Game 135: Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation (1989)

     

Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation

United States

Independently developed and published

Released 1989 for DOS
Date Started: 19 January 2014

    

Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation is a 1990 shareware offering from two Virginia high school seniors, Brian Weston and Victor Shao. This is not an opening sentence that fills you with confidence as to the quality of the game, but I'm pleased to report that it's good. Not great, but good. If I could track them down, I'd send them their shareware fee. I'd even adjust it for inflation.

A player of Vampyr could be forgiven for thinking it was a lost Ultima title. It looks most like IV but plays like a combination of II and III, with only a single PC, NPCs responding in single lines of dialogue, and a separate combat map that takes place on a blank tiled floor, no matter what the original terrain. It has most of the same keyboard shortcuts as the Ultima games, including (K)limb and (Z)stats. The layout of the castle is almost identical to Ultima V, with a jester greeting you upon entry to a large courtyard, the king's chambers on the second floor, numerous locked and hidden doors, and the occasional treasure room. It does the whole bit where you can't see through walls or trees, and squares remain dark when they're so obscured. However, as we'll cover, the game does have some innovations that transcend its Ultima-inspired origins.

The opening area looks somewhat like Castle Britannia next to the city of Britain.

 
Unfortunately, I can't tell you much about the back story of the game. The brief document that accompanies the files only tells you:

Welcome to Vampyr: The Talisman of Invocation, an adventure game set in the world of Quilinor. Here, the monsters are very nasty, the merchants are stingy, and the citizens are just a bit crazy. You, as an adventurer, must travel throughout this world to save all these creatures from a certain destruction.

The authors of the game (fairly) expected the player to contribute $10 for the full manual and $20 for the manual and hint book. Unfortunately, their addresses are no longer valid. I think I've tracked them down, but I haven't been able to make contact just yet.
 

Character creation is a quick process. You specify a name and race (human, elf, dwarf, and "corantir") and get automatic rolls for physical strength, mental strength, dexterity, constitution, charisma, luck, life (hit points), and gold. The rolls are random, from 3 to 20, and it's hard to get a well-balanced character. You next spend 180 skill points among nine skills: attack, defense, offensive magic, defensive magic, miscellaneous magic, lock picking, climbing, stealing, and perception. You don't specify a "class" but rather define one for yourself based on the number of points you channel into fighter, mage, or thief skills. I found that the early game is very hard if you don't prioritize fighter skills.

 
You start in an outdoor area next to a castle and town, wielding a dagger and wearing cloth armor. The castle contains the land's lord, King Tevon, who immediately gives the player a quest:  to go to the forest to the northwest and find out what happened to a group of clerics he sent there to investigate a gathering of monsters. Presumably, if I fail in this quest, he'll send someone to find out what happened to me.

The dungeon in question wasn't too hard to find. It was small, with only one level, and after wading through some monsters, I found the group of clerics huddled in a corner. From their dialogue, I gather they had been ensorcelled into following someone named Dalagash. I stole some document from the head cleric, defeated him in combat, and ran off.

My "stealing" ability was 1 at this point, so I suspect this was a scripted encounter. Or maybe if I'd "passed," he wouldn't have noticed and attacked.

The king rewarded me with gold and experience points and bade me to go figure out who "Dalagash" is. I have no clue where to go for this, so I've just started exploring the land. It's quite large, and I think I'll have to resort to mapping. I'm guessing Dalagash is the "vampyr" of the title.

Could you maybe be a little more helpful?

But let me back up. Before I could complete this first quest, I had to defeat enough monsters to rise at least two levels. The opening parts of the game are horribly deadly. At Level 1, I lost about 80% of my combats and had to reload. It took me a couple of hours to get the necessary experience points for Level 2, then maybe half that to get to Level 3. You "level up" by visiting a trainer in the castle or one of the towns, at which point you have 45 points to add to your various skills. The twist is that each trainer specializes in certain skills, so you can't choose to increase every skill at every trainer. In any event, after I made Level 2 and put almost all my points into attack and defense, combat became a little more manageable.

You see enemies coming your way on both the overland and dungeon maps. Once they attack you, or you attack them, you're taken to a separate combat screen, much like Ultima III, which unfortunately offers no terrain options to funnel the enemies. Your only options are to cast a spell, move into them to attack, fire a ranged weapon, or swap weapons. You can flee by moving to the edge of the screen, but once you're back on the game map, the monster is still right there next to you, so you haven't saved yourself much (although you can use a save/reload trick described below).

Fighting three skeletons. I've just cast "magic missile."

There are a lot of other NPCs--jesters, guards, magicians, shopkeepers--hanging around the castle and towns, and each has a line of dialogue if you (T)alk to them. In a welcome departure from Ultima II, NPCs of the same type don't all say the same thing (e.g., "Ugh, me tough"; "Pay your taxes!"). Talking to the various guards in the castle produced a variety of responses, from "get out of my face" to "your mama says you're ugly--just kidding, little fella!"

