Telengard: Pointless Fun

I might have mentioned this game is a little hard.

Telengard

United States

Microcomputer Games (developer); Avalon Hill (publisher)

Released in 1982 for Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80; 1983 for Atari 800, Commodore 64, and FM-7; 1984 for CP/M, PC-88, and PC-98; 1985 for DOS
Date Started: 5 March 2010

Date Ended: 6 March 2010
Total Hours: 6
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5) in the sense that there's no winning condition and you're meant to die
Final Rating: 25
Ranking at Game #413: 190/413 (46%)

   

Well, Telengard has some interesting--perhaps even unique--features. For a while, I assumed there was no reason not to just hang around the stairs to an inn, since every square held the potential for random encounters and random treasure every turn. It turns out the dungeons are full of interesting--and generally deadly--things. Some things I've discovered since my last post:

• Pits that sometimes give you the option to climb down, sometimes just unceremoniously toss you down
• Teleporters that send you to random locations
• Monsters that do what they typically do in D&D-derived games. Dragons coat you with fire, ghouls immobilize you, vampires sap away your hard-won experience points, and so on. Not all monsters kill you, though. Hobbits and skeletons (?) occasionally steal your stuff, and more than once I met an elf who, disturbingly, healed me to full strength because he "liked my body." A nice dragon gave me a sword +2.
• Chests with buttons of four different colors. You have to figure out the appropriate pattern--getting zapped every time you get it wrong--for the chest to open. Goodly amounts of treasure inside those.
• Holy altars. Give them enough money and they cast beneficial spells on you. Give them too little money, or no money, or try to walk on by them, and they call you "dirty pagan trash" and summon undead to kill you.
• "Scrolls of rescue" that return you to inns. I thought these were going to be my salvation, but they take away all your gold which, since gold is one of the primary ways to build experience points, is very bad.
• Fountains that alternately contain healing waters and poison.
• "Jewel-encrusted" thrones that give you the option to (r)ead runes, (s)it on them, or (p)ry the gems, with randomized chances of different things happening depending on what you do. Once, when I read the runes, I got +1 wisdom. A second time, I somehow brought about the return of the "ghoul king," who promptly slaughtered me.

Would any adventurer worth his salt hit (i) right now?

These different things make the game fun and fast-paced and, I admit, slightly addictive--at least, once you get your hero up to level 3 or 4 and stop dying every step.

Telengard isn't really a game you play for a long time, since there's no way to "win." Instead, it's a game you blow an hour or two on here or there, perhaps competing for highest score or fastest leveling with a friend. The manual actually encourages this with several suggestions for "multi-player" games: "see which player can advance his character to the highest experience level in a given time period"; "see who can map the most dungeon spaces of a given dungeon level" (this is followed by the helpful suggestion to "use graph paper").

Lacking any friends who are likely to want to play Telengard, I don't really have any reason to keep going with it. It might be fun to see if I can get to level 10 or level 12, but death can strike any time, and it's discouraging to have to keep starting over. In six hours of gameplay and probably 100 characters, the highest I was able to climb was level 8 (alas, forgot to take screenshots). After that character died, I gamely tried again. Helped by a ring of regeneration +4 that I found early on, I managed to get Arturos up to level 6. Then I found a "misty box" that asked me to enter a random number. I did, and found myself teleported to a much lower fathom of the dungeon, where I was immediately slain by a level 25 fighter.


Next game.

*****

Further Reading: As I progressed in my chronology, I found that Telengard is a commercial version of a long line of games stretching back to a 1975 PLATO game called The Game of Dungeons or dnd. Daniel Lawrence, the creator of Telengard, copied elements from the PLATO titles and developed Dungeons & Dragons (c. 1977) for DEC mainframes, then later tried to commercialize it as Telengard (1982). Other games in this line include Dungeon of Death (1979), Dungeons and Dragons for Heathkit DOS (1981), The Standing Stones (1983), Caverns of Zoarre (1984), and DND (1984).