Game 168: Warrior of Ras, Volume Four: Ziggurat (1983)

This title screen is from the C64 version even though I played the Apple II version.

Warrior of Ras, Volume Four: Ziggurat

United States
Randall D. Masteller (author); Screenplay (publisher)

Released 1983 for Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and Commodore 64

Date Started: 12 October 2014
Date Ended: 13 October 2014

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 27
Ranking at Time of Posting: 75/164 (46%)

Ranking at Game #457: 250/457 (55%)

Ziggurat brings the Warrior of Ras series to a satisfying conclusion, synthesizing elements that we saw in Dunzhin, Kaiv, and The Wylde (links to my reviews, which it would make sense to review if you want to understand this one). We've got the indoor walls and room layout of Dunzhin, the expanded item list from Kaiv, and the tactical combat system from Wylde, all in pursuit of a randomly-generated treasure, just as in the first and third games.

The back story--just as superfluous as those for the first three games--recounts a warrior's expedition to the Ziggurat of Ras, where he hoped to find the "Sapient Scepter of Sirocco" and break the power of a "wretched king whose reign of horror reduced these prosperous lands to poverty." The game's interface is presented in the manual as the creation of a magical amulet, passed down to the warrior by his father, "the great warrior Dominican." As you start your own game, you receive a random quest item--the Spiteful Rod of Jysor, the Ebony Horn of Fisat, the Silver Scarab of Sevyw, etc.--to find.

The main quest is randomly generated at the start of the game.

As with the other three, there's no character creation. You can import a saved hero from the previous games, but otherwise you start as a Level 1 adventurer with 2000 gold pieces to spend among armor, swords, torches, food, water, packs, crosses, flint & steel, ropes, dirks, picks, mirrors, and magic items. As with the previous two games, there's a magic sword for 3000 gold--something worth saving for. Unlike the previous games, you can purchase various potions, rings, and wands in the shops instead of only finding them in the dungeons. Magic dirks and magic spears also join the item list for the first time in Ziggurat. A bug in my version made dirks cost $30 but sell for $500, making it possible to get infinite gold at the outset.

The market, for the first time, has potions.

Once outfitted (the "@" gets you a "standard pack" of gear for $1900), you stash your excess treasure in the vault and then head into the dungeon. The ziggurat consists of about half a dozen randomly-generated dungeon levels connected by tunnels. As you move along, you may encounter packs of the game's varied monsters. Stepping on a special square in the rooms always generates a battle followed by a treasure haul.

In the basic interface, little has changed. You type various commands (EAT, INVENTORY, GET, MOVE EAST 3) or their abbreviations (E, I, G, M E 3) to interact with the world and your objects. Volume Four restores the ability to specify a number of squares to move that Volume 3 took away. Every so often, you have to DRINK water and EAT food to avoid hit point damage. You supposedly need torches to see, but I couldn't figure out how to light them in this game (USE didn't work), and the dungeon revealed itself despite the lack of them. I also noted that Rings of Light appeared to have no effect, so this might be something that was never sufficiently programmed. Ropes also don't appear to have any use at all.

The corridor at the north end of this level is connected by two tunnels, but not to the rest of the level.

The random events and messages that kept Dunzhin and Kaiv interesting are gone here. Ziggurat does add secret doors for the first time. 

You may have to walk past them a few times.

In Dunzhin and Kaiv, combat was fought through commands on the main screen. Wylde moved this to a separate combat map, which Ziggurat preserves. I found this system admirable in Wylde--only a handful of other games in the era were offering special combat maps--but also a little annoying, as it made each combat last a bit too long. Ziggurat solves the problem by making the combat screens a lot smaller and removing navigation obstacles. I thought it hit the right balance.

Something called a "slizzer" aims for my chest. This attack will cost him about 10 movement points. #3 and #4 will get to go next, after which everyone will be below my number of turns, and I'll get to attack. If things get rough, I can flee out the corridor to the right.

Combat is governed by "turns," the number of which are affected by strength, encumbrance, and magic considerations like Potions of Haste. Every action--turning, moving, running, throwing, using a magic item, attacking--consumes a number of turns, and the character with the highest number always goes next. This is a complexity we don't see again in top-down games until maybe Wizard's Crown. Unfortunately, clever enemy pathfinding makes it hard to get on the same line with them at a distance and reduces the utility of spears and some magic items.

Tossing a spear at a warrior.

Like the previous games, in melee combat, Ziggurat allows you to do a regular HIT, AIM for a round, or put your energy into a FORCE attack, afterwards specifying what body part you want to target. Low-armored body parts like heads and necks are harder to hit but easier to score a quick kill. Each body part has its own hit points. Lucky rolls can result in critical hits that do 2 or 3 times the damage.

A few new commands make an appearance here: CHOP, GOUGE, KNEE, and KICK. Regrettably, the manual doesn't cover these new commands at all, but they seem to apply to unarmed combat.

Killing enemies gives you experience points, which in turn make up levels, which in turn affect your attack value and hit points. Leveling is rapid through Level 10 and then slows down considerably as experience point requirements increase exponentially. 

My character about halfway through the game.

Magic treasures--rings, wands, and potions--are far more plentiful than in the predecessor games, at least at specific treasure squares. You can activate a Ring of Shielding, quaff a Potion of Strength or Ironskin, or wield a Wand of Fire almost every round if you want. I found that offensive rings and wands had some weird range issues--enemies can be too close to use them--but potions were particularly valuable, and I sold most of the other magic items to buy more potions of Healing, Super-Fight, and so on.

Your ultimate goal is to get strong enough to defeat the higher-level creatures on the later screens, like mummies and vampires, both of which require magical weapons to hit. One room holds the quest treasure, and I don't know if this always happens, but in my game it was in a section of a level with no doors or tunnels inside. I finally learned that you can wield a PICK and use it to knock through walls, which is how I got into the quest area.

