Im playing Serpent Isle on DOSbox (not Exult). I am almost done in Monitor and have just slain the Goblin King. In my curiosity, I went inside the Explosive Powder Maker building north of the Sleeping Bull Inn and talked to a ghost, who turned out to be the Chaos Hierophant. He gave me a scroll an I didn't think it was a big deal, but now I read somewhere that this is a game breaking bug.

Does anyone know what problems this causes down the road? Do I need to start over?? Ive already completed the Silver Seed and have put a good 20 hours into this game already.

Thanks!

***As I side note, i played Serpent Isle as a kid and remember doing the exact same thing. I never beat the game back then so its interesting to find out 20 years later that it may have been because of a bug! >: (

It can jam up the plot later on. You're supposed to meet him almost at the end of the game. It may be possible to still complete with cheats, i.e. teleporting to the next area if you get stuck, but of course you'd have to know where to teleport.

hmm, that seems like a reasonable work around, As an additional piece of information, I went back to the exploding powder building and was able to talk to the ghost again. The ghost still appeared as the chaos hierophant and we had the same conversation again (I even got another scroll from him). This seems promising since in the dialogue he says he will only be friendly and talk to me once.

But.... just in case I play for another 50 hours and then find myself screwed. where would I have to teleport to or what exactly would I have to do to work around the potential bug? Please note that I have Silver Seed installed (I heard it disables the developers console)

Thanks again for the response, I continued playing and completed Sleeping Bull and Fawn last night. = )

That depends on where exactly you might get stuck. Failing everything else, it should at least be possible to teleport to the final room and do the endgame, provided you have all the blackrock serpents. Silver Seed doesn't remove the cheats, it just changes the command line needed to activate them from "serpent pass" to "serpent manimal".

Hmm. it sounds like I'm in a lot of trouble. As painful as it sounds, I thinlk I better start over. Are there any other bugs or considerations that I should be aware of?

The only other major one is when you find the serpent staff, make sure to walk fully into the room before picking it up. Otherwise you risk a similar problem in the late game.