Ouch! Yeah… that sounds really evil. Total party wipe just because you stepped on the wrong trap? Can you at least load from an earlier save if that happens or would you just be hosed? And I guess they cannot be resurrected because a “rescue party” can’t get to the corpses stuck in the wall?

The thing is that the trap is in the second game, and also to fully describe it requires spoiling something about this game. I’ll reveal it here.

The second level of the dungeon has a poem inscribed in consecutive spots of the floor. It reads: “A dungeon’s dark” – “when it’s not lit” – “Look out! Or you’ll….” and the last spot has a pit trap.

But this is outdone by the second scenario, Knight of Diamonds, which has a similar poem, but it leads to a spot that immediately teleports the party into solid rock, killing them all utterly with no chance for rescue! And to field characters for the second scenario, they have to be created in the first game, and they must also have been trained up there because the second scenario is designed around having game-winning characters from Proving Grounds.

Most traps in Wizardry games don’t warn of their presence, but these two are exceptions, so maybe the designers though they were fair game.