I bashed through the walls to the south and am about to pounce on the quest treasure.

The treasure was guarded by a "zombie king," but I defeated him (aided by potions) and collected the treasure. Returning to the entrance, I was given this message:

I ache to know what the rest of this message said, but I suppose it's lost to history.

After your success, you get a new quest treasure and can keep playing the character.

The GIMLET should be, by a small margin, the highest in the series:

• 1 point for a threadbare game world.

• 2 points for character creation and development. No creation options, but leveling is rewarding.

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. No special encounters, but the monster parties have various special attacks and defenses and are well-described in the manual.

• 5 points for combat. The body part system and tactical logistics are both impressive for a 1983 game.

• 4 points for the most extensive equipment system of the series.

• 3 points for the economy, which is relevant for most of the game, especially with the ability to buy magic items.

• 2 points for having a main quest. 

• 2 points for limited graphics and sound and a serviceable interface.

• 5 points for gameplay that is replayable and pitched at the right difficulty level and length.

The final score of 27 is 2 points higher than Wylde. In my post on Dunzhin, I said that the game "has some ideas too good to ignore, but it lacks too many RPG elements to fully enjoy as an RPG." It's in this sentiment that I leave the series. Although it developed some RPG elements, like an inventory system, after Dunzhin, it never really blossomed into a full-fledged RPG. On the other hand, author Randall Masteller only had a year between the first game and the last, and regardless of what I think makes a good comprehensive RPG, it's clear that Masteller achieved exactly what he set out to achieve: create a challenging game whose randomly-generated quests and dungeon levels could amuse even the game's author.

While Masteller was working on the Ras series, he was also programming and porting other authors' games for Screenplay and other companies, including MicroProse. Titles concurrent and just after Ras include Asylum II, Solo Flight, F-15 Strike Eagle, and Silent Service. More than a dozen titles follow in the 1980s, most sports and action games. He did porting work on Pirates! (1987) and Airborne Ranger (1987), both fondly remembered from my childhood. Eventually, he started his own company, Random Games, focusing on board and strategy games. You can read my full account of his work in the post on Dunzhin.

None of his future games, alas, were RPGs, so we will not be encountering Mr. Masteller again. While I can't detect direct influence of Warrior of Ras on later games, this small series represents some of the most innovative titles of the early 1980s and deserves to be better remembered. I also suspect it will be a long time before we encounter the word "ziggurat" again in an RPG.

Game 165: Warrior of Ras, Volume Three: The Wylde (1983)

This is the opening screen from the C64 version, which I couldn't get to run properly. A follow-up screen (as well as the main screen in the Apple II version) clarifies the game's full title. Despite the 1982 copyright date, most  online sources say it was released in 1983, and the manual has a 1983 copyright date. I'm going to go with 1983 as correct and assume 1982 is the copyright date for the entire series.

Warrior of Ras, Volume Three: The Wylde

United States
Randall D. Masteller (author); Screenplay (publisher)

Released 1983 for Apple II, Atari 8-bit, and Commodore 64

Date Started: 28 September 2014
Date Ended: 28 September 2014

Total Hours: 5

Difficulty: Medium-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 25
Ranking at Time of Posting: 61/164 (37%)

Ranking at Game #457: 223/457 (49%)

Warrior of Ras, Volume Three: The Wylde is the third of a four-game series in which all titles were released in an extremely short time period between 1982 and 1983. I reviewed the first game, Dunzhin, in January, and the second, Kaiv, just a few weeks ago (links to my reviews). The games are characterized by an unnamed hero who explores the titular areas and fights numerous random combats, all with the goal of reaching a far-flung area and collecting a treasure.

All of them are light on most classic role-playing elements. The series has limited back stories, no character creation, no NPCs, limited equipment (no equipment at all in the first game), and limited character development. For these reasons, the games have earned lower scores on my GIMLET. Nonetheless, they do feature some interesting innovations for the era, in particular a complex system in which every body part has its own hit points, armor class, and protection. This is true of both the PC and his foes, and combat becomes an exercise in determining whether to strike easy-to-hit but well-armored places, like chests and abdomens, or low-HP but hard-to-hit locations like heads and necks. The combat system is also slightly more tactical than the average game of the era in that it allows you to spend rounds AIMing or to sacrifice accuracy for power in FORCE attacks.

Also notable about the series is the way that the author, Randall Masteller, rapidly added features as the titles progressed. Dunzhin had no inventory, but Kaiv offered some basic armor and weapons, including the odds of weapons breaking in combat, the need to keep a stock of torches, and the need to eat and drink occasionally. The Wylde, meanwhile, builds upon the previous games with a more complicated combat system.

The main city screen designates the object of your quest.

  
The brief back story recalls Grimsweord the Warrior's ill-fated expedition to the "Kaiv," which left him mortally wounded. When the king's wizard can't heal him, he calls upon his apprentices for a volunteer to travel to the "Wylde" and recover the "Truculent Tonic of Tabanid." No one volunteers, so he designates a girl named Cwenellen and gives her detailed instructions on the game's interface.

As with Kaiv, it's not really clear whether you're supposed to be Cwenellen or just following in her footsteps. I guess it's the latter, because each new game randomizes the treasure that you're supposed to find (just as in Dunzhin, but unlike Kaiv where everyone's quest treasure was a big pile of gold). In my trials, I got the "Rotting Star of Vekuz," the "Robust Cross of Xusat," and the "Velvet Ruby of Tehyq." There's also a coda at the end of the manual that says Cwenellen returned triumphant with the Truculent Tonic after six years--only to find that Grimsweord had died after three.

