Unlimited Adventures: Trial of Champions (1993)

Another victory screen. This could become addictive.

         

I promised I wasn't finished with Unlimited Adventures. I love that it's always there, that it will always be there, whenever I get the Gold Box yen.

    

This time around, I decided to play one of the earliest adventures listed on the sheet that Abacos sent me, Wraithstar's "Trial of Champions" from April 1993. It's one of eight adventures from that month, and it seemed like it might be just right for my Level 5-6 party (the one that had finished "The Restoration of Gundahab"), as its starting characters are Levels 6-7. As it happened, I found it a bit too hard, and I ended up ducking out for a while to Roy Osborn's "What Are Friends For" (May 1993) for a little while. (This is not to be confused with Roy Orbison's cover of "That's What Friends Are For.")

      

"Ernie Devlin" is either a coincidence or an obscure reference from a 1970s kid.

       

"Friends" starts on a large overland map with the following backstory: "You have just arrived in Smallsville after an arduous journey from the east. The reason that you are here is because you got a strange request from your longtime friend Ernie Devlin." The request had been accompanied by a package with a picture of a wand, a ring, an orb, and a talisman and a note that said to meet Ernie in Yarbor.

   
As we tried to find Yarbor, we visited some menu towns and other locations and got the sense that all was not right with the land. We found a recently-burned town and a dying old woman who told us that the Southern Realm used to be guarded by an organization called The Protectors, but a "new ruling class" came to power, slowly took over, and drove everything to hell. The Protectors vanished. She told us we must stop Owha Tajrkiam and bring The Protectors back.

    

Things are pretty grim in this world.

       

We saved a "young man" from an assailant, and he asked if we'd help him find a Protectors' outpost. We said yes, but for some reason, when he actually joined, he became a young woman named Nacacia, a Level 11/9 thief/ranger. As her level significantly exceeded our own, I began to wonder if I'd chosen the wrong module.  

     

Maybe there was no artwork showing a woman fighting.

       

Eventually, we arrived at what I guess was Yarbor. A dark robed man approached and said, "If you want to see your friend alive, you will bring me the Ring of Power." He pointed his staff at us and we were teleported to a dungeon. As we roamed the caves, we were attacked every few steps by some canonical creatures (margoyles, carrion crawlers, Drow champions) and some created for the module (sand elementals). Fortunately, we could generally rest between encounters, as some of those enemies hit hard.

        

And paralyzed.

       

There was a boss fight with a fire elemental and some efreet. After we defeated them—an authentically challenging battle—we rescued a Protector named Priam, who turned out to be a Level 18 (!) fighter. I later checked the manual, and it turns out that Priam and Nacacia are stock NPCs programmed into the kit. Nacacia was originally in Curse of the Azure Bonds and Priam was in Secret of the Silver Blades.

      

This guy gets around. I guess that's why he's Level 18.

       

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way out of the dungeon. I searched every square (using the "search" option) and pushed every wall, but I got nothing but battle after battle. That did its job, and after an hour or so, everyone was ready to increase another level. I thought the module had promise, so it was with some reluctance that I quit and sent the characters back to "Trial of Champions."

      

I poke at some walls in vain.

          

"Champions" is a tight, well-written module with one standard-sized town and one standard-sized dungeon. There are only about ten battles in it, but each one really punches. They're all designed to be tactically interesting in their own ways. They were a perfect challenge for my Level 7 party. I had to experiment with a variety of spells, keep up with healing during battle, and make a lot of use of magic items sold in the town.

   

The module begins with the party's arrival at Sedille, to which they have been drawn by promises of fame and wealth in the "Trial of Champions." As they disembark from their ship, they're greeted by the mayor of the town, Rolf, a fun callback to Pool of Radiance. Like his Pool namesake, he leads the party on a brief "tour" into the city, where a festival is underway.

   

The module begins.

     

The town has one shop ("Anjel's Armory"), a trainer, a temple, and an inn. The shop sells all gods, including some high-level mage and cleric spells that provide some much-needed tactical advantages in combat. It also sells healing and buffing potions. Even though the party was reasonably flush from the previous adventure, I had to make some tough choices here. You also need to save 1,000 platinum pieces to buy entry into the trial.

      

Some of the shop's offerings.

      

There are some fun "tavern tales" at the inn. We learned that centuries ago, a powerful sorcerer named Malhavok created the Trial of Champions "using foul magics." Apparently, no one has ever won the trial, but the mayor keeps sending people to their deaths because "it brings this small town much tourist money."

     

The town has the following encounters:

    

• In an alley near Anjel's armory, a pack of undead (specters, ghouls, and wights) attacks. "Enough mortals have invaded our resting place. You shall trouble us no more!" The battle isn't terribly hard on its own terms, but wights and specters can drain levels, which is kind of the opposite of why you're here.

