Took up MM8 again for the first time in years, playing on an (aging) Vista PC. Started up a troll as the main character, and had gotten along to the point of uniting the factions / filling out promotion quests for the party. Saving a couple backups in the Save Games slots. Have Mok's patch, the game works fine with occasional errors thrown when trying to save, but I save frequently enough all that usually costs is a couple minutes' of gameplay to make it back up.And lo and behold this morning, I fire up the game and discover poor Bruce the Troll is 1173 years old! Have no idea 'how long' he had been suffering from this advanced age, and was trying to figure out if Vampires in Shadowspire or Basilisks in Murmurwoods could possibly have done this to him.
And, being a long ways from having Divine Restoration or the alchemy skill necessary to build up such a potion, I resorted to a game editor. Found a live link still working with mm8che.exe and was able to edit Bruce's age back to 25 (on the second try, had to remember to 'Run As Administrator' to get it to actually edit the .dod files correctly).
And looking at the character edit screen in mm8che.exe it hit me.... the YEAR in the game was 1173! Somehow, the year had been incorrectly transposed onto poor Bruce's age (I don't know if the two stats are adjacent in the hex file?).
So he was schlepping around with a might of 3, endurance of 0 and negative scores for intellect and personality. And the kicker was his condition was still shown as 'Good' on the character portrait (as opposed to 'Decrepit' or 'Fossilized'), so I have no idea when he got affected.
But somehow, in a corrupt save, the 'Year' in gametime/gameplay became the character's age. (Fortunately, only the first character in the party, his other cohorts were still in their 20s and 30s.
