Telengard: Pointless Fun

I might have mentioned this game is a little hard.

Telengard

United States

Microcomputer Games (developer); Avalon Hill (publisher)

Released in 1982 for Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80; 1983 for Atari 800, Commodore 64, and FM-7; 1984 for CP/M, PC-88, and PC-98; 1985 for DOS
Date Started: 5 March 2010

Date Ended: 6 March 2010
Total Hours: 6
Difficulty: Moderate (3.0/5) in the sense that there's no winning condition and you're meant to die
Final Rating: 25
Ranking at Game #413: 190/413 (46%)

   

Well, Telengard has some interesting--perhaps even unique--features. For a while, I assumed there was no reason not to just hang around the stairs to an inn, since every square held the potential for random encounters and random treasure every turn. It turns out the dungeons are full of interesting--and generally deadly--things. Some things I've discovered since my last post:

• Pits that sometimes give you the option to climb down, sometimes just unceremoniously toss you down
• Teleporters that send you to random locations
• Monsters that do what they typically do in D&D-derived games. Dragons coat you with fire, ghouls immobilize you, vampires sap away your hard-won experience points, and so on. Not all monsters kill you, though. Hobbits and skeletons (?) occasionally steal your stuff, and more than once I met an elf who, disturbingly, healed me to full strength because he "liked my body." A nice dragon gave me a sword +2.
• Chests with buttons of four different colors. You have to figure out the appropriate pattern--getting zapped every time you get it wrong--for the chest to open. Goodly amounts of treasure inside those.
• Holy altars. Give them enough money and they cast beneficial spells on you. Give them too little money, or no money, or try to walk on by them, and they call you "dirty pagan trash" and summon undead to kill you.
• "Scrolls of rescue" that return you to inns. I thought these were going to be my salvation, but they take away all your gold which, since gold is one of the primary ways to build experience points, is very bad.
• Fountains that alternately contain healing waters and poison.
• "Jewel-encrusted" thrones that give you the option to (r)ead runes, (s)it on them, or (p)ry the gems, with randomized chances of different things happening depending on what you do. Once, when I read the runes, I got +1 wisdom. A second time, I somehow brought about the return of the "ghoul king," who promptly slaughtered me.

Would any adventurer worth his salt hit (i) right now?

These different things make the game fun and fast-paced and, I admit, slightly addictive--at least, once you get your hero up to level 3 or 4 and stop dying every step.

Telengard isn't really a game you play for a long time, since there's no way to "win." Instead, it's a game you blow an hour or two on here or there, perhaps competing for highest score or fastest leveling with a friend. The manual actually encourages this with several suggestions for "multi-player" games: "see which player can advance his character to the highest experience level in a given time period"; "see who can map the most dungeon spaces of a given dungeon level" (this is followed by the helpful suggestion to "use graph paper").

Lacking any friends who are likely to want to play Telengard, I don't really have any reason to keep going with it. It might be fun to see if I can get to level 10 or level 12, but death can strike any time, and it's discouraging to have to keep starting over. In six hours of gameplay and probably 100 characters, the highest I was able to climb was level 8 (alas, forgot to take screenshots). After that character died, I gamely tried again. Helped by a ring of regeneration +4 that I found early on, I managed to get Arturos up to level 6. Then I found a "misty box" that asked me to enter a random number. I did, and found myself teleported to a much lower fathom of the dungeon, where I was immediately slain by a level 25 fighter.


Next game.

*****

Further Reading: As I progressed in my chronology, I found that Telengard is a commercial version of a long line of games stretching back to a 1975 PLATO game called The Game of Dungeons or dnd. Daniel Lawrence, the creator of Telengard, copied elements from the PLATO titles and developed Dungeons & Dragons (c. 1977) for DEC mainframes, then later tried to commercialize it as Telengard (1982). Other games in this line include Dungeon of Death (1979), Dungeons and Dragons for Heathkit DOS (1981), The Standing Stones (1983), Caverns of Zoarre (1984), and DND (1984).

