Game 224: Dungeon of Nadroj (1991)

Anyone know what Blackmar's Dungeon is?

    

Dungeon of Nadroj

Australia

C. W. Jordan (developer), published as shareware

Released 1991 for Amiga

Date Started: 22 May 2016
Date Ended: 22 May 2016

Total Hours: 3

Reload Count: 9

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: 22

Ranking at Time of Posting: 78/223 (35%)

Raking at Game #453: 181/453 (40%)

It takes some guts to write an independent shareware RPG for what is arguably the premier RPG platform, in the heyday of its popularity, but that's what C. W. ("Bill") Jordan did here in 1991 with Dungeons of Nadroj. While it can't compete in quality with some of the best commercial games of the era, Jordan deserves credit for creating a game that feels familiar without feeling completely derivative. As I told him during a brief correspondence earlier this week, I couldn't identify a single specific game that must have served as Jordan's inspiration.

Dungeon of Nadroj belongs to a subset of games that we might call "afternoon RPGs": light games of short duration and randomized gameplay that use RPG elements. It's going to suffer in my GIMLET rating for not having much of a framing story or an epic quest, but that was never the developer's intention. An Australian chess champion, Jordan became well-known within his community for developing chess programs, and Nadroj feels like the type of game that a chess game developer would write: brisk, replayable, and more concerned with mechanics than content.
      

The game's "instruction manual" leaves out the important keys (U)se and (D)rop.

    

Jordan was 33 when he wrote Nadroj and began selling it in magazines for $25 AUD. Like legions of developers before him, Jordan decided to name the dungeon by spelling his last name backwards. Memo to future developers who might think about doing the same thing: this only works if you have the right sort of name. If your name is Bill Rorret, you got lucky. Mr. Jordan, in contrast, did not, and his game name sounds as silly and forced as, say, Dungeon of Ekorbgnilob. (Revelation: the first six letters of my last name are an anagram for "goblin." How did I never see that before?) Again, though, we give it a pass for not being that serious a game in the first place.

   

Two PCs encounter each other in the dungeon.

   

Up to 4 players can explore the dungeon, competitively or cooperatively, all with a goal to kill a wizard on the sixth level. When you start the game, you set the number of characters, choose from human, dwarf, elf, and hobbit classes (I found no functional difference), and give each character a name. If more than one character is active, you decide whether they can fight each other and how many moves each character gets per turn. After that, it's off to the dungeon.

Levels are supposedly randomized for each new game, but I didn't see that happening, so it's possible the only version floating around online is a demo version rather than the full, paid version. Each level is 14 x 14 squares, with the squares initially hidden but slowly revealed as they enter your field of vision. As you explore, you fight both fixed and wandering monsters appropriate to the level, collect treasure, and use it to improve your character's dexterity and strength (the only attributes), restore lost constitution, and purchase equipment.
  

The combat is pretty basic. You see your character's and the monster's comparative strength and dexterity levels and health meters. As the seconds tick by and you and the monster attack each other, your meters deplete until one of you is dead. Your only options are to toggle between "Defend," "Attack," and "Thrust" modes, but these just seem to affect the speed at which the meters reach their inevitable outcome. You can also "Run" or "Use" a particular item that gives you an offensive or defensive advantage against the enemy, but there aren't many of these.  

  

Combat with a poorly-drawn mummy.

   

Slain enemies give up gold. If the enemy was fixed (there are about a dozen of these per level), he'll also have a treasure chest that might be trapped or might have some special inventory item.

In between monsters, you encounter wandering NPCs. If you "talk" to them, they'll give you brief hints, such as the locations of stores. If you "trade," each will offer potions that increase strength, potions that increase dexterity, and healing potions. The potions that increase strength and dexterity are the primary mechanisms for character development in the game. They start at 200 gold pieces each and increase by 20 gold pieces for every point you increase.

  

Buying healing from an NPC.

   

You start the game with no inventory and slowly accumulate weapons, armor, rings, potions, scrolls, and so forth. Even after winning the game, I remain confused about how it treats weapons and armor. There's no "equip" command. There is a "use" command, but you can only have one item in active "use" at a time. Thus, if you have a sword and a suit of armor in your inventory, I don't know if they improve your combat stats if you're not actively "using" them. There are some items--sacks, ropes, and lanterns among them--that never seem to do anything even if "used."

