Updated Re-release of the first two games, adding a new dungeon, as well as new equipment, on top of almost all of the content from FATE and Undiscovered Realms. It also continues the story of the adventurer, now known as the Champion of Grove, who retrieves the Book of Fate and returns it to where it originally belongs. Not too long after this, the Champion meets a Traveller who claims that within the Temple of Fate lies a Chamber of Trials to prove one's worth. The Champion decides to follow the Traveller back to the Temple of Fate and venture into the Chamber of Trials.
• FATE: The Cursed King (2011) takes place in a separate realm with a Middle-East theme. As a citizen of the city of Ekbatan, the Player Character grew up hearing great tales of good and evil, particularly the heroic deeds of the Champion of Grove, and resolves to eventually do great deeds worthy of the Champion's attention. One day, while adventuring just outside the city, the player enters a small cave and finds a chest. Unable to make out the writings on it, the player opens the chest, only to realise that it was the tomb of an evil necromancer, T'Kala, and that by opening the chest, T'Kala's evil spirit was unleashed upon Ekbatan. The player is unable to warn the King of Ekbatan fast enough, and the city is destroyed. Miraculously alive, Kurosh, the Beggar King of Ekbatan, now bestows upon the player the task of ridding the city of T'Kala's influence.

Story aside, the basic mechanics of the game have remained the same throughout the series. The Player Character arrives in town to undertake a quest to defeat a dangerous monster down at the bottom of the nearby dungeon...aaaaand that's it, retire and pass down a heirloom to a descendant, or go dungeon-plunging. Point-and-click hack-and-slash gameplay, Socketed Equipment created by the Random Number God, so on and so forth. It wasn't really anything new, but it did refine the formula by adding some new features.

First off, your character gets a pet. Its main function is to multiply the size of your Grid Inventory, but it also serves as a convenient Stone Wall (it cannot die, though it will flee battle for a while if it bottoms out on Hit Points) and can be sent back to town with its load of Shop Fodder, which it will (somehow) sell to local merchants before reporting back with the spoils. This pet could also be fed various types of fish to transmogrify it into various types of enemy monsters for varying amounts of time. Fishes are obtained by fishing in liquid bodies positioned below clouds of fireflies, though the activity itself mostly consists of staring at the screen until an exclamation mark pops up, and then clicking a button with the mouse button on time. Yields include fish, new gear, or sometimes nothing at all. All equipment is randomly generated, except for a few, rarely-appearing "Artifact" weapons with pre-determined stats. These can become outclassed by the weapons given enhancements through the Random Number God, but they still sell for a ton. That's important in a game where vendors buy stuff for one-eighth of their selling price.

Next, the game runs on a Point Build System, rather than expecting you to choose a Splat at the beginning of the game. By putting stat points into Strength, Dexterity, Magic and Vitality, you can customize and hybridize your character into anything you desire. The game also takes Tech Points to its obvious extreme by giving you an entire second layer of levels, Renown, to gain experience points, called "Fame", in. Having higher Renown levels not only unlocks the use of some gear (e.g. "Requires Renown of Distinguished"), but gives you extra points to put into various skills & aptitudes, such as Critical Strike, Dual-Wielding or the three flavors of magic (Attack, Defense, and Charm, with the latter encompassing Summon Magic). Fame points are primarily gained by defeating boss characters and by handling Side Quests for Non Player Characters, but there are also minstrels you can pay to praise your name, instantly raising you to the next Renown level. This takes a ton of money, but—as the game itself points out—you are essentially purchasing skill points.

Finally, the game has an interesting handle on the ending. While you're given a specific goal of getting down to a certain dungeon level and defeating a specific boss monster, you still have a choice after you accomplish this. You can retire your adventurer and then start a new quest using his or her descendant and picking one piece of equipment to pass on to them, or continue journeying down the dungeon. The games are capable of randomly generating up to 2,147,483,647 levels per dungeon.