     

I kept trying to grab a shot of a backstab, but this one, near the end of the battle, is the only one I could get.

      

• In a large town square, a disfigured man offers information for 10 platinum pieces. He says he used to work for Malhavok and that "the key to passage is the elements of his name."

• A secret door leads to an abandoned alley with half a dozen margoyles and two black puddings. Black puddings can only be damaged by magic or fire, and the first time we faced them, I ran out of spells before we could kill them, putting us at a stalemate. The second time, I memorized "Magic Missile" instead of "Enlarge" and was able to clear them out. They left a number of magic items.

       

Black puddings are the worst.

       

• A group of thieves ambushes the party in an alley near the inn. This is the easiest battle of the game.

• In a town hall, a woman who looks like Sasha from Pool of Radiance sells the party a brass amulet necessary to enter the trial.

• In the streets approaching the trial, an old man asks us to find the fate of his daughter, Kallithrea. She is another of the stock NPCs who made an appearance in "The Heirs to Skull Crag."

           

I mean, she went in alone, and there are six of us, so maybe we'll do better?

      

As the party gets near the trial, a man steps out of the crowd and says, "follow me." He leads the party to a secret door. Behind it is a group of spellcasters who greet the party with: "Welcome fools! You'll be one less party we have to compete with for the test!"

   

This leads to a battle with two mages, two clerics, and two fighters, all relatively high level—and they all get to go first. The clerics inevitably cast "Hold Person" and the mages inevitably cast "Lightning Bolt." The battle is nearly impossible to survive. It took me about eight tries to defeat them with half my party unconscious or dead. The enemies have some amazing loot, though, including a flail +3, a Girdle of Giant Strength, and a Wand of Ice Storm.

      

What about the female party members?

         

You cannot exit once you've entered the Trial of Champions. The trial itself begins with a modest combat against three earth elementals and some efreet. In the same chamber where we defeated them, we found the ghost of a previous contestant who gave us his long sword +3, though we didn't identify it as such until we were out of here.  

   

We soon found the ghost's (living) companion—Sir Priam again!—who joined the party. His room offered the only safe place to rest on the level. 

 

A northeast room had a battle with about 20 trolls. Gold Box trolls regenerate and will pop back up, fully healed, in the same place that they died, about four rounds after you kill them. Thus, to avoid those regenerations, you either have to kill all the trolls in four rounds or block the places that the early ones died with "Stinking Cloud," "Blade Barrier" (I had a few on scrolls), or your own bodies.

      

These are some particularly ugly trolls.

      

South of Priam's room was a jail guarded by six minotaurs, two dracolisks, a necromancer, and a cleric. They were arranged in a formation perfect for "Fireball," but the dracolisks were capable of stoning us with a gaze, and we had no way to cure that. 

    

Kallithrea was in a cell behind the minotaurs. We unlocked it with a key looted from the trolls, and she joined the party. She's a Level 9 cleric, and her healing helped a lot in the coming battles.

      

Poor woman was so rattled she forgot her own name.

         

Behind a hot door was a fight with a red dragon, salamanders, and efreet, followed immediately (no resting) with a battle with more fire-based creatures. Kallithrea had given us two Rings of Fire Resistance, and between those and "Resist Fire" spells from her and my existing cleric, we were able to do all right.  

     

The perfect formation for my second-favorite spell. I might even be able to get him again on the ricochet.

       

A door leading out of this room had a sign: "A curse upon all who enter the domain of Malhavok. Only the learned shall pass." We had to choose from five letters: Z, T, C, K, and G. The old man's clue from earlier was that "the key to passage is the elements of his name," which we interpreted correctly as the only letter (K) within his name.

        

But in the Latin alphabet, "Malhavok" ends with a "C."

         

Malhavok was waiting on the other side. "I did not create this little game for fools to win," he sneered. "I created it to bring me profit!"

   

The final battle had two groups of enemies far enough apart that they couldn't be affected with mass damage spells. Each group had a combination of fire elementals, fire giants, salamanders, hellhounds, one high-level cleric, and one high-level mage (Malhavok himself for one of the groups). Complicating things, Malhavok couldn't be targeted by spells directly (he must have some form of invisibility); he was capable of "Delayed Blast Fireball"; and he had a very high initiative.  

     

Malhavok goes early and nails us.

       

The spellcasters were naturally a priority, but the elementals, giants, and salamanders were capable of wiping out half a character's hit points with a single attack. In short, it was a deliciously challenging fight, won only through extensive buffing, extensive in-combat healing and dispelling (when a cleric hit us with a lucky "Hold Person"), and the right damage spells in the right locations at the right times. "Haste" probably would have trivialized it, but my mage never took that spell.

     

Half of the final battle's enemies.

