Game 134: Warrior of Ras, Volume One: Dunzhin (1982)

Warrior of Ras, Volume One: Dunzhin

United States

Screenplay (publisher)

Released 1982 for TRS-80, Apple II, PC Booter; 1983 for Atari 8-Bit, Commodore 64

Date Started: 17 January 2014
Date Ended: 17 January 2014

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 22
Ranking at Time of Posting: 39/134 (29%)

Ranking at Game #456: 182/456 (40%)

Every once in a while, I play a game and find myself wishing I could force it to breed with another game. The Elder Scrolls: Dungeons of Daggorath would remove the health and fatigue bars and force you to use audio and visual cues to figure out your status. It would also remove markers showing the locations of enemies and force you to listen for them. Meanwhile, enemies like armored knights and fake wizards could be killed with stealth tactics and not by just dropping items in your area for them to pick up. Starflight II: Countdown to Doomsday would replace the blunt action space battles with the tactical battles of Buck Rogers. Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Knight of Legend would blend fun adventure gameplay with a combat system where you could target particular parts of your foe and use your "foresight" skill to anticipate his own attacks, so you'll know exactly when to dodge and parry.

Warrior of Ras, Volume One: Dunzhin begs to be bred with some other dungeon crawler of the era, like Temple of Apshai or one of the Robert Clardy or Stuart Smith games. It has some ideas too good to ignore, but it lacks too many RPG elements to fully enjoy as an RPG. If it had featured the room descriptions of the Dunjonquest games, the plot of Ali Baba, or even the inventory system of Rogue, I'd be trumpeting this game as a forgotten gem.

A typical Dunzhin screen. I've explored about 3/4 of this level. The lettered rooms all have treasures on the letters. I'm in the northeast corner, fighting a group of ghouls, about to attack one by swinging at his chest. If I defeat him in this combat, the stairs down to the next level lie a few steps to my east.

 
You play an unnamed hero who enters a randomly-generated five-level dungeon in search of a unique treasure that's randomly assigned just before you enter.

You know what? I don't even want to know.

As in a roguelike, you navigate a maze that is initially dark but opens up as you explore. Commands are entered via text, either fully spelled out (MOVE, SEARCH, HIDE) or by keyboard shortcut (M, S, C, respectively). You fight enemies in various numbers, find treasures, negotiate traps, deal with a variety of random occurrences, and try to keep yourself healthy long enough to retrieve the assigned treasure from the bottom of the dungeon and get back to the entrance.

It sounds a bit like a roguelike, but there's no permadeath (you can save anywhere) and, more importantly, no inventory. You technically have armor and a sword, and both can "break," but this just serves to adjust your attack and defense scores. There's nothing to pick up and use. It's not a very good RPG in lots of other ways: no NPCs, no role-playing encounters, no true economy, no character creation, no magic, no puzzles. And I hate the movement system, in which you have to type commands like MOVE EAST 3 and MOVE NORTH 2 to get around the dungeon. That's like the ninth game to avoid using the Apple II's arrow keys. Was there some kind of stigma?

Moving four squares to the east. At least the game supports abbreviations.

 
Despite what sounds like a lot of faults, the game is more notable for its innovations. These include:

1. A complex system of armor class and damage.  In addition to an overall total of hit points (called "total defense") as well as armor hit points ("armor defense"), both you and your enemies also have individual hit points, and an individual armor class, for each part of the body. If the blow is serious enough to overwhelm that body part's armor class, it subtracts from that body part's individual hit points. If it's not serious enough, it just subtracts from the total armor defense. As you increase in levels, your body part hit points increase in value. If any one of your body part hit points slips to 0, you die.

My character sheet from late in the game. Note that each of my body parts has a separate hit point total and armor class.

 
2. A nice tactical/logistical combat system. You have far more options in combat than in the standard Apple II RPG of the era. First, you can choose whether to make a normal attack, AIM carefully (sacrificing power for accuracy), or use a FORCE attack (sacrificing accuracy for power). In every attack, you specify what part of the enemy you want to try to hit. The game is ridiculously specific about these parts: in a humanoid enemy, you can target the head, neck, chest, abdomen, right arm, left arm, right leg, or left leg. In bestial enemies, your choices change to head, body, left and right forelegs, and left and right hind legs. If you deplete the hit points of any one body part, the creature dies. Areas like heads and chests have fewer hit points but are harder to hit, so you have to decide whether you want to try to wear down the enemy slowly by targeting an easy-to-hit area like the chest, or go for a one-hit kill by targeting the neck (the hardest) or head. Experience with various enemies helps you learn the best practices for each.

