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| "Looks like a (puts on sunglasses) riveting title." |
Dungeon Adventuring Construction System
United States
I.F.C. Systems (developer); Softdisk (publisher, in Loadstar disk magazine)
Released 1990 for Commodore 64
Date Started: 25 September 2024Date Ended: 29 September 2024
Total Hours: 7
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5)
Final Rating: (to come later)
Ranking at time of posting: (to come later) The Dungeon Adventuring Construction System was written by David Caruso II and published in Issue #74 of Loadstar in 1990. As delightful as it would have been if the author had been the son of the NYPD Blue actor, there appears to be no relation. The kit initially resulted in only one complete adventure, Caruso's own Dark Fortress (1990), published 4 issues later, but a re-release of the kit in 1998 resulted in three more: Annathor's Crypt (1998), In Search of Demonbane (1998), and Treasure of the Loadstar Tower (1999). Crypt and Demonbane are both by John Mattson, whose Labyrinth (1991) and Knight's Quest (1991) we covered over the summer.
The main Dungeon program released in Issue #74 acts as a character creator, central "hub" for characters, and dungeon editor. The individual adventures are called from the main program as "data disks," allowing a persistent character to participate in multiple adventures. We saw this basic setup as early as Eamon (1980), although the mechanics of the Dungeon system are very different. Characters can be human, elf, dwarf, sprite, and ogre. Attributes are strength, intellect, dexterity, and luck. For humans, these seem to always roll within a range of 11 to 16; some of the other races can roll up to 18 in the expected values. The instructions say the maximums are 25, but I suspect that's the maximum you can achieve through leveling and not the initial creation. There are no explicit sexes or classes; it's best to regard each character as a combination fighter/thief with the thief's ability to use magic items.
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| The end of the character creation process. |
All games take place in a single-level, overhead, gridded dungeon of 17 x 38 squares. (This makes 646 total squares, although the game instructions oddly insist that there are 678.) Every adventure has an entry point, a quest location, and an exit point. Everything else is just an obstacle or asset on the way to the quest location. The editor allows for a wide variety of such encounters, including messages, dialogues, battles, locked doors, one-way doors, secret doors, squares of darkness (you can't see the character), treasures, traps, and healing squares. You can have multiple encounters in a single square.
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| Finding a trap. About half the time, you have a chance to disarm it. |
Exploring these dungeons and triggering the various encounters feels a bit like playing Phantasie (1985). There are even little dots where you find certain encounters. Some of the character creation elements, such as the inclusion of ogres, sprites, and luck, may also have been influenced by the earlier game.
The kit allows creators to make any monsters that they want. Monster attributes include armor class, regular attack type and damage, special attack type and damage, the frequency of the time that special attacks are used, accuracy, attacks per round, and hit points. There's a very crude graphic editor that you can use to create a small monster portrait, but overall graphics are not the system's strength.
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| Battle options against a skeleton. |
Combat has you specify a type of attack (though I never got any options other than "swing") and a spell that you want to cast, if any. Once you initiate it, you can just watch the rounds go by or interrupt at any time to specify a new type of attack, cast a new spell, or switch equipment. Killing enemies rewards you with experience and, often, treasure.
The system includes 18 spells, each of which has a three-letter code. Spells are treated as inventory items on other pieces of equipment like wands, scrolls, and stones. Thus, you might find a crystal with three castings of HEA ("Heal") or a staff with STR ("Strength"), BAL ("Fireball"), and DAP ("Disable Trap").
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| Some of my items and their spells. |
Spells are separated into combat and non-combat varieties. I found that the most valuable of the former is LZE ("Paralyze"), which stops enemies from attacking for a few rounds. PHY ("Psychic") lets you see enemies' precise statistics. Non-combat spells include TRS ("Spot Treasure"), EYE ("Cat's Eyes"; allows you to see in darkness squares), TEL ("Teleport"), PAS ("Passwall"), and ESP (sense the location of the quest). Effective use of these spells is absolutely necessary to succeed in the adventures.
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| PHY lets me see the statistics for the underboss in Dark Fortress. |
Equipment is less varied. The character can equip a weapon, armor, and shield. Equipment does not accompany the character in and out of the dungeon programs (although it is converted to experience points when you leave), so each adventure has to start the player with some appropriate items. In both Dungeon Welcome and Dark Fortress, the starting equipment lasted throughout the adventure and was better than anything found during the adventure.
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| Entering Dungeon Welcome. |
Dungeon Welcome is a small program contained on the editor disk. It has two halves. The top half of the dungeon introduces the player to the different encounters that the kit offers and lets him find a magic wand that helps a bit later on. The bottom half offers a brief quest to find a ruby.
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| The kit offers a dialogue system that enables passwords and riddles. |
The game manages to pack quite a bit of content in a small space:
- A man near the entrance introduces the quest and alerts you to a secret door to the east.
- A "falling rubble" trap cuts off access to the early part of the level.
- A small area of darkness that you have to navigate by feeling your way through.
- Battles with a goblin and an imp.
- A door requires a purple key. The key is found in the middle of a river, but the game has you automatically slip and fall down the river (using the teleportation mechanics, accompanied by messages) and miss the key.
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| What's even the point of being an elf? |
- A magic necklace contains the PAS spell, which you can use to come through the wall near the river and grab the key. There are two ways to get the necklace. One is to fight a tough battle with a wizard (I died the first time); the other is to find a secret door near the wizard.
Once you have the key, you're teleported back to the beginning, and you can use it to open the locked door, grab the ruby, and leave.
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| About to win the scenario. |
Back in the "Guild" (the main program disk), you have to visit the "Review Board" to level up. I was disappointed to find that my accumulated experience from Dungeon Welcome wasn't enough for even half the experience I needed for Level 2. I suppose I could have played it again. The game comes with a couple of higher-level characters on the disk if you want to bypass that kind of hard work.
Dark Fortress is the first complete adventure using the Dungeon creation kit, and the author really goes all-out. It took me three tries to win it (you really need to pay attention to spells), and I almost wished I had grinded (ground?) the character in Dungeon Welcome for at least one level.
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| The title card for Dark Fortress. |
The setup is that "for many years, the Dark Lord and his army of evil have terrorized the land." You have to invade his fortress and kill him. Intelligence suggests that if you do kill him, "all his followers will be destroyed forever." It's hardly the most original plot line in CRPG history, but it's better than nothing. Characters start with plate mail, a bronze shield, and a magical halberd.
Early in the adventure, you wander into a room where the Dark Lord's chief lieutenant, Lothar, is rallying the troops. He takes off, and you have to win a difficult battle against an ogre, followed by an easier one against a goblin.
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| Entering the first Dark Fortress room. |
The rest of the dungeon is structured in four major sections, each requiring you to find a key that's necessary to reach the Dark Lord in the final area. I don't believe there are any "walking dead" scenarios in the game, but there are some places that you definitely want to have one encounter before another. Chief among them is a prisoner who tells you to give a ghost a book. If you reach the ghost first, not knowing what to give him results in your character being teleported to a trap that could easily kill him.
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| A FIRM SHAKE got me nowhere. |
Some features in this adventure include:
- Four cells, each of which contains a tough monster. You absolutely need spells to defeat them. But after each battle, you find a powerful magic item and get to enjoy the benefits of a healing square.
- An imp tells you he hid a wand in a hole. If you reach in, you get bit for damage (and no wand). If you refuse to reach in, the imp grabs your arm and bites it for damage. We all know what we call that type of choice.
- A huge room with a checkerboard floor. From the moment you enter, each square offers three or four options for movement, one of which teleports you to the next safe square; the others have traps and send you back to the beginning. If you make your way through the area, and defeat a dragon, you can access a treasure room with more spell items than you could possibly use during the remainder of the game.
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| One wonders how a "huge dragon" appears "suddenly." |
- An encounter with the "head of security," Cunik, who has one of the keys. You meet him after a large room in which every single square has a battle with some monster.
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| "Cunik" sounds like a Slav trying to insult a Canadian. |
- A large maze of secret doors and dark areas. EYE really helps here.
- A second encounter with Lothar. If you defeat him, you get the Blade of Lothar, necessary for defeating the Dark Lord.
There are a lot of different monsters in the scenario. I wrote down: giant ant, rust monster, giant plant, ogre, goblin, boulder (yes, you fight an actual boulder rolling across the screen), magic swords, skeleton, djinni, tryant (treant), crystal statue, killer kube (mimic), axe beak, mummy, dweeb, zombie, ape, tyrannosaurus rex, imp, and dragon.
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| The djinni has perhaps the most complex graphic in the game. |
You eventually find the Dark Lord in a room in the northwest corner. The difficulty of the battle is mitigated with the dozens of spells that the average player would have upon reaching this point. I cast YZE at the beginning, giving me a few free rounds, and buffed myself with STR, AGI, and SHD. The Blade of Lothar did so much damage that even at 100 hit points (well over double monster other monsters), he died in just a few hits.
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| "Full Force" was the name of his sword. |
After he died, "the fortress start[ed] to rumble and shake," and I had to run for the exit and return to the Guild.
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| Another example of a load-bearing boss. |
My victory with Dark Fortress let me reach Level 1 finally. When you level up, you get to increase two attributes, and you get a bump in maximum hit points.
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| Leveling up at the end of the scenario. |
Miscellaneous notes:
- In addition to Dungeon Welcome, the main disk also lets you create a random dungeon called Lost World. It starts you with a sword, plate mail, and wand with four spells and sets you loose on a map in which monsters, treasures, and other encounters have been completely randomized.
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| Fighting a goblin in a Lost World scenario. |
- A "boss key" (F5) blanks the screen. It's hard to imagine a year and platform (the Commodore 64 in 1990) less in need of such a feature.
- If you die during an adventure, you're returned to the guild and will be resurrected by the review board, although the death counts against your statistics (I don't know if it has any other detrimental effect). While you're on an adventure, your character is registered as GONE on the roster, so if the adventure goes badly, you can't just kill the program and try again. However, GONE characters do eventually "make their way back" to the guild. It takes a few hours.
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| The roster screen, or "Guild" as the game calls it. |
- One major problem with the program is that messages only appear once and any key cancels them. You have to be sure not to hold down a movement key or press it too fast, lest you automatically acknowledge a message before you've read it.
- Along the same lines, the title cards for each adventure, establishing the plot, stay on screen only as long as it takes the program to load. Even at era-accurate emulator speeds, I kept missing most of the text.
- There is no money in the game.
- The sound palette is okay, with a lot of dings, smashes, bloops, and arpeggios reminiscent of Sword of Fargoal (1982).
- The 1998 re-release of the kit seems to offer no extra features except a new title screen.
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| Lost among dark squares in In Search of Demonbane, Part I. |
My only complaint about the kit is the slow speed of character development. A player who liked the game would have had to play Dungeon Welcome, Dark Fortress, and Lost World repeatedly to enjoy the benefits of leveling, at least until 1998. Beyond that, it's not a bad blend of roguelike and Phantasie elements. I liked many of the textual and dialogue encounters and wished Caruso had employed more riddles and puzzles in them.
I'm not sure if I ever established a clear policy for creation kits, including whether to number, play, review, and rate every game separately or whether to cover them in one master entry for the kit itself (and not force myself to play every module). I started to do the former with this one but then decided to be consistent with my approach to games like Eamon (1980). (It's worth noting that El Explorador de RPG, Jason Dyer, and Nathan Mahney at CRPG Adventures took the opposite approach.) I guess the approach I've settled on is to regard it as one "game" with multiple modules if it requires a central hub disk but separate games if the kit produces standalone executable files. In that spirit, I briefly checked out Annathor's Crypt and In Search of Demonbane even though they weren't published until 1998. I don't know what caused a revival of the kit eight years after it was first published, but I suspect Jon Mattson discovered it and wanted to write adventures for it but figured no one would still have the original disks from 1990.
Both adventures offer more interesting stories. Crypt concerns the retrieval of a magic staff from the resting place of a black druid, still guarded by his fanatical followers. Alas, I couldn't get the game to run past the title screen. I got an error every time I tried to load it. Mattson's documentation does a decent job with world-building, though, and shows that the kit can support more complex narratives.
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| The setup for Annathor's Crypt . . . |
Demonbane is in three parts. It casts you in the role of a thief who accidentally released a demon while exploring an ancient tomb. A wizard named Roth captured you and tossed you in his dungeon, but he agrees to let you go if you'll embark on a search for a magic sword that can slay the demon. Part 1 begins with a "test" that the wizard has devised to see if you're even capable of wielding the sword: the recovery of a mystic rune from his basement. Parts 2 and 3 only unlock with passwords obtained from the earlier parts. The character starts with a shortsword, a cuirboilli vest, a small shield, a healing potion (HEA), and an Atlas elixir (END). The first level is almost entirely dark squares, and while I'm sure it would have paid off eventually, I got sick of it early on and ran out of time to finish this entry by my self-imposed deadline.
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| And for In Search of Demonsbane, Part I. |
Among the two scenarios I experienced, I'd give the game a 27 on the GIMLET.
It does best with multiple combat options (particularly spells) and the
overall short but challenging gameplay (4s), worst in "Economy" (0), and
2s and 3s in everything else. The specific scores depend a lot on the specific modules, with the 1998 games clearly earning higher ratings in both "game world" and "encounters and foes."