      

Malhavok had some solid loot, and a chest nearby had a scroll proclaiming us the winners of the Trial of Champions. Sandar, the old man, was reunited with his daughter. The mayor thanked us and, somewhat redundantly, dubbed us "Champions of Sedille." 

      

It was nice of him to write this out, considering he never expected anyone to win.

       

The party left the module having gained a couple new levels and numerous pieces of new equipment. I want to play the follow-up to "The Restoration of Gundahab" with this party, so I probably won't use them again, lest I over-level myself for that game. Maybe I'll try to find one for evil parties next time.

       

I mean, accepting "only his thanks" should have been a role-playing choice right?

       

"Trial of Champions" was a relatively short but satisfying, challenging adventure. How is it that a fan got it just right, less than two months after the kit's release, when so many major developers of the era got it so wrong?

Warriors of Legend: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

 

That's a heck of a promise.

      

Warriors of Legend

United States

Synergistic Software (developer); Virgin Games (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS

Date Started: 27 March 2025 

Date Ended: 17 April 2025

Total Hours: 17

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) 

     

Summary:

 

The last RPG using Synergistic's "World Builder" engine, Warriors of Legend takes place in a world clearly inspired by the stories of Conan (the subject of the previous World Builder game). A party of four heroes must slay the members of the Black Circle and stop an invasion of the land of Lemuria. The "studio" view cities and dungeons are fun to explore, but just about everything about the game's mechanics are a janky mess with minimal RPG elements. It's too bad, as there are some good ideas here, like full-sentence dialogue, a reagent-based magic system, and lots of equipment slots. 

     

****

    

No one seemed to be terribly interested in Warriors of Legend, so I pushed on to the end. The ultimate goal of the game, not terribly well-related during gameplay itself, was to find and slay the members of the Black Circle, collect their pieces of the Chaos Key, and use it to stop the god Set from entering the world.

        

I had killed the first two members of the Black Circle—Moc Madure and Gamorrah—during the first three entries. Each member of the Black Circle, save one, can only be killed with spells. I'm not sure if there's only one spell that kills each one or whether there are a couple of possibilities. The spell system is so unreliable, with spells sometimes not casting when you click and sometimes not doing anything when they cast, that my victories may have been just luck with a particular spell rather than the inevitable need for that spell.

     

An NPC gives us information about the next location.

      

As you kill each member and obtain each key, dialogue back in Illandria changes to reflect your victory and to give you hints for the next mission. I'm going to be charitable and assume that there are sufficient hints in all of this dialogue to get the player through the levels and to suggest what spells are necessary to kill the bosses. The problem is that there are an awful lot of people in Illandria, including many who are easy to miss, and I had no interest in doing a complete circuit of the city between every mission. Thus, the hints that I received were mostly incidental as I visited shops.

    

I stumble upon an NPC who tells me a lot about the fifth boss, Bandor.

        

A Dead Man's Key looted from Gamorrah let us into the ancient palace. The palace was a large maze of hallways with frequent invisible pits. Falling down a pit meant fighting a battle and then climbing up back to the beginning. Fortunately, the potions of "True Seeing" that we had found in Gamorrah's lair let us see the pits and avoid them. Even then, the screen is small enough that we sometimes stumbled into them accidentally, especially when coming from the north.

      

Somehow, I didn't get a screenshot of a single pit, but here's the palace in general.

      

A few new enemies made an appearance here: beholder-looking things, large lions, and fat, toothy worms. They all died from a couple of bonks with our Thor's Hammers.

      

Worms and beholders in one screen shot!

    

At the end of the dungeon, we found the third Black Circle member, Khalimad. We had two dialogue options with him: "Prepare to die, Evil One!" and "Can I use the bathroom?" Since I had to replay the encounter several times, I tried both. The second option got him to laugh and give us a hint: "On the off chance you should defeat me, you'll be wanting an empty flask."

   

It took about half a dozen tries to defeat him. Someone in town had told me that he could be defeated with the "Gripper" spell, which is nice except there's no such spell, at least not that I was able to find. "Paralysis" eventually did the trick, which I suppose is enough of a synonym for "Gripper" that either I was supposed to figure it out or they changed it in production and forgot to change the dialogue.

         

Why do these guys all have the same face?

      

His treasure chamber had the third piece of the Chaos Key and a Mummy Key. A nearby room with a waterfall explained what he meant about an "empty flask." Clicking on it with the flask got us a potion of Holy Water, supposedly one of the ways to defeat the skeletons in the next dungeon. I couldn't get it to work. The game doesn't let you throw it at enemies, just consume it yourself. How does that help?

     

The next dungeon was the final choice on the outdoor map: the pyramid. We went through a few screens of Canyons of the Ancients before finding a sarcophagus propped up against the canyon wall. A skeleton came out of it and, like last time, killed all of us in about 15 seconds. After several reloads, I learned that the "Armageddon" spell was a sure way to kill these skeletons, freeing me from having to figure out how the Holy Water worked.

    

I wasted some time trying to defeat this skeleton the traditional way.

     

The Mummy Key let us into the pyramid through the empty coffin. I guess we somehow started at the top, as we had to make our way through multiple tiers to the bottom. This part of the game was both annoying and clever, which would be a good tagline for Synergistic's entire catalogue. The game became a kind of platformer in which we had to find our way from the top to a particular door near the bottom by going across platforms and up and down ladders. The key to this exploration was the "Plank" spell, which lasted about 30 seconds each time I cast it. While it's active, a plank automatically appears to connect to the nearest platform if you walk to the edge of the current one. You can also click to generate them. 

    

Making our way across magically-generated planks.

         

There were a number of doors, most leading to minor treasures and battles. Annoying, entering a door caused all the planks we had generated on the outside to disappear. We had to find the particular door that led us to the final battle with a lich named Bohan Atep. There were a bunch of skeleton minions leading to his chamber, and he had a couple when we found him. There were no dialogue options; he just attacked. Fortunately, "Armageddon" wiped everyone out.

     

Moments later, my "feeble spells" kill him.

       

The fourth piece of the Chaos Key lay beyond, as did a White Key.

     

At this point, I had a problem: there were no more places to visit on the map. I wandered around the city for a while, selling my loot and buying Armor Amulets for all the characters. With the mithril armor I'd already purchased, my characters hardly ever got damaged in combat. The Armor Amulets changed "hardly ever" to "never." The only thing I had to worry about were spells from boss enemies and the occasional spider capable of poison.

    

From NPC dialogue, I knew that the next member of the Black Circle was named Bandor, but I had no idea where to find him. I waded through about three dozen more barbarian jokes (My favorite: "Do barbarians prefer cats or dogs?" Answer: "Depends on the sauce") before I gave up and consulted a walkthrough.

    

A: "A new home."

      

It turns out there are large parts of the city that are completely inaccessible from the ground. You have to climb a ladder to the inner walls and use the "Plank" spell to cross rooftops. The ladder was always there—I verified it by starting a new game—but I hadn't registered it as a ladder. 

     

I remember I had the same problem when I played Captive. I want my ladders to have two side rails, dammit.

      

The ladders and upper walls led to a couple of new locations, including the Thieves' Guild Vault, but I was there prematurely.

      

Crossing rooftops with "Plank."

        

The other new location was the inner part of the city containing King Osric's Palace. It had five exterior doors and multiple interior doors, and the shtick was that I had to open them in the correct order with the correct keys. There must have been about 20 doors and as many keys. I assumed they were one-use items and dropped them after using them; If I hadn't, I wouldn't have had room in my inventory for anything else.

      

Q: What does a barbarian do when he encounters a wooden door that requires a particular key?

        

As we explored, we got attacked by random guards—gnats at this point—and occasionally by the next boss, Bandor the Butcher. He claimed to have usurped the throne from King Osric years ago, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would he have put out a call for heroes? 

   

Anyway, he claimed that: "Your strength is no match for my shape-shifting power. I can transform myself into any shape, any form, from the smallest mouse to the greatest dragon." Sure enough, every time he attacked, he took on the form of a different monster from the game, including beholders, lions, red dragons, and giant spiders. The problem for him is that none of those monsters had been a real threat for hours now. Every time he attacked, we just bonked him a few times and he disappeared. For the last half dozen times he appeared, he said, "Prepare for our final battle!," but it was never the final battle.

   

Except, I guess, this time. You can see the obelisk in the room behind him.

     

It took me a couple of hours to open all the doors necessary to enter his inner chamber. I don't remember what his final form was, but it was something pathetic. After we'd crushed him with our Thor's Hammers, we found his obelisk and got the fifth piece of the Chaos Key and the Bronze Key.

      

Bandor attacks us as a lion.

      

The final area was accessed via the Thieves' Guild Vault, through a door, and down some stairs: The Temple of Set. It was another large, annoying maze full of monsters, including some new ones: giant orcs and flying gargoyles. It was impossible to map normally because directions were inconsistent. I had to use a node map. 

 

Some new foes, no harder than the old ones.

         

It took a while, but I eventually found an obelisk with the sixth Chaos Key piece. Beyond it was a room with a swirling red gate. A voice said: "Oh, more tourists, I see. Having fun? Busted up any of our quiet local taverns yet? That's what you do isn't it? Go away." It seemed like a weird statement from the God of Chaos, and I suspect that the game accidentally pulled dialogue from an NPC somewhere in town.

     

At least it wasn't a barbarian joke.

