Crimson Shroud Walkthrough, Chapter 1: Palace Grounds

Your first choice of the game is to either demand that Frea be waked, or to try and shake her awake; both options will ultimately result in the same outcome, but the scene is extended if you have Flint try to shake her before giving her the hilua powder. This does not seem to influence the ending.

Sinner's Gulch, The Sun-Gilt Palace of the Rahab

Palace Grounds, First Gate

Your first encounter with goblins will start with a decision, to spin and parry or lean away. Leaning away is more difficult; to parry you have to roll a 7 or higher, with 1d6 and 1d10 to make the roll with. Leaning will instead demand an 8 or higher with the same dice pool. This is just a tutorial on die rolling though, as if you avoid or parry the first arrow a second one will follow, and the story will proceed as normal.

Important treasure is highlighted in blue.

Encounter
x1 Goblin
HP 119 MP 95
Skills & Magic - Focus

x1 Goblin Hunter
HP 84 MP 104
Skills & Magic - Inspire

Treasure

x1 Bone Axe
x1 Vigor Leaf
x1 Vigor Berry
x1 Mana Leaf
x1 Bone Bow
x1 Silver Ring
x1 Vigor Bread
x1 Saint's Tincture

To cover the system in detail, Crimson Shroud relies on a combination of the Active Time Battle system now familiar to RPG enthusiasts, and on less standardized fare. Each character has their own time bar in battle, colored in green, which steadily fills up relative to their Weight stat. Each character also has their own pool of Hit Points and Magic Points; HP is always restored to full after each battle, while MP stays at what it was at the end. Characters gain MP when their attacks hit, when they take damage and through the use of certain skills. Each time you complete your character's turn, their bar drops to 0 and begins to fill up again.

Each character can take between 0 and 2 actions in a turn, but they cannot use an action twice in the same turn. Attack, Magic and Items are one group of action, and once one of those is chosen, they cannot be chosen again until the next turn arrives. Then there's Skills, which are an entirely separate action in their own right. At any time you can End Turn; if you end without taking action, the character's ATB bar will stay filled and their next turn will come more quickly. Ending after taking just one action will not have this effect, but you may want to do so in some fights to conserve MP. When you attack or use an offensive magic or skill, there are two factors involved. Your projected damage, and your chance to hit. Since hitting with an attack raises MP that can then be used on skills to improve accuracy, it's important to attack targets that you can hit reliably at the start of a fight, then improve accuracy with skills or magic and go for more powerful moves.

For example, in the first fight you can open by attacking with Lippi to fill his MP, then casting Focus to give him Enhanced Accuracy. Your accuracy is higher versus the Goblin rather than the Goblin Hunter, so attacking the Goblin takes priority.

In Crimson Shroud, there is no character level, nor level-ups. Giauque, Lippi and Frea each have their own base stats which will never change. That is not to say that the game is without character development; instead, you improve your characters by tutoring magic and skills to them after fights, and by equipping better equipment to them, which will also endow them with abilities. This is another key point to the system. There are only a very few abilities that your characters begin with innately. Other abilities instead come from wearing equipment, and taking that equipment off will cause you to lose the ability.

Status buffs are the key to combat. Frea is not your typical Black Mage that we know from Final Fantasy. Her role is not damage dealing, but improving the offense, defense, accuracy and evasion of your damage dealers, making her a very central character to the party. Ironically, that does make her a Black Mage--a Final Fantasy I Black Mage, that knows TMPR. Unlike with that Mage though, none of her buffs are bugged, so go ahead and rely on spells like Arms Lore and Enhance Attack to power up your party members. While Frea can acquire MP in the traditional ways, it's usually a waste of her turn to be attacking physically, so instead you want to use the Meditate skill to accrue MP. Meditate gives 15 MP + (1d8, 2d10, 1d12, 1d20.) In general you're looking at 40-50 MP at least, enough to supply two or more rounds of continuous casting. The game recommends that you cast Protect on Frea, but that isn't really necessary in this encounter, and you won't be doing it in every fight until you make it to the second floor. Her primary stats are Intelligence, Resistance and MP.

Giauque is your Fighter, and main damage dealer. Early in encounters you'll want to use his regular attack command to build up MP, then cast Inspire to give him Enhanced Attack, preferably stacking that along with Weapon Damage +10% from Frea's Arms Lore. In this first fight you'll be targeting the Goblin before the Hunter because your odds of hitting it are better, but later on Giauque will be learning moves like Focus for additional accuracy, and with careful tutoring Giauque can start battles with enough MP to cast use his skills before his attacks. His primary stats are Attack, Strength, Vitality and HP. That last one actually means that you don't need crazy Resistance for Giauque--even though it helps, he can soak up many powerful hits with those Hit Points.

Your final party member, Lippi, is something of a Red Mage. His damage output is not quite as heavy as Giauque's, nor is his magic output up to speed with Frea, but he can switch roles quickly, giving Giauque supporting fire or casting additional buffs while Frea is preoccupied, and managing minor healing. His primary stats are MP, Avoid and Dexterity, with the rest being supplementary, and Lippi is more characterized by having poor Vitality, Attack and HP. Of course, this is to your advantage--the party wouldn't really work if Giauque was your only damage dealer, nor if you had a second damage dealer and no fallback caster. Each of the characters balances each other out.

After the encounter you'll have your first chance to barter for treasure using Barter Points. My performance for this fight usually gives me around 300+ BP to use, but if you have trouble and can't keep everything then the key treasure you absolutely need to pick up from this fight is highlighted above. The Bone Axe will be very useful on the first floor, as it's your first real upgrade to Giauque. The Bloody Strike skill that it teaches deals melee dark damage and steals HP, letting you get as high as 100+ HP from an enemy and save on healing. The Axe's usefulness will drop significantly once you reach the floor boss due to enemies rapidly developing immunity to dark skills, but for now it's a great choice. More long term is the Silver Ring, which gives +15 maximum MP. While your first instinct may be to put it on Frea, she doesn't have any problems with MP and her accessory slots will be taken up by more important things. Instead I recommend it for Lippi, since with this and some equipment you'll find shortly you can turn him into a backup healer.

The Bone Bow is less useful than the Axe, but its Spread Shot does allow you to deal multitarget damage to soften up enemies for Giauque, which is one of the better ways to use Lippi's somewhat weaker offense.

Following this fight you can begin moving around the map, but you can only move to blue areas--the white ones are decoration. As you explore, additions will be added on to the map, giving you new areas to access. Exploration consumes MP, but there's no penalty for hitting 0. Our current path will be through Malora's Garden to Ruahnan's Ablutory, then into the Second Gate.

Palace Grounds, Ruahnan's Ablutory

There is no such thing as a treasure chest that is trapped that Lippi will not untrap for you. Go ahead and seize the spoils when prompted.

Treasure
x1 Aero Staff
x1 Thunder Staff
x2 Power Ring
x3 Vigor Berry

Beguiling Veil may appear tempting, but the Aero Staff is the best of the treasure and should be equipped immediately in preparation for an upcoming encounter. The loss of a nonelemental magic attack from the Mage's Staff is not really all that harmful, as Wither is a critically important spell. Being able to cast Impaired Defense is not an easy ability to come by, and makes enemies that much more vulnerable to Giauque's attacks or Lippi's Spread Shot. We'll be able to get more mileage out of these Power Rings later, but for now I recommend either putting both of them on Giauque or temporarily swapping Lippi's Silver Ring out to give both to him to catch him up in damage to Giauque and ease some of the difficulty of this floor's subboss.

Palace Grounds, Second Gate

Encounter
x2 Goblin
HP 119 MP 95
Skills & Magic - Focus

x1 Goblin Hunter
HP 84 MP 104
Skills & Magic - Inspire

Treasure
x1 Bone Axe
x1 Physician's Balm
x1 Vigor Leaf
x1 Mana Leaf
x1 Battle Knife
x1 Gambler's Silver
x1 Vigor Berry
x1 Saint's Tincture
x1 Healing Ring
x1 Ybarra Crown
x1 Reveal
x1 Angel's Wing

For your forced surprise attack, you'll roll 2d4 to determine how many turns the enemy is delayed for. This counts the turns of every character from both sides, so if you were to roll low enough then they would still get one turn out of the deal before all three of your characters' turns had come up. A note about d4 dice--there are three numbers on each side, and in Shroud the number rolled is the one displayed upright on all three faces. It can be a little difficult to wrap your head around initially, and it's not really necessary knowledge to play, but this is why you see three numbers on the in-game die but can still roll 2, 3 and 4 in this encounter.

Lippi will probably have enough MP left over even after the travel time to cast Focus, and Frea can start putting Wither on enemies and Arms Lore on allies while keeping her MP up with Meditate and Sacred Chant. This fight is a tutorial on adding dice bonuses, basically bolstering your chance to hit or the damage you deal by factoring in additional die that the player adds to the game. These die are kept in their own separate inventory, a dice pool, and are given to you automatically when you use abilities of different elements in sequence to form a combo.