With each new game in the series comes new features and equipment. Undiscovered Realms raised the player's level Cap to 199, gave the player the ability to import their characters from the first game and introduced two new towns, each with their own dungeons, with the defeat of Kaos and retrieval of the Book of Fate only possible once these two dungeons are purged of their evil influences. The Traitor Soul introduced a Character Class System by giving the player the option to start off new games as an individual from another species, added an additional dungeon, brought back the town of Grove and its dungeon, removed the player's level cap, increased the player pet's inventory size, and introduced Limit Break and Real-Time Weapon Change. The Cursed King features a Free Rotating Camera and introduces an Non-Player Character party system and online features, allowing players to trade items and connect to each other through Facebook.

All four games are available on WildTangent's website, as well as Steam and GOG.com.

No relation whatsoever to anything starting with "Fate/" in the Nasuverse, the setting-neutral tabletop game based on Fudge, F.A.T.A.L., Exit Fate, or a character from Lyrical Nanoha.

---

You have been granted new tropes:

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Played with. The game's so-called "final boss" usually resides in the 40th floor or so, but according to the game's source code, the dungeon could go on to two billion levels, although trying to go that deep (using cheats) would likely crash your game, even then it's not a good idea to go past the hundreds since your actual character is capped at level 99, and the monsters would be far stronger than you beyond that point.
• "Arabian Nights" Days: The setting of the fourth game.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: Dire Walrus Pups ^note  and later adults are encountered as enemies under Typhon, and yes, they're large, pink walruses with fanged tentacles on their shoulders.
• Awesome, but Impractical: High-powered magic items that your character isn't spec'd for would qualify for this, especially if the enchantments aren't too helpful to your current build (a +30 bow skill doesn't mean much to someone with a pure melee build, for example). At least they still sell for a lot.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Once you rid Ekbatan of T'Kala's influence, Kurosh the Beggar King regains his throne...and crowns you as a way of thanks.
• Bears Are Bad News: Undiscovered Realms and The Traitor Soul introduce a race of humanoid bears known as the Urzaklan as enemies. They are absent from The Cursed King, albeit their models and sound effects are still available in the game's folders, meaning someone with a basic modding knowledge can bring them back.
• Bee People: Undiscovered Realms and its sequels introduce a race of large, humanoid bees as enemies, both being the Bee Legionnaire and the Queen Bee. If their stinger wasn't bad enough, they can also wield swords to attack you sometimes.
• Big Bad: A monster between dungeon level 40 to 52 in the original. Undiscovered Realms gives us Kaos, The Traitor Soul has both Kaos and your Nemesis, and in The Cursed King, T'Kala is this.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Large arthropods and insectoid beings are often encountered as enemies. From giant beetles, humanoid bees and ants, voltaic snails, humanoid cockroaches, mantoids, there's plenty of variety.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Perhaps the single best item to get at the beginning of the game is the humble fishing pole, because with a little patience and some luck, a fisher can hook fish containing artifacts out of any body of liquid with a group of fireflies hovering above it, including the ones in all the towns; most of the artifacts that the player usually fishes up in town or the first few levels of the dungeons will sell for five-digit figures once they are identified, which provides a very significant return on investment in the early game. Even without taking into consideration the chance of fishing out artifacts, some of the fishes that can be pulled out in the early game will (temporarily) transform your pet into creatures that are just plain overpowered.
  • Aside from the summon and Charm Monster spells, the rest of the Charm Magic spells are this, including Identify, Town Portal (which both provide the same function as the corresponding scrolls/books with the same name) and Mental Map (which reveals the entire dungeon layout).
• Breath Weapon: The Basilisk and its fire counterpart, the Salamander, release electric or fire waves from their mouths as one of their two attacks.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The Gharial Basilisk in The Cursed King is basically an Indian gharial with bigger eyes.
• Cap: Your character and pet can only gain experience up to Level 99 in the first game and up to Level 199 in the second. From the third game onwards, the level cap has been removed.
