Next up I headed into the Bracada Desert. This place ended up being a strange one. There was this giant teleporter cluster with teleport pads all over the area. Many high peaked ridges made travel around on foot in this place terrible.

There was one little road that forked in two different directions. Along the road was a temple to heal at and I'd end up needing more than I'd hoped. It also led you to the teleport clusters.

The issue was I started on the map in the southeast. There was no road and I'd have to work out the teleport system as well. After crossing over one of the teleport pads, I found myself in a strange area with a cluster of them. I then started to test out a few of them to see where they would take me.

Bracada Desert ended up having some trainers that would end up being my sole reason to return here a few times over. I wish I had acquired and leveled up the skill learning a little faster. Most of my group would only learn up to expert and I was more than fine with that. This skill alone would help keep the rest of my group on par with my knight who rarely got taken out in any battle and always had the highest amount of experience earned.

Someone among all the homes I'd also find expert daggers and bows. Granted all my group already had expert bow from another place. That was kind of the nice thing about finding the lower-tier ranking of skill upgrades. There would end up being more than one place to acquire it. Not so much for higher tiers.

This place also had some higher-level water magic spells. I rather wish I could have gotten my water magic skill to master much quicker than I did. It was however kind of hard since my sorcerer has three magic skills and to get to master each one of them, I needed to get it to level 7.

The biggest threat in this area ended up being the griffins. There were some massive spawns of them in both regions of the desert surrounding the rocky part of the map. They were also in smaller clusters in the rocky section down in the shallow valleys waiting like a trap to be sprung.

When I was out in the open in the desert areas of the map, they were easy to kite and deal with. In the more confined areas, they ended up being a bit more of a challenge. Thankfully my knight could land some devastating melee damage. As long as I was not getting ambushed by any large groups they were not that much of an issue.

I also picked up quite a few more side missions from this area. The amount I had was now starting to stockpile quite deep in my quest log. I had come here originally to see if I could have any luck freeing the dwarves I needed for the main quest line.

It was kind of hard trying to keep track of everything I needed to be on the lookout for. Even with a quest log. I ended up writing down some of my shorthand just to give myself an idea when I was in a zone of what I needed.

So far, I've found this Might and Magic to be one of the more easily to get sidetracked. I might go into an area wanting to both explore and hope to find a quest item I need. By the end of I've done nothing and a whole bunch of other stuff instead.

I ended up finding my first golem piece as well here. These things were almost like a curse. There were six pieces in total. They would end up taking up a decent chunk of one of my character inventory. I would also be stuck missing one piece for what felt like forever.

At least the couple of chests I found here were decent. I ended up looting some boot upgrades along the way. Along with an ok amount of gold that I'd end up adding to my growing stash in the bank. On that fateful day, I was able to level up my many magic skills to master or higher and needed to splurge on quite a lot of expensive books.

I then found the Red Dwarf Mines where I needed to save quite a few dwarfs that had been turned to stone. Honestly, the context clues the game was giving about this place made it sound like this quest would be quite a dreadful change.

For most of the areas I ended up finding dwarfs in they had ooze. Ooze you could only damage with magic damage. Thankfully my sorcerer has a spell that adds fire damage for a short duration to weapons. This ended up making this place not so bad.

The dungeon was also not that far from the road. I ended up needing to make a couple of short trips to the temple for revivals or turning my people back from stone. I would at least have some potions in my inventory to save me from having to make as many temple heal runs as I would have needed to do otherwise.

While two of the dwarfs I'd end up saving would sit in my party till I went for the quest turn-in. I’m thankful I did not have to return to the king every time I saved two of them. I kind of wish I could have had an army of dwarfs around me but such things were not permitted in the game. Any extras I found just went back home on their own. At least that is what I assumed they did the game was not exactly clear on what happened to them. I know they at least survived otherwise I would not have been able to finish the quest.

This was also yet another dungeon I did not fully clear. Thankfully I did not need to do either. There was an elevator that took me down to a deeper floor. Down there the place was covered in medusa.

I attempted to kill a few medusae. I would even find rooms where they were not in. However, there were only so many trips I was willing to run back to the temple to cure people getting turned into stone. This was also not a spell I could learn anyway.

The spell stone to flesh was an earth magic spell and I was already stretched quite far on as it was in skill points towards all the other magic types I wanted to have access to. I would also only have such a cure on one of my characters and the chance of that character getting turned to stone made it even less likely that I wanted to acquire the skill let alone the skill level to use the spell.

It was then time to return to The Barrow Downs and Stone City to return the dwarfs to the king. I was hoping this would allow me to start building up my castle and repairing it. Sadly, it was not.

I’d end up getting visited by two factions who would end up going to war with each other. I was seen as someone trapped in the middle, they were hoping to get on their side to win the war effect.

Final Thoughts

At the very least I went off to do a couple more random things before getting involved in lots of nonsense. Some zones have some nice permanent stat boost pillars in them. Getting a nice plus ten endurance and might for each of my characters was quite a massive boost.

There would also be test pillars that if you had fifty of the required stats you could get some bonus skill points from. After realizing this I started to horde some pieces of gear that high plus to certain stats on them. While I did not have high hopes for all my characters passing each stat test. I had a feeling a few of them like endurance or even luck could get them to fifty over the long run by just hanging onto some items.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Might And Magic VII