Perhaps I am unclear. I do not find the character Kieran stupid in any way. I like the feline look, he is really cool.
The stupid thing about it is - sorry for being harsh - that he has got so low stats that he is a lot harder to play. Not more challenging in the way of having to rethink ones strategy, just harder in an irritating way.

The character stats are what's "stupid", not the character.

He was my first choice at plyaying the game, only I had to start over and choose someone else because I got so bored with reloading.

Having just checked a F.A.Q on the game I found this about him,

Kieran (Huline)
Kieran's stats may be low, but don't be fooled. He is very fast and needs the
least recovery time after attacking. If you are a quick player Kieran can really
work out. Even his magic can grow fast once you start gaining mage levels.
If you are an experienced player, then give Kieran a chance.


So it would seem his best stat is Dex and that he can attack faster then the others and has good magic skills when you start leveling them.

True, he's about 20% faster than other characters (one more attack in 5 or so), but it doesn't matter much: His low might score makes the extra attacks almost useless. And I've never heard of a Dex stat?

His magic skills are better than Michaels, but worse than Conrads, so not much gained there.

Anyway, sorry for ranting, I just got so confused as to why they made him like that. I seriously thought the protection skill of 6 was an erronous 16.

As I said I don't know a lot about this game, however Dex would have something to do with Ranged attacks I think. Just saying don't write him off. As the F.A.Q says don't write him off just because of his stats there is more to it then that.

I'm not writing him off, actually I'm going through the game these days with him as my choice of character :)

I may be a ranter, but it just seemed so pointlessly done by Westwood. Thank you for your answers.

My pleasure, I enjoy talking to people about stuff like this. It has made me want to play the game again, crank up my cd version.

It is a bit hard to say why Westwood put him in there like that, but I would say he might have been in there as a sort of expert character. Takes more skill and knowledge of the game to play him well sort of thing. Or they might have just wanted a more Personality based character rather then skills, they liked him enough or the fans did to make him the cannon character to beat the game.

Well, it certainly does take a bit more forward planning to play him. As for the Urbish Mines, the level with the two-headed flying snakes was only beaten because I had saved up a lot of swarms and also emptied the wand of fireballs at them, along with channeling my remaining mana into the green skull.

The snail-like monster right at the mine entrance was almost impossible. I had to move in, use the green skull, then move out and close the door VERY quickly, then rest and repeat in order to get anywhere. Took many tries.

I'm not sure how I'll beat Castle Cimmeria.

If you want to see a good player play through the game with him have a look at this Kikoskia's LP of Lands of Lore. Maybe watching when he gets to that part and see what he does.

I can see he had even more trouble defeating the Larchon than I did :D

Settings to run smoother
 

I have the talkie version of LOL on a disc and managed to get it to run on DosBox, but have a question. It was pretty choppy so I raised the cycles to around 10,000, which helped some. Does anyone have some generic recommended DosBox settings for this game?

Also, sometimes as the character is about to speak, or I point to something that has a verbal explanation, there is a lag while I hear the cd "kick in" and the voice begins shortly after. Is this normal? Thanks alot!