Tunnels & Trolls: Computer Solo Adventure

The game map. The starting island is in the lower left. I don't think the Dragon Continent looks as much like a dragon after all. More like a bird.

My last posting prompted some fond remembrances and discussions of game books. I had suggested that the nature of Crusaders of Khazan's encounters reminded me of these options, and I drew a parallel between "page-scumming" in game books and "encounter-scumming" in the game: saving one's place and testing all the options before deciding on the preferred ending, versus simply making your choice and seeing where it takes you.

If I'd waited a little longer to write that post, I would have drawn a more direct link between gamebooks and Khazan, because it turns out that the game is based on gamebooks, called "solo adventures" by Tunnels & Trolls' publisher. Fiendishgames mentions a couple of them in this comment: Sewers of Oblivion (covering the Gull sewers) and City of Terrors. I'd be surprised if Arena of Khazan and Sea of Mystery didn't also contribute a lot of material. The problem is that playing the game is starting to feel a lot like a literal gamebook, with copious text in the window and a series of branching encounter choices in just about every visitable location. At times, the other parts of the game seem almost superfluous, as if the creator just typed the gamebooks into the computer and then created a half-assed interface to make it seem like the player was playing a computer RPG.

"But Chet!" I hear you sputtering, "You love copious encounters and choices in your games!" This is true, but I like them when they're role-playing choices, or at least character-based choices in which success is determined by character attributes rather than hitting upon the "right" option. Too many of the choices in Khazan--not all, but too many--feel more like standard CYOA book choices, where the plot unfolds in ways that you couldn't have possibly foreseen from the nature of the choices.

Note that the game has me choose whether to hike or more in a particular direction rather than letting me actually walk across a map. Just one of many ways in which it feels like a gamebook that happens to have a CRPG-like interface.

 
But the larger problem is that there simply isn't a good balance between text and actual gameplay. Envision a typical RPG dungeon. At one end of a hallway, you have a chat with an NPC. Then you walk ten steps down an empty corridor and fight a combat with a party of orcs. The challenge for a game is to make those 10 steps feel necessary, or at least not useless, even though they're empty. It could be done by using the space to build up a sense of suspense about the impending encounter, perhaps with some atmospheric messages every couple of steps. Maybe there's a chance of a random encounter along the way. Perhaps the navigation itself is a puzzle, and the encounter at the "end" of the corridor is actually behind a secret door that the player wouldn't know is there until he maps the rest of the level. A modern game might feature interesting graphics and sound to enhance all of these possibilities. Whatever the case, you don't want the player to reach the next encounter feeling like the game simply wasted his time in the meantime.

Khazan often makes me feel that the 20 steps I walk between the gates of a city and its docks or a shop are its way of simulating the gamebook choice of "if you want to go to the docks, turn to page 91; if you want to go to the shop, turn to page 54." I've felt this way in only a few other games. The overland map in Champions of Krynn comes to mind. It was just wasted space, and the game would have been better off offering a menu of travel options, like Curse of the Azure Bonds did. A lot of other games have featured so many interminable dungeon levels, with no interesting geography, that I'd rather they'd just lined up their combats and let me chug through them in a row. But for the most part, games manage to do a good job--a surprisingly good job--of giving the sense that the space they occupy, and the physical process of moving through it, is somehow necessary, or even fun.
 

Khazan's problem is that the amount of text and the sheer number of options in the fixed encounters just contrasts too sharply with the paucity of graphics in the space in between. It's a little like reading a physical gamebook but forcing yourself to do a lap around the block every time you make a choice (which, come to think of it, would be a pretty good exercise plan). Still, almost all computer RPGs are, in effect, computer "solo adventures," so much of what makes Crusaders of Khazan notable, and a little unsatisfying, in this regard is somewhat ineffable.

The bloom has come off the rose for a few other reasons, including some undocumented menu choices (I missed out on a lot of items in shops because I didn't realize that F9 and F10, of all things, scrolled through the selections) and weird gameplay elements that I'm not sure if they're bugs or what. Shops randomly stop selling food (often when I most need it), for instance. Resting abruptly stopped healing wounds on my dwarf (I don't think he was afflicted by any other conditions) and I had to reload a much earlier save. A lot of combats plunge me into darkness even when they're initiated in lit places. Occasionally, one of my characters will get no experience from combat for no reason that I can see. The continent, which I had assumed was open and fully explorable, has a bunch of features that artificially restrict movement, such as the characters taking damage for every step they take when walking in what looks like desert terrain, sea currents that prevent landing in all but a a few areas, and in the entire northern half of the map, a banshee who attacks every time you stray off a narrow path.

Most of my playing since last post has been on a series of islands. I first bought a ship from the docks in Gull, then headed out into the sea.

Can I rename it?

I made due east for the mainland, expecting that I'd explore from the south to the north, as I'd been warned by everyone that the northern areas of the continent (above a cliff wall known as the "Great Escarpment") are dominated by monsters. However, the moment I landed, I got a message that it was "too hot!" and started taking damage. I'm not sure what this is about, but I later discovered that it happens every time you walk on an open area of the continent, although you can periodically rest (even in the "too hot!" zone) to recover hit points.

Am I wandering across the sand with no shoes or something?