  • Fame is capped at level 20 across all four games, but the final Renown (Unattainable) is purely a Bragging Rights Reward as no Elite or Legendary item requires more than the 19th Renown level (Demigod).
• Captain Ersatz:
  • The original release of FATE averted this trope by having verbatim Dungeons & Dragons monsters but occasionally with different names, such as owlbears, beholders (called watchers), ettins (called two-headed giants), gnolls, and myconids. However, most likely due to copyright issues, a free DLC for the game changed these monsters by giving them new names and/or minor differences to their model—owlbears became shrikes, beholders became abominations, and while ettins, gnolls, and myconids remained unchanged, they were renamed hill ogres, jackal fiends, and death caps respectively. These changes were carried over to subsequent games, and retroactively applied to the first game once the contents of the DLC were included as standard.
  • A good deal of monsters in the later games are also obvious stand-ins for Dungeons & Dragons creatures, such as:
    • The nautiloids, which are basically illithids (mindflayers).
    • The scorpfeline, a monstrous cat with a scorpion's stinger and two tentacles growing from its back, which is modelled after the displacer beast.
    • The roach king/lord from Undiscovered Realms onward, being a towering, bipedal cockroach, strongly resembles an umber hulk.
    • The shadow elf race from The Traitor Soul and The Cursed King, which is a dead ringer for the drow, minus being Always Chaotic Evil.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • The enchanter will sometimes curse an equipment to either drain your health slowly over time or drain your health each time you hit an enemy.
  • Nautiloid Apprentices (a Mindflayer-like monster) do this literally: if they aggro you, they'll start spamming high-damaging waves of fire, each blast diminishing their HP until they drop dead.
• Cast from Stamina: Your character from The Traitor Soul onwards, as well as allies in The Cursed King, can perform a rage attack that consumes a large amount of stamina as well as a small amount of mana. The stamina consumed is typically a non-issue since stamina regeneration is quite fast, and the only other thing stamina is used for is to run.
• Character Class System: From The Traitor Soul onwards, the player can choose from a selection of species to play as upon character creation. Each species has its own list of advantages and, on rare occasions, trade-offs. Playing as a human character, for instance, will give an automatic 5% Magic bonus and five skill points each in Staff and Spell Casting skills, whereas playing as a Shadow Elf will grant a 5% Dexterity bonus, 5% movement speed bonus and five skill points each in Sword, Bow & Crossbow and Dual-Wielding skills. The choice of character also determines your character's starting weapon and spell. As examples, Shadow Elf characters are given a bow and Haste spell at the beginning, whereas Cogger characters begin the game with a sword and Spectral Armor spell.
• Chest Monster:
  • The Mimic masquerades as a Large Chest until you walk right up to it. Players who can spot the difference in size between a Mimic and a real Large Chest can blow its disguise from afar by using a ranged attack. Befitting this trope, a Mimic can cause serious trouble on its own for the inexperienced player in earlier parts of the game because it No Sells all magic attacks and has a powerful bite attack.
  • Cursed Swords may occasionally emerge from any chest that the player opens. Like Mimics, Cursed Swords are also immune to magic attacks, but they are considerably weaker and can be easily dispatched as long as the player has appropriate equipment for their level.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: Rarer items emits different coloured glows in this game. Green is Uncommon, Purple is Elite, Yellow is Legendary. A Legendary item has higher stats than an Elite item of an exact same type, which itself is better than its Uncommon counterpart, and so on.
• Continuing is Painful: When the player character dies, they have four options: give up some experience and fame to continue, lose some gold and get teleported, drop all gold and get teleported, or quit and try from the last save point.
• Continuity Nod: The backstory of The Cursed King makes mention of the Champion of Grove. This is, of course, referring to the Player Character in the first three games of the series.
• Cthulhumanoid: Nautiloids from the second game onwards are blue/green humanoids with squid-like faces and webbed hands who can attack with spells or weapons. Yes, they are pretty much obvious expies of the Illithids.