The Wylde adventuring screen. My character has made it from the city in the lower-left to the trading post in the lower-right, on the way to the treasure location in the upper-right.

The Wylde takes place on a single screen of around 48 x 48 squares depicting randomly-generated trees, hills, rivers, and I guess swamp. You start in the city in the lower-left and must make it to the treasure location in the upper-right.

In the city--or at either of two trading posts along the way--you can purchase equipment. The list has changed a little since Kaiv. There are no more torches and flint and steel, since we're outside. There are no encounters that require a rope or pick to overcome, so no ropes or picks, and instead of food and water, you only have to worry about food. New items are shields and coats, both of which provide some combat protection. Just as in Kaiv, you start out with 2,000 gold and can quickly purchase a "standard pack" of goods for 1,970 by typing @. There's a magic sword to save 3,000 gold pieces for.

Buying things in the market. Here, I finally got the magic sword.

A few differences from Dunzhin and Kaiv become immediately apparent, some good, some bad:

• Each game starts with a random creature designated as a "bounty," and for each one of those creatures you kill, you get 100 gold pieces upon returning to a trading post or the city.

• You can only return to the city about 5 times before the wizard gets mad at you and prematurely ends your quest. (You can kind of get around this by saving your character and then importing him into a new game. The only thing you sacrifice is uncollected bounties.) Thus, you really need to make it to the trading posts to replace broken equipment, restock food, and collect bounties.

Maybe Lord Doserror the Inevitable and his wizard aren't really good guys.

• The odd events from the previous games that gave you luck (or took it away), randomly teleported you, and required you to quickly hit a key to avoid damage are gone. Instead, you just get random environmental messages, such as a storm off in the distance, the tracks of wolves on the ground, or rotting corpses. Every once in a while, you step into a rainstorm or snowstorm and have to wait until it passes.

 

This accomplishes nothing except to burn an hour.

• Time passes at the rate of one hour per move. At 21:00, the game forces you to camp for the night (until 06:00), and there's a chance of a random encounter while you sleep. If you don't EAT when you wake up, you start taking damage.

• In the previous games, you could move up to 9 steps at a time, but in this one, you can only move one step per action. This makes it even less forgivable that you still have to type MOVE EAST and MOVE NORTH (or the abbreviations M E, M N) instead of just using the arrow keys.

The biggest difference is in combat. In the previous games, it took place fairly quickly on the main screen. You might encounter a party of 6 skeletons, but they would attack you one at a time, and you had the options described above to hit each body part, take a round to AIM, or use a FORCE attack. In The Wylde, when enemies come upon you, you move to a separate combat screen that represents a zoomed-in area of where you were in the world. Enemies start some distance away and slowly advance on you. They can surround you and attack simultaneously. Once they get into range, in order to attack you must be facing the appropriate direction, accomplished by the TURN command.

As the wolves close in, I try to dispatch this one quickly by going for the neck.

You and your foes each have a set of movement points that deplete as you do various actions. Some actions, like RUN (which moves you two squares) deplete a lot of points, while others, like TURN, deplete only a few. The relative movement points remaining determines who goes next.

The tactical combat screen theoretically gives you more combat options. For instance, spears appear in the inventory for the first time, and if you can line yourself up with a distant enemy, you can throw them and take them down before they come into melee range. Practically, this is difficult, because enemies are smart and they come at you in a zig-zag pattern instead of a straight line. Also, swapping a sword for a spear in your hand requires that you first STORE the sword and then FETCH the spear, then FETCH the sword again once it's thrown. Coupled with the need to TURN, these actions take a lot of movement points, so you have to make sure there's plenty of distance between you and your foe.

Throwing a spear at a distant wolf.

Once you start finding magic items, like Rings of Fireball and Wands of  Lightning, they work the same way as a thrown weapon (need to be facing, in a straight line) but without the need for all the storing and fetching, so they're a bit more viable as options.

Blasting an enemy with a Ring of Fireball.

The terrain also adds some tactical considerations. If you're attacked by multiple enemies, you want to put yourself in a position where only one or two can engage you at the same time. Depending on the pattern of terrain, you may be able to funnel enemies to you along a straight line, giving you more chances to use thrown weapons or magic items.

BRIBE and HIDE are gone as options; you can still flee by moving yourself to the edge of the combat screen, and as far as I can tell, this always works.

In all, this is quite impressive. Recall that we're in 1983--perhaps even programmed in 1982--and the only other games in which combat is taking place on a separate tactical screen are Tunnels of Doom and Ultima III. The Wylde shows no influence from either game, and it actually seems to anticipate the tactical combat systems that SSI would introduce starting with Wizard's Crown, two years later.

In practice, I didn't really care for it. I thought the battles took too long and there were too many of them. But I think the problem is me, not the game. The lack of story and other RPG elements made me eager to finish this one quickly, in a single session, as I had done with its predecessors. Every time a combat screen showed up, I groaned and prepared for a 10-minute ordeal. In 1983, I think I'd have been a lot more forgiving and would have really enjoyed the tactical nature of the battles.

5 skeletons converge on me (on the right).

Post-combat, the enemy might drop several items of treasure, including potions, wands, rings, and piles of gold. I learned the hard way that you have to type GET for each dropped treasure before moving on. The end of combat also sees the game checking for level advancement, which (like the previous games) comes pretty rapidly through Level 10 and brings improvements to hit points, attack scores, and defense scores.

Enemies get harder as you move from the southwest to the northeast, and appear in context-specific terrain. Wolves, fighters, skeletons, and elves give way to lions, gargoyles, ogres, and gorgons, and finally to wyverns, trolls, vampires, and mummies. Like their D&D counterparts, these monsters have some special attacks: high-level undead drain experience points; harpies can paralyze; gorgons can turn you to stone. A lot of the higher-level ones can only be damaged by magic, making the magic sword a necessity past a certain point. I didn't encounter any creatures capable of spell-casting or missile weapons, but then again I fled from a lot of combats just to get to the end of the game. Combats are quite hard, and only by liberal reloading was I able to persevere.

