I have discovered the hard way that it is possible to be teleported into rock. Once was the
result of a Teleportation trap, and the other 2 times (on the first floor of the first bonus dungeon)
were due to an enemy's use of Miracle. This causes the entire party to be lost forever.

Do you think that's fair?

(Fortunately, unlike in classic Wizardry, the game doesn't auto-save when this happens, so I can
just reload.)

If you want to see for yourself, going to any floor with a lot of rock (you can use the Rock Counter to check) and casting Diomente can cause this to happen. The floor I mentioned is a good choice, as it has 265 stones (out of 400 squares).

Things can truly be less fair.

In Mordor/Demise line of dungeon crawlers, teleporters were placed right at the entrances of some rooms (so you better know which doors not to open). And if you triggered it? High chance of your party be scattered and access to your map - lost. Yes and game auto-saves each step (back-ups can be made however). Oh and maps are 45x45, so your ex-party is doomed to very slow and painful death (and no, your mage or cleric won't be able to solo his way out).

At least, teleport straight into rock is done in one step. Literally Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies..

For the example that you described, if you know the trap is there, you can avoid it.

However, on that particular floor in Elminage Gothic, you could be randomly ambushed by one of those giant fish enemies, have it decide to cast Miracle, have it choose Enemy Teleport, and then have your party be "in the stone" and lost forever. In otherwords, the RNG can, after any step taken on that floor, decide that your party is lost forever.

By the way, is there any practical legal way to get any of the Morder/Demise dungeon crawlers
DRM-free?

There was an issue with rights on that game. There is Ascension "mod" (they altered Demise: Rise of Ku'tan significantly, additions don't feel that "organic"; and it packs several layers of DRM, so not sure if we gonna get it on GOG one day), and then there is Revelation (which only fixes major bugs from original, like map corruption and such, and makes only slight alterations in Ku'tan vesion (+couple more floors), so it is closest to original Demise).

Mordor/Demise went through many companies, and all the original copyright holders went out of business, so I think it is safe to consider Revelation (no drm in that version). That's unless authors of Ascension will attempt to bring their Demise to GOG.

I should probably mention a few things about that "big fish enemy" (Brainsly). It dies easily to damage, but is quite dangerous.

Aside from teleporting your party into rock, it can do lots of damage with Raglass (200+) and can behead your characters (25%). It also acts 3 times for round.

Defensively, it has high resistance to status ailaments and instant death, but its summon resistance is really low (30%). This means that it is easier to Contract one than to instant kill one, and it works well as a summon.

By the way, use Spirit Pact on it and it becomes a Ninja. Yes, a flying fish ninja, of all things. (Compared to other Spirit Pact ninjas, this one isn't as good at inflicting status ailments, but is far more resistant to them.)

Games like to defy common sense

When you add monster to party, most of them are 0-3 years old, including humanoid opponents... But ok, you can say that those monsters are just devilish spawns, created from the void.

But then, you can make party of 10 years old humans and send them into the dungeons. And they would fight more successfully than whole kingdom's army and they can kill gods.

Also when you add undead monsters to party, apparently, they never died, as their Death counter shows 0. Do they reproduce in undead state or something, it is better not to think about it that much.

Also Elminage follows trope "An Economy is You" to the letter. Apparently, you are the shopkeeper's only customer (as noone else is buying his limited offer merchandise), and you are also the only one who supply him with new stuff to sell (which he is happy to resell back to you at double the price).

Do you mean backup save games when you save in multiple files? Or do you mean copying the save files manually? (If so, which directory?)

Thanks.

Rob

If you are asking about Elminage - you don't have to do backups, because this game doesn't mess around with your saves (thankfully!).

What concerns Demise, it keeps global world save (which constantly refreshes), so it is better to copy whole game sub-directory, which is at ".../Demise/system" to some safe place in case game will decide to screw you. You aren't allowed to save manually by in-game means in Demise, so you can't save-scum conveniently, but it is still helpful to prevent stupid deaths and to "decline" quests ("Kill Namana"... you don't want to get such quests on level-ups).