• Dem Bones: Skeletons appear often in the early dungeon levels; deeper dungeon levels feature Skeletal Knights. In The Cursed King, crafty players may unlock the Undead as a playable race (though they gain normal-looking bodies upon equipping armor.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: Fate seems to be the local equivalent of the Grim Reaper, as he appears to you when you die, but he's willing to revive you in exchange for a small personal sacrifice, and, sometimes, tempting Fate and touching the statues will result in the statue dropping rare gemstones.
• Dual Wielding: An option available to everyone with every weapon that you can wield one-handed, which means everything but bows/crossbows, staves and polearms. In The Traitor Soul, Shadow Elves start with 5 point in this skill, along with skill in both Swords and Spears. Many monsters also employ this fighting style with the most disparaging combinations.
• Dungeon-Based Economy: The games concern a series of towns that developed around vast dungeons (at least one of them hypothetically infinite) in order to serve the adventurers.
• Dungeon Shop: The items sold in the dungeon are much more powerful and pricey than the items sold in the village.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The first game had some things that were not seen in the sequels:
  • The game's demo version came in two flavors: a "low bandwidth" version for computers with slower internet connection speeds, which had limited and lower-quality audio samples, and a "high bandwidth" version that has all the bells and whistles. The download size of the former is around 100 MB smaller than the latter which, in the mid-2000s, was still a substantial amount of data in many parts of the world. It was also not trialware and could be played with no time restrictions, although it locked the player's maximum level to 7 and the lowest dungeon level they can access to 3.
  • Many of the monsters were virtually carbon copies of creatures in Dungeons & Dragons. See the Captain Ersatz example further up this page for more details.
  • A free DLC, called the "Bonus Pack", which added new items and monsters post-release.
• Elite Mook: Just as you can find better armor and equipment, you can also find "Elite" enemies, stronger variations of previously encountered foes with better stats.
• Emergency Weapon: If your character has no weapons, punching the enemy is the only other option. In addition, assuming that you went into the dungeons with no weapons or armor, your character will automatically pick up and use the first weapon and the first of each armor type if the criteria for using them are met.
• Excuse Plot: With every instalment, this trope's presence diminishes a little. The first game's plot could be summed up as "go down to Level x, kill this monster, and be a hero". From the second game onwards, a Plot Device is added, be it the Book of Fate, the Chamber of Trials, or a hermit called Awadji.
• Facial Markings: An aesthetical choice for some characters' faces.
• Final Death Mode: Hardcore mode/difficulty. This is harder than Legend difficulty and cheats are disabled. Your character's demise is permanent, and your progress gets sent to the online leaderboards.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Sorted by the least amount of Magic required to use the spell, the Fireball, Frost and Lightning Strike spells go in this order. You can also fight Fire, Ice and Lightning elementals in that order.
• Free Rotating Camera: In the first three games, the camera could only zoom in and out and rotate a little to the left and right with the appropriate arrow keys held down. The Cursed King upgrades the camera to this.
• Full-Boar Action: From the third game, the Half-Orcs' pet of choice seems to be a wild piglet. All of the games also have wereboars as enemies.
• Game Mod: The first game was "moddable" through a long convoluted process, while the sequel makes this a lot easier for players, with its appropriately-named MODS folder.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: Your pet can never die, but it will stop fighting for you once its Hit Points is down to 1. In The Cursed King, Non Player Characters you recruit will faint, not die, if their health drops to 0 and can be revived with the right potions or spell; otherwise, they will automatically revive themselves over time.
• Giant Spider: One of the most common monsters in the dungeons, it comes in both hairless and hairy variations. Both tend to be poisonous. You can turn your pet into a non-poisonous one with one of the cheapest fish.
• Grid Inventory: about 10x4 per backpack. Made egregious by the amount of 2x3 equipment in the game, as well as the infrequency of 1x1 potions and 2x1 belts; it is not unusual for your "full" inventory to have an entire horizontal row empty.
• Hard Mode Perks: Unless you play on Legend or Hardcore difficulty, the easier difficulty levels restrict your chances of encountering graded items and, due to the way the game's item spawn mechanics work, generally require you to dive deeper into the dungeon to get better drops. On Page difficulty, Random Drops are never graded.