Game 6: Telengard (1982)

     

Telengard

United States

Microcomputer Games (developer); Avalon Hill (publisher)

Released in 1982 for Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80; 1983 for Atari 800, Commodore 64, and FM-7; 1984 for CP/M, PC-88, and PC-98; 1985 for DOS
Date Started: 5 March 2010

     

Modern CRPGs are for wimps, aren't they? I mean, you start out in some safe little nest, hear your back story, and immediately get a quest that involves killing rats. In no time, you're level six and fireballing kobolds. Where's the challenge?

Compare that to Telengard. Here is a full transcript of my first adventure.

Game: Your name, noble sire?

Me: Arturos

Game: You are now descending into the depths of the Telengard dungeon.

Game: Do you want to go (u)p, (d)own, or (s)tay on the same level?

Me: (S)tay

Me: North

Game: You see a level 3 dragon. (F)ight, (c)ast, or (e)vade?

Me: (F)ight

Game: You do 4 damage. It does 14 damage.

Game: You died!

Game: Another not-so-mighty fighter bites the dust. Do you wish to play again?

Wow.

This game is crazy. I had some more success with further characters, but I keep dying while I stop to type this blog post. Why? Because although the game is turn-based, it automatically does something for you whenever you don't press a key after five seconds. And there's no way to pause it! I'm trying to make notes for this entry, and a skeleton just killed me.

Every time you hang out for a turn in a square, there's a chance of finding treasure in that square. Without even leaving the stairs at the bottom of the inn, I found over 1000 gold, a ring of protection +2 and a ring of regeneration +1. Six monsters came along and tried to kill me. Finally, a mummy succeeded.

What about rats? Don't you have any rats?

This game is crazy.

All right. I'd better back up. From all appearances, Telegard is a "Roguelike" game in which you wander around a dungeon, fight monsters, and collect goodies and treasure. [Edit: I didn't know what I was talking about back in 2010. This game is emphatically not a roguelike. It is part of the DND line that started with the PLATO Game of Dungeons. See the links at the bottom for more.] The manual sets up the adventure with the typical dramatic language of the era:

I am, alas, to be another of the foolish ones. A whole legion of them, really.

You begin by randomly rolling some character stats and giving yourself a name. That's it; no race or class choices.

As in Rogue, you can save your character, but every time you reload the game, it deletes the save file. Hence, death is permanent. And, as in Rogue, frequent. This is the only game I've ever played in which there's actually a keyboard command to commit suicide. (I'm not making that up.) Trust me, when you encounter a level 3 giant mere seconds after you created your character, there's not much else to do.

In Telengard, you see this screen a lot.

Gold is copious but worthless in the sense that you can't buy anything. But it appears that every time you ascend to an inn, the game converts your accumulated gold to experience points, which is swell. Not that experience points stop me from turning the corner and wandering into level 4 dragons.

I found out the hard way that you can't collect multiple swords, rings, shields, etc. When you pick up an item from the floor, it automatically replaces whatever you were carrying. Since you only have a few seconds to decide, you want to be very careful. Not that that sword +2 really does anything against the level 5 minotaur.

There are spells in the game which you collect as you advance experience levels. They're standard D&D fare: level 1 includes magic missile, sleep, and cure light wounds. Casting them is dependent upon "spell units." I haven't lived long enough to figure out how or if these regenerate.

I'm sorry to keep harping on this, but you die so often in Telengard it has to be seen to be believed. Here's a video of about four minutes of gameplay. I think I die five times.

Telengard and I are not going to be friends. I just came from a punishingly difficult game and I'm not much in the mood for another one. Since there doesn't seem to be any way to "win" Telengard, I'll give it my six hours, see how high a character level I can achieve and how low a dungeon level I can explore, and then move on.

*****

Further Reading: As I progressed in my chronology, I found that Telengard is a commercial version of a long line of games stretching back to a 1975 PLATO game called The Game of Dungeons or dnd. Daniel Lawrence, the creator of Telengard, copied elements from the PLATO titles and developed Dungeons & Dragons (c. 1977) for DEC mainframes, then later tried to commercialize it as Telengard (1982). Other games in this line include Dungeon of Death (1979), Dungeons and Dragons for Heathkit DOS (1981), The Standing Stones (1983), Caverns of Zoarre (1984), and DND (1984).