Fallthru: Hunting and Gathering

Hopefully, I can stop scrounging for food now.

Another six hours in Fallthru has produced little reward, but I finally feel like I'm getting the hang of the game, and towards the end I started to make some real progress.

I spent a couple hours just screwing around with sample characters so I could get a sense of the map layout and the game mechanics. The game's "odometer" system, which records the number of steps taken in a particular direction until you switch directions or RESET, helped with mapping. In addition to the starting city of Or'gn, I found the locations of three other cities: Slavhos, Odetn, and Forod, as well as a bunch of farms that dot major crossroads.

The cities and farms all took up a maximum of five or six squares, so there's really no need to map them separately. Cities all have a shop or two and a well, and most farms sell both food and grain and offer free water. 

I manage to kill a bird moments before I die of starvation.

With water fairly plentiful, the primary survival obstacle in the early game is food. Food, water, and fatigue tick down at a rate of 1 every 25 moves, and you die if any get to 0. Restoring fatigue is a simple matter of typing REST, although this usually has the consequence of depleting water and food. It's hard to get them all back to their maximums at the same time.

I finally found a good hunting area in the wilds to the northeast of Or'gn, where squal (basically quail) and rabir (basically rabbits) appeared at random or with the use of the HUNT command (which takes two hours). I learned to THROW KNIFE when they appeared. If I was lucky enough to hit them, I then had to TAKE my knife back and PREPARE the animal, which converts it to food: 2 rations for squal and 3 for rabir.

Hunting is a tedious but necessary process in the early game.

At first, I was just interested in getting enough food to stay alive, but it later occurred to me that I could sell it in Or'gn for 0.09 ems each (100 ems make a gold rall). For about an hour, I had to type repeatedly:

>HUNT

>THROW KNIFE AT SQUAL (or RABIR)

>TAKE KNIFE

>PREPARE SQUAL

>HUNT

After a while, I had a backpack full of meat. I sold it in Or'gn and repeated the process a few times until I had enough money to buy an axe.

A "navaid" is alas far in my future.

As I had been wandering around, hunting and mapping, I ran into a bunch of NPCs and warriors. I still wasn't any match for the warriors, I thought, but I began noticing the same names multiple times. When a warrior approaches, you can accept his challenge by typing FIGHT, or you can say HELLO and find out his level (along with a little bit of lore). I noticed that each named warrior had the same level, though sometimes different equipment, every time I encountered him. Many were Level 0 like me. I started taking notes.

Once I had my axe, I tried a policy of fighting any warrior who was Level 0 and didn't have manifestly better equipment. The strategy paid off. Through my combat victories, I got about 30 rall and swiftly rose to Level 3. I noted, however, that the number of rall you receive from defeated foes seems to be related to the variance between your level and theirs, and as mine rose, the rewards grew slighter. Occasionally, my hit points dipped and I had to YIELD combat and pay a tribute of a few rall to my opponent. A couple of times, I died and had to RESTORE.

Victory!

During this time, I had encountered multiple wandering NPCs and tried to help them when I could. If they asked for food, water, or ralls, I happily typed GIVE. Eventually this paid off when a little girl handed me a ruby. This was consistent with a bit of lore I received from an NPC that said, "Those who persist in good works are rewarded."

What goes around comes around.

I wanted to sell the ruby and buy a sword or some armor, but another piece of lore said, "jewelry of Faland has value beyond money," so I suppose I should hold onto it.

Lore is a vital part of the game. It works much as it did in The Land. Each NPC, when greeted with HELLO (the only dialogue option) plucks a random selection from a "lore database." I've recorded 38 lines so far. Here's a sample:

• The emerald of Thun deciphers the runestone.
• Hole-in-the-wall lies east of Biclif.
• A warrior gains honor through clarity.
• Rings can be obtained from the ringmaker in Triod.

There were three overtly related to the  main quest:

• If you truly seek home, then you must learn how to fight Zugg, the most powerful demon in Faland.
• It is said that home lies at the end of the golden way.
• The golden way runs through Sorf.

Aside from providing direct hints, these bits of lore also give me some ideas for things to look up with the INFO command. For instance, INFO THUN (from the first comment above) gives me:

Thun is an ancient cavern, known to the earliest peoples of Faland as a place of great power and mystery. It has not been occupied for many generations and is little visited due to its remoteness and the forbidding nature of the surrounding terrain. It is said now to be a lair of felven. Rumors that the cavern hides a great treasure have long circulated.

Felven turn out to be "felines of unmatched power" whose attack cannot be withstood by any weapon, armor, or magic. Fortunately, they only attack on moonless nights because they avoid all light. Basically, they're this game's version of the grue.

Lesson learned: you don't want to be out in the wilderness on the night of the 15th day.

Some of the INFO entries have filled in a bit of the back story of the game. Some entries make reference to the "demon wars" of long ago and an ancient evil king named Morag. Unfortunately, although there are entries on almost every location, creature, and piece of equipment (making it one of the few games of the era with weapon and armor descriptions), there are no entries for some of the things that would be most obvious, like FALAND, DEMON, and PHARG (a creature I encountered underground).

Among the lore entries were this sequence:

• The weyring is a remarkable instrument. If you have one, the command WHERE IS {place} can help you find numerous locations.
• If you have the wit and courage to find the secret of Black Water Cave, you can wrest a weyring from it.
• Black Water Cave is beneath a grass-covered mound.
• A silver amulet opens the door to black water cave.