• Healing Factor:
  • The most obvious example of this trope is any equipment socketed with either an Amethyst or Peridot. Amethysts increase the speed of you automatically recovering Hit Points over time, while the Peridot recovers a certain percentage point of your maximum health each time you hit an enemy.
  • Fainted Non Player Characters in The Cursed King will eventually revive themselves, recovering a small chunk of their health in the process, over a period of time.
  • Your pet has a very slow version of this, which can be sped up via gemstones and trinket enchantments.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: "Page", "Adventurer", "Hero", "Legend" and "Hardcore". In this order, they represent the games' difficulty levels from Easy to Hard, with "Hardcore" being "Harder Than Hard with no cheats allowed and Final Death Mode enabled".
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: They definitely look very shiny, and the locked ones in The Cursed King look brand-new. Of course, there is also the occasional Mimic...
• Intrepid Merchant: The merchant from the village also shows up in several levels of the dungeon.
• Joke Item: The Gem of False Hopes, a gemstone with absolutely no enchantments and a very low sell value.
• Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Subverted with the gambling merchants. While a player is unlikely to make a huge profit from purchasing items with unknown magical properties, it is still possible.
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: You do not want to know how fish, rings and even clothes can be fished out from lava pools in dungeons, or how an everyday fishing rod can be used to fish in lava pools in the first place.
• Lethal Joke Item: Peronto's Cheesehead of the Emerald Bay is an extremely rare and unique artifact helmet that can only be fished up in towns. While it only adds 1 point of Defense and drastically reduces your Vitality, it also greatly increases the amount of gold and magical items you will find in the dungeons. Furthermore, it has a sell price higher than any other artifact that can be fished up in town, so you can sell it for a very tidy sum if you choose not to wear it.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Your character and pet recover full health upon level up.
• Limit Break: From The Traitor Soul onward, the player can press the spacebar to perform a rage attack, sacrificing some stamina to do massive damage to all enemies within contact range.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Whenever you send your pet to town, regardless of the amount of time left before they return, you will immediately meet up with your pet if you go back to town yourself, whereupon they would always have already sold whatever unequipped items they were carrying at the time. Considering the amount of Shop Fodder you will get in the dungeon, and your pet taking up to 2 minutes to return to you, you can Sequence Break by sending your pet to town, then immediately spawning a town portal to get yourself back to town to meet up with your pet, which has already sold all its inventory in the handful of seconds it takes for your computer to load the town.
  • The game's help overlay freezes existing and new background UI elements, including the indicator that appears when you get a bite while fishing, which stops the potential fish from escaping until you close the overlay. Taken to its logical extreme, you can enable the overlay while fishing, step away from your computer to do something else, then return to your computer to set the hook on the bite that you got while you were away.
• Meaningful Name: The Mimic lures you near by mimicking an ordinary treasure chest then reveals its eyes, tongue, wings, and sharp teeth.
• Mega Dungeon: Each game takes place within a single, endless, procedurally-generated dungeon.
• Money Spider: Even the weakest mooks have about 10 gold with them almost every time. The amount increases based on the level of the monster.
• Monster Town: Each of the four towns across the games are inhabited by a mix of friendly humans and monsters. Typhon and Druantia have a more even monster-to-human ratio compared to the clearly human-centric Town of Grove and Ekbatan, and if you consider the Temple of Fate to be a "town" (which it technically is), it is mostly occupied by monsters.
• Must Make Amends: The only justification for the player's quest in Undiscovered Realms and The Cursed King.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The backstory of Undiscovered Realms and The Cursed King reveals that the player was the one who accidentally unleashed the Big Bad upon realms that once sealed them away. In the former, the player leads the Big Bad to a book that granted it tremendous power—enough to terrorise two realms—and in the latter, the player opens a treasure chest engraved with Starfish Language that was actually a tomb containing the Big Bad.