On higher levels, you fight tougher creatures like dragons, demons, balrogs, vampires, and puddings, but you start to find more useful magic items. There's a "magic sword," for instance, that protects against any damage from undead, and rings that detect evil creatures, warn you of impending attacks (and give you a chance to flee), and protect against fire and magic. These rings are never called anything but "ring," so you have to remember which effects are in which inventory slots. There's one fun bug: if an undead creature attacks you while you're protected from undead, your hit points actually increase with every attack, potentially well above the normal maximum of 200.

   

A "Ring of ESP" does its job.

   

On lower levels, almost every fixed enemy's treasure chest requires a key. You have to develop an inventory of different keys--iron, copper, gold--on upper levels to open any of these chests. You're generally rewarded with multiple treasures per chest if you have the key.

  

I don't have the right key to open this chest.

   

Levels are dotted with staircases, parts of the corridor that slope upwards and downwards, magic portals that teleport you to other levels, trap doors, and secret doors. The ratio of regular squares to those that screw with your movement gets a little tiresome sometimes.

   

   

Slain characters can "reincarnate," but their strength and dexterity are reduced to 1, they lose all their equipment, and they lose all their gold. The maps remain explored and all the fixed encounters--which you really need to build the character--already tripped, so "reincarnating" is worse than just starting over. 

  

  

With the equivalent of permadeath thus in effect, winning the game is hard unless you spend a long time grinding. You want to spend a long time on earlier levels, earning money, buying potions, and getting your strength and dexterity up high. Camping near a store seems like a good idea; that way, you don't have to rely on random NPCs for healing potions. You probably don't want to move down to the next level until your stats are 10 times the level number.

Since I was willing to abuse save states, I won the game more quickly, though I had to "reload" quite a bit. The wizard roams the sixth level, but he's invisible, so you need a Potion of Detect Invisibility to find him. This can be purchased from one of the shops if you don't find one, although none of the potions in the shops are labeled, so you have to spend a while testing them.

   

For some reason, if you can't see the wizard, you end up fighting a pudding.

   

Once you can see the wizard, killing him isn't very hard--he falls far more quickly than the dragons and balrogs you can find on the same level. Defeating him gives you a brief message in which Jordan forgot to put spaces around the [Name] and [Class] variables. Hitting SPACE at this point dumps you to the Amiga desktop.

The "winning screen." Either by bug or by design, the wizard has no graphic of his own. You're seeing the last NPC I encountered.

Nadroj isn't going to do great on my GIMLET, but I still liked it. It didn't hurt that I played it while taking a break from the 100+ hour Fate: Gates of Dawn and just before the confusing Swords & Sorcery. Nadroj served great as a quick, fun palate-cleanser.
      

• 1 point for an extremely brief game world.
• 2 points for character creation and development in the form of buying potions.
• 2 points for NPC interaction, both to trade things and hear a small selection of hints.
• 1 point for a set of standard foes.
• 1 point for near option-less combat.
• 3 points for a variety of equipment you must use intelligently to survive.

      

     

• 4 points for an economy that never gets stale given the need to buy potions.
• 2 points for a main quest.
• 2 points for goofy graphics, no sound, and an okay interface, though the in-game instructions don't bother to tell you all the commands.

     

This is a "balrog." I think you'll agree I'm being a bit generous on the graphics.

       

• 4 points for gameplay, mostly for replayability and not overstaying its welcome.

    

That gives us a final score of 22, which doesn't sound great, but is on the upper end of independent RPGs. It's much better than the other Independent Australian RPG I've played in the last year: 1990's Stone of Telnyr.

In e-mail correspondence, Mr. Jordan told me that the Amiga shareware scene was pretty active in Australia in the early 1990s, with a number of stores selling cheap disks by mail, and one magazine--MegaDisk--with a large shareware library. Bulletin board distribution was also quite common. There are probably dozens of uncatalogued shareware RPGs from this era (that wasn't a challenge!), and Jordan's was one of the few lucky ones to find its way to modern databases. Jordan says he did well with some of his programs, but he only ever received one shareware payment for Dungeon of Nadroj. Reviews were good, though, and the game was awarded "public domain game of the month" by one UK library.

As I mentioned, Nadroj is unique among shareware programs (so far) in that it owes no obvious inspiration to an earlier commercial RPG. You can't describe it as a "Whatever clone." Jordan told me that while he was familiar with some roguelikes--LARN, Moria, Hack--he was primarily inspired by tabletop Dungeons & Dragons and Tunnels & Trolls sessions from the 1970s. He also tried his hand at adventure games and an adventure game creator, all of which seem to be lost.

It's a bit refreshing to play a game with brand new elements, and even more refreshing to cover a 1991 game in a single posting. Back we go to Nadroj's thematic opposite with another posting on Fate.