At the same time, NPCs don't impart quite the same volume of lore that you would get in an Ultima game. In an entire town, only one or two NPCs out of 15-20 might have something worthwhile to say, and even then it's pretty cryptic: "beware the false dragon's lair!"; "blue is for servants, hearing the call." Also, none of the NPCs are named.

A rare helpful tip from an unnamed brute.

Each town has a couple of stores, and I upgraded my weapon and armor almost immediately. You can only have one suit of armor at a time, but you can keep up to five weapons in your backpack and (S)wap amongst them in combat; the most common reason would be to switch between a missile weapon and a melee weapon. I haven't found any other types of objects (e.g., potions, wands, scrolls) so far, and I suspect they don't exist.

The magic system is a little weak. There are eleven spells available in combat--seven offensive and four defensive--and five non-combat spells. Oddly, the non-combat spells of "cure light wounds" and "cure critical wounds" aren't available in combat, when you'd most need them. Most of them have names that give away their purpose--"fireball," "spell protection," "iron skin"--but a few, like "mystical boost," are mysterious (I haven't been able to get it to successfully cast). You have all the game's spells available at the outset, but some of them require more magic power than a Level 1 character has. Success and power of spells, as well as (I think) how many points they eat up, are governed by the associated skills.

A few random notes:

• Armor and weapons have condition statuses (excellent, good, fair, bad), and they degrade with use. Once a weapon gets to "very bad," it's only a few more blows before it breaks. This means you need to carry around several weapons. Fortunately, enemies often drop them.

• You can (P)ick anyone's pocket if your "stealing" skill is high enough. If you fail, generally nothing happens, but occasionally an alarm goes off and you have to flee town or get attacked by guards. The same dynamic applies to picking locked doors in towns.

You see an ankh anywhere on this screen? I didn't think so.

• I guess I'm playing this one a year late. Despite the MobyGames date of 1990, all of the files have summer 1989 dates, and the copyright notice says "1989, 1990."

• You can (L)ook at enemies adjacent to you to learn a bit about the number of monsters in the group and their weapons and armor.

• You can save anywhere in the wilderness, but you can't save in castles, towns, or dungeons.

• Each town has a pub. If you buy a round of drinks for the pub, you get different dialogue lines from the NPCs than before you bought the round.

I have not. And without more to go on, that doesn't really help.

• I'm not sure how much to trust this king. There's a torture chamber in his castle.

• Some of the towns on the water have ships for hire, which will transport you to other port cities, saving you the walking time. This is a rare dynamic in games of the era. I don't think you get to board and man your own ships in this game.

• As far as I can tell, time doesn't pass in the game. Any time you're outdoors, you can (R)est and recover hit points and spell points, but the game doesn't track days or time of day.

• Character creation does not include a choice of gender. Enough people call you "fella" that I think you're supposed to be male, but I can't say for sure.

A confusing choice.

Perhaps the game's oddest contribution to the genre is what happens when you die. Instead of a "game over" screen, you find yourself in Heaven, sporting a pair of wings. There are angel NPCs to talk with and (quite naturally) a weapon and armor shop.

And the shops sell the best items I've seen in the game so far.

Eventually, you find your way to the "gods," who are, of course, Brian Weston and Victor Shao. They assess to see if you're worthy of being sent back to the world. I don't know what happens if you are, or how they even make the evaluation, but every time I've been assessed, they've said "you proved yourself to be unworthy" and I've been blasted to ash right there in front of them.

Didn't I already die? Do I go to "Heaven 2" now?

There are some in-jokes in this section. The janitor who sweeps up your ashes is the authors' computer science teacher. Elvis is alive and playing "Hound Dog." One of the angels asks if you've seen The Heavenly Kid, a (best-) forgotten film from 1985. Another angel references the old "Hans and Frans" skit from Saturday Night Live. You can attack and enter combat with either Brian or Victor, but I suspect they're invulnerable.

As I said, it's not a bad game, but there are a number of programming mistakes that put cracks in its professional veneer. The game often registers the wrong keypress, especially if you hit something unexpected. For instance, if you get a yes/no question and accidentally hit something like SPACE, you might find yourself in the midst of casting a spell. If you reload an old game after ending up in Heaven, your icon still has its angel's wings. Sometimes reloading doesn't return you to the hit points and spell points you had when you saved--just the position. Reloading always resets the enemies on the map, so if you find yourself approached by an enemy you don't want to fight, saving and reloading will make him go away. There are numerous typos in the conversations. Monsters sometimes don't disappear after combat, so you have to fight them multiple times in a row. However, just as I was wrapping up this post, HunterZ alerted me to a later version of the game that supposedly fixes some of these problems, so I'll be using that one for subsequent play.

I have absolutely no sense of the game's size and scope--no indication whether it will take another three hours or another thirty. Hopefully, my inquiries to the two authors will be returned, and I can report on a manual next time, maybe have some idea what the titular "Talisman of Invocation" is.