This screen comes up a lot. Fortunately, you can reload.

Unfortunately, I was unable to win. I did reach the location of the treasure a couple of times. The game said, "You have come to the site of the item of the wizard!" and told me that it was being guarded by 5 mummies. Something glitched in the game at this point, and the combat screen went all wonky.

This is some odd terrain.

I was still able to kill the foes, but after combat, there was no way to pick up the quest treasure. All I could do was leave, return, and fight the 5 mummies again.

I suspect the problem is with the cracked version of the game floating about. Some jackass took the original Apple II version and replaced Randall Masteller's name with "Some Loser" and the name of the publisher (Screenplay) with "1200 Club," and this is the only version that seems to be available on any site.

Crackers show their wit and humor.

I'd try harder to find the original version--perhaps even get the C64 version working--but I can't imagine that the ending of the game is any different than Dunzhin, when you return with the randomly-generated item and the game simply says "You have obtained the item! WELL DONE!" I did make it back from the treasure location to the city, so I don't have any problem just envisioning that I got this message and calling it a "win."

The GIMLET for The Wylde is just going to be a few tweaks from Kaiv:

• 1 point for the game world. The framing story is still very brief, and with no impact on gameplay.

• 2 points for character creation and development. Leveling is rewarding, but there are still no creation options.

My late-game character.

• 0 points for no NPCs.

• 3 points for encounters and foes. The monsters are still interestingly varied, but there are no other types of "encounters" in The Wylde the way there were in previous games.

• 5 points for combat. That's a point higher than Kaiv and reflects the effort put into the tactical combat screen. The body part/armor class/damage system continues to be unique and interesting.

• 3 points for equipment, slightly improved from Kaiv with throwing items and magic items.

My mid-game inventory.

• 3 points for economy, which is relevant throughout the game. You really need to save for that magic sword. It's just too bad that you can't buy other magic items in the shop.

• 2 points for a basic, if randomly-generated, main quest.

• In an exact repeat of what I said last time, "2 points for bare-bones graphics, a sound system that consists mostly of piercing boops, and a text-based control system that I still don't like for movement even though Masteller tried to help by allowing abbreviations."

• 4 points for gameplay. Masteller deliberately designed the game to be replayable, and the random nature of combats and constantly-changing quest treasure supports this. It was only slightly too hard for my tastes (with permadeath, it would be impossible) but relatively quick even with the long combats.

The final score of 25 is 2 points higher than Kaiv and 3 points higher than Dunzhin, reflecting the continued development of the series. The improvements are modest, but still impressive given the rapidity with which the games were released.

I've continued to correspond with Mr. Masteller (you can read some of his recollections in the post on Dunzhin), though I fear that the low numeric scores may have insulted him a bit, even though I tried to explain that I'm ranking every game from every era on the same scale, and 23-25 isn't bad at all for the Bronze Age. I look forward to seeing how things continued to develop in Ziggurat, the last game of the series, which I'll play within a few weeks.

****

If anyone wants to see a Crystals of Arborea posting, he or she will respond with the answers to two questions:

1. How do you enter 3D view with characters other than Jarel? Is it even possible? If not, how are they supposed to explore dungeons and such?

2. Is there any way to join Jarel with the other companions and move them with him, or does he always have to explore independently?

The entire game is driving me nuts, and I'm afraid I need these answers to keep my sanity long enough to offer a full post.

Game 162: Warrior of Ras, Volume Two: Kaiv (1982)

This is the C64 opening screen; the full title is on the next screen. I originally had it as a 1983 game, but the copyright screen and manual for the Apple II version says 1982.

Warrior of Ras, Volume Two: Kaiv

Randall D. Masteller (author); Screenplay (publisher)

Released 1982 for Apple II; 1983 for Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64

Date Started: 27 August 2014
Date Ended: 27 August 2014

Total Hours: 4

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 23
Ranking at Time of Posting: 51/158 (32%)

At the beginning of this year, I reviewed Warrior of Ras, Volume One: Dunzhin, the first of a four-game series by Randall Don Masteller, published by Screenplay of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. This was an enormously productive period for Masteller, with all four games--each building in capabilities--issued within a two-year period. I had originally tagged the first sequel, Kaiv, as a 1983 game, but the screen and manual copyrights both say 1982. Since the first two games were advertised together, the 1982 date is probably correct.

I didn't dislike Dunzhin. (It would be worth reading or re-reading that review before getting into this one.) It enjoyably passed an afternoon and I gave it a score of 22, which wasn't bad for a 1982 game. It had some strong innovations, including a complex system of armor class and damage, with different body parts having different ACs and damage levels; a tactical combat system involving three levels of attacks against various enemy body parts; experience rewards relative to your level vs. the enemy's; and the ability to "search" for a particular foe at any given time. I just wished it had other RPG elements, like an inventory and a strong economy. "It has some ideas too good to ignore," I remarked, "but it lacks too many RPG elements to fully enjoy as an RPG."

The less-exciting Apple II main screen.

Thus, I was looking forward to Kaiv, which features an inventory system, with some items used flexibly for combat (e.g., potions, magic rings) and others used as puzzle-solving tools (e.g., ropes, picks). Unfortunately, we still have no character attributes and no way to even name your character, but the series is clearly growing.

