This is a largely empty sector, other than the occasional fire giant and a strange troop of characters. This is a good sector to earn additional experience points if you want because the giants will continuously respawn. The giants are slow and ponderous, but can be dangerous in groups, so advance slowly and try not to draw too many on the screen at once.

The strange group of characters (Chinchilla, Merlinious, Tibbet and Toop the Brave) will attack you and flee when they're on the verge of defeat, earning you 7,500 experience points for driving each one off.

Right at the entrance to the fire giant fortress, you'll be surrounded by a couple of elite fire giants and three regular fire giants. As soon as you're noticed, retreat outdoors and try to lure them to a much more defensible position. There's a natural bottleneck just outside their fortress, which will allow you to engage them sequentially. If you're feeling cocky you can engage them inside the door, but don't move inward, or you'll just attract additional giants. Their size prevents them from moving through narrow doors easily. When they're grouped closely together, holy smite is very effective as well.

Don't bother trying to manipulate any of the gongs or the apparatus at the room at the far end of the first level until you get the wardstones, which can be found in the fountains in the room at the northwest and northeast corners of the level. The northwest stone is surrounded by traps, while touching the northeast stone will activate three golems (adamantite, clay, magic). The magic golem is immune to spells and magical weapons, so you must use normal weapons to dispatch it. You likely won't have any on you, but the fire giants carry normal weapons, so you can grab a few off their corpses. The fountain also contains Elminster's Ecologies, a book that will tell you the strengths and weaknesses of dense puddings, fire trolls, fission slime, magic golems, and marilith demons. When you have the wardstones, touch the gongs in the rooms to the left and right of the entranceways, and you'll be rewarded with 5,000 experience points per party member. If you want to do the gongs one at a time (which is prudent, since they open up the rooms otherwise shielded by forcefields), ensure you have the hammer wardstone for the gong on the left and the skull wardstone prior to touching the one on the right. In addition to the guardians already present in those rooms (fire salamanders, fell cats, flaming skulls, and burning men), as soon as you open the fountain to get the additional wardstones, you'll be assaulted by a second wave. In the right-hand (eastern) room, the second wave will consist of bone fiends and an erinyes (lesser baatezu). Once you have all four wardstones, touch the strange machine, and you'll earn 20,000 experience points per party member and can advance to the second level.

The first level. This map reveals the layout of the first level of Yaga-shura's lair. Once you get by the heavily guarded entrance, the two rooms initially blocked by forcefields contain your most formidable challenges.

On the second level, there'll be a couple of fire giants waiting at the top of the stairs, but they're isolated, and the narrow staircase should let your fighters handle them in sequence. There's a trap right at the top of the stairs and narrow passageways on each side of the staircase. Send one character equipped with boots of speed and a ring of fire resistance (or protected from fire by spell) through the narrow passageways to explore inside and lure the pair of fell cats patrolling inside back to your waiting party and away from the fire giants inside the chamber (they're too large to follow through the passageway). Send a fast character inside again and get the fire giants to chase you to one of the small passageways. They'll stay there trying to get through, which lets them be picked off by the ranged weapons of the rest of your party (they'll also line up nicely for lightning bolts). One of the fire giants, Berenn (40,500 experience points), is a cleric who'll cast spells like aerial servant and summon elemental. To avoid his spells, cast silence on him, and he'll line up for the slaughter near the narrow opening like his brethren.

At the back of the room the giants were in is a brazier surrounded by traps and holding Yaga-Shura's heart. Grab it and collect 20,000 experience points per party member. Go through the doors on the right-hand side and let the slave woman go for 15,000 experience points per party member and to obtain some additional information on Yaga Shura. One of the metal plates behind her (hit the tab key to see which one) contains some magic items, but is trapped. His bed has a trapped chamber as well, containing his journal and a bag of plenty +1.

Traps in the fortress:

• On the stairs directly forward of the entrance room, on the right-hand side
  
• At the entrance to the room on the right of the entrance room
  
• At the top of the second set of stairs on the left
  
• Several are in the room with the lava fountain in the northwest corner of the level, surrounding the fountain
  
• On the second level, there's a trap right at the top of the entry stairs
  
• In front of both of the big sets of doors in the chamber past the entry stairs
  
• Two surrounding the burning pit in that room
  
• One just left of the center of that room
  
• One near the first fountain through the (unusable) double entrance doors