• Noun Verber The Butcher: Randomly-generated bosses often get names assigned to them in this fashion. Alternately they pull one from a list of Punctuation Shaker words.
  • The player can also manually edit the files ^note (Namely, prefix.dat, prefix2.dat, suffix.dat, suffix2.dat, and title.dat, in the NAMES directory) containing name-parts, leading to names such as "Arseface the Beautiful" and "Galvatron the Anachronistic", among other things.
• New Game Plus: That, plus a full level of experience, some Fame and an Ancestral Weapon with all its stats boosted by 25%.
• Oddly Shaped Sword: The Cursed King has the Talwar Sword, which is a massive, serrated cutlass in a S shape with an odd gap right on the tip, as well as the far too spiky Kopesh and the Thorn Mace (A twice-curved morningstar weapon).
• Old Save Bonus: If you had any of the older instalments installed on the same machine as a newer instalment, the latter will give you the option to import existing characters from the former, complete with all their existing levels and equipment.
• One Game for the Price of Two: Inverted with The Traitor Soul, since it contains almost everything from the first two games.
• Our Demons Are Different: Demons in the first games are lean, pink-skinned Horned Humanoid creatures with wings and vaguely Egyptian-looking garments and immune to Fire damage. The Cursed King has the Imps as a new playable race of small, red-skinned humanoids with horns. Demonlings and their palette swaps are smaller, weaker and attack with weapons.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Wouldn't be a fantasy game without dragons right? Wyverns are small, only have four limbs, which are their legs and wings of course, and show some avian characteristics such as feathers, beaked mouths and talons. There are standard wyverns and venomous wyverns. The bigger dragons are of the usual Western type, albeit bipedal, and come in four different flavors: Fire-breathing, ice-breathing, venom-breathing and thunder-breathing. Of these, firedrakes, icedrakes, venomdrakes and thunderdrakes are medium-sized but still pretty formidable enemies. Green dragons, Frost Dragons, Venom Dragons and Thunder Dragons (basically enormous counterparts of the previous ones) are gargantuan-sized and easily among the strongest monsters in the games.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Shockingly enough, Fate's Orcs are not low-level Mooks (that would be Goblins) but are massive, blueish brutes who hit quite hard and encountered midway through the Dungeon, resembling fatter counterparts of Ogres. Half-Orcs are humanoid in size and form and can be used as playable characters from the third game onward, working well as melee-oriented fighters. From the second game onward, Orcs of smaller sizes known as Frost Orcs are encountered in Typhon's dungeon as low-middle level encounters.
• Pet Monstrosity: See Shapeshifting.
• Point Build System: For every level gained, your character/ally gets five stat points and two skill points. For every Renown level gained, four skill points are granted. Collecting tarot cards and exchanging three of them in The Cursed King will reward your character with at least one stat point.
• Power Equals Rarity: Played with somewhat. Artifact equipment, indicated by a gold background fill in the inventory screens, is fun to collect and much more powerful than entry-level equipment, but because any equipment can be upgraded by various enchanters, they can also be outclassed by more generic equipment, especially near the end of the overarching quest.
• Punctuation Shaker: T'Kala. The game's random name generator also drops an apostrophe into some names on occasion.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Aside from the different hairstyle and starting outfit, there are absolutely no gameplay difference between the male and female. In fact, the equipments, which covers the character's hair and clothes, would make their appearance virtually indistinguishable from each other.
• Random Drop: The only way to legitimately restore the two statues in The Temple of Fate in Undiscovered Realms and The Traitor Soul is to pick up their missing equipment from random enemies in the game. To a lesser extent, every other item in the game falls into this as well.
• Rare Candy: The Shrine of Learning, which often only appears once every few levels. Attempting to read the book on the shrine will occasionally increase the proficiency level of one of your character's skills, but it may do the reverse instead and decrease a skill. At other times, it does nothing.
• Real-Time Weapon Change: From The Traitor Soul onwards, the player is able to switch between two different weapon setups by pressing the Backspace key.
