Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge

"Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge is the 6th title in the Wizardry series of computer role-playing games. It was the first in the trilogy surrounding the Dark Savant, which was followed by Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant and Wizardry 8. It was developed by Sir-tech Software, Inc. and was released on the Amiga and DOS platforms in 1990 by the same company, and for the SNES in Japan in 1995 by ASCII.

Although based upon previous games in the series, David Bradley completely rewrote the system for this release. This was the first game in the series to feature full color graphics. The game was mouse-driven and ran with EGA graphics. It was also one of the few games in the Wizardry series that would not allow characters to be imported from previous games. The character creation and level-up process was more detailed than in previous releases. The player can choose from eleven races and fourteen professions. There are multiple skills divided into several categories, and magic is divided into six schools. Combat also allowed several different options, such as thrust or bash, depending on the weapon selected.

Clockwise from upper left: conversation with a dead wizard; the party in combat with Night Gaunts; sample character view screen; trading with an Amazon merchant.

Wizardry VI is a first person, tile-based and menu-driven RPG. Its monsters and races are made up of many mythological creatures and people, from the fictitious, to even some real life races and people. The player may meet Sirens and Charron from Greek mythology, the Amazulu (a group of black warrior women, whose tribal name is derived from the Amazons of Greek legend, and the Zulu of Africa), and even the Caterpillar from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland."

Source: Wikipedia, "Wizardry_VI:_Bane_of_the_Cosmic_Forge," available under the CC-BY-SA License.