One aspect of the die rolls used for Meditate and other skills that isn't explained is tilting, where you throw the dice with enough velocity that they hit the figurines on the top screen. This is difficult to pull off even occasionally, as no particular corner seems especially good for tilting, though I favor throwing the dice in a loose circle directed at the bottom left. Tilting will automatically give you an additional 1d10, 1d12 or 1d20 to add to your next accuracy or damage bonus.

At the end I typically have 400+ BP from this encounter. The Healing Ring and Ybarra Crown are the most important loot from this fight, as you can put the Healing and Silver Rings on Lippi for additional healing when Frea's occupied, and the Ybarra Crown is valuable for the MP and DEF bonuses to Frea, as well as Minotaur damage resistances. However, you may want to hold off on equipping the Crown until both Lippi and Giauque have learned Inspire, because the Crown replaces the Circlet and Arms Lore with it. This is also the first time you can trade dice for BP, which provides an easy out for getting rid of the many 1d4s that the combo system tends to flood your limited pool space with.

Palace Grounds, Western Cloister

Choose "Reminisce!" if you want to learn more of Giauque and Frea's background, then after the event sequence the Tower of Solis Antechamber will be added to your map.

Palace Grounds, Tower of Solis Antechamber

Choose to open the treasure chest. The magical lock will stop you, but your party will be ready to take on the subboss. Gear up and head into the Tower of Solis proper.

Palace Grounds, Tower of Solis

Encounter
x1 Minotaur
HP 286 MP 80
Skills & Magic - Despair, Focus, Bloody Strike, Spiral Scourge

Treasure
x1 Minotaur Horn
x1 Aqua Ring
x1 Vigor Berry
x1 Saint's Tincture

The Minotaur is your tutorial on battles at range, and on status buffs. Unfortunately, you want to roll as low as possible, but with 1d6, 1d12 and 1d8 it's not uncommon to roll something in the vicinity of 19 and have Giauque and Lippi both severely crippled by the disadvantage. Depending on how high you roll, this can become a battle of endurance, waiting for the range penalty to wear off. Frea's turn should open with Protect and Sacred Chant or Meditate all cast on herself, as the Minotaur is an extremely powerful monster. You'll need Enhanced Attack and Weapon Damage +10% on Giauque to really harm the Minotaur, and to top that off Frea will have her hands full healing the party, as Minotaur will be taking off 60-70 HP per turn with his Bloody Mace, or 90 with the Bloody Strike skill. This is one reason why turning Lippi into a backup healer is important, and why Bloody Strike is such an amazing skill for Giauque in this fight. Since the Minotaur also has the skill though, unlike previous monsters he can restore his own HP and extend the marathon battle.

The Minotaur loves to cast Despair to inflict Impaired Attack, which can be countered with Inspire, though that consumes one half of your turn and as the reverse is true with Despair countering Inspire, you can end up going back and forth with Lippi, Giauque and the Minotaur for quite some time. He's smart, too--the Minotaur never casts Despair on Frea, as she'll only deal 1 damage per hit in the first place. His Mace will also sometimes paralyze characters, putting those Angel's Feathers in your inventory to use. Spiral Scourge is his special attack, hitting all party members for 90+ damage and inflicting poison.

You may have to repeat the fight to get enough BP to grab the Minotaur Horn. In addition to the stat bonuses it gives, the Horn also gives Syphon Heart, a very similar skill to Bloody Strike. Since the Horn is an accessory rather than a weapon, this alleviates the Bone Axe going out of style after this floor. The Aqua Ring is ideal for Frea, giving a +25 max MP bonus and the ability to both give and dispel the poisoned status effect.

For tutoring, Heroism on Giauque will let you take that Circlet off of Frea for the Ybarra Crown, while Despair will let you cripple the enemy's attack the way the Minotaur just did yours. I chose to go for Heroism, as Wither is in my experience more effective than Despair, especially since you'll soon have access to party-wide healing. Lippi's Hex can inflict Impaired Accuracy, but in this run I went for Heroism for both damage dealers. Frea will not have an extensive career with damaging magic, hence why I wasn't big on Attune Magic, so this may be a good opportunity to pick up Magic Paling if you feel the need for it.

After the fight you'll pick up the Key of Solis accessory. Don't equip it--it's a key item that we'll be losing shortly. Head out into the Tower of Solis Antechamber.

Palace Grounds, Tower of Solis Antechamber

Open the chest with your newfound Key of Solis, and the last leg of the tutorial chapter will begin.

Treasure
x10 Pure Azoth
x1 Light Staff
x1 Dark Staff
x1 Hero's Resolve

The Azoth is the most valuable thing here, as it opens up item crafting at last. Crafting is very simple; you can only meld items of the same name, and each time you do so you lose one Pure Azoth. Don't fret over it, as Azoth is found all of the place and enemies practically hemorrhage it in their loot. The item coming out of the meld will be stronger than the original, and can be melded with further items of its class to improve upon it further. For example, you should have two Bone Axes by now--meld them in the Items menu, and you'll have a Bone Axe +1 with superior stats. Should you pick up another Bone Axe, you can meld that to the Bone Axe +1 for a Bone Axe +2, and keep going up until you have a Bone Axe +9 (don't do this.) You can also meld spellbooks to items, but it's not very useful this early in the game and the second spell will always be the one that is replaced by the new spell--so of course, the second spell is almost always the best one.

We're not done here yet. Head back into the Tower of Solis.

Palace Grounds, Tower of Solis

Select "Search the room from top to bottom." Lippi will discover a lever in the Tower, and a door in the Eastern Cloister will open up.

Palace Grounds, Eastern Cloister

Encounter
x1 Goblin
HP 119 MP 95
Skills & Magic - Despair, Focus

x1 Goblin Hunter
HP 84 MP 104
Skills & Magic - Bloody Hail, Inspire

x1 Goblin Shaman
HP 75 MP 185
Skills & Magic - Fire Arrow, Jinx, Meditate

Treasure
x1 Kris
x1 Studded Armor
x1 Buckler
x1 Vigor Berry
x1 Longbow
x1 Hunter's Cloak
x1 Bronze Helm
x1 Gambler's Silver
x1 Flame Staff
x1 Wizard's Robes
x1 Healing Ring
x1 Mana Berry

This is your first ambush. To start, you roll 2d4 to see how many turns the opponent will get over you. Luckily, with only d4s in play this is one roll that's at least weighted in your favor. Most of these enemies are already familiar to you, but in previous fights the monsters were programmed to not use certain skills, and the Shaman is a new addition. You should prioritize taking out the Goblin Shaman here, as Jinx inflicts Impaired Accuracy and will force you to divert turns to recasting Focus. The Goblin Hunter's Bloody Hail will siphon HP just like with Bloody Strike, but it's ranged so the Hunter has improved accuracy no matter who he's after.

The strategy for this fight is fairly cut and dry, casting Wither on the Shaman and Focus with Inspire to maximize your output and take out the key enemies quickly. Once the Goblin Shaman is cut down, the battle should quickly fall in your favor.

Now that you have access to crafting, you can meld those two Power Rings and Healing Rings together and consolidate your equipment a bit. The Buckler will contribute to Giauque's new shield, melding it with your existing one for a Buckler +1.

With the way opened from our progress back at the Tower of Solis, it's time to proceed to the next chapter. However, if you had already cleared out the goblin ambush before heading to the Tower of Solis, then you're in for a very different fight at the chapter's end...

Encounter: (Secret) Chapter Boss
x1 Zombie Minotaur
HP 286 MP 80
Skills & Magic - Inspire, Despair, Focus, Bloody Strike, Spiral Scourge

Treasure
x1 Minotaur Tongue
x1 Bloody Mace
x1 Heal
x1 Saint's Tincture

The original Minotaur was a tutorial on battle-at-range, and this one does that job for elemental resistances. As an undead creature, the Zombie Minotaur now takes 0 damage from Bloody Strike. So while the battle is easier from the lack of an attack penalty, you've also lost one of your main means of dealing damage. Thankfully, you've also gained others. Once Protect, Wither, and your support spells are all cast and ready, Frea can switch over to casting Aeroslash, which the Zombie Minotaur is critically weak to. It will take as much damage from one Aeroslash as it would from Giauque if Giauque had Weapon Damage +10% and Enhanced Attack thrown on him over an Impaired Defense Minotaur, and this greatly speeds up the process of damage dealing. If you were able to outlast the Minotaur, then you can outlast its resurrected corpse.

The Minotaur Tongue can be equipped to teach Syphon Mind to steal MP, and it boosts max MP by 35. Meanwhile, the Bloody Mace is a much-improved Bone Axe, with 38 attack and Bloody Strike. The Tongue costs a whopping 300 BP though, and with your turnout generally at 400 BP for this fight, it's going to be one or the other. I would recommend the Tongue for long-term use, as the Bloody Mace is going to be invalidated in the very next chapter.

Next time, the kid gloves will come off as Crimson Shroud sees you out of tutorial land and into the uppermost caverns of Rahab.