Computer games - Moria (and other roguelikes)

Would you build a town above
a huge dungeon of monsters?

Moria (which you can download for free from here or here) is a roguelike computer game that I played on my Atari ST.  The premise was simple.  You were a hero who had to descend into the dungeons of Moria (a dungeon populated with a multitude of dangerous and powerful monsters) from the town that is built on top of it(?) and fight your way to level 50 where the Balrog may be (you may have to go lower to find it) and then kill it.

I used to be completely addicted to this game.  Completely.  It took ages to get the experience, stats and magical items before I was even near to killing the Balrog.  I admit that I did it via save scumming too.  The computer would delete your character file if you died so I would always copy it to another place on the disk.  Here I a few memories...

You had to haggle for literally everything,
including a ration with an asking price of 5gp.
You probably could haggle him down to 3gp.
Great use of game time.

I decided to play a human ranger  and doggedly tried to kill the Balrog.  Eventually, I was victorious with my Holy Avenger battle axe, but it took a while.  Here are a few things I remember from Moria.

I had to learn what the characters meant.  Everything in the game was represented by ASCII characters with letters representing monsters.  I learnt to be wary of a B (Balrog) or a D (Ancient dragon.)

Haggling took forever!  Forunately in later editions, they just dropped the price to whatever the final asking price before just offering the asking price.

Stinking cloud would get rid of all the mice (the rs)

I constantly bought scrolls of *Enchant Weapon* and *Enchant Armour* in the hope that this time, they would improve the weapon.

The delay on a scroll of recall was sometimes deadly.

I learnt fast with a horde of lice that area effect weapons are really useful

I cast remove curse on a ring of weakness but left it on because it looked pretty, not realising that the effect still stayed.

You could even do some mining.

My tactics at higher levels was to have two rings of speed (which made me faster than everyone except the Balrog) and bash monsters so that they were stunned and couldn't move.  It worked as long as monsters with powerful ranged weapons, such as dragons, were not able to use them.

I played a human ranger (a warrior who can cast mage spells in game terms) and required an extra 50% experience for my versatility.  It was worth it, though.

Things you really need:  Rings of Speed (x2), the see invisible ability (part of my holy avenger axe), remove poison magic, remove curse magic, freedom of movement (also part of my holy avenger axe), restore life levels potions, potions of healing, scrolls of Word of Recall (but don't forget that they have a delay), a sustain stat item (also part of my Holy Avenger axe.  The Holy Avenger ability is very useful.)

Ancient Domains of Mystery (ADOM)
is a little more complicated than Moria.

I found this game addictive because there were plenty of items to discover and since each was randomly generated, (and regenerated every time you return) there was plenty of exploring to do.  There were also a wide range of monsters.  Each character could have different descriptions (a p for humanoid, for example could have many descriptions such as a filthy street urchin to an evil iggy.)  There were also plenty of things to deal with - mining, disarming traps, fighting (plenty of it), picking locks and many many more things to do.

There are tons and tons of roguelike games which vary greatly - some have deep stories, some have graphics, some are quick and easy and some are based on a Fighting Fantasy book.  You can find the Roguelike wiki here.

To finish off, here are a couple of Moria moments from Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring in Moria ASCII:

Boromir takes a sneaky peak.

Gandalf vs the Balrog

Computer games - Mystic Well

Mystic Well is a 1st person RPG that came with issue 28 of the ST Format magazine.  It is a game that I really got into and it showed me the value of exploring and discovering.


It's a very basic and straightforward RPG, its creators not wanting to burden you with complications like instructions or telling you what the hell is going on.  It saves you the effort of having to sit through an introduction and goes straight to telling you to reroll stats or to pick a class for your character.  I like it when my games are to the point.  


You have four stats - strength, agility, reason and vigour which, have some affect on the game.  OK, I expect strength is how much damage you do, agility relates to your chances of getting hit, reason affects your spellcasting ability(?) and vigour definitely affects how many health points you get when you level up.  

Am I doing well?  At least my character is smiling.

You also get four other stats which change when you wear different types of armour or use different spells, but they just have weird symbols followed by the letters AP and I have no idea what they do.  But I try to increase them anyway.

There is a bar for health, energy, food and water.  You need to eat and drink to stay healthy.  Energy decreases whenever you perform an action and you cannot do anything other than move when it is 0.  It increases with time, its speed being dependent on your food and water level(?)

Still, it's fun to discover!

You have the choice of four classes which get different bonuses from the available weapons and armour and they each have their own special skills, which you activate if you press the diamond icon while their right hand is empty.  The warrior can perform a big attack (I think; it does reduce energy to 0), the thief can jump two squares (quite handy to get over pits), the priest can bless themselves and heal themselves simultaneously and the wizard can't do anything.  Ah, that must be it!  The wizard can cast spells (written on blue paper with yellow bits on the top and bottom) without destroying them after the first time they cast them.  Nice work, wizard.

So it's not totally user friendly, but what it did do was make me work to find things out and experiment.  In some weird twist to the story, plunging me into a dungeon with no instructions, aim or items made every mundane act an act of discovery.  Wizards don't get the same bonuses from leather armour as warriors.  If you press the diamond button while holding a club, you can throw it.  This wall is fake.  Some mirrors are magical and show you a map of the dungeon (you have to find out which ones by holding one in your right hand and, yes, pressing the diamond button) etc.

Eventually, after lots of experimenting, I managed to clear the various levels of the castle and make it to a crazy level with blue walls, dragons and crazy robots.  I fought my way through this level to find a room where a floating yellow skull attacked me mercilessly.  I killed it to get a congratulations message and then the game continued.  Was that it?  Did I just win?  If so, why am I still playing on?

This means game over.

Despite (and perhaps because of) its lack of clarity, I enjoyed Mystic Well because it had a huge area to explore with lots of good items scattered around the area (the item distribution was done well.  There were plenty of good rewards after difficult bits and the monster advancement was good).  It also gave me a buzz, when I discovered what certain items did and when I discovered a new hidden place.

If you want to get ahead quickly, then you can find a fireball flinging sword if you fall down a couple of pits, so if you find the pits and can survive the fall, then you can get ahead.  I also remember a way of finding a piece of twisted mithral when you are at a low level, which, if you throw it  in the well, will raise your level to fourteen.

Cheer up.  Here's an
ST Format...

I need to apply this level of discovery to other gamebooks.  I always got a buzz when I discovered the way of overcoming a problem I had been unable to solve.  The one that sticks out in my mind the most was the Toadmen in Creature of Havoc.  I had the solution, I had just got so immersed in the book that I had forgotten to think about which paragraph I was on.  I was on 287 and since I was with Grog, I should have subtracted 52 from the paragraph number.  When I read the paragraph, I enjoyed reading the first line:

'In the heat of the battle, you have forgotten all about the litte half orc...'


I certainly had.  I wonder if Steve Jackson knew this?

So the lesson from Mystic Well is that keeping information secret in order to be found out is fun.  I won't do it to the extent that Mystic Well did (and I can't in a gamebook due to the differences in format.  Imagine if Fighting Fantasy didn't have a rules section.)  But I must remember that discovery is fun :).

You can play Mystic Well on the PC if you download an Atari ST emulator (such as STEem) and then download the file.

Bonus extra review


The above link goes to a review written at the time.  I love the following quote:

'The game itself was, as far as I could tell, well enough written
and ran smoothly with very little disk accessing.'

This bought back a whole load of memories of my Atari ST where I would play for five minutes at a time before the computer accessed the disc.  A little green light would flicker and the computer would make a soft thudding noise as the game would freeze, waiting for its next set of instructions.  Mystic Well did not need to access the disc very much.  It's funny what people used to look for in a game.  

Finally, if you are Jim Todd, the creator of Mystic Well, please get in touch as I'd love to know what all the stats mean and what the spell Mnemonic enhancer does.

Should it always be good to be lucky?

This post is based on a post I made in the official Fighting Fantasy Forum back in February 2010.


However, if you are lucky, shouldn't you always get the 'good' result even if it looks bad? I know your aim was probably to avoid the missiles but if fate is smiling upon you then shouldn't you be hit if you pass? Even if it looks bad at the time, you will ultimately win so surely its the result you want. Or should being luck rolls not look at the 'bigger picture' of the book and only show a short term gain? 

Here's an example:
At the beginning of Black Vein Prophecy, if you fail a luck roll, you get struck by something that gives you multicoloured scales. At the time, it looks bad, but you actually need them to win.

You are walking down a corridor in a dungeon and a trapdoor opens in front of you. You can test your luck to avoid it. If you do avoid it, you carry on down the corridor and get killed by a horde of zombies. If you don't avoid it, you fall into another level of the dungeon and lose stamina. Should you fall in the trapdoor if you are lucky or unlucky? 

Here's another one (this is purely hypothetical as I wouldn't do this in a book):

You are on paragraph 1 in a book and trapped in a dungeon. You are searching for an exit to the surface, which depends on luck. If you find it, you get to the surface and ultimately lose the game. If you don't, you have to go deeper into the dungeon and fight a tough monster but you find an item which means you win at the end. Should you find the secret door if you are lucky or unlucky?

Opinions please?

September is the busiest month

Good day to you all!

Sorry to drag you away from reading all the Windhammer competition entries or the Tin Man's September update or reading how the Adventurer Games Guild is doing.  I just have a short message for you all.

As a teacher, my workload varies between six week summer holidays to frenzied activity throughout the year.  September is one of those times of frenzied activities as the school year is just starting which means that instead of trawling the web to find everything new gamebook related (speaking of which, here's Anjin in Exile, a blog by Windhammer entrant Martin Runyon) to posting things from my stockpile of posts which I have been saving up for the rainy (an occasionally, snowy) days of the winter months.  It also means that I might be a bit slow in replying to emails and comments.  I'm still thinking of you all, I just have my day job to concentrate on. 

There's still plenty to look at though - I've written a new review for the Lone Tigers and if you are stuck for choice, have a look at the Gamebook Feed.

Quest for the Aubern Pelt review

The front picture

I was intoduced to this one page gamebook (which you can download from Demian's page on it) by Jake Care on his post about one page gamebooks.  After playing his enjoyable little gamebook, I went over to the page and downloaded the images to give the gamebook a go.  Despite being on two sides of A4 (or possibly because of being on two sides of A4 - as Mark Rosewater says, restrictions breed creativity), the gamebook contains a lot of innovative elements that provide the player with lots of choice.

The one page adventure is available for free as two image downloads from Demian's gamebook page on it, so have a go at it before reading the review.

Theme 1/5

Since the authors had to fit a whole adventure onto one page, something had to give and so the background is rather light.  However, they devote 1/6 of the adventure to it.  A selkie has had her pelt stolen from her by a sidhe and she cannot live beneath the waves without it.  It is up to you to enter a dungeon full of Sidhe and get the pelt back.  Pretty straightforward but it's pretty good for 1/3 of an A4 side of paper.

Illustration 3/5

There is only one actual illustration to the one page gamebook and that is a drawing of the back of a lovely young woman who appears to have nothing but an otter to cover her up.  The authors, however, make good use of pictures in their rules systems.  You have to draw yourself a map of the dungeon using the diagrams provided which, whilst not too pretty, seem to make a which door choice a bit more entertaining, especially as you know that there will be a room behind the door and not a deadly booby trap.  The combat system is also shown using a picture, listing all the manoveres you can make and whether they are offensive or defensive.  Also, instead of getting a list of spells, you are given a grid of runes which make up spells that you can cast in the book.  As you use the runes, you cross them off from your grid.  An inspired idea.

They say a picture paints a thousand words and this certainly rings true when writing a one page gamebook.  With an innovative use of pictures, the authors have come up with a magic system, a mapping system and a complex combat system on two sides of A4 and still have room for a bit of nudity too.  A lot of ful length gamebooks could only boast one of those things.

Gameplay 4/5

Once again, James and Chris have managed to pack a lot of choices into two sides of A4.  The use of the map means that the gamebook is very free roaming.  The book also has 34 paragraphs which also offer lots of choices.  You can cast a spell or fight a monster.  Do you eat the gruel or use up runes to cast a spell on it first?

The gamebook also offers you interesting puzzles with combat.  In combat, you have a choice of actions that you can take which are ranked in order of power.  For example, backstab is the most powerful attack mode and dodging is the most powerful defence option that you have (monsters have alert which is more powerful).  After you have made an action, you have a limited choice of actions that you can take in the next round depending on what you did.  So for example, if you chose to backstab the monster in round 1, then you have to wait in round 2 which is the weakest action to take.

The puzzle comes from the fact that you are given all of the monster's manouvers so you need to work oout the sequence of manouvers that will kill the monster and cause you the least damage or you could fight defensively until the monster runs out of manouvers and so it flees (very useful of you enounter a monster in a dead end that you don't have to kill).  The combat system also incorporates the magic system by having two spells that you can cast as your actions.  I enjoyed working out which actions to take in the combat system, especially agaisnt the mimc which takes whatever action you took in the last round.  Try and work that one out!

Exposition 1/5

This, along with the theme are the two things that were cut to fit the adventure into two sides of A4.  After the introductory paragraph and the rules, you get very little description of the dungeon.  The paragraphs on the encounter table aren't written in full sentences and the adventure doesn't even describe what a sidhe or a selkie is (although they are mythological creatures so you could look them up) and it does not describe the effects of the spells you are casting.  Much like the Take That You Fiend spell in Tunnels and Trolls, you have to imagine how the defensive combat spell defends you and why casting a spell lets you avoid combat (is it invisibility, or does it grant speed to help you run away or does it teleport the monster away?  It's up to you).  I suppose you could write your own narrative of what happened if that's what you're into.

Rules 4/5

As I've stated in gameplay, this adventure has fitted in a combat system, spell system and way of exploring a dungeon, all on two sides of A4.  There is also a character creation system where you distribute 10 points between magic and stamina and cross of a rune for each stamina point you take.  However magic points aren't used in the adventure and I never ran out of runes, so I guess a stamina of 10 is best.  Whether this was an error or that magic would have been used in later adventures, I'm not sure.  The rune system is also slightly inconvenient as runes are randomly placed on a grid.  It may have been clearer to have a tally for each rune which would save me having to hunt around to make sure I have all the runes I need.

However, these are minor niggles in an excellent and innovative rule system that covers less than two sides of A4 paper.

Conclusion 13/25

This is a great adventure and a good education for someone who wants to push the boundaries of solo gamebooks whilst simultaneously saving space.  Yes, the score is mediocre, but lets remember that this adventure covers 2 sides of A4 paper.  It lost points on exposition and background because the authors had to cut something and these are two things that the players could provide themselves if they wanted.  A great little adventure.  I would like to see more in this style.

Five stupid decisions that you can make in a gamebook

If you don't get one, it will reflect
badly on you.  

For the April A to Z, I wrote about enemies you may face.  However, there are times when you are your own worst enemy in gamebooks.  Here are ten of them in no particular order.  

1)  Not picking up a mirror in Portal of Evil.

I lost the count of the number of times you have the opportunity to pick up a mirror or mirror like object in Portal of Evil.  When you finally meet Horfack, you realise why it is so important.  You also realise that Peter Darvill-Evans is being very helpful.  What would you rather face - a mindless skill 8 stamina 10 zombie or a powerful skill 10 stamina 20 fighter who reduces you skill by 2?

He hasn't done it
for a reason.

2)  Losing the map in the Tyrant's Tomb.

How blatant does Dave Morris have to be when he says 'Guard it (the map) with your life as you cannot complete your quest without it.'  If you don't have it when you reach the desert then your bleached bones deserve to turn to dust in the wasteland.

3)  Throwing Singing Death into the pit in Sword of the Samurai.

You've come all this way for the sword, it boosts your initial stats and you still throw it away and destroy it.  Even the demon Ikiru isn't that evil.

You're batty if you do.

4)  Swimming to the surface in Demons of the deep.

You have gills.  You can see a big underwater city.  If you swim to the surface you will be seen by the ship load of evil pirates who have just thrown you overboard to drown.  How blatant does the clue need to be?  Explore Atlantis.

5)  Putting on a slave collar in Chasms of Malice

There are plenty of random deaths in Chasms of Malice but putting on a collar  that only the slaves of your enemy wear is not random and although you probably will die in about four paragraphs time, you shouldn't die  in this way.

Windhammer is here! Windhammer is here!

Hello all!

As Aston Saylor has already noted, September brings us much goodness in the world of gamebooks.  The entries to the Windhammer competition have now been published.  All 22 of them!  Yes, you read that correctly, 22 wonderful gamebooks to delight our eyes.

Betweeen now and the 7th November, we can all vote on our 2 favourite gamebooks by sending them to  vote@arborell.com.  We can also send feedback about the gamebooks to  feedback@arborell.com.

It would be great if you could jot down a few notes for the entrants about your thoughts and feelings on their books.  I'm sure all writers appreciate constructive criticism. 

And that's it from me.  I don't want to drag you away from the excellent entries to this years Windhammer competition.  Enjoy the read!