The framing story is set in the land of Ras (the name was originally an acronym for "Random Area Series"), ruled by Lord Doserror the Inevitable. Doserror's greatest warrior, Grimsweord, has just returned from "the Ancient Lands," where he discovered the legendary Kaiv. His account of his adventures comically, though somewhat uncomfortably, intersperses lore with game instructions:

I reached a massive door, twice as tall and wide as this hall. I pounded on it with the hilt of my sword. I felt a strange sensation. A voice within my mind told me that I had indeed found the Kaiv, though it made it seem as if it were some fell game. As the doors swung back smoothly on massive hinges, I heard the voice ask:

 DO YOU WISH TO PLAY A SAVED GAME?

As I had never entered the Kaiv before, I said (N)o.

It goes on like this through all of the gameplay elements and commands. I'm not sure if the suggestion is that the hero is Grimsweord, or another fighter sent to the dungeon to do a better job.

Exploring the "Kaiv" means navigating both combats and obstacles.

Kaiv allows an import of a character from Dunzhin, with all his attendant experience and gold. That seemed a little too easy for me, so I started with a new one. The game begins in a marketplace outside the cave, where you can purchase a variety of exploration items, armor, and swords. Weapons can break in combat, and you need a couple of backups, since the game won't allow you to fight with fists. The manual says that the "standard pack" at the outset would consist of a suit of armor, three swords, 10 torches, 15 food, 15 water, a cross, flint and steel, three ropes, two dirks, a pick, and a mirror. This is all easily purchasable with the starting 2,000 gold. In fact, the only thing outside your price range at the beginning is a "magic sword" for 3,000 gold--something to save up for.

Purchasing an initial selection of equipment.

Weight and encumbrance affect movement, so the game lets you store excess cash outside the dungeon. There's no reason not to do this unless you plan to bribe creatures a lot.

The titular cave is a series of randomly-generated maps progressing west to east for six screens. Where Dunzhin was organized in discrete, lettered, rectangular rooms, Kaiv's spaces are far more irregular, spotted with cliffs (you need a rope to climb), pools of water or acid, and other navigation hazards. Some of the hazards produce an early variety of "quick time event" where you have to quickly hit a key to avoid taking damage.

I have suffered a collapse and am using my pick to get out of it.

Hitting a key quickly avoids taking damage from an acid pool.

The game preserves the movement system I disliked from Dunzhin where you have to type MOVE EAST 3 or MOVE NORTH 1 to mince along at the desired number of steps. Yes, you can abbreviate this M E 3 and M N 1, but it's still more annoying than using the arrow keys. Sensing this, Masteller did allow the use of the arrows to move one step in any direction on the Commodore 64 version. I started trying to play that version, but I ran into a bug by which all of my attacks always missed the enemies. Thus, I was stuck typing things the long way in the Apple II version.

You rarely want to move more than one step in any direction into unexplored territory, as the torch only illuminates one square around you and you could easily find yourself running into walls and taking damage.

Combat hasn't changed much at all from Dunzhin. As you explore, you run into packs of ghouls, skeletons, wolves, fighters, ogres, goblins, wyverns, trolls, vampires, and other D&D-derived monsters. Sometimes they'll offer you the choice of withdrawing without combat, but mostly they just want to fight. You can try to HIDE or BRIBE enemies to leave you alone if you're low on hit points. The monsters have a variety of special attacks and are fairly well-described in the game manual.

LORDS: Once they were great knights and warriors, but they were trapped in the Kaiv eons ago. These accursed noblemen are magnificent fighters. They are heavily armored, with plate mail, war helmets, and swords of great renown.

GORGONS: The sight of a gorgon can turn a warrior to stone, and with good reason. Gorgons have shapely human bodies but hideous faces, glowing eyes, deathly pale skin, and "hair" of writhing serpents. The ancient legends say that a mirror can protect the warrior from being turned to stone.

In combat, you choose to just HIT or to spend a round AIMing or increasing your FORCE. In addition to the type of attack, you specify the body part to be attacked: Head, neck, chest, abdomen, left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm (with arms and legs replaced with forelegs and hind legs for creatures). For both you and the monsters, each body part has its own armor class, chance to hit, and hit points, and if you reduce any of them to 0 (or the creature's total hit points to 0), the creature dies. Heads and necks have very few hit points but very low chances to hit; chests and abdomens have a lot of hit points and a high chance to hit.

Fighting a fighter.

Armor absorbs a few hit points damage on each body part, slowing losing armor points as it does so. When the armor defense reaches 0, it's time for a new set of armor. All in all, it's one of the most complex health and armor systems that we have in the Bronze Age. It's just too bad there aren't more types of armor.

There are no classic attributes, but your level affects your attack and defense values as well as your individual body hit points. I found leveling was absurdly rapid in the early stages: I gained one level for every single combat up to Level 7, and after that I still managed to get up to Level 10 pretty fast. (This makes sense if the assumption is that many players imported characters from Dunzhin.) But since the required number of experience points increases by 25-50% each time, it will still take a long time to reach the maximum level of 20.

A late-game character sheet shows my attributes and hit points for each body part.

Monsters politely attack you one at a time, and you always get the first blow, so it's possible to work your way through a pack without them ever getting a chance to hit you. This rarely happens, though. In general, I find the combats very deadly, though the ability to save anywhere reduces the consequences of this.

Enemies never drop anything, but you find gold and potions and supposedly rings and wands on the dungeon floor. I say "supposedly" because in 4 hours of play I never found a wand or a ring. There are eight types each of potions, rings, and wands, and the effects are both powerful and useful. Potions include healing, haste, hiding, ironskin, strength (doubling attack damage), and "etherealness," which allows you to move through walls. Rings operate either by charges or duration, and they include three types of shielding rings, fireballs, invisibility, teleportation (random), and light. Wands include cold, fire, lightning, and paralysis. It's not a bad inventory system for a series that had no inventory in the first game.