With that plan temporarily shot, I decided to visit the nearby islands before hitting the continent. The first was a small one called Thorn, just north of Phoron. There was a small town called Anthelios in its one explorable square, and I entered.

As I wandered the hallways, I found myself attacked repeatedly by demon apes. At last, I came across some villagers (there were some encounter options where I had the choice to attack them) who explained that the townsfolk were followers of a sea goddess named Goloe, but she had cursed them for impiety and sin and was sending the demon apes to attack them every month. They asked if I would kill the 30 demon apes currently wandering the city, which would put them in good shape for at least the rest of the month.

I agreed, of course. The demon apes weren't terribly hard, as long as I kept Linn the Wizard away from their clutches, although there weren't 30 of them in the city. I had to keep leaving the city and re-entering, allowing the random encounters to reset, before I could meet the quota. When I did, I got a message that the townsfolk came out of their homes and resumed their business, though I got no more options for helping them in the long term, nor any reward. Meanwhile, I seemed to have made an enemy of the goddess:

Much later in my sea explorations, I came across a "castaway" in a raft. I ignored a crewmember's advice to keep away from the "sea witch," went out to help her, and discovered that she was none other than Goloe herself. She deemed me "worthy of crusading for the great wizard" and blessed me with sea water. Some time after that, I thought of going back to Anthelios to see if the encounter had made any difference, and it had. When I approached the altar, instead of getting a rebuke for helping the villagers, I was allowed to plead their cause. Goloe agreed that she'd punished them enough and called off the demon apes. She also gave me some gold and a bit of verse that I can't quite interpret yet:

When second greatest you do face [the empress's wizard, Khara Khang?]
Khazan's binder in a silver place [probably refers to some artifact I've yet to find]
Teach a rogue to teach a rogue [okay...]
Answer then in ogres' brogue! [a reference to the language system, I guess]
The spender's name in words so bright [clueless from here out]
Clever thief is demon wight
To vanquish wizard this complete
Else second's master must defeat

On another island, inhabited by Amazons, the queen wanted me to retrieve a stolen ring from a dragon on the isle of Khazad. I accepted the quest, but when I got to the island, I found that the dragon was too powerful to defeat in combat for my low-level party. Instead, I had a series of encounter options where I ran into a cave and met a hermit named Briah who had been trapped there for years. He came up with a plan by which I distracted the dragon while Briah opened a secret "trap door" on the beach.

As with the rat battle in the sewers beneath Gull, I had to choose the same options over and over again, suspecting that I was just wasting time, before the encounter finally paid off, with all of us escaping into some secret tunnels beneath the island. The tunnels led under the ocean to another island, called Res (heck of a feat of engineering, that), where I constructed a new ship from some pods--after first fighting a battle against pod people/zombies that escaped from the pods.

When I returned to the queen of the Amazons, she gave me detailed instructions for finding Goloe's temple on an island in the "dragon's maw" ("currents" keep me from reaching it otherwise). I had to land in a particular place on the coast and walk a certain number of steps in various directions before boarding a ferry to the island. Again, what I took to be desert kept damaging me, and if I strayed from the path, I got attacked by a banshee.

Goloe's temple was full of combats with water creatures like merfolk, sharks, and kelpies. Some of them were nearly impossible, causing me to reload multiple times. I ultimately didn't find anything useful here. There was a lagoon in which I could swim and dive to some underwater caverns, but even when I took pains to fully explore them despite taking "choking" damage every move, I didn't find anything to continue the story. I made a note to return later.

Fighting a bunch of "nix waterhorses" in the temple.

Continuing my exploration of the islands, I found:

• Peleki's island, occupied by a guy named Peleki and his large family. He offered both food and gossip for a price, and in the latter category told me a number of things, including that Empress Lerotra'hh's favorite story is "The Arrogant Knight," that I can only approach "the unicorn guardian" if I'm not wielding any weapons, and that "the best gem to bear a soul is a diamond of golden hue." I dutifully wrote everything down but left before I spent all of my money.

One of Peleki's bits of gossip. I'm sure its meaning will become clear later.

• An island composed entirely of bones of the dead, with living skeletons controlled by a skeletal hand bearing a black ring. I had numerous options to flee, but I kept investigating and found myself in a very long battle with "living skeletons"--very long because neither of us seemed to be capable of hitting the other. It was very weird. My attacks only connected with them about 1 in 30 times, and they never hit me at all. I eventually had to set the combat to "auto" and go run some errands while the battle finished up. When it was over--my party still unscathed--I had various options to take the ring or flee. Everything but fleeing resulted in the death of at least one of my characters. Maybe I'll return when I have more constitution.

Part of my endless battle with skeletons.

• The island of Garr, which had a store in the middle of nowhere.

 
As I sailed, the game occasionally gave me messages from my "captain" and noted the presence of crewmembers on my ship. I have no idea where they came from. Did they come with the ship when I bought it? If so, what did they do when I wrecked it on the dragon's island?
 

As I close, I've finished what I can do on the islands, and I've pulled in to the city of Knorr on the coast of the continent. Maybe here I'll get more of a trail on the main quest. I've barely explored the spell system at all, so I really need to purchase some magic for my wizard and rogue and start testing it out. More on that, and combat and equipment, next time.