Anyway, it looked like you weren't supposed to enter the shrine, so I ended up just using a Levitate scroll and pick up the gem from one of the corners where I had dropped it while dreaming (didn't occur to me to throw it past the pillars).
There's no "supposed", using Levitate+Portal at the endgame, when you make to the Shrine, is a perfectly legitimate way to pick up the blackrock fragment. Throwing it past the pillars also works, as does simply dropping it between 2 pillars where you can easily pick it up from the outside later on. Thing is, if you have no spellcasting ability and can't levitate by other means, throwing it through the pillars becomes the only possibility.
Well, much of TFM is a tutorial that anyone experienced with UU1 should not really need to read. And since I can't recall the manual mentioning the secret room it must have been in that section.
It's also quite conspicuously visible in the map of LB's castle that comes with the game. Top left corner.
I just watched Spooney's "review". He does have some good points, but he concentrates solely on the negative things about the game, like the NPCs getting in the way and being mostly useless (or in the case of Lord British, totally useless) and the Headlesses being far tougher than in other Ultima games.
The headless are exactly as tough as in the first game. You just encounter one rather early on, in an area you're clearly not supposed to be in so early. Anyone who pays attention to cues (and who's played the first game) would know, upon entering this area, that something tough is up ahead. Of course it didn't stop me from going in there at level 1 or 2 anyway, but I did save first.
The game is definitely more frustrating and harder then the first game, which I guess is partly why I abandoned it the first time. It's also a bit rougher around the edges, especially the Pits of Carnage where I aborted my first game. The devs have said themselves that they would have like extra time to polish the game.
The game has certainly its problems, and I've no problem with them being pointed out, but you have to pick which ones are worth focusing on. CGW had a loooooooong review of the game, most of which actually negative, but they did a perfect job in pointing out exactly what doesn't work and
why it doesn't work. And they had nothing stupid like "SECRET ROOM IN STARTING AREA ZOMG SO CONFUSING!" This ultimately is what distinguishes good reviewing from stuff like Spoony and Croshaw.
Once you find that magic vendor in Killorn Keep you hardly need to cast spells anymore, since using gold to recharge wands instead means you can use the wands instead of spending mana, thus eliminating the need to sleep to regain hit points and mana.
Heh, yeah it's a good way to cheese the time, especially since there's a lot of gold and it's otherwise pretty useless. I like casting my own spells though and not having to rely on wands.