         

A demonic face then peeked through the gate. I wasted a lot of time trying to attack it and cast spells on it. Nothing seemed to work, but to his credit, Set was patient. He didn't fight back or anything. He just looked at us while we pummeled him. It was sad, really.

   

Eventually, I thought to try to use the pieces of the Chaos Key directly on the gate. I chose one and clicked. "As Set devours your soul," it said, "you realize you threw the keys in the wrong order." The game immediately ended. Order? Studying the graphics, I realized that the keys all have a little letter on them. Five of them spell out CHAOS and the last one has a little key symbol. 

       

What kind of "Chaos Key" is this if I have to throw its pieces in order?

         

Tossing them in that order worked. After each one bonked Set in the head (which was slightly hilarious), they came together to seal the gate. After that, a couple of screens of endgame text began: "With the Chaos Key restored, the portal into Chaos has been sealed. Set can no longer meddle in the affairs of Lemuria. King Osric, in his gratitude, has declared the heroes Champions of Lemuria. They shall never want for wealth, power, and honors. And, of course, they will be expected to deal with any other minor threats to the kingdom that may come up in the future . . ."

       

          

And that's the end, though I like the idea that I could fire it up and get a few new barbarian jokes whenever I want.

     

Warriors of Legend is incomplete and unbalanced in ways that go beyond a simple lack of playtesting. There are flaws in its very concept. It is another sign of the somewhat baffling ignorance with which Synergistic treated the rest of the CRPG world. From Dungeon Campaign (1978) all the way through the World Builder games, Robert Clardy seemed so interested in doing his own thing that he never looked at what anyone else was doing, and because of that, I don't think he ever really understood how the core mechanics of role-playing games are supposed to work. So we end up with a game in which you can get the best equipment in the first hour; in which the player has full-sentence dialogue options that are mostly meaningless; in which there are four characters but only one can act at a time; in which a visually interesting city is populated with dumb, generic encounters; in which a complex spell system is used six times (what is the point, even, of the mana bars?); in which you have multiple options for healing, none of which are necessary because you can just wait a minute; in which you find multiple interesting-looking inventory items with no clear purpose; and in which you have inventory slots that are never used.

     

Conan was clearly the better game. It had crisper, larger graphics and its RPG mechanics, though underdeveloped, at least made it clear that it was more of an adventure game. I don't know what they thought they were doing here.

   

Let's try a GIMLET:

    

• 5 points for the game world. This is probably the best category. I like the visual and linguistic themes of the Hyborian Age setting (I'm 100% sure that this was originally going to be a Conan game), and I like how the NPC dialogue reflects the changes the party is making in the world. I wish it had come with a map and the streets had been a bit easier to navigate.

      

Scenes like this make me want to like the game a lot more.

      

• 2 points for character creation and development. You need warriors and one guy to cast spells. Archers and agility are useless; thieves and stealth are useless. "Character development" consists of some of your attributes increasing a little bit during the game as you hit things.

• 5 points for NPC interaction. You do learn about the game world from NPCs, and their dialogue—when it's not barbarian jokes—makes up a lot of what's interesting about the setting. I give some credit for the mechanics of full-sentence dialogue options even if they hardly ever matter. 

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The monsters in the game are visually interesting but don't offer much in the way of challenge or tactics, except the bosses, who annoyingly cannot be killed except by certain spells. There are no non-combat encounters except for the navigation puzzles.

• 2 points for magic and combat. Combat involves nothing more than selecting characters and pointing them at enemies, and we've talked about how the interface makes this annoying. The variety of spells is mostly wasted, plus subjected to an interface in which you can only mix one spell at a time. 

      

Bashing a giant spider.

       

• 3 points for equipment. There are several types of weapons and armor, but most of the system is wasted by allowing the player to find the best stuff from random battles early in the game. It's unclear what some of the most expensive items (Demon Amulets, Undead Amulets, ankhs, spellbooks) even do. 

• 4 points for the economy. It's not bad. Between spells and the more expensive equipment, you generally have reasons to sell loot and burglarize houses for at least the first half of the game.

• 2 points for a main quest with multiple stages but no options or side-quests.

 

Ataris's inventory at the game's end. I hung onto that Dragon Sword for the entire game, just in case.

       

• 3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. The graphics are generally nice. Sometimes, they strive for too much detail, but in general, they contribute to the evocative nature of the setting. Sound is minimal, on the other hand, and I thought the interface was a nightmare. It required far too much mousework, often clicking on moving targets. Getting into the spell menu during combat requires far too many clicks. And the perspective is a real problem in a game so dense with buildings and items. In the city streets, it's often not clear where you can and cannot walk.

• 3 points for gameplay. Linear, not replayable, too easy, but at least not terribly long.