A typical combat sequence might go:

>You have encountered 3 minotaurs

>Your action? HIT HEAD

>You are going for the head. Press any key when you feel lucky! SPACE

>You missed

>The minotaur is going for the abdomen

>The minotaur hits the area with 8 points of force

>That area is protected for 4

>You are still alive with 10 points to that area and 48 points overall

>Your action? HIT CHEST

>You hit the chest with 18 points of force

>That area is protected for 6

>The minotaur is defeated!

Getting whacked by an enemy.

Occasionally, you get lucky and strike a critical hit, doing two or three times the normal damage. You can also try to HIDE to escape combat, BRIBE the enemy to make them go away, or use a WAND that instantly kills your foe--but you only have a few charges.

3. Quick time events. Obviously, this isn't what they're called in 1982, but the spirit is the same. When you wander into a trap, get hit by a ghoul (who can paralyze), or get hit by a cockatrice (who can petrify), the game tells you about your predicament and gives you the opportunity to "hit any key" to avoid it. This option only stays on the screen for a second, so you have to be paying attention to the game. If you miss it, you still get kind of a luck-based "saving throw" to minimize damage. Normally, I don't like this kind of dynamic in games--I prefer RPGs to be based on statistics rather than reflexes--but it's still quite innovative, and it keeps your attention throughout the game.

At least it doesn't tell me to press A, B, A, Y, X to avoid danger.

 
4. Relative experience. We see this in a lot of modern games, but I think this might be the earliest example of a game that awards your experience based on the enemy's difficulty relative to your level. You can't grind on skeletons forever if you want to advance rapidly. This brings us to:

5. Call your foes. I guess the idea is that the dungeon is basically swarming with monsters, and you're brushing past them on the way in and out of the rooms. When you engage in combat, you're not so much encountering enemies as encountering a particularly hostile pack of them. Thus, if you have a desire to fight a particular enemy, you just have to type SEARCH [ENEMY NAME], and you'll generally find one within a few moves. I had fun working my way through each of the 18 creatures listed in the manual.

This command has a couple of uses. First, enemies are divided into three groupings: "low-ranked" (e.g., skeletons, fighters, elves), "middle-ranked" (e.g., gargoyles, ogres, harpies), and "high-ranked" (e.g., wyverns, trolls, minotaurs). High-ranked foes are very rare in the game, even on the bottom level, so the only way to ensure that you test your mettle against them (and reap the best experience point rewards) is to deliberately search for them. Second, as you explore you'll occasionally find that your treasure has been stolen by a thief. You have to SEARCH THIEF to find him and get it back.

 
There are some other innovative elements that aren't good or bad. Every few dozen moves, some random event occurs. A ghostly voice whispers "go away!" and teleports you somewhere random. A woman's voice whispers "I like you!" and increases your luck or "I don't like you!" and decreases it.

I'm having flashbacks to high school.

 
Sometimes fog blankets the dungeon for a few rounds. You suddenly get a message that you're feeling confident, and your attack score increases. Perhaps most oddly, occasionally a "crystal ball" that you're supposed to be carrying (the game's way of hand-waving the interface) asks if you're "feeling brave" or if you "think it's wise" to execute whatever command you've just typed in. Answering "right" or "wrong" has effects on your luck, but I could never get a handle on what was right and what was wrong. It's simply because these events are random, and not predicated on any player decisions or skill, that I'm ambivalent about them.

A single game is fairly short. After some time experimenting, it only took me about two hours (and, admittedly, a bit of save-scumming) to get a character up to Level 11 and win the game.

Leveling up after combat.

Each of the "dunzhin's" five levels is subdivided into lettered rooms, and not until you walk on one of the letters do you determine what you're going to find there. Usually, it's a bit of treasure. But there are handful of special rooms scattered throughout the dungeon: one where you can repair armor, one where you can repair weapons, a "regeneration room" that heals you, and a teleport room that takes you to a random place in the dungeon. It's nice when the repair and regeneration rooms occur on lower levels when you really need them, but sometimes they're right next to the entrance.

In this expedition, it was on the last level, just where I needed it.

 
As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no point to the game's treasure. You don't get any kind of score when you leave the game, and the only way to use it in-game is to BRIBE enemies to go away, but this seems to fail far more often than HIDE, which costs nothing.