• Regenerating Health: Some items will regenerate your health, as will the Amethyst gem when added to a socketed item.
• Save Scumming: Averted as the game saves automatically every time you quit or enter a different dungeon level or town and by the lack of an option to save without quitting. Your only option then was Alt-F4.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: For a price, you can get a minstrel to increase your Renown by one level, which translates into 4 skill points. At higher levels, it's actually faster to buy Renown levels than earn them legitimately, as at characters of a high enough level can earn money quickly by getting equipment enchanted to sell more than their original price.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: T'Kala, the Big Bad of The Cursed King, was once a necromancer who was executed by the King of Ekbatan. His soul was sealed in a treasure chest buried in a small cave outside the city...until the player opened it. Cursed Swords also qualify, since they lie inert in some treasure chests until the player opens them.
• Serrated Blade of Pain: At low levels, you can find the Goblin Scimitar (whose cutting edge is barbed like a saw) and the Orcish Scythe (same thing, on a stick). At high levels, Harpoons, Battle Lances and Greatswords sport irregular, jagged edges.
• Shapeshifting: Depending on what fish you feed your pet, it can transform into more powerful creatures for a certain length of time. Flawless fish turns your pet into another creature permanently until you feed it another fish or you die.
• Sinister Scythe: Most polearms are different types of scythes. Despite the large blades they all deal "piercing" damage (And most of them do have a spearpoint on them).
• Slice-and-Dice Swordsmanship: Applies to swords, maces, hammers and axes, which have the same motions. The same is true for the two handed Polearms and Staves but averted with spears (only stabbing is performed).
• Snake People: Nagas that look suspiciously like gorgons minus the petrifying gaze appear as enemies in the first game and all the sequels. Undiscovered Realms and The Traitor Soul introduce the Na'grah, a race of cobra-like nagas, and The Cursed King gives us the Naga Queen.
• Socketed Equipment: Naturally, as this game was inspired by Diablo.
• Stalked by the Bell: In The Cursed King, The Ghost of T'Kala's Curse, a Level 100 monster, will appear and continuously deliver Scratch Damage to you if you spend too much time idling in a dungeon level. It is not an Invincible Minor Minion, though, so it can still be killed.
• Tech Points: Gaining Fame from defeating boss monsters, completing quests and paying a minstrel will increase your level of Renown, which allows you to use the more powerful Elite and Legendary items.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Shrines exemplify this trope pretty well. A shrine that is ostensibly the same level as the player character works as a Mighty Glacier, with absurdly high health and ridiculous magic ability (but fortunately, are completely sedentary). This is bad enough, but they're also capable of summoning creatures MUCH more powerful than the player (up to and including dragons), and unlike the player's summons, these creatures are permanent and cannot be dispelled. About the only mitigating factors here are that shrines are rare and that the summoned creatures still qualify for experience.
• Underground Monkey: Be prepared to meet some bats, Giant Spiders, goblins, rats and walking mushrooms in almost every dungeon level.
• Unidentified Items: The game has scrolls and books for identification; books can be used more times than scrolls. Charm Magic users can also purchase a spell to identify items.
• Unwitting Pawn: The player is this in Undiscovered Realms, convinced by the Big Bad itself, under the disguise of an old man, to escort it to The Book of Fate, enabling it to regain its lost power.
• Watching Troy Burn: This is the fate of the City of Ekbatan as a direct result of the player unsealing T'Kala. Would have been All Your Base Are Belong to Us if the player reached the city before T'Kala did.
• We Buy Anything: All town merchants. It does not matter if they specialise in selling magician's equipment or weapons; they will buy anything and everything from you at the same price.
• We Sell Everything: The travellers. They are seen in towns and may occasionally be encountered in dungeons selling a variety of goods ranging from potions to weapons or even gemstones.
• Zerg Rush: Some boss monsters have a group of underlings under their command and will usually throw all of them against you first. The games also frequently place groups of different monsters nearby in a small, open area so that, more often than not, all of them will rush you the moment you walk in.

---