Seems there's a one-way door from 13E, 8N to 14E, 8N in this version. This leads to a too-square room with no escape. And me without telport or etherealize. Why won't fly work?

I knew I shouldn't have left the men in the Inn. That was her plot to get them undefended.

Sadly I can't even die. Well, maybe if I rest enough to die of old age.

Fly won't work because you're underground (the towns are all underground in MM1). Unfortunately I think your only course of action is to force-quit (i.e. close DOSBox) and re-load your last save. That should work fine though, and is much faster than trying to die in-game.

That was a "why god why?" sort of question.

I don't really picture "fly" as actually flying, since you don't get to choose where to go, and it is instant. Seems more like a modified teleport to me!

Will you actually age when you rest? In MM2, I am pretty sure that the passage of time doesn't age you, and that there is no time limit (contrary to what signs above the doors in a certain castle say). Is MM1 different in this respect?

Also, in case I ever play the game, if I make an all female party, will I have any issues?

At least, now that you know it's there, you can avoid it.

The Locust Plagues in the NES version aren't so nice. If none of your characters are fast enough to act first and one appears in the front ranks, it's game over.

Reminds me of how in Elminage Gothic I was ambushed by an enemy that used Miracle to teleport my party into rock (a fate worse than a party wipe).

Edit: I actually remember running into a can't continue or die situation in Final Fantasy 6. Gau and Umaro were my only living characters, neither could use any magic attacks, the enemy was invisible (so physical attacks wouldn't work), the enemy's attacks kept healing me (Magic Urn rage is *really* good in that game), and the game would not let me run away.

Yes, some monters can't be hit by female characters.
But you'll eventually have a large pool of hirelings, so should not be an insurmountable problem.

So it's like its sequel in that respect?

Portsmith seems like it would be much friendlier to an all-female party, indeed. After accidentally "discovering the secret", I wished for my party to be more than 50% female. I wonder if the magic works on phenotype or orientation, or along some other lines. A quest to cross-dress?

Well, the sequel has two fountains that actually change the sex of your characters.

Then again, there is also a character who is third-gender in some versions of the game. (In the dos version of the game, zer gender is incorrectly set as female.)

I actually made a topic in the general discussion forum about games with third gender options. It got some troll responses, unfortunately, but also got some rather nice responses.

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_with_more_than_two_gender_options

As a side note, since you seem to like these early cRPGs, you might want to look into Elminage Gothic. It is like the early Wizardry games, complete with high difficulty and things like level drains. It has three gender options, the third being "?". Unfortunately, too much of the top tier equipment is male only.

The former is unfortunately predictable, the latter a welcome surprise. Yeah, I purchased it on gog-release, but haven't really gotten around to it.
For one thing, I didn't expect it to have brutal difficulty, which I don't really welcome. (For the record, I don't see Bard's Tale 1 or MM1 as brutal, just slow to get started.) I'll try it out eventually.

Picking third-gender (or unspecified) for my characters doesn't really interest me in particular, though I might choose it for one of a party for a sense of variety. Seeing such things incorporated into the game "narrative" is more interesting to me. I'm using narrative extremely loosely here, I just mean anything the game developers are putting up on the canvas as part of their world.

I suppose if the game actually responded to my third-gender characters in any meaningful way that would be pretty cool. But somehow I don't expect more than complete blindness or really really awkward romance junk.

Yes, but there are no hirelings to fill the ranks in MM1.

Wizardry IV actually did this intentionally. Fortunately, the developers were thoughtful enough to include a Monopoly reference that would let you escape.

Then again, Wizardry IV also has a floor filled with invisible mines, a floor filled with spinners, a floor spilled with rotating floors (that move the walls around it), a 3D maze with stairs that don't lead in the direction they say, and enemies that love to cast the game-ending MAKINITO spell.

From what I can tell, Wizardry 4 is more performance art than game.