     

That gives us a final score of 32, below my "recommended" threshold, which is accurate. I don't recommend it. Looking at my entry for Conan, which I gave 42, I said: "Synergistic doesn't do things quite the same way as any other RPG developer. This has produced both bad and good results, and Conan fortunately balanced on the "good" side." Warriors of Legend is balanced on the "bad" side.

    

I think "historical" might be stretching it.

        

Warriors made so little splash that the only magazine I can find to review it was the January 1994 PC Joker (German), which called it a "diamond in the rough" and gave it 69%.  

     

I have no idea what was going on at Synergistic in the early 1990s. The company isn't nearly as well documented as, say, Origin or SSI. Somehow, they had lost the Conan license but managed to get licenses to make, in the same year as Warriors of Legend, games based on The Beverly Hillbillies and Homey D. Clown. It would be hard to imagine characters less in need of video games. Accordingly, both games have shown up on lists of worst games of all time. Who at Synergistic thought that these were viable properties? 

      

Homey don't play that game. Neither did anyone else.

         

It doesn't surprise me that the company at this point took a turn towards action and sports titles. Their sole RPG for the rest of the company's life is Birthright: The Gorgon's Alliance (1997), which I understand is perhaps more of a strategy game than an RPG. I really hoped that Synergistic, which started off so strong with the Campaign series, would really "make it" with one of these later RPGs. Alas.

 

My Apologies

I did not get an entry together for tonight. Unfortunately, I had a very busy week. Having reached the end of that week, I'm in a particularly good mood. A careful scan of the main page (sorry, mobile users) may reveal the reason why.

Game 548: Realms of Darkness (1987)

It was a long road to get here.

     

Realms of Darkness

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)
Released 1987 for Commodore 64 and Apple II, 1989 for MSX, PC-88, PC-98, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000

Date Started: 12 April 2025   

      

We've gone back in time. This is SSI's own Silver Age, 1984-1987, before the Gold Box, before the Dungeons & Dragons license, when it was primarily a wargames company but occasionally took a chance on an RPG brought to them by an independent developer like Charles Dougherty (Questron), Winston Douglas Wood (Phantasie), and Ali N. Atabek (Rings of Zilfin). In a way that I probably did not appreciate when I was playing some of those games for the first time, someone at SSI had a remarkably good eye for innovative titles that may have been inspired by Ultima and Wizardry but pushed beyond the boundaries set by those games, in ways that sometimes didn't work but were always interesting.

   

Realms of Darkness fits into this era perfectly. The designers were Gary Scott Smith and Alex Nghiem, who met at an Apple II computer club in Wichita, Kansas. Smith had been noodling with a dungeon game for a couple of years, and he drew Nghiem into the project. Smith handled the programming, Nghiem the graphics. When they had a playable demo, they shopped it to various publishers. SSI, showing its customary taste, snapped it up. A few years later, Smith and Nghiem wrote Tangled Tales (1989), which earned Smith a 10-year stint at Origin Systems.

     

This is about all you get for a backstory.

        

The game is an adventure-RPG hybrid with several unusual, perhaps unique, elements. Its overland exploration (including shopping) looks like any first-person adventure game of the period. Underground, it becomes pure Wizardry—except that you get textual descriptions of the environment, and you can hit ENTER at any time to bring up a text parser and start typing Infocom-style commands.

       

Solving a puzzle with the text parser.

      

You control a large party of eight characters drawn from as many classes: fighter, thief, sorcerer, priest, friar (martial-artist), champion (fighter-sorcerer), knight (fighter-priest), and barbarian (fighter-thief). Each has minimums in the game's attributes: intelligence, wisdom, agility, strength, and vitality. During character creation, the game rolls six values from 1-19. You allocate them each to a particular attribute, and then the game tells you what classes you can choose. (This is all quite similar to Wizardry, including the prestige classes.) You then chose race (human, gnome, dwarf, elf) and sex.

      

Assigning ability scores during character creation.

     

Based on the manual's recommendation to have two priests, I ignored the vanilla fighter class and went with:

    

• Cadoc, a male human champion
• Kastillia, a female elven knight
• Bilge, a male dwarven barbarian
• Faerish, a female human friar
• Timid, a male gnome thief
• Presstra, a female elven priest
• Palliata, a female elven priest
• Sarogoth, a male human sorcerer

        

The final party.

    

The manual offers absolutely no backstory for the game world, but it seems to be a standard high-fantasy world drawn from Tolkien and D&D. Gameplay begins in the city of Grail. It becomes clear that the player is going to get a series of quests in a linear order from a guard captain in the city. The manual walks the player through the opening stages, including getting the first quest (recover an ancient king's sword, Zabin, from some local ruins), buying equipment, and the first few minutes of dungeon exploration.

       

Finding the first dungeon.

