MM1 Guide – Secret of the Inner Sanctum

MM1 Guide for Secret of the Inner Sanctum strives to slow-reveal the info you need so you can explore and solve the game in conjunction with your own mapping process. We choose not to use comprehensive map spoilers.

Creating your Party

If you want guidance on creating a party, take a look at our Party Planning page.

Building Strength

Check out the Building Strength page to learn about grind spots and side-quests.

Getting Started

You start out your adventure in the town of Sorpigal. Every time you check into the Inn you will Save your game and also Reset the static encounters in the town. If you close down the game without checking in at the Inn, upon return, you will start at the point where you last checked in to the Inn. Thus, if you have a bad encounter you have the option to close the game and reload from your last save.

All new characters will start with an unequipped Club. You will need to get into the habit of (S)earching after every combat. Chests or Sacks may drop from defeated foes but once you step away, it disappears. Chests and Sacks will contain weapons, armor, items, gold, and diabolical traps. Be sure to (e)quip your Clubs and seek out better weapons. Gold is short at the beginning so you are not able to just buy everything. I suggest you only buy range weapons for your Robber and Archer, the rest you will find in Chests along the way.

Raising a Level is an important activity that you must do when you are able. It cost Gold to raise a level in the Training Hall. If you do not have enough Gold you can keep on fighting and you will keep collecting XP so there is no risk of losing XP if you cannot afford to Level up. However, it is important to level up as soon as you can so that your power grows, allowing you to explore more regions.

You need to map out each region that you explore and keep track of any clues you learn along the way. You will need to fight many encounters to earn Gold (g) and Experience (XP) so you can grow in strength. It is possible to explore too fast and find foes that you are not yet ready to face. As an example, you will likely be level 4 or 5 before you venture out of Sorpigal.

Questing in VARN

All the details necessary to complete each quest is hidden by default but available within this table. Tap or Click on a Quest Row to discover more details.

List of Main Quests

Exploring VARN

If you prefer to just start exploring VARN and mapping out the surface and dungeons then refer to this table which lists details about each region. This table shows, and is sorted by, relative difficulty between the areas.

Reveal Map Details

ES refers to Encounter Size and larger number indicates potential for larger encounters.
MG refers to Monster Group and this indicates which Foes may randomly spawn in an encounter. Higher MG number means more difficult foes. You can see the MG value for each Foe in the Foes Database.
Teleport, Town Portal, or Surface spells are blocked from use by unknown forces in some dungeons and castles.

Sorted here by MG value Ascending to show the relative difficulty progression between maps, considering the Random Encounters.

Attribution

How to obtain a copy of this game:

eBay link – PC and C64 versions (1986)
GOG link – Digital PC version (includes games 1-6)