The "grass-covered mound" is somewhere near Odetn--I've seen it from the tops of trees--and I have a shovel that I can use to DIG if I get there, but I'm not sure where to get a silver amulet. I've seen them hanging around the necks of random NPCs, but I don't want to kill them or STEAL them, as wandering warriors attack immediately if you get "dishonorable" status. Laying down money and trying to BUY or TRADE doesn't work, and lore says "amulets cannot be bought."

Lacking other ideas, I decided to explore the catacombs beneath Slavhos, which according to INFO used to house slaves in the days of King Morag. Getting through the area involved a lot of juggling of the lamp, the bottle, and oil, but basically it was a 5 x 5 area in which I kept getting attacked by "Pharg" (no idea) but managed to defeat them (rising to Level 4 in the process). A single room led DOWN to a small chamber with a key, which in turn opened a gate that led to a treasure room with a ruby and 5 "ikons." The ikons were too heavy to take out all at once, so it looks like I'm going to have to tote them one-by-one back to Or'gn for sale.

Entering my first Fallthru dungeon.

Combat in the game is pretty rote, the only variables being your weapon, whether you're wearing "armor" (there's only one type), and your combat level. The experience looked like this:

>FIGHT
The savage horror aims a blow at your head. Nice dodge!
>FIGHT
You swing. Good hit! The nasty brute is bloodied!
>FIGHT
You duck under razor claws and deliver a powerful blow.
>FIGHT
You dodge too late. Claws rip your flesh!
>FIGHT
You strike, then take a blow and dance away!

In the end, I don't actually kill the pharg. I just drive it off.

After this, I have a few options, including continued exploration of the road network and a cavern beneath the city of Forod. In addition to a sword and armor, there's at least one item I'm saving to buy: a "flyr," which greatly increases movement speed and thus lowers depletion of fatigue, food, and water over long distances.

A few miscellaneous notes:

• The only sound in the game is a startling system beep whenever one of the game's eight-hour periods rolls over.

• I've mapped close to a thousand squares, but less than 1 in 100 has anything special in them. Most are generic descriptions, like "you are in a slightly rolling region of well-kept farms."

• When moving down the road, you can't type too fast because you'll miss warriors and NPCs.

• I guess you could make money by buying and selling grain, too. Most farms sell it for something like 0.02 per pound, and you can sell it in the city for 0.04. A sack holds 29 pounds and costs 0.45 to buy, so it would take one trip just to make a profit. Subsequent trips would yield about half a rall each (you can only carry one full sack at a time). I think hunting is easier.

The farmer spells it out.

• Juggling inventory items is tedious and annoying. The whole process of trying to buy oil and fill my lamp was a comedy worthy of the Keystone Kops. To buy oil, you have to have an empty bottle--you can't buy ounces to fill a partly-full bottle. It has to be on the ground. So do the ralls that you're buying it with. Then you have to pick it up and fill the lamp, but the lamp has to be on the ground to transfer the oil. The bottle will hold 12 ounces but the lamp only holds 8. I naturally made mistakes at every stage in this long process.

Let's talk briefly about the book before I go. A few days ago, I bought a copy of Fallthru: The Mentat Warrior by game author Paul H. Deal. The paperback version is a large 678 pages; I read the equivalent of about the first 40 of them.

The plot concerns eight people from Earth, none of whom know each other, who wake up in an inn in Faland one morning and have no idea where they are. There are two men (including Martin, the main protagonist), two women, two young boys, and two young girls. All have been plucked from various places and times, and the only thing they seem to share in common is that most were fatally ill and hospitalized before they appeared in Faland. They wake up in perfect health.

Shortly after waking up, they meet a man named Engar, who explains that they're not on Earth, though Faland is similar in many ways, including a roughly 24-hour day and a 360-day year. It is occupied by a race of human-like beings who speak a form of English, and humans have apparently been mysteriously appearing once a year, in groups of 8, for about 20 years. No one knows why this is happening, whether the humans died back on Earth, or what. But while generally pleasant, Faland is a tough place to live, and the humans will be sold into slavery if they can't learn a trade, so Engar says that he'll be training them in fighting, first aid, scouting, hunting, and whatnot for the next month. Slowly, through training and testing, the group figures out what skills suit them best. Martin shows some promise as a "Mentat," a warrior with special mental abilities.

While the writing is perfectly adequate and some of the descriptive passages are quite good, the dialogue (the hardest part to get right) is stilted and sometimes cringeworthy. The eight humans don't talk, think, or act like real people who have suddenly awakened in a strange place. They accept their situation a bit too readily and express no remorse for the people they (presumably) left behind, nor for the inconveniences of being transported to a medieval-level society. Where I'd be alternately screaming, crying, swearing, looking for hidden cameras, and throwing up, the characters in this book happily wander off to breakfast (me: "Don't eat that! It's an alien planet! Can you tolerate the microbes? You don't know!") and sit around and ask questions like, "What kind of life do people have here? Do they raise families?" and "Do warriors get paid?"

Engar offers way too much exposition in just a few pages. None of the characters have any traits or flaws that make them feel like real people. Finally, at times it feels like too much of a game adaptation, with Engar referring to his combat "level" literally.

It's possible that some of these things change, or receive explanations, as the novel goes on, but I should probably avoid reading ahead for spoiler reasons anyway.

This switching back and forth has worked out for me pretty well. I'll keep playing Fallthru, but let's see if we can finish off Dragonflight first.