      

You move around the overland area with the WASZ cluster—or the JKNM cluster if you want to go northeast, northwest, southeast, or southwest. Since it's never necessary to do the latter, except to save time, it's easier just to keep your hand on WASZ. You cannot turn in the above-ground areas; each square has only one static screen. There are a variety of single-key commands like C)ast a spell, P)urchase, E)quip, and G)et. Anything more significant requires the text parser. Character sheets are brought up by hitting the corresponding number, and 9 gives a summary of everyone.

       

Walking around town.

    

The small town has:

   

• A guard captain's office. Here, you get quests by entering parser mode and typing TALK. It probably would have taken me a while to figure that out on my own, so I'm grateful to the manual.

       

Getting the first quest.

      

• A tavern. Its sole purpose seems to be to sell food. 

      

And lunch and dinner both cost more than the best weapons or armor in the game.

      

• The Hall of Heroes, where you can exit back to the character utilities.

• An inn where you can sleep and restore spell slots. It took me a while to figure out that you don't interact with the innkeeper with P)urchase; you just go to the rooms. It doesn't seem to cost anything.

   

The innkeeper seems to want you to sign in, but you can just walk past him through the curtain.

      

• A blacksmith where you buy weapons and armor. We bought some starting items, but our starting gold didn't go very far. Everyone got daggers and maybe some padded armor.

      

This is a pretty lame selection.

     

• A provisioner where you buy torches, ropes and hooks, and so forth.

• A couple of screens that just show the town path.

      

The exit from the town is south from the provisioner's shop. It takes you into a forested area with, as best as I can tell 26 squares. However, one of the squares has an old man fishing, and if I talk to him, he says, "If you value your lives, don't go beyond the river because Gorth rules the land with an iron hand." I don't know what "beyond the river" means. There are some river screens in the south, but I don't know of any way to go "beyond" them.

       

The "game world," unless something else opens up.

        

The old man's warning.

       

There's a temple in this area, where you can heal various conditions, including death and the horrible things that can happen if restoring death fails: "Restore Ashes" and "Restore Dust" (again, this goes back to Wizardry). Two other squares in the outdoor area have stairs or ladders down to dungeons.

    

Options at the temple.

     

The forest is dangerous, and the manual warns you to hie to the first dungeon, northeast of town, rather than poke around too long in the outdoor area. I won about half the battles I attempted while mapping the area.

  

Combat begins by telling the player the party composition.

    

This one might be a problem.

      

The player then has options to fight individually, have everyone fight, bribe the monsters with silver, bribe the monsters with food, flee, act friendly (sometimes), surrender, or go into the party inventory or some game utilities.

    

Well, this is goddamned terrifying.

    

If you fight individually, the character has various options depending on class: fight, turn undead, cast a spell, use an item, and so forth. (As the characters level up, there will be additional options for some classes, like a "flying kick" for the friar and a "sneak attack" for the thief.) You cannot choose specific enemies to target with attacks or spells. Unlike Wizardry, actions execute as you select them for each character, rather than at the end of the overall selection process. Enemies' attacks are threaded with the characters'.

   

In dungeons, only the first four characters can fight in melee range (and there are no bows or otherwise any considerations of distance), but outdoors, everyone can participate. The "everyone attack" option is particularly useful here, saving you from specifying individual attacks for each character, although you wouldn't want to use it when you have spells to cast.

     

These outdoor enemies were too hard.

    

Spells use Wizardry's slot-based system; Level 1 characters just start with two slots in the first level, but that includes a mass attack ("Fireball") for the sorcerer and "Healing" for the priests. Still, at Level 1, those rear characters don't have a lot to do.

        

Sarogoth has two Level 1 spell slots and four spells to choose from.

      

After battle, characters get experience and silver. Sometimes you find a chest that must be examined, disarmed, and opened. Experience is apportioned partly based on what the character did during the battle, but everyone gets at least something, which is nice. 

    

The victory screen after my first winning battle.

      

The interface changes when you go underground. It becomes a classic Wizardry wireframe dungeon with walls and doors, and you can turn in each square and face all directions, although there's no indication what direction you're facing. Maybe there's a "Compass" spell later. Combat works the same way, and there are both fixed and random battles.

     

I explored the first level underground, which was mostly 16 x 24, though with an odd bit jutting off to the west (as I mapped it) and nothing in the northeast corner. The space-to-encounter ratio was pretty good, and there were at least half a dozen times I had to use the text parser to type in a command. I worried that the lack of a list of commands in the manual would be a problem, and maybe it will be later, but so far obvious prompts like TALK and EXAMINE have worked fine.

 

The first dungeon level, at least assuming that you start facing north.

        

Some notes on the first level:

   

• There's a pile of rubble right next to the entrance. CLIMB RUBBLE allows you to see a message on the ceiling: "Illusory wall in chief's room."

• The "chief's room" refers to the goblin chief, not far away. Once you defeat him, you can indeed walk through an illusory wall to find a metal card, a rainbow potion, an "Unlock" scroll, and copper earrings.

• There are several doors that require a Green Key to open. There are two Green Keys to be found on the level, one by searching a messy bed. The other is given to you by a rat if you first find a piece of cheese in the galley and bring it to him.

      

It's not exactly realistic, but at least I didn't have to fight with the text parser. This all happened from EXAMINE HOLE.

     

• There are two magically-locked doors on the level. "Unlock" is supposed to be a Level 1 sorcerer spell, but I didn't get it yet. Fortunately, there are ways around both doors. For the southern one, you just have to find an alternate passage. For the northern one, you can teleport to the other side of it if you MOVE ALTAR at an appropriate encounter and teleport back by wandering into a bubbling pool of liquid. The area with the pool of liquid is the odd one that juts out to the east. The walls are ragged here, as if to suggest a natural cave.

      

The small "rough-hewn" area.

      

• The southern magically-locked room has a sign on the door: "Danger! This door locked for your safety!" On the other side, accessible by going a longer way around, you find a ghost who tells you that he was also searching for the lost sword Zabin, and that a sorcerer broke it in two.

       

For a moment, I forgot that Zabin was a sword.

      

• Part of the sword is found in a room to the far north. 

     

Quest half-completed!

     

• One room has an old man sitting on a box. If you TALK to him, he offers to entertain you for 25 silver. Pay him, and he puts on a puppet show, then causes a hidden door to open.

• There are some one-way doors and one-way walls.

• The stairs going down are behind a metal wall with a slot. You must INSERT the metal card to open it.

        

Enemies were mostly forgiving, but I did have characters die twice. They included goblins, goblin guards, skeletons, giant spiders, attack dogs, wizards, and tribe priests. They only deliver a few silver pieces per battle, so even by the end of the session, I still couldn't afford all of the meagre items in the blacksmith shop, especially where I had to pay for resurrection and a couple of de-poisonings.

     

I guess these odds are fair.

      

I went back to town to rest and restore my spell slots frequently. Unlike Wizardry, the game remembers the dungeon state. Fixed battles remain cleared, and you cannot find the same treasures twice. Doors don't remain unlocked, however.

    

Miscellaneous notes:

   

• It's possible to break the party into two smaller parties and rotate between them. I don't know yet under what circumstances it will become necessary to do so.

• Although you can save anywhere, there's no way to reload without rebooting the game. Character deaths are immediately written to disk; even rebooting the moment they happen doesn't help. I don't know what happens when all the characters die; the manual doesn't address it and it hasn't happened yet.

• After the title screen, there's an opening cinematic that suggests a very different sort of game. It shows a brief vignette of an adventurer exploring in a side-scrolling interface. He comes upon a chest with a doorway behind it. A skull rises in the doorway. The adventurer blasts the skull with a spell, then opens the chest. The chest is apparently trapped, because the adventurer disappears and turns into a ball of floating light that goes through the doorway.

    

An opening cinematic gives you a completely incorrect impression of the game.

    

• As the existence of the tavern indicates, characters need food. It won't be an issue for a while, as they all start with 150 rations, and they deplete slowly. 

• Sound is limited to "boip" when you go through doors and "bink" when you walk into a wall.

• I've been in touch with Smith, who confirmed that he was inspired by Wizardry and Phantasie. The game's approach to inventory, including the process of equipping characters, is similar to the latter game, as is the way it divvies earned experience.

• You may have noticed that my system of drawing random games has brought a "Darkness" theme to the "Recent and Upcoming" list. In this case, Realms of Darkness turned out to be a compromise between the titles suggested by Smith and Nghiem (Spellbinder) and SSI (Seven Realms of Doom).

     

I was well into my fourth hour with the game before the characters leveled up. When they cross the experience point threshold (1,000 in my case), they automatically get extra hit points and spells. My spellcasters did not move up to the next slot yet, so that must happen every other level. 

    

Cadoc was the first to level up.

      

So far, Realms of Darkness seems like a solid game, at least as playable as Wizardry or The Bard's Tale. It's a nice counter to the idea that after three or four passes through the 1980s, all that's left are dregs. I'm sorry that it took me so long to get to it. I don't remember all the specifics, but I do remember that I had trouble getting the emulators to work with every version that I could find. Many commenters tried to help me over the years, but I kept having problems. Eventually, commenters Abacos, Busca, Laszlo, MacCentric, and LanHawk all independently sent me working versions. I thank you all and apologize that there was so much duplication of effort. I also apologize to reader S. B., who wrote to me about the game in 2020, and I promised him I'd get to it "within the next six months." I hope you're still reading.

   

Time so far: 4 hours