You can have no more than six in your party, but you can have up to 18 in the roster. Normally, you would create exactly six characters, use those, and not ever need to create more. See the strategy tips page for guidelines about assembling a party.

Druids and assassins cannot be created from scratch. You have to create a knight, rogue, wizard, or sorcerer, build that character up with the stats that a druid or assassin requires, then retrain him.

While viewing the character that has the items in question, hit the 'Trade Items' button. Both the giver and receiver must be in your party for this to work.

Only the first three characters can engage monsters in hand-to-hand combat. Similarly, monsters can only engage the first three characters in hand-to-hand combat. The last characters in your party can only fight the monsters if they are using long-range weapons.

Question marks mean you aren't sure what exact kind of monster you are facing. If you see ^?Humanoids^?, for example, they might be orcs, and then again they might be kobolds. Sometimes you'll discover what they are part way through the battle. Increasing the vision and wisdom of your characters can help you identify monsters more often.

Ten.

Figuring that out is part of the game!

There are 36 sorcerer spells and 36 wizard spells. Sorcerers and wizards can complete their respective suites of spells by character level 17 at the earliest. Druids learn both spell sets and can complete both by level 23 at the earliest.

No. He'll get another chance to learn it next level.

See the navigation question on the strategy guide page.

Gwuils come from a novel I wrote. In that book, it's a race of transformed humans, short, small, and baggy, with dark-gray skin, whose bodies cannot properly maintain themselves. As time goes by, they almost self-destruct, their mental faculties in particular slowly ceasing to operate properly, until they can do no more than sit and stare vacantly. Gwuils are not viable life forms.

Why I chose to include them as a race in the original UNIX version of Murkon's Refuge, I don't know, but I faithfully moved them over to this web-based version of the game as well. In the game, they possess none of the crippling qualities of the Gwuils from the book, so do not fear to create Gwuils to be part of your party.

If it's a piece of equipment, hit the 'Examine Inventory' button while viewing the character who is carrying it. If it's an invokable object, then the only way to know what it does is to invoke it and see. If it's a "Broken Item" or an "Empty Stone," it does nothing, and you can throw it away. If it's an object you see in the shop (and therefore not one you can examine) then the only way to find out is to buy it first.

A couple of objects may be invoked to cast spells whose uses are not immediately apparent. If this happens, just go with the flow. You may discover by accident what the spell does; if not, eventually one of your spellcasters will learn a similar spell, and then you can find out what that does by clicking 'View Spells' from the 'View Character' screen and then 'Show Details' if necessary.

Yes. There's no reason to book it back to town just because a guy can level up. Sometimes -- especially after a character changes classes -- a character will gain multiple levels at a time. When that happens, resting at the inn will page you through however many levels that character has enough experience to gain. The short answer is that experience is never lost if you don't rest at the inn promptly to level up.

Insufficient agility.

The success of all three of these things are dependent on the monster's paralysis resistance. Some monsters are resistant to paralysis, seizure, and critical hits, while others are totally immune. Creatures of flesh and blood are far more likely to be prone to these types of attacks than creatures like wraiths and zombies.