It takes a while to survive to Level 2, since when you're Level 1, even the lowest monsters can kill you in a single blow. The dangerousness curve evens out as you increase in levels (which happens quite rapidly, at least up to around 10) and get more hit points and higher attack and defense scores. The maximum level in the game is 20, though you'd have to grind a lot to get that high, and nothing anywhere near that level is necessary. The game allows you to save your character as well as the scenario, so you can use the same character in multiple sorties or bring him into later Warrior of Ras games.

A common message until you get a few levels on the board.

 
The quest treasure is located on the fifth level, and it's guarded by a pack of the higher-level monsters in the game (three "lords" in my case). Once you defeat them, you just need to make a beeline for the exit. When you get out of the dungeon, your victory screen is just some white letters on a black background that read:

You have exited the Dunzhin.

Congratulations!!!

You have obtained the item!

WELL DONE!

I think it was the "Freezing Bracer of Tikif" that I was after, but whatever. I'll take it.

I should mention that the game manual, though lacking any production qualities and displaying a curious bent to underline every appearance of the word "Dunzhin," is fairly well-written, and it sets up a more elaborate back story than the game really uses. The player is explicitly given as the son of a duke in a kingdom called Ras, ruled by "Lord Doserror the Inevitable." The manual takes the form of a narrative told by a half-crazed unsuccessful adventurer who has just emerged from the dungeon and is warning the PC about its dangers within while simultaneously instructing him as to the interface (e.g., "Seeing that the skeleton's neck and bones were unprotected, I drew my sword and swung at it, issuing the following command: HIT NECK (Return)").

In a GIMLET, I can only give it 22 points, including a couple of bonus points for its innovations. I give its best scores (4) for brisk, challenging "gameplay," and (4) in the "encounters and foes" section, since all of the enemies are well-described in the manual, are balanced well in difficulty, and offer lots of grinding opportunities. (Unfortunately, it doesn't have any role-playing encounters to go higher in this category.) It loses points for no NPCs, no inventory, and barely any economy.

Fortunately, we'll get to find out what this game is like with those elements. Dunzhin is only the first game in a four-game series, and my understanding is the second game, Kaiv, introduces an inventory and spell system, and the third and fourth games, Wylde and Ziggurat, have a combat system in which you can anticipate enemy attacks and react accordingly.

The series was created and programmed by Randall Don Masteller and published by Screenplay of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I exchanged some e-mails with Masteller this week, and he was very eager to stroll down memory lane with the series. He started playing Dungeons & Dragons while in the Navy in the 1970s, but he became disenchanted with some of the rules of the game, so he and a friend developed their own tabletop RPG called The Game: Fantasy Edition. The rules of The Game found their way into Ras, which he began writing in BASIC on a TRS-80 in 1979. "Ras" was originally an acronym, standing for "Random Area Series," alluding to the game's creation of random levels. Basically, Masteller wanted to create a game that he could play and enjoy when he was finished.

An ad for the first two games in the series.

Masteller had already written the first three games and was in the middle of the fourth when Screenplay accepted them for publication. A programmer at Screenplay, William Denman, translated Masteller's BASIC code (which he thought would be too easy to copy) to assembly language. To "maximize exposure," Randall and Screenplay "put it on every machine I could think of"; the games ultimately had releases for the TRS-80, the Apple II, the Atari 8-bit series, the Commodore 64, and the PC (in booter form). The odd spelling of Dunzhin was to avoid any legal problems with TSR, and he just went with the theme for Kaiv and Wylde; as for Ziggurat: "Well, I could not find a way to spell it wrong that looked right, so . . ."

In 1982, there weren't many outlets for marketing computer games, Randall says that the Screenplay team worked hard to get it into toy stores, and they scored a coup when Toys 'R' Us agreed to carry it. Randall made a "very nice amount" from the games for a few years.

He says he had other ideas for RPGs but had trouble finding publishers, so as sales started to drop from the Ras series, he started taking whatever work he could find. He went on to work with MicroProse and Mastertronic, and he has programming credits on at least 25 other games, including Pirates!, Airborne Ranger, and Metropolis. In 1995, with his wife, Bonita, he launched Random Games, which focused on board games and strategy games. They had a few good years, but unfortunately the company went out of business in the early 2000s, while it was in the midst of developing an updated computer version of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game, the popular board game from Games Workshop. Masteller now works at Raleigh-based Kadro Solutions, which makes e-commerce software. 

I look forward to checking out the sequels later this year. For now, we return to 1990 with Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation.