Unlimited Adventures: More Adventures, Summary, and Rating

 

        

Unlimited Adventures

And specifically, "The Heirs to Skull Crag" adventure

United States

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

Released 1993 for DOS and Macintosh

Date Started: 31 January 2024

Date Ended: 25 February 2025

Total Hours: 29 (two full adventures, several partial ones)

Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5), but depends heavily on the adventure

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

      

Summary:

    

Unlimited Adventures is a creation kit that uses the Gold Box engine, the basis of ten Dungeons & Dragons games and two Buck Rogers games between 1988 and 1992. "The Heirs to Skull Crag" is a short but satisfying adventure that exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the creation kit. It casts the party as a group of caravan guards who get caught up in the fate of a fortress whose lord or lady, called the Roadwarden, serves as the protector of trade routes through the Dragonjaw mountains. A cabal of odd enemies has slain the Roadwarden, and her artifact weapons and armor have been scattered among the factions. The party must recover the items while arbitrating a succession feud among the dead Roadwarden's children. There are several side areas and adventures.

   

The module makes excellent use of the variety of enemies allowed by the engine (which is based on the latest commercial version, as seen in 1992's The Dark Queen of Krynn), the tactical combat, the spells, character development, and equipment. Weaknesses are the same as the weaknesses of the Gold Box engine and the Unlimited Adventures kit in general: no interactivity to the environment, a broken economy, and graphics that are all stock art rather than created specifically for this story. It nonetheless stands up well against other Gold Box games.

     

*****

     

The next adventure I checked out was "Ghost of Greyhawk Manor," by Mike Whyte, apparently created as part of a 1993 Halloween contest on America Online. The plot is that the PC (whichever party member was selected when you hit "Begin Game") is on the trail of a malevolent entity named Malhavok. Years ago, Malhavok tortured and slaughtered the PC's family and burned his village. The PC has traced Malhavok, through similarly destroyed cities and scenes of slaughter, to the town of Greyhawk.

    

Right now. This is the first time I'm hearing that name.

    

I decided to do something different and make the main character a cleric surrounded by five paladins. The game starts everyone at a relatively-high Level 9, to include cleric spells through Level 5 and +2 equipment. I envisioned the cleric, Karras, not as a kind, healing cleric, but rather a wrathful, vengeful one. I decided to see how long I could stay alive while giving all offensive spells to the cleric and relying on the paladins' "Lay on Hands" abilities for healing.

   

As the party enters Greyhawk, they witness an altercation between a local lord, Blaine, and a messenger from the duke, who is upset about Blaine's dalliance with the duke's daughter. In the inn, the party hears about the history of Lord Blaine's family. Fifty years ago, the viscount's daughter went insane and murdered her family, then killed herself. Her spirit still haunts the old manor, protecting a hidden vault of riches that succeeding generations have occasionally tried to find, most of them getting slaughtered by the vengeful spirit. Blaine himself barely made it out alive when he went for the treasure.

        

The party gets the main quest from "Duke Skynyrd."

    

The relationship between this haunting and Malhavok is unclear, but when the party meets the duke (amusingly named Skynyrd), he tells them that Malhavok is at the old estate, looking for the one weapon that can kill him: the sword Blackrazor. Lord Blaine (a Level 7 chaotic good human fighter) and one of his companions, Usurp Toe (a Level 10 lawful evil human fighter) join the party on the way out of town. We're soon attacked by a pack of wolves (I immediately start regretting my lack of "Fireball"), which causes Usurp Toe to run off after our victory.

   

The core of the game takes place in the enormous Greyhawk Manor. The author did a great job making the manor seem like a real place with evocative descriptions of rooms and encounters.

 

As you know, I'm a big fan of "flavor text."

       

He also took the time to create original art for the game, or at least digitize it from photographs.

     

They both look familiar, but I can't quite place them. Are they from Doctor Who?

       

However, it soon became clear that this is not a module in which you want to screw around with unconventional party composition. First, the module calls upon the skills of thieves and magicians; there are locks that need to be picked and doors that need to be "Knocked." Second, enemies are hard. The largely-undead bestiary resists most of the cleric's offensive spells (most of which are fairly useless even against normal enemies; does anyone really ever cast "Cause Blindness" in a Gold Box game?) and attempts to turn them. Many of them drain levels. And you can't easily ride back to town for a quick "Restoration" because the game likes to throw enormous wolf packs at you when you do.

      

We just wanted to get a drink and identify some equipment.

        

Thus, my mind turned to bringing my victorious "Restoration of Gundahab" party into the module. First, I needed something to get them from Level 6 to roughly Level 9. I sorted the list randomly and looked for the first 1993 module with a starting level of between 4 and 8. The first one was "Travelers and Thieves" from May 1993 by a "Turbo007." It creates characters with 40,000 experience points, which was about the average for my party.

   

The adventure does not have a description in the Rose Dragon database, nor does it have a title screen. The opening screen begins: "After your graduation, a group of your friends decides to take a trip to England to sight-see." The visit includes a tour of the ruins of "old town Cambder . . . the birthplace of the youngest king ever to rule England." (The youngest king ever to rule England was Henry VI, born at Windsor Castle in Berkshire. Things are not starting well.) The game uses the "tour" feature to escort us through the ruins, as the tour guide explains that a current archaeological project is underway at the location to "discover the secrets of time travel." The guide leaves the party alone to explore. The air becomes thick. Someone screams for help in the distance. Then . . . nothing. I walked on every square, tested every wall, tried sleeping, etc. Nothing seems to move the story forward. If I go back to the starting square, it just repeats the tour. I looked up a review of the adventure in the Unlimited Adventures newsletter from 2010, and it mentioned the problem but says that the reviewer "got around it." It does not say how. Meanwhile, however, it sounds like the module isn't great: "Nothing made sense."

     

The automap doesn't even show an exit.

      

I went back to the drawing board and selected the next game to match my criteria: "Volcano" from May 1993 by a "Dave C." Unfortunately, the database was wrong: Instead of the Level 5-6 adventure it promised, the adventure starts new characters at 140,000 experience points, or about Level 13 for a fighter.

   

Next up: "Shadow of Moloch" from July 1993 by "Skarsol." It begins on an outdoor map of a pleasant countryside called Lanethorn. We enter a peaceful village where the friendly people smile at us. It's all very suspicious.

    

The game begins on an outdoor map.

        

"Something nags at you," the game says as we leave the town. Before long, we're stopped by a group of armed men who demand to know our business. The leader pretends there's some trouble on the road ahead and suggests we spend the night in his camp. When we refuse, he attacks. The ensuing battle against a bunch of "Bestea knights" and "cult knights" leaves three of us unconscious.

     

I've played enough RPGs to know this won't end well.

      

More guards appear in a mountain pass, where we bluff our way through, then barely survive attacks by ice wolves and cult assassins. On the other side of the mountains is a menu town where the shop sells +2 equipment. 

  

I continue on to a castle on a promontory. A dark, severe-looking man greets me and says that all the priests are "engaged in a prayer convocation" hoping to "bring peace to this troubled land." We can't do anything here. Instead, we enter the village at the base of the castle. It is a full 16 x 8 map with an inn, a shop, a training hall, a tavern, and a temple. But something is clearly wrong. The residents are all fighting with each other. The schoolhouse is empty of children. We're attacked repeatedly by assassins in the street. And when we ask one resident about entering the castle, he returns with a squad of soldiers and tries to kill us.

     

The game has the first use of dialogue options that I've seen with the kit.

       

The problem: there's no way to exit the village. The entry square has no exit, and I've tried every other square and wall. I made some good experience fighting the assassins, and most of my characters leveled up twice, but if I'm going to continue with this module, I'll have to export the characters and start over. It's too bad, because I found this one promising.

      

A typical battle against cult assassins.

     

Thus, a bunch of false starts. I bear neither the kit nor the creators any ill will. They were amateurs attempting a new tool in its first few months of existence. What I'll do when I play the next one is choose one with the best ratings or something. But for now, I'm going to wrap up my current coverage of Unlimited Adventures and give it a rest for at least a few weeks while I make progress on some other games.

     

There is no good way to rate a kit. My usual practice to date has been to rate each game independently if the kit results in a standalone program and to rate them collectively (or based on the demo program) if the player must have the original kit to run the adventure. Obviously, a kit is only as good as the adventures made for it. Since Unlimited Adventures theoretically can accomplish the best of everything previously accomplished with the Gold Box games, a theoretical GIMLET score for it would add up the top score for each category across the series of Gold Box titles. That would be a 68, incidentally, but the highest I ever rated for "economy" was 4, and I think it's possible to create a game with a better one, so let's call it a 70. That means that I think Unlimited Adventures is probably capable of creating a game that rates higher, if only by one point, than any other game I've ever rated. It would tell a story and have encounter and side quest options as interesting as Pool of Radiance or Curse of the Azure Bonds, offer the depth of character classes and character-based role-playing as Champions of Krynn, keep the magic and combat system of any of the titles, and outdo all of them for the economy. Not much could be done about graphics, sound, or interface, which would keep even a perfect Gold Box game from pushing much higher than 70.

    

This is all most Gold Box games needed to immediately gain 3 GIMLET points.

        

But I don't think it's fair to the other games on my list to rate a kit by its hypothetical best product, so I'll give it a rating instead based on "The Heirs to Skull Crag," if for no other purpose than to keep the game from showing up in my list with a row of blank cells:

      

• 5 points for the game world. I like the small, localized nature of the story. It has a fair amount of lore, but I think the developers could have done a better job setting up the reveal of the final villains. 

• 6 points for character creation and development. It has all the strengths and weaknesses of the Gold Box engine and the first-edition AD&D system. We're so used to games that offer multiple races, classes, alignments, and meaningful leveling that we sometimes forget what a rarity it was in the early 1990s. 

• 5 points for NPC Interaction. As with most Gold Box games, this is a weird combination of the people you can actually speak to (who are more "encounters" than "NPCs") and those that join the party. The dialogues, alas, offer little opportunity for choice or role-playing.

• 6 points for encounters and foes. In terms of description, varieties, and tactics, any game based on D&D was doing monsters better than just about any other game during this period—and most of the exceptions were cribbing from D&D. Between different sorts of physical attacks, spells, effects like poison and paralysis, breaths, and resistances, the player is always having to adjust the strategy. While there are a lot of contextual encounters in the game—both combat and non-combat—there aren't many choices, and very little role-playing. 

     

The Gold Box series doesn't get enough credit for doing this in every module.

       

• 7 points for magic and combat. I still think the Gold Box engine is one of the best ever designed for tactical combat. This module highlights its strengths superbly, and in general the authors deserve a lot of credit for programming so many spell effects. Most of the weaknesses are weaknesses of the system.

• 5 points for equipment. You have a lot of equipment slots, plus usable items like potions. I always appreciate how easy it is in a D&D game (Baldur's Gate 3 a notable exception) to compare items. I wouldn't mind some item descriptions and greater randomization, and of course we're a long way off from crafting.

• 2 points for the economy. It exists. You need money for training and item identification, and there are some magic items to buy. Like with most Gold Box games, which try too hard to stick to D&D rules about wealth and experience, the game is overly generous. The kit is capable of better, though.

• 4 points for quests. There's a main quest and some side quests and side areas, but few opportunities for choices or role-playing.

• 5 points for graphics, sound, and interface. We've talked about how, in a weird way, most of the graphics in Gold Box games are symbolic rather than literal, but I still can't bring myself to give it nothing at all. Sound effects, particularly combat sound effects, are sparse but decent. Where the engine really shines is in its controls, which simultaneously allow for intuitive mouse, keyboard, and joystick inputs.

• 5 points for gameplay. The challenge level is perfect. The length is good, but a little short for everything possible with the engine and characters. There's inherent replayability in any system with so many character choices, but I don't think the plot is replayable. It's fairly linear but does give the player a few choices.

   

That gives us a final score of 50, which puts it right around the quality of the Savage Frontier titles. I agree with this. I think "The Restoration of Gundahab" would rank about the same, the better economy balanced by a slightly more linear and shorter plot.

    

In a November 1993 Computer Gaming World review, Rudy Craft didn't think much of the Gold Box ("sorely lacking"; "far removed . . . from the cutting edge of computer gaming technology"), but he still thought that the program was "the best adventure construction kit available." He points out that, "Origin has not yet released an Ultima Underworld adventure construction kit, nor are they likely to." Apparently, the original release of Unlimited Adventures shipped with bugs and without some crucial documentation, but both problems had been fixed at the time of the review.

 

(As an aside, Craft's description of the game begins with this sentence: "Unlimited Adventures allows the player to design and/or plan an essentially unlimited number of adventures." I have no previous experience with Mr. Craft, but I have to wonder if he's one of the writers who would later insist that "a role-playing game is a game in which you play a role.")

   

The kit sold just over 32,000 copies in its initial run, respectable for a product that was essentially just a repackaging of tools that already existed. I don't imagine expectations were very high; judging by contemporary accounts, SSI was pinning most of its RPG hopes on the subsequent release of Dark Sun: Shattered Lands. I'm not sure why, but the release of the kit marked the end of MicroMagic and was the last commercial release for most of its staff, including founder and lead designer Jason T. Linhart (I attempted to get in touch with Linhart to no avail).

     

My module list grows.

       

The kit accomplished its mission and lived up to its name. A creator/user community popped up immediately and continues to this day. As recent comments pointed out, Unlimited Adventures came out just before the widespread availability of the Internet. Accordingly, the manual simply envisioned players trading modules on floppy disks. But early adopters of the new paradigm took to cyberspace, where they organized an AOL Forum (1993-2001) and shared information on various Usenet groups. Developers and fans uploaded files to university web sites and FTP servers. A Yahoo group ran from 1999 to the late 2010s (Yahoo shut down all groups in 2019). The first web sites were online by 2000, cataloguing the best adventures in perpetuity.

       

The site I've been using lists 648 modules for the PC and 148 for the Macintosh, including around a dozen created in the last two years. Creators soon figured out how to "hack" the kit so that they could include character classes, races, environments, enemies, and equipment in worlds well beyond the Forgotten Realms, including most of the D&D campaign settings, Doom, Star Trek, Star Wars, Middle Earth, Arthurian Britain, and many others.

    

I look forward to sampling some of these as I continue my adventure through time. I obviously can't let myself get too distracted, but I can see inserting an Unlimited Adventure into the occasional streak of 30-point games just so I'll have something to look forward to. I'm taking the kit off my current list, but in no way are we done with it.