Game 538: Unlimited Adventures (1993)

 

I like how the title screen exemplifies the act of creating a dungeon.

       

Unlimited Adventures

and "The Heirs to Skull Crag" module

United States

MicroMagic, Inc. (developer); Strategic Simulations, Inc. (publisher)

Released 1993 for DOS and Macintosh

Date Started: 31 January 2024

(Title note: Almost every existing reference to the kit calls it Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures and uses the acronym FRUA. However, it does not appear to me that the "Forgotten Realms" setting title, which is present in all the Gold Box games set there, is meant to be part of the kit's title. The manual refers to it solely as Unlimited Adventures every time it appears, although it does also use the FRUA acronym for the default directory.)

       

It's hard to believe that it's been over four years since I played my last Gold Box game: The Dark Queen of Krynn (1992). I've missed it. There were a few things I never liked about it, but man have I missed its combat system. In the 150 games I've played since Dark Queen, only about half a dozen have exceeded a 5 in the "magic and combat" category on the GIMLET, and most of those were roguelikes. It has been dismal. So I found myself grinning like an idiot while playing the first few battles of "The Heirs to Skull Crag," the adventure that comes packaged with Unlimited Adventures. I've said before that you can't make a truly bad fantasy game with this engine, and I stand by it.

      

Hold my beer.

      

Unlimited Adventures is one of those rare bean-counting business decisions that also happens to be great for the fans. Strategic Simulations' contract with TSR was extended into 1994 (resulting in Dark Sun, Eye of the Beholder III, and games I haven't yet covered, like Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession and Menzoberranzan), but TSR stipulated that 1992 was the last year of the Gold Box. Someone—I'll try to find out who before we wrap up this game—had the bright idea of releasing the Gold Box development tools to the fanbase. They farmed out the job to MicroMagic, the TK-based company who had written The Dark Queen of Krynn after a prior history specializing in ports for SSI, Origin, and Electronic Arts. The resulting kit allows anyone to make a Gold Box game.

   

And wow, have people done it. Commenter Abacos was kind enough to put together a master list of all adventures hosted and reviewed on just one web site, and there are over 650 of them. Abacos's datasheet is a thing of beauty; it includes the file sizes, the number of reviews, the date, the starting character levels, and other key data elements, including a brief description. It looks like the most popular adventure is "AT1: Dark Alliances" (1999) by Ben Sanderfer. The largest by file size is "The Snow-Woman's Daughter" (2023) by an author named "hans" (he has the top four largest by file size), but the largest by number of dungeons (80) is "As Seen Through the Eyes of Jade" (1997) by Harri Polsa. The most recent one came out just last month: "The Horse Plague" by Ronald M. Green. There are updates of almost all the classic Gold Box titles, including an offline version of Neverwinter Nights (1990), plus fan sequels and adaptations of Dungeons & Dragons modules. I will naturally not be able to play all or even a modest portion of them. I'm starting with the adventure that came with the kit, "The Heirs to Skull Crag," and after that I may pick a superlative, a commenter favorite, or just a random roll.

  

The kit comprises a map editor, a monster editor, and an event editor. You cannot create your own spells. There is no graphics editor; you must select everything from stock art or create your own using a couple of specific graphics programs (the manual mentions Electronic Arts' DeluxePaint and ZSoft's PC Paintbrush, but I don't know whether this list is exhaustive). I've read in a couple of places that TSR gave explicit permission for designers to use any published Dungeons & Dragons artwork as long as they owned a valid Unlimited Adventures license, but I haven't come across any paperwork to that extent. I'm inclined to think it's an urban legend, but if anyone knows an official source, please let me know.

        

The monster editor lets you rename and change the statistics and abilities of your least favorite monsters.

           

The event editor allows a variety of complex events, both combat and non-combat, including dialogue options and choices. I would be interested if any readers could point me to an adventure on that list that has a lot of role-playing choices, which we haven't seen in the commercial Gold Box games since Pool of Radiance. 

   

Choosing among different event types.

       

Some commenters have said that they'd like to see me make a game, and all I can say is that if I'm going to do that, it's going to be after May when I have more time. It won't be part of this initial set of reviews. However, I did fire up the kit, and it feels user friendly enough. Walking around the dungeon and putting up walls, I was reminded a bit of settlement-building in Fallout 4. 

      

Water pumps and auto-turrets next.

      

I jumped right into character creation with the default adventure, which is provided less for play and more as a template for editing. Character creation remains identical to what MicroMagic developed for The Dark Queen of Krynn, including its icon selector, which has you choose from 49 options instead of meticulously coloring every arm and leg yourself. I was surprised to see that the kit still applies AD&D first-edition class restrictions on races. Only humans and half-elves can be clerics, and the only classes available to dwarves, gnomes, and halflings are fighter, thief, and fighter/thief. Attribute rolls are generous: I rarely saw a single digit, and the average attribute is at least a 14. As usual, the game includes the ability to modify the character to any set of attributes you want, ostensibly so that "it matches a favorite AD&D® game character."

       

This was my first roll.

       

Based on random rolls, I created:

       

• Hemlock, a lawful evil female elf fighter/thief
• Ascham, a neutral good male human ranger
• Isaac the Blind, a neutral evil male half-elf magic user
• Thaxla, a chaotic neutral female dwarf fighter
• Choshen, a lawful good male human cleric
• Gary, a true neutral male half-elf fighter/magic user

     

Characters start with 50,000 experience points, enough that the single-class characters are Level 6 and the multi-class characters are Level 5 in each. The characters also start with a selection of equipment, including +1 weapons and armor appropriate to their classes. That's too bad; I rather like the process of going to the store and equipping the characters. But the game's way makes more sense for the plot.

      

Selecting the right character icon.

      

(When I was creating the characters, I didn't worry about level caps, as I assumed this would be a short game and I didn't realize that the characters were going to start at a high level. I guess Hemlock is destined to remain a Level 5 fighter forever; a few of the others will get only one or two boosts.)

   

If the game documentation came with any backstory for "The Heirs to Skull Crag," I overlooked it. However, it's relatively clear from the opening screens what's happening. The party is a group of caravan guards who have just finished escorting a client to the titular keep, which has a small town at its base. Before they've even done anything, the caravan master pays them a bunch of gold and what turns out to be a Ring of Protection +1.

       

This doesn't look much like a "Skull Crag."

     

I remember when I played Pool of Radiance, I spent an hour or so before playing imagining how my six characters met each other in the first place, making up backstories for each of them. I did that a bit here, trying to account for the varied alignments among the party members. The backstory works well with my motley party; you could imagine caravan guards coming from all walks of life, not caring much about each other's worldviews when they have a straightforward job to do. I don't know what the official AD&D line on this is, but I've decided that "evil" is just a worldview and doesn't necessarily mean that a character can't have friends, or isn't pleasant enough to be around as long as no major ethical issues present themselves. So here we have a tired group heading into the Thirsty Traveler to toast the end of a lucrative gig, with no plans to talk politics. (And for some reason they share finances and have no problem with Gary taking the Ring of Protection. We'll ignore that.)

   

Some of the sites I consulted about the game talked about how the graphics and textures had improved from the previous Gold Box releases. I don't know. I think those sites are forgetting about Dark Queen. To me, they seem about equal to the portraits, scenes, and textures in that game. In fact, most of them are re-used from previous games. There are definitely some nice images, and the textures perhaps support a wider variety of materials, doorway types, and environmental features like crackling fires in every house. The problem, of course—and this is one of the key issues with the Gold Box—is that as nice as they look, they are just textures. They don't really tell you much about the real environment. You can't interact with them. They don't even show approaching enemies. Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder, and Ultima Underworld ruined this kind of abstraction. Even the NPC portraits feel more like placeholders than the actual NPCs in front of you. They often show backgrounds that don't make sense in context, for instance.

         

If we're in an armory, why do gothic spires rise behind her?

      

The town at the base of Skull Crag is small and doesn't use all of the spaces in its grid. One big change became clear as I explored the town and, later, the keep: Unlimited Adventures finally supports maps larger than 16 x 16 without playing tricks. The town and its keep are 19 x 19. At first, I thought the town map was just warping the character to unused areas and fudging the coordinates as we saw in previous Gold Box games. There are even areas that look like the "excess" squares could fit. But I confirmed its 19 x 19 configuration in the editor. The keep has the same size and actually uses almost all of it. Moreover, the instructions say that you can go up 576 tiles, and they don't have to be in a square configuration. The keep is 20 x 28, for instance.

           

The town at the base of Skull Crag. The winding passages to the north and south are also clearly supposed to be going "up" to the keep and "down" the valley below.

      

The town has an inn, a tavern, stables, a general store, an armory, a missile weapon store, and a magic shop that either is always closed or opens later on. I bought arrows in the missile weapon store and was pleased to find that they automatically stacked in my inventory—no more having to go in and "join" them. That might have already been in Dark Queen; I don't remember.

       

80 gold pieces for 20 arrows seems steep.

      

The inn has half a dozen guest rooms. The innkeeper tells you not to enter any of them. If you do, you get a shocked or angry reaction from the guest within. This was fun. Few of the Gold Box games had this level of world detail.

     

"Plus, I'm in the middle of turning into a lich."

Wow, this inn will rent rooms to anybody.

         

The tavern also has more options than in the last few Gold Box games, including the option to listen for rumors (and without having to look them up in a separate adventure journal!). I hear:

• "The witch in the tower on the west side of town is mighty secretive about her home. I wonder what she's got hidden in there." This refers to a building that we later enter and are automatically teleported to another part of town.

      

This is what the witch is hiding.

     

• "Bjorn's in a bad mood recently. I heard someone stole his horse. You know, he's killed people for less than that before." No idea.

• "Tinya says her aunt Penelope just died . . . but you can never trust a word she says, anyway. Her name's not even Tinya, you know. They just call her that."

• "Do you remember Kitama and Moraya, the two little ones visiting from Eagle Peak? On their way back home, they were captured and devoured by a roving band of ettins."

       

This is the work of Tao Rodríguez-Seeger, grandson of folk legend Pete Seeger, who was on the design team. "Penelope" is Pete Seeger's sister, "Tinya" is his daughter, and "Kitama" and "Moraya" are two of his grandchildren.

        

There are a lot of private homes with fireplaces but no people. As we wander the streets, we meet a few combats with drunk mercenaries, thieves, and the like—nothing hard, but reminding me how the system works. I am surprised that my fighter/mage can cast spells in armor; I thought the series fixed that a while ago. Nothing otherwise seems new in combat or spells, at least so far. I notice the party can't rest or "fix" (a shortcut command that heals all wounds without having to cast individual spells) except in safe spaces, but we've seen that in the games before. 

      

Happy days are here again.

         

Overall, it's disappointing that the authors didn't make a few fixes. I would have liked the ability to select characters with the number keys, for instance, and to switch between character screens or inventories without having to back entirely out and select a new character. These shortcuts are the norm in most other multi-character games such as Betrayal at Krondor. I suppose it's folly to have expected much from a project meant to simply wring a few coins out of an existing property.

    

The north gate is broken and the keep is blocked by guards, so the only way for the party to leave the city is through that little trail to the south. It presents itself as a tunnel carved through the mountain which releases the characters into the outdoors, although the "outdoors" is a straight corridor with stone walls (at least until combat begins). Walking along the corridor, the party encounters a lone rider on an injured horse being chased by a horde of monsters. An arrow sends the stallion to the ground, spilling the rider, who jumps up and prepares to defend himself. The party runs forward to defend him; we'll assume that the evil members are thinking about reward.

        

It would be nice if the engine had supported lower-case letters.

         

The battle that ensues is the fifth or sixth of the game, but it is the first authentically challenging one. The party, assisted by the rider (whose name is Sir Dutiocs) and a few road guards, faces a small army of minotaurs, ogres, and hill giants led by an ogre mage. Fortunately, large monsters fare poorly on outdoor maps, where they get hung up easily on trees and rocks and such. The party is able to keep their distance and take out most of the monsters with arrows and spells. I can't tell you how much I dig this battle. It has been literally years since I had truly enjoyable party-based combat.

       

 I really needed my "Fireball" fix.

        

As the last ogre falls, Sir Dutiocs thanks us for our intervention. He was bearing the body of the leader of the Roadwardens, Arelin Starbrow, back to the keep. She was killed by the monsters. He asks us to join him there: "We will have need of valiant fighters such as yourselves to recover the arms of the Roadwarden." He gives us a writ of passage to show to the guards.

   

As we return to town, the passage collapses behind us, so I guess there's no more leaving to the south. After resting and re-memorizing spells, we make our way to Skull Crag, a multi-leveled fortress with a training hall on the first floor, though none of us are ready to level up yet. The first floor has a Great Hall, guest rooms, a Temple of Sune, and other typical castle features, but there's nothing to do here except store excess items in a vault.

       

So this is where Sasha ended up.

          

Upstairs, we find Dutiocs meeting with an old man named Morudel of Marsember. Morudel was the "consort" of Arelin Starbrow, who must now be replaced as Roadwarden. One of their children will probably inherit the title, but first Arelin's arms—sword, shield, lance, and helm—must be recovered, as they "embody the power that sustains Skull Crag." Morudel asks me to assist the heirs in accomplishing this task. Their names are Kallithrea, Dazmilar, and Yemandra, and Dutiocs tells me where I can find them in the keep and town.

     

This guy looks a bit old to have been romping with the leader of a knightly order, but that's what happens when all your art is repurposed.

     

As I've said many times before, I always prefer the low-key, low-level, local quest to the world-saving adventures that most RPG heroes get up to. So far, "Crag" has checked that box. I'll wrap up here and see if I can win it in one or two more, then move on to some other modules.

      

Time so far: 2 hours