You also have to carry stocks of torches, food, and water, and the game frequently gives you messages about getting hungry and thirsty or torches running out. I don't mind the dynamic, but you never find torches, food, or water in the dungeon, and especially as you start to explore more screens to the east, it's annoying to have to trek back to the entrance to revisit the market.

Kaiv also keeps Dunzhin's dynamic of having all kinds of weird things happen as you explore. A voice whispers "I like you" or "I don't like you." You suddenly feel a boost in confidence. The cave collapses around you and you have to use a pick to get out. A voice says "go away!" and you're randomly teleported elsewhere. You disturb a colony of bats (other than a brief animation, I don't think this has any consequences). These special encounters keep the game very unpredictable.

Dunzhin had a "main quest" to find a random treasure on the bottom floor. Kaiv's main quest seems to be finding the "Legendary Treasure" on the sixth screen. This legendary treasure is . . . wait for it . . . a pile of 5,000 gold pieces. Just a tad underwhelming, but of course the "real" point of the game is just to explore and develop as high as possible.

It took me about 4 hours of play to get to Level 11, collect enough funds to buy a magic sword, and make it to the site of the treasure. When I finally got there, I found that I could only carry about 3,500 of the 5,000 gold pieces if I didn't want to start dropping other items. This reduced my movement speed to 1 per round, but fortunately I had a lot of "Haste" potions and was able to compensate as I limped back to the exit. There was no acknowledgement, upon leaving, that I'd found the legendary treasure.

My final inventory. I'm not sure what the purpose of the dirks was. Don't ask me why I'm holding my regular sword when I have a magic sword.

I expect the GIMLET to score slightly higher than Dunzhin. Let's see:

• 1 point for the game world. Unfortunately, the framing story is very brief and has no impact on actual gameplay.

• 2 points for character creation and development. There are no creation options and a fairly standard experience/leveling system during the game itself.

• 0 points for, alas, no NPCs.

• 4 points for encounters and foes. The monster list may be somewhat derivative, but it's still nice to find such an early game implementing features like paralysis, level-drain, and the need to hold up a mirror against gorgons. The various random happenings in the game are a little too random to be fully enjoyable, but they do add some variety to the exploration.

Sometimes enemies are just trying to get from one place to another, just like you.

• 4 points for combat. The body part/armor class/damage system is unique and interesting, as is the ability to spend a round improving AIM or winding up more FORCE. There is still no magic in the series--only magic items.

• 2 points for a basic equipment  selection. I was disappointed that I never found rings or wands. I don't know if they were exceedingly rare or if it was a bug.

• 3 points for the economy. Unlike the first game, gold has some use, and you have to keep collecting it for survival gear. Having to save for the magic sword is a nice sub-goal.

• 1 point for not much of a main quest.

• 2 points for bare-bones graphics, a sound system that consists mostly of piercing boops, and a text-based control system that I still don't like for movement even though Masteller tried to help by allowing abbreviations.

The game has pretty good in-game documentation, too.

• 4 points for gameplay, earned mostly for the modest level of difficulty and for lasting just about as long as the depth of the gameplay could support.

This gives us a final score of 23, surprisingly only one point higher than Dunzhin. The discrepancy is primarily in the 2 bonus points I gave to Dunzhin for some of the innovative elements that didn't fit into other categories. I debated whether I should carry these points forward but ultimately decided not to. 23 feels like it works well in comparison to other games with similar scores.

My post on the first game has some information about Randall Masteller and his influences. I had a great e-mail exchange with him that week, in which he enthusiastically answered all of my questions and really seemed keen to talk about the game. (Some of the other developers I've contacted in the past year have been far less pleasant.) I'll shoot him an e-mail to let him know this one is up and see if he has any additional remembrances.

I'll be playing the final two Ras games over the next few months. Based on the manuals, Wylde and Ziggurat offer similar game mechanics but deeper back stories and more meaningful main quests. As randomly-generated dungeon crawls go, the Warrior of Ras titles offer a reasonable amount of fun for short time periods, and I've enjoyed watching the series develop.

Game 134: Warrior of Ras, Volume One: Dunzhin (1982)

Warrior of Ras, Volume One: Dunzhin

United States

Screenplay (publisher)

Released 1982 for TRS-80, Apple II, PC Booter; 1983 for Atari 8-Bit, Commodore 64

Date Started: 17 January 2014
Date Ended: 17 January 2014

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 22
Ranking at Time of Posting: 39/134 (29%)

Ranking at Game #456: 182/456 (40%)

Every once in a while, I play a game and find myself wishing I could force it to breed with another game. The Elder Scrolls: Dungeons of Daggorath would remove the health and fatigue bars and force you to use audio and visual cues to figure out your status. It would also remove markers showing the locations of enemies and force you to listen for them. Meanwhile, enemies like armored knights and fake wizards could be killed with stealth tactics and not by just dropping items in your area for them to pick up. Starflight II: Countdown to Doomsday would replace the blunt action space battles with the tactical battles of Buck Rogers. Hero's Quest: So You Want to Be a Knight of Legend would blend fun adventure gameplay with a combat system where you could target particular parts of your foe and use your "foresight" skill to anticipate his own attacks, so you'll know exactly when to dodge and parry.

Warrior of Ras, Volume One: Dunzhin begs to be bred with some other dungeon crawler of the era, like Temple of Apshai or one of the Robert Clardy or Stuart Smith games. It has some ideas too good to ignore, but it lacks too many RPG elements to fully enjoy as an RPG. If it had featured the room descriptions of the Dunjonquest games, the plot of Ali Baba, or even the inventory system of Rogue, I'd be trumpeting this game as a forgotten gem.

A typical Dunzhin screen. I've explored about 3/4 of this level. The lettered rooms all have treasures on the letters. I'm in the northeast corner, fighting a group of ghouls, about to attack one by swinging at his chest. If I defeat him in this combat, the stairs down to the next level lie a few steps to my east.

 
You play an unnamed hero who enters a randomly-generated five-level dungeon in search of a unique treasure that's randomly assigned just before you enter.

You know what? I don't even want to know.

As in a roguelike, you navigate a maze that is initially dark but opens up as you explore. Commands are entered via text, either fully spelled out (MOVE, SEARCH, HIDE) or by keyboard shortcut (M, S, C, respectively). You fight enemies in various numbers, find treasures, negotiate traps, deal with a variety of random occurrences, and try to keep yourself healthy long enough to retrieve the assigned treasure from the bottom of the dungeon and get back to the entrance.

It sounds a bit like a roguelike, but there's no permadeath (you can save anywhere) and, more importantly, no inventory. You technically have armor and a sword, and both can "break," but this just serves to adjust your attack and defense scores. There's nothing to pick up and use. It's not a very good RPG in lots of other ways: no NPCs, no role-playing encounters, no true economy, no character creation, no magic, no puzzles. And I hate the movement system, in which you have to type commands like MOVE EAST 3 and MOVE NORTH 2 to get around the dungeon. That's like the ninth game to avoid using the Apple II's arrow keys. Was there some kind of stigma?

Moving four squares to the east. At least the game supports abbreviations.

 
Despite what sounds like a lot of faults, the game is more notable for its innovations. These include:

1. A complex system of armor class and damage.  In addition to an overall total of hit points (called "total defense") as well as armor hit points ("armor defense"), both you and your enemies also have individual hit points, and an individual armor class, for each part of the body. If the blow is serious enough to overwhelm that body part's armor class, it subtracts from that body part's individual hit points. If it's not serious enough, it just subtracts from the total armor defense. As you increase in levels, your body part hit points increase in value. If any one of your body part hit points slips to 0, you die.

My character sheet from late in the game. Note that each of my body parts has a separate hit point total and armor class.

 
2. A nice tactical/logistical combat system. You have far more options in combat than in the standard Apple II RPG of the era. First, you can choose whether to make a normal attack, AIM carefully (sacrificing power for accuracy), or use a FORCE attack (sacrificing accuracy for power). In every attack, you specify what part of the enemy you want to try to hit. The game is ridiculously specific about these parts: in a humanoid enemy, you can target the head, neck, chest, abdomen, right arm, left arm, right leg, or left leg. In bestial enemies, your choices change to head, body, left and right forelegs, and left and right hind legs. If you deplete the hit points of any one body part, the creature dies. Areas like heads and chests have fewer hit points but are harder to hit, so you have to decide whether you want to try to wear down the enemy slowly by targeting an easy-to-hit area like the chest, or go for a one-hit kill by targeting the neck (the hardest) or head. Experience with various enemies helps you learn the best practices for each.

A typical combat sequence might go:

>You have encountered 3 minotaurs

>Your action? HIT HEAD

>You are going for the head. Press any key when you feel lucky! SPACE

>You missed

>The minotaur is going for the abdomen

>The minotaur hits the area with 8 points of force

>That area is protected for 4

>You are still alive with 10 points to that area and 48 points overall

>Your action? HIT CHEST

>You hit the chest with 18 points of force

>That area is protected for 6

>The minotaur is defeated!

Getting whacked by an enemy.

Occasionally, you get lucky and strike a critical hit, doing two or three times the normal damage. You can also try to HIDE to escape combat, BRIBE the enemy to make them go away, or use a WAND that instantly kills your foe--but you only have a few charges.

3. Quick time events. Obviously, this isn't what they're called in 1982, but the spirit is the same. When you wander into a trap, get hit by a ghoul (who can paralyze), or get hit by a cockatrice (who can petrify), the game tells you about your predicament and gives you the opportunity to "hit any key" to avoid it. This option only stays on the screen for a second, so you have to be paying attention to the game. If you miss it, you still get kind of a luck-based "saving throw" to minimize damage. Normally, I don't like this kind of dynamic in games--I prefer RPGs to be based on statistics rather than reflexes--but it's still quite innovative, and it keeps your attention throughout the game.

At least it doesn't tell me to press A, B, A, Y, X to avoid danger.

 
4. Relative experience. We see this in a lot of modern games, but I think this might be the earliest example of a game that awards your experience based on the enemy's difficulty relative to your level. You can't grind on skeletons forever if you want to advance rapidly. This brings us to:

5. Call your foes. I guess the idea is that the dungeon is basically swarming with monsters, and you're brushing past them on the way in and out of the rooms. When you engage in combat, you're not so much encountering enemies as encountering a particularly hostile pack of them. Thus, if you have a desire to fight a particular enemy, you just have to type SEARCH [ENEMY NAME], and you'll generally find one within a few moves. I had fun working my way through each of the 18 creatures listed in the manual.

This command has a couple of uses. First, enemies are divided into three groupings: "low-ranked" (e.g., skeletons, fighters, elves), "middle-ranked" (e.g., gargoyles, ogres, harpies), and "high-ranked" (e.g., wyverns, trolls, minotaurs). High-ranked foes are very rare in the game, even on the bottom level, so the only way to ensure that you test your mettle against them (and reap the best experience point rewards) is to deliberately search for them. Second, as you explore you'll occasionally find that your treasure has been stolen by a thief. You have to SEARCH THIEF to find him and get it back.

 
There are some other innovative elements that aren't good or bad. Every few dozen moves, some random event occurs. A ghostly voice whispers "go away!" and teleports you somewhere random. A woman's voice whispers "I like you!" and increases your luck or "I don't like you!" and decreases it.

I'm having flashbacks to high school.

 
Sometimes fog blankets the dungeon for a few rounds. You suddenly get a message that you're feeling confident, and your attack score increases. Perhaps most oddly, occasionally a "crystal ball" that you're supposed to be carrying (the game's way of hand-waving the interface) asks if you're "feeling brave" or if you "think it's wise" to execute whatever command you've just typed in. Answering "right" or "wrong" has effects on your luck, but I could never get a handle on what was right and what was wrong. It's simply because these events are random, and not predicated on any player decisions or skill, that I'm ambivalent about them.

A single game is fairly short. After some time experimenting, it only took me about two hours (and, admittedly, a bit of save-scumming) to get a character up to Level 11 and win the game.

Leveling up after combat.

Each of the "dunzhin's" five levels is subdivided into lettered rooms, and not until you walk on one of the letters do you determine what you're going to find there. Usually, it's a bit of treasure. But there are handful of special rooms scattered throughout the dungeon: one where you can repair armor, one where you can repair weapons, a "regeneration room" that heals you, and a teleport room that takes you to a random place in the dungeon. It's nice when the repair and regeneration rooms occur on lower levels when you really need them, but sometimes they're right next to the entrance.

In this expedition, it was on the last level, just where I needed it.

 
As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no point to the game's treasure. You don't get any kind of score when you leave the game, and the only way to use it in-game is to BRIBE enemies to go away, but this seems to fail far more often than HIDE, which costs nothing.

It takes a while to survive to Level 2, since when you're Level 1, even the lowest monsters can kill you in a single blow. The dangerousness curve evens out as you increase in levels (which happens quite rapidly, at least up to around 10) and get more hit points and higher attack and defense scores. The maximum level in the game is 20, though you'd have to grind a lot to get that high, and nothing anywhere near that level is necessary. The game allows you to save your character as well as the scenario, so you can use the same character in multiple sorties or bring him into later Warrior of Ras games.

A common message until you get a few levels on the board.

 
The quest treasure is located on the fifth level, and it's guarded by a pack of the higher-level monsters in the game (three "lords" in my case). Once you defeat them, you just need to make a beeline for the exit. When you get out of the dungeon, your victory screen is just some white letters on a black background that read:

You have exited the Dunzhin.

Congratulations!!!

You have obtained the item!

WELL DONE!

I think it was the "Freezing Bracer of Tikif" that I was after, but whatever. I'll take it.

I should mention that the game manual, though lacking any production qualities and displaying a curious bent to underline every appearance of the word "Dunzhin," is fairly well-written, and it sets up a more elaborate back story than the game really uses. The player is explicitly given as the son of a duke in a kingdom called Ras, ruled by "Lord Doserror the Inevitable." The manual takes the form of a narrative told by a half-crazed unsuccessful adventurer who has just emerged from the dungeon and is warning the PC about its dangers within while simultaneously instructing him as to the interface (e.g., "Seeing that the skeleton's neck and bones were unprotected, I drew my sword and swung at it, issuing the following command: HIT NECK (Return)").

In a GIMLET, I can only give it 22 points, including a couple of bonus points for its innovations. I give its best scores (4) for brisk, challenging "gameplay," and (4) in the "encounters and foes" section, since all of the enemies are well-described in the manual, are balanced well in difficulty, and offer lots of grinding opportunities. (Unfortunately, it doesn't have any role-playing encounters to go higher in this category.) It loses points for no NPCs, no inventory, and barely any economy.

Fortunately, we'll get to find out what this game is like with those elements. Dunzhin is only the first game in a four-game series, and my understanding is the second game, Kaiv, introduces an inventory and spell system, and the third and fourth games, Wylde and Ziggurat, have a combat system in which you can anticipate enemy attacks and react accordingly.

The series was created and programmed by Randall Don Masteller and published by Screenplay of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I exchanged some e-mails with Masteller this week, and he was very eager to stroll down memory lane with the series. He started playing Dungeons & Dragons while in the Navy in the 1970s, but he became disenchanted with some of the rules of the game, so he and a friend developed their own tabletop RPG called The Game: Fantasy Edition. The rules of The Game found their way into Ras, which he began writing in BASIC on a TRS-80 in 1979. "Ras" was originally an acronym, standing for "Random Area Series," alluding to the game's creation of random levels. Basically, Masteller wanted to create a game that he could play and enjoy when he was finished.

An ad for the first two games in the series.

Masteller had already written the first three games and was in the middle of the fourth when Screenplay accepted them for publication. A programmer at Screenplay, William Denman, translated Masteller's BASIC code (which he thought would be too easy to copy) to assembly language. To "maximize exposure," Randall and Screenplay "put it on every machine I could think of"; the games ultimately had releases for the TRS-80, the Apple II, the Atari 8-bit series, the Commodore 64, and the PC (in booter form). The odd spelling of Dunzhin was to avoid any legal problems with TSR, and he just went with the theme for Kaiv and Wylde; as for Ziggurat: "Well, I could not find a way to spell it wrong that looked right, so . . ."

In 1982, there weren't many outlets for marketing computer games, Randall says that the Screenplay team worked hard to get it into toy stores, and they scored a coup when Toys 'R' Us agreed to carry it. Randall made a "very nice amount" from the games for a few years.

He says he had other ideas for RPGs but had trouble finding publishers, so as sales started to drop from the Ras series, he started taking whatever work he could find. He went on to work with MicroProse and Mastertronic, and he has programming credits on at least 25 other games, including Pirates!, Airborne Ranger, and Metropolis. In 1995, with his wife, Bonita, he launched Random Games, which focused on board games and strategy games. They had a few good years, but unfortunately the company went out of business in the early 2000s, while it was in the midst of developing an updated computer version of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game, the popular board game from Games Workshop. Masteller now works at Raleigh-based Kadro Solutions, which makes e-commerce software. 

I look forward to checking out the sequels later this year. For now, we return to 1990 with Vampyr: Talisman of Invocation.