Here, Have Another Post on Tyrann

Yet another victory.

  

Tyrann did some weird stuff on the first few levels, and only some inexplicable persistence on my part kept me from abandoning the game. Any lesser CRPG addict surely would have.

As I tried to explore Level 3, I found it simply impossible. Every single combat absolutely slaughtered me. Enemies always attacked first, and were generally capable of wiping out a character's hit points in a single attack. I was losing 2 out of 3 combats with full-party deaths and having to trek all the way back to the town level to resurrect or un-paralyze characters on the third. On the rare occasion that I won a combat, it delivered thousands of experience points and my party members were leveling up relatively fast, but they still got taken apart by every enemy. The game does a good (i.e., annoying) job mixing undead and non-undead creatures in most encounters so that no single spell works against all of them. (Tip for people who inexplicably want to play this game despite my postings: sacrifice one warrior position for a second druid position.)

An archmage one-shots me.

      
You'll recall from a previous post that almost all encounters in the game are at fixed locations, and once you clear a level it remains clear. This isn't 100% true, as I have encountered an occasional stray combat at a previously-visited location, but it's functionally true. I could wander for an hour on a previous level and not find a single combat. So returning to early levels to grind was out of the question.

Meanwhile, Level 3 had a staircase to Level 4 that wouldn't let me descend. I didn't think I was any more capable of surviving Level 4 than Level 3, but I figured that thanks to MobyDX's maps, I could perhaps skirt the fixed encounters and look for messages, special encounters, or even the endgame. I don't know what my plan was, really--I was just sick of dying on Level 3. In any event, it didn't work. The game showed me an option to "(D)escendre," but hitting the appropriate key did nothing.

I suspected I knew the reason. The manual had a line towards the end that says, "When your team has attained an average of 11 levels of experience, you will be able to load Side B." Even though I was playing off a disk version of the game, I suspected that it was enforcing a similar rule. Dungeon Levels 4 and up were the equivalent of Side B, and I'd need to hit character Level 11 to go down.

At this point, my team had an average of Level 5 or 6. Now, they were leveling rapidly on Level 3, but I still didn't think there were enough fixed combats on the level to get us up to an average level of 11.

I thought some more. I developed a theory that the disappearance of fixed combats on Levels 1 and 2 wasn't intentional--that it was, instead, an artifact of the way I was playing. I was saving the game with save states rather than using the tape-saving mechanism (which I couldn't get to work). When you use save states, it's the equivalent of never shutting off the computer. My hypothesis was that if the game was played "properly' and re-loaded in between sessions, it would re-seed the first two dungeon levels with encounters, I could grind more, I'd be better equipped for Level 3, and I could eventually get to character Level 11. I didn't particularly want to grind more, but I was obsessed at this point.

This is a text-heavy entry, so here's a picture of Chestre on some kind of 'roid potion doing major damage to an enemy.

  

It took me a while to get saving to work, mostly because I didn't understand how WinAPE was doing it. I thought I had to insert a "blank" cassette file to save, but it turns out that WinAPE will just create a file on your computer (with a .wav extension) representing the saved tape file if you don't try to mess around with it too much. Once I figured that out, the saving worked fine.

Reloading didn't. I kept getting "out of memory" messages when re-starting the game and loading the saved file. Eventually I hit upon the right combination of settings to get this to stop happening.

Anyway, a surprise greeted me the first time I successfully reloaded the saved game. A message popped up on the screen that said: "The village staircase will take you directly to Level 4." Sure enough, when I went down, I was on a level that I hadn't mapped before.
   

Part of me thinks this is really lame; part wishes more RPGs would do it.

      

And lo-and-behold: the difficulty of combats was fair again! I encountered some of the same monsters as on Level 3, but they were weaker, slower, less damaging, and quicker to die. I was able to proceed without much trouble at all, and with the town more conveniently available again.

