This realm may surprise you, since it begins with the same message as the previous realm. This is actually an error in the previous map, which can be fixed by adjusting its script to use message 916 rather than 917. This realm is the one where you will be required to jump into the middle of action against well-prepared hero forces. It will test your true ability as a Keeper.

Your tasks begin as soon as your view fixes into place, because you begin with a full compliment of twelve creatures, some of which include deadly lair rivals. Immediately select the Creature Information panel and pick up your Vampire, Warlocks, Bile Demons, and Skeletons. You have been started with a complete Basic Five plus Workshop, including three separate lairs. You need to place these creatures manually into different lairs - Vampires with Bile Demons or Skeletons, and Warlocks with whomever won't be cowering in fear of your Vampires.

Notice that your portal is connected to a hero-owned area already, and so is the corridor reaching toward the east. You should steer far clear of the eastern area until I say so, but if you go ahead and smash into the western area now, you can secure for your use the Call to Arms spell.

With that distraction temporarily out of the way, you must start your creatures working and training immediately. All of your Dragons and Warlocks will try to head to the library. Put most of them to training instead, and absolutely do not tolerate them wasting their time on research of the Destroy Walls spell. You will not need it until much later into this conquest. Your Bile Demons will head to the Workshop. You are going to find that you sorely need to produce traps and doors to protect yourself from the imminent invasion, but your Workshop is going to be severely understaffed until you can get your Mistress and some Dragons trained to a sufficient level to handle your invaders. Begin rotating the Bile Demons between manufacturing and training, letting one of them increase a level at a time if possible. Also, enlarge your Workshop to the minimum size needed to produce all items as quickly as you can.

Your gold situation will rapidly deteriorate unless you secure funding, and in this realm it will not do to sell off your Training Room, so you must also immediately begin tunneling for gold while multitasking with the above job rotation. The gold vein to your south is not entirely safe, for it borders caves which already contain dangerous heroes, and will soon contain legions more - there is a trick to this realm. If you know where not to tunnel, it is quite doable. If you don't, you are all but certain to be defeated. Two of the places you must not connect to are immediately to the south of your dungeon on either side of the gold vein. Not for aught were you started with the Sight of Evil spell - use it to your fullest advantage, and dig out only as much gold as you can safely take.

While three of your Imps mine the southern gold, use the fourth to tunnel from the north edge of your dungeon toward the small crevice in the rock at point 1. Here you can release a level 5 Hellhound to join you. Normally you'd say boo, but you need all the help you can get here.

Once the southern gold vein has been mined out completely, which you may want to speed along by using a possessed Imp to carefully dig out safe tiles, you can also tunnel along the Impenetrable Rock westward to points 2 and 3, where you can add a level 5 Orc and an invaluable Increase Level special, which you should use quickly, to your belongings. Note that this Orc is the only one you will receive during this campaign. Although it is in fact "possible" to attract Orcs through the portal, you have no Barracks available.

(This is probably an error in the level script - Guard Posts are given to you twice instead of the Barracks...)

With the southern gold expended, you will need to head with much gusto to the northern vein. Build a secondary Treasure Room nearby and use it until the gold here is expired. Beware the small cave in the rock directly south of the northern gold - it is a trap, yet another place to which you must not connect. If you connect to it, you will end up letting even more heroes into your dungeon, so seal it off instead and let them wither in their cave when they drop in.

Be sure to build a Graveyard and a 3x3 Torture Room as soon as possible. When the heroes start to arrive, you will want to deposit their corpses there and let your Hellhound desecrate them in the way they rightly deserve. This will let you raise an army of fast-training Vampires. During the duration of this realm, you will want to keep one of your Vampires at low-level. A few seconds before each pay day, grab the low-level Vampire and torture him. He'll get angry, but the rest of your Vampires will suddenly learn to properly fear your wrath and will voluntarily reduce their salaries by half. This only works for as long as the Vampire is being tortured, so don't remove him until all other Vampires have taken their pay. Once you're done, take him out and sprinkle the smallest pile of money you can grab onto him. Suddenly all is well, and he will return to his lair to heal what little damage he received.

(Building the Torture Room also allows you to attract Mistresses from your portal, of course, which you may need to do if you lose minions in this realm. And losing some minions here is almost inevitable. Just be sure to lock your Mistress(es) out of it, because you need it clear for torturing your Vampire!)

Heroes will begin to visit your dungeon soon, but I will point out in advance more locations that you need to visit as soon as it is possible to do so before explaining the heroes' visitation schedule below. As soon as you have a couple of level 5 or 6 creatures, head west to point 4. A grumpy Giant guards a copy of the Speed Monster spell here. Then, turn south toward point 5, being extra careful not to break into the larger cave just to the north. Inside this smaller cavern two level 5 Mountain Dwarves protect a copy of the Heal spell.

Once you have a significant number of level 7 creatures, you can assault the hero area to your east - within lies a gem tile, the Conceal Monster and Protect Monster spells, and another Increase Level special. These are well-defended by strong heroes, however, and you almost certainly will not be able to claim them before some heroes have attacked your dungeon.

According to the official game editor documentation, there are twelve game turns per second on any machine fast enough to run the game at full framerate. If this is the case, then the first hero party will visit your dungeon at almost ten minutes into the conquest. But I must say that it seemed like much less time than this - it will more than likely catch you unprepared.

Assuming the twelve turns per second rule, the heroes will pour into your dungeon from the listed locations at the given times:

1. 9.72 minutes: 3 Archers and 3 Barbarians at levels 2 and 3 will enter from the western hero door. They carry 1800 gold and intend to attack your Dungeon Heart.
   
   
2. 16.67 minutes: You evade an attack by six Thieves and Wizards at levels 5 and 6 by not having connected to the large southeastern cavern. They too carry 1800 gold, but intended to steal gold from your dungeon.
   
   
3. 18.05 minutes: Another party identical to the first enters from the western hero door once again.
   
   
4. 30.55 minutes: 2 Giants at level 6 and 2 Mountain Dwarves at level 7 enter from the western hero door. They carry 1200 gold but will make up for this by attempting to destroy your rooms. Be especially careful that none of these heroes evade your minions' attentions. I lost a good part of my Graveyard to a Dwarf before I saw what was happening. Your mentor only announces that your rooms are being destroyed when he detects this intent in a creature, not while the rooms are actually being destroyed.
   
   
5. 40.27 minutes: A massive attack is coordinated, but you evade most of it once again by not having connected to the southern cave system. From your west a party of 3 Archers at level 7 and two Thieves at level 8 carrying 1500 gold enter to attack your Dungeon Heart. If you kill only the Archers, the Thieves will also try to steal gold. From the south would have come another group of destructive Giants and Dwarves the same as the last, as well as a group of 3 level 7 Monks and level 6 Priestesses with 1500 gold who come to attack your Dungeon Heart. Good thing you avoided them!
   
   
6. 48.61 minutes: Yet another massive attack is coordinated, and yet again you slip by most of it. This time an identical group of Monks and Priestesses will enter your dungeon from the west. This is an extremely dangerous attack. More Wizards, Thieves, Giants, and Dwarves join the growing legion of heroes waiting for you in the southern cave...
   
   
7. 51.38 minutes: The heroes now make a last-ditch effort to destroy you, but you will escape most of their wrath. In the small cave below your northern gold which I told you to seal away, as well as in the southwestern network of caves near where you found the Orc, will spawn two more parties of Giants and Dwarves intent on destroying your rooms. From the corridor to your east, which leads to the gem area, a tunneller party will emerge consisting of the same heroes led by a level 4 tunneller. Because they drop in within their small keep, they may also release a number of other unassociated heroes at the same time.

In order to minimize damage from these attacks, it will be wise to begin placing traps in the areas from which they spawn as fast as you can manufacture them. Place some Alarm Traps, which are not oft used, on their spawn points so that you will be immediately alerted of their attacks. Once you have researched the Guard Post and manufactured Lava Traps, you can also use them together to create a death trap for the unsuspecting do-gooders, protecting the rest of your dungeon.

When the heroes enter your dungeon, you will need to drop everything you have on them, even if the creatures in question are not trained high enough. Hopefully together they will deal enough damage, and they may even gain levels in experience by fighting stronger heroes. This saves you time and money in training.

Once the attack at 51 minutes has passed, you have survived the first and only really difficult stage of this realm. However, the bad news is that you have only just begun to establish yourself here. To the south, beyond that large forbidden cave, lies a hero castle of a design much more clever than those to which you have recently laid waste. The heroes in this realm have created hidden chambers, use Guard Posts to keep units assigned to particular areas, and have a number of wicked traps scattered in the worst of places.

Open up any or all of the areas I previously told you to avoid one at a time and eliminate any resistance from within using your now well-trained minions or effective traps - you have Lava Traps to protect your main dungeon, and Boulders to crush the enemy. When you open up the southern cave, you will be able to make several more Vampires from all of the resulting bodies. Keep training them up, and torturing your newest one before pay days to keep your bank roll in order. You only get two sides of a gem tile to mine here, so a 45000-gold pay day is still going to wear you down.

Once you are prepared, you can take on the southern hero keep. With the Destroy Walls spell, you can take it on in whatever fashion you want. I actually recommend avoiding all areas that are not critical to the mission of destroying the hero Dungeon Heart, as virtually all you will find is unnecessary resistance and a ton of gold pots. You can clear out the main caverns with minor battles, and then have your Imps bring in Boulder Traps and set them in front of locked doors. When the hero Heart is destroyed, the Boulders will immediately activate, rolling into those rooms and crushing most if not all of the heroes within. Their precious traps will also evaporate, saving you even more hassle in claiming the spoils.

The only places you have an interest in visiting on your way to the Dungeon Heart are the following ones which I have enumerated on the map:

• Point 6 - A Steal Hero special awaits you here.
• Point 7 - Another Increase Level is guarded by heroes of moderate power. Fire it off as soon as you can.
• Point 8 - An unaligned level 9 Dark Mistress will join your crusade. You can claim her quite easily by using a shot of Destroy Walls on the west side of her room.
• Point 9 - Within a small magma pool hidden in the north wall is a level 7 Skeleton looking for a new Keeper.
• Point 10 - Down the third of these four narrow hallways a level 9 Dragon has been imprisoned. Free him for posterity if not for his raw power.

After passing point 10, you can use a shot of Destroy Walls on the western side of the corridor leading south to bring yourself into the heroes' Heart Room. If your dungeon is currently connected to this area (there are no intervening Lava Traps that have been triggered, in other words), the Lord of the Land and his band of mirth-making maladjusts, who have been here all along hiding like cowards, will begin to saunter out. When they do, give it to them hard. By this point I had 13 Vampires (what a devilish number), all but one of them level 8 or above. The heroes stood no chance.

Once the Lord of the Land is naught but a bad memory, send most of your creatures back to your dungeon to heal and rest. Let your Dragons wade across to destroy the hero Heart, and use a powerful possessed creature like a Mistress to help finish it off in person. As soon as the Heart is destroyed, you have won, but the realm is not exactly finished yet. Now that the hero dungeon is destroyed, all hero path, walls, and traps will evaporate. This means that you just released all of the heroes whom you didn't earlier kill. Unless you want this to end very ungracefully, sit back and watch your Boulders kill most of them. The survivors will head toward your dungeon if there is a path. Hopefully you prepared other traps to greet them on their way. If not, try to isolate them into groups and attack with your Vampires, Mistresses, and Skeletons.

There are two more secrets that you can obtain, but these are best gotten after destroying the hero Dungeon Heart. In the large watery room immediately to the south of the heart at points 11 and 12 are two Dungeon Specials - a Reveal Map and a Resurrect Creature. You must dig into the wall near point 11 to find the Reveal Map, which releases some feisty level 10 Monks in the process. Also beware the Lightning Trap within, which did not disappear due to being an unaligned trap. Somehow the Monks didn't set this one off...

Anyway, with the Reveal Map special triggered, you are now free to mop up all remaining heroes and claim their goodies as you desire. Or, quit and call it a day. You certainly deserve some rest after destroying this realm!