The Blue Stone

Yesterday night I dreamed I was playing Ultima IV. The only distinct things I remember about the dream are obtaining a second ship, and battling some balrons. When my alarm clock made its first two beeps, these chimed with the balron's sleep spells. On the third beep, I woke up.

Now that I am truly awake, I find that I still only have one ship and have just exited the shrine of Honesty where I achieved partial avatarhood. I decided that since the dungeon Deceit was nearby on a tiny island, I might as well attempt to retrieve the blue stone. Unlike the previous dungeon, I have very little memory of this dungeon or which level the stone can be found.
For good measure, I mixed several Dispels, which turned out to be very useful. The first two levels were not particularly exciting. In Level 3, Iolo and Jaana both touched magic balls and increased their Intelligence. A section of Level 4 was full of treasure chests. I did accumulate plenty of Gold on this expedition, but I had to fight for a lot of it.

There were several interesting rooms in this dungeon. This one on Level 6 had a group of magi around a campfire, while two hydras sat behind magic fields protecting treasure. After eliminating the magi, the party lined up in two groups with Jaana and me heading each group to dispel a field and proceed to kill the hydra. It turns out that the Dispels we cast were actually not needed, because after the battle, when Iolo when to collect the one treasure chest by the fireplace, the fields disappeared. I did not recall this feature.

The nastiest room was one on Level 5. It had two reapers and a large Sleep field. I still haven't "discovered" the location of mandrake root so I was unable to cast Tremor or Negate Magic. So I had to take the slow route  of walking across (not wanting to use up more Dispels since I was low on black pearl) and dispatching the reapers while being asleep more than half the time. Dungeon Deceit also had many falling rock and pit traps and so my party was the worse for wear by the time we found the blue stone on Level 7 past a number of magic fields. I cast an X-it spell to get us out of there.

I decided that we would sail south around Verity Isle. (We did not stop and Moonglow.) From there we would strike west until we hit the main continent of Britannia. However as luck would have it, we spotted shallow waters and found a remote island with a village - Buccaneer's Den!

14679 moves. Cumulative playing time = 9.5 hours