Thus, my new hypothesis: the manual didn't mean an "average of 11 levels of experience" per character; it meant, "a sum of around 11 levels of experience" for the party as a whole. And the disk's equivalent of allowing you to load Side B of the tape was to scan the party and alter the dungeon so that you go directly to Level 4--but it only does this when you load the party from a saved game. As for Level 3, I suspect it exists solely for grinding purposes. It ensures that the party trying to hit the "sum of 11 levels of experience" never possibly runs out of combats to get them there. The average player of 1984, saving on tape after every session, probably would never have finished mapping Level 2 before getting the message on some re-load and having the dungeon reconfigured to start on Level 4. (Levels 1-3 are permanently lost to me at this point; going up from Level 4 returns me to the town, no matter what staircase.)

Although I've never seen this particular approach in a previous game, it does have an analog in Tyrann's obvious inspiration: Wizardry. There, the party had to develop its skills in the "proving grounds" of the first 4 levels before fighting a fixed encounter and winning a "blue ribbon" that allowed passage to lower levels. What Tyrann does is the same concept, just a little less interesting and more clumsy.
    

I would have been so disappointed if a French RPG hadn't featured a loup garou.

    
For Level 4, I stopped mapping myself and used MobyDX's extracted maps. I should add that the game has no secret doors, spinners, teleporters, or one-way doors, so it's only cheating in a very minor way to use the maps. I still have to hit practically every encounter, as leveling up is the only way to ensure survival on lower levels. Anyway, Level 4 had a bit of a mystery that I never solved. The map is split in half. To get to the right half of the map, you apparently have to ascend from Level 5, but the left side has no place to go down to Level 5. After exploring the left side exhaustively, I tried saving to tape and reloading again, and sure enough, the game told me that the stairs from the town would now take me directly to Level 5. I hope nothing was important on the right-hand side of Level 4.

Level 4. I never figured out how to get up to the right side or down from the left side.

    
Level 5 was full of traps and had a much smaller number of encounters than previous levels. It also brought the game's first and (so far) only special encounter: upon stepping into one square, I got a message saying, "Fear not, brave subjects! I am Wakhan'Yorl, God of Virtues." Wakhan gave Talbot, my druid, a 10-point increase in all attributes, which is pretty cool because it makes him act first in all combats, giving me a chance to fire off an OKOY ("paralyze") or ZINAK ("turn undead") spell before they can act.

Don't tell me not to craignez. I'll craignez if I feel like it.

  
Talbot acquired his 10th and last spell when he hit Level 10; I guess all level-ups from here will just give him more slots for each spell. My mage still has a few slots to go. So far, there have been no mass-damage spells. The first-level spell "paralyze" remains the most useful in the game, since it seems to work unfailingly against all non-undead monsters and paralyzes them permanently for the rest of the combat. My mage's YPAFET ("sleep") also does its job pretty well.

Talbot's complete spellbook.

   
KERR ("Word of Death") is a high-level druid spell which theoretically works great--it instantly kills every living creature--except that if you wipe out a party with it, you don't get any experience for the battle. You also don't get any experience if you end a combat via "turn undead," MOKAR ("friends"), or the enemies fleeing. There's one major spell mystery: ZADEQ indicates that it results in metal mou, or "soft metal." It doesn't seem to do anything at all. I suppose it might be lowering the effectiveness of enemy attacks in ways that aren't obvious.
   

The poor little mouse saves me from a trap.

  
If the game has any originality, it's in some of the usable inventory items. The "white mouse" (souris blanche) turns out to be a trap-detection device. It runs one square ahead of the party and triggers any traps it finds, dying in the process. I've never seen anything quite like it in an RPG. A mysterious fiole (flask) turns whoever drinks it into a super-warrior for the duration of one round. A chien de combat and a bebe dragon are both animals that you can use in battle for a guaranteed high-power attack against one creature, but there's a chance that the animal will die. A baril de poudre explodes for damage against each enemy (accompanied by a decent sound effect), and a parchemin casts a mass-damage spell.
  

My thief's current inventory.

   

Judging by the maps, I have 5 more levels to go, and I guess you probably won't see a post again until I win, which will only be after many more hours of slogging.

Time so far: 11 hours
Reload count: 22

*****

Just a quick announcement: For the last few years, I've set a personal goal of churning out one blog post every 2 days. There are streaks in which I've met the goal (e.g., the last few weeks), but when I don't, I fail pretty badly.

I've decided there are three bad things about such an ambitious schedule:

1. I simply can't meet it all the time, and this causes me a bit of stress. I can't take a couple days off from RPG playing without falling behind fast.

2. If each new post is only "new" for a couple of days, it doesn't encourage very much discussion. I might only get a dozen comments before we've moved on to something else.

3. If I have some extra time, I feel compelled to play more games and line up more draft posts--after all, having 5 drafts in the pipeline still only gives me material for the next 10 days. It discourages me from working on other aspects of my blog, like the GIMLET page and the "glossary" page I've been trying to set up for over a year.

Thus, I'm setting a new goal of posting every 3 days instead of every 2. This will still result in 122 posts a year--not much lower than my average, and more than I did in 2015--but hopefully at a steadier, more reliable pace that encourages more thoughtful reflection and discussion on the games.

Game 209: Sword of Kadash (1984)

      

Sword of Kadash
Dynamix (developer); Penguin Software (publisher)

Released 1984 for Apple II; 1985 for Commodore 64; 1986 for Atari ST and Macintosh

Date Started: 29 December 2015
Date Ended: 30 December 2015

Total Hours: 7

Reload Count: >100

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)

Final Rating: 18

Ranking at Time of Posting: 40/206 (19%). Obligatory disclaimer that it performs better as an action game than an RPG.

The earliest arcade games, like Pac-Man and Space Invaders, featured limited gameplay, but they weren't deterministic. Random variability in enemy movement and unpredictability in player movement meant that no two games were exactly the same, and players had to respond to an ever-changing game board to succeed.

At some point, a new kind of game became popular: the platformer. In the earliest incarnations, platformers differed from other games by being completely deterministic. Instead of quickly reacting to the presence of enemies who had some artificial intelligence, however rudimentary, platformers prized the ability to navigate a series of obstacles that fundamentally never changed. Every screen of Pitfall or Super Mario Brothers looks exactly the same for every player every time he plays it. (Perhaps I should say "almost every screen," since it's been years since I played either and I may be forgetting a small number that had some randomness associated with them.) Enemies always emerge from the same places at the same times; the same blocks always hold the same treasures, and the moving platforms that give the genre its name always start in the same positions and move at the same speeds.

It's going to be a while before I start talking about the game, so here's a typical Sword of Kadash screen. This room has multiple entrances and exits, a shield, a demon guarding it, and a couple of other enemies in an inaccessible room. (There is undoubtedly a secret door.) I am "shooting" my +1 axe at the demon.

    

Because these games are so deterministic, victory almost always comes through experience rather than skill alone. I suppose it's not impossible that a skilled player might be able to fire up Super Mario Brothers, learn the controls, and cruise all the way to the end on his first try, using his perception to suss out the best path through each screen and anticipate obstacles and surprises. It just seems very unlikely. Too many enemies appear suddenly, and the results of too many actions are essentially arbitrary. Instead, most successful players win after a long series of failures in which, through trial and error, they memorize each screen and know exactly what to do when they get there.

In spirit, Sword of Kadash is this kind of game. It doesn't have the same jumping puzzles as platformers, but it has the same approach to trial and error. No player could make it through on the first try by skill alone because too much of what happens is completely arbitrary. Only through extensive experimentation do you know which items are cursed, what traps go off when you pick up certain items, what enemies appear when you touch a certain wall, and so forth. Reflexes won't save you every time. Players are manifestly meant to make maps, take notes, and through a long process of dying and learning, eventually plot a path through the game to the end. 

There are no jumping puzzles in Kadash, but you do have to time your way past a lot of rolling things.

      
Sword of Kadash is an action RPG, although as with most action RPGs of the era, we're being a bit generous on the "RPG" part. In its basic interface, it's not a million miles different from Caverns of Freitag (1982),  Sword of Fargoal (1982), or Gateway to Apshai (1983): you run around a multi-room map, killing enemies in real-time, earning experience for each kill, and picking up useful items. (I wanted to record some video, but I'm having problems with my recording software; I recommend checking out this YouTube video if you want to see the game in action.) It hangs on to RPG credentials by a hair: experience causes you to increase levels and perform better in combat. Your maximum hit points increase by 100 per level. The only flexible inventory it offers is a supply of magic scrolls that the player can use as he deems necessary.
  
The framing story uses a Persian theme. The character is a nameless wanderer, lost in the desert, captured by a band of brigands. In return for sparing his life, the brigand king orders the character to enter the Fortress of the Dragon, overcome its demon and lich guardians, and return with the Sword of Kadash, former property of "an almost invincible Templar Knight." The king apparently doesn't want the sword for its power: "Faithful followers of Allah, they seek not to use the sword [but to] restore it to its holy resting place in the Vizier's Palace as a symbol to all true believers of the vanquished Crusaders."

There's no character creation process (an awful lot of action RPGs don't even let you name your character), just a selection of among three difficulty levels. The character starts at the entrance to the Fortress, armed with a dagger, a shield, and 2000 hit points. Gameplay takes place in a maze of 256 discrete rooms.
   

The game begins. There are a few hidden objects in that tree.

    
Combat is a bit weird and reminiscent of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Intellivision cartridge. While you can fight enemies in melee range, it's a major failure on your part if an enemy ever touches you, as you take swift and constant damage. Instead, you fire three-round bursts of "darts" at enemies from a distance, with the ability to bank the darts off many of the game's walls. Despite this, the weapons you pick up are daggers, morning stars, and swords, as if such items can just be infinitely thrown. (One wonders if the developers of Ghosts and Goblins ever played Kadash.)

The dungeon is littered with weapons, pieces of armor, magic scrolls, keys, treasure chests, first-aid boxes, and holy symbols. Each item allots you some experience when you pick it up, and if the weapon or armor is better that what you already had, it replaces your existing item. (There is otherwise no way to "drop" anything in the game.) Other than the experience points, I don't think there's any point to keys or treasure chests--the game has no doors and no economy. Scrolls add to your spell total.

This room has one of each of the game's treasures except for a first aid box.

    
Where Kadash differs from other action games is in the insidious number of traps and other bad things that can happen to the character as he explores. Clearing out the initial group of monsters that might occupy a room is the easiest part of the game. The hard part is trying to anticipate and react to what happens when you pick up certain items or even just walk in certain places. Some of the possibilities include:

• Arrows shoot out of the nearby walls and pierce you for major hit point damage unless you quickly step out of the way.

All I did was pick up a holy symbol.

   

• More enemies spawn around you.

• A rolling wall or ball appears and rolls back and forth, crushing everything in its path. 

    

Picking up a first aid kit caused this rolling ball to spawn and crush me. Even if the wall to my right was a secret door (it's not), there's not enough time to avoid the damage.

      
Truth be told, one of these things almost always happens when you pick something up. Perhaps you're a better player than I am, but I did not find that I could react fast enough to the appearance of these objects to save myself unless I already knew what was going to happen. This is what I mean by "success by experience" rather than success by skill.

Even if nothing awful happens when you pick something up, there's a decent chance--about 1 in 4, I think--that the item is cursed. When you pick up a cursed item, you remain in "cursed" status until you find a holy symbol. While in cursed status, you don't gain any experience and your weapons and armor are far less effective. There aren't very many holy symbols in the dungeon (and many of them are, themselves, cursed), so a first-time player would spend an awful lot of his time cursed. Again, only experience tells you which items are safe to pick up and which must be left alone.

Late in the game, there's an entire hallway of cursed items that you can't avoid. Only if you left a single holy symbol untouched in an earlier room can you approach the endgame uncursed. Trial and error.

Every item in this hallway is cursed.

    
Oh, how else does the game screw with you? Some walls are secret doors, and you have to find some of them to get to key places. When you touch them, they disappear, brick by brick, but some of them you have to shoot first, and all of them will refuse to open if you're off by one pixel. There are also invisible walls in many rooms that you have to navigate around; again, you have to shoot some of these first to pass. A few of the smaller monsters refuse to occupy the same plane as the darts you fire at them. Finally, you take damage if your own weapon rebounds against you (at least, if your weapon rating is higher than your defense), which happens more often than you might think.

This empty-looking room is actually a maze of invisible walls.

Against all of this, you only have a couple of advantages. Enemy pathfinding is poor, so you can sometimes get them trapped behind walls or lure them around corners one-by-one. Some of the rooms feature a weblike latticework that traps enemies but lets you shoot through it, allowing you to shoot them as they futilely try to reach you. Banking your shots works in a few key locations. Enemies don't follow between screens, so if a room has multiple entrances, you can stand by one exit and shoot at them as they approach, then pop out the door and come at the screen from another entrance, repeating until they're dead.

If I'm very patient, they'll come around the corner one-by-one.

I can kill every spider in this room without them coming anywhere near me by shooting holes in the latticework.

   
The only "spell" in the game, cast from your accumulated magic scrolls, is a kind of "Fear" spell that sends enemies scurrying to the farthest corner. There are a few locations where none of the above tricks work, so you essentially have to use a spell to avoid being overwhelmed.

Each character theoretically has a number of "lives" for each game, but success--particularly in the later screens--largely depends on accumulating as much experience, and the best items, as possible. When you die, you start over at Level 1 with a sword and shield again. This is not a survivable condition in the late game.

The game sounds exasperating, and it is--but in a way that you don't quite mind. It's small enough that starting over isn't that bad. The player makes maps, notes his mistakes (if only mentally), and charges once more unto the breach. After all, if it wasn't so hard, it would only be a 5-hour game, and players would feel like they'd wasted their money. I could see buying Sword of Kadash in 1984 and having lots of fun with it as I slowly learned its pitfalls and perils, finally winning after a few months of effort. When you think of it, doesn't Dark Souls take essentially the same approach?

The very act of walking into this room sends rows of daggers flying at you. There's a secret pit to avoid them, but good luck finding it when you have only a second to react. This room must have been the end for a lot of players.

    
Not willing to simulate the length of this process in 2015, I used save states rather liberally, but I tried not to play like a complete jackass. On my first play-through, I took save states every 5-10 minutes and reloaded if I died, but otherwise tried to adapt to the game's difficulty. By the time I reached the end after about 4 hours, I was too weak to get through the final screens, and I was hopelessly cursed because I didn't know about that final corridor of unavoidable cursed items.

Towards the end of the game, you face a few tough foes. First, there are a couple of liches capable of summoning other monsters around them; I couldn't defeat them without spells. More important, you come across a dragon that you need the Sword of Kadash to kill. The first time you cross his path, you don't have it, so you have to cross his dragon fire (which is unavoidable, unless I missed something) and open a secret door to progress to the sword. Later, you have to stand in his dragon fire and throw the sword at him until he dies. In both cases, you have to have a boatload of hit points to survive the fire. This business about having to dash across a dragon's breath has appeared in two other action RPGs--Caverns of Freitag and ICON: The Quest for the Ring. Author Chris Cole told me that he had played the former.
    

One of the liches, guarding a couple of holy symbols, surrounded by traps. I forgot to talk about the traps.

      

When I first reached the dragon I was down to a couple hundred hit points and had no way to get any more. I had to retire the character.

My first ill-fated character. He doesn't have enough hit points to cross the dragon's breath and open the secret door to the north.

   
The second time, instead of being conservative with my save states, I pretended like I was a player who had already been through the game a million times. I saved before every room, tested what happened with each object and pathway, and then re-loaded and completed the room like a pro. I reached the endgame with over 7,000 hit points and defeated the final enemies with ease.

The Sword of Kadash! I forgot to screen-shot the room while the lich was still alive.

To win the game, you have to stand right in the dragon's breath and shoot at him with the Sword of Kadash.

    
The end game screen, I'm pleased to report, has the character contemplating using his accumulated experience to take the Sword of Kadash and kill the bandits rather than deliver it to them.

I don't quite get the "more must be claimed" part,  but I like the last bit.

    
For GIMLET purposes, it's never a good sign when the totality of the game's controls are the directional pad and a fire button, but this is going to be a case where the GIMLET--designed for classic RPGs--doesn't quite tell the whole story.
       

• 1 for the game world, a basic framing story that has little to do with gameplay.

• 1 for character creation and development, offering the bare minimum necessary to be an RPG.

• 0 for no NPCs

• 3 for encounters and foes. I thought the liches were creative, and the rooms can be seen as a type of puzzle "encounter."

• 1 for magic and combat, again offering only what was necessary to be considered in the category in the first place.

• 1 for equipment which you can only accumulate, not drop.

• 0 for no economy.

• 3 for having a main quest and a couple of "side quests" involving the collection of better equipment from rooms you don't otherwise have to explore.

• 4 for graphics, sound, and interface. All are good enough for the scope of the game.

• 4 for gameplay. It's quite hard, but I suppose its difficulty is sensible for its length and scope.

        

That gives us a final score of 18. That's pretty low by RPG standards, but the kind of player who enjoys Sword of Kadash is probably not the same type of player who enjoys Wizardry. Kadash is a fun game, just not a great RPG specifically.

   

    

Sword of Kadash was the second offering from the Oregon-based Dynamix, a company that would soon become famous for solid action and games like Skyfox, Arcticfox, The Crimson Crown, F-14 Tomcat, and Red Baron. They became a division of Sierra in 1990 and shut down in 2001 (although the founders have started new game companies since then), and in all their years, the only return to RPG territory seems to have been 1993's Betrayal at Krondor.
     

The production values of the game were nice. This fold-out included a rundown of the game's enemies.

      
Author Chris Cole was nice enough to respond to my e-mails and talk a bit about the development of the game. He was only 15 when he started working on the game and 17 when he finished. (When I was 15, by contrast, I wrote an 80-page science-fiction novel that featured the line, "We have to stop those Martians before they kill my dad!") Chris and two friends, Paul Bowman and Clark Fagot, frequented an Oregon computer store called the Computer Tutor, run by Dynamix founder Jeff Tunnell. Lacking the funds to buy much, they would simply visit and "salivate over the cool games." Tunnell, who thought they were shoplifting until he got to know them, called them "the three hoodlums."

"We didn't have any money and $30 was a big deal for us," Cole wrote. "We felt burned when we got a bad one...and we seemed to get burned a lot. So I started mouthing off that I could write a better game in two weeks. Well, the gauntlet was thrown down, and Jeff...said that if I thought I could do better, he'd publish it." Tunnell and Damon Skye had already started Dynamix and were about to publish Stellar 7; Kadash would be the company's second game.

In writing the game, Cole says he was influenced by Stern Electronics' Berzerk (1982) and Williams Electronics' Robotron: 2084 (1982), but he was exposed to basic computer RPG development via Caverns of Freitag and overall RPG mechanics via a number of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons sessions with his friends. While Cole wrote the game interface, several friends--Paul Bowman, Damon Slye, and Bryce Morsello--helped with the designs of most of the rooms. "We had a lot of fun playing each other's rooms," Cole said. "It was really like how we played AD&D at the time."

Cole agrees that he deliberately set out to create a game that required an accumulation of experience to finish. "I meant to make a tough game. Those were the types of games I liked and felt like there was a real investment in your character." As for the name: "It was a girl! I had a teenage crush on a girl in my school whose name was 'kinda' like 'Kadash.'"

A shot from the Apple II edition of the game.

   
Cole was hoping that Tunnell would be able to work out a publishing deal with Electronic Arts, but "Jeff's relationship with EA at the time of negotiations for Kadash were not so great," so he approached Penguin Software instead. The Persian motif was a late addition. Cole had intended it to have a high fantasy theme, but someone at Penguin made an association between "Kadash" and the ancient city of Kadesh and insisted on a Persian framing story. Cole thought it was a bad marketing decision: "This was 1983 and the Iran hostage crisis had just ended. Americans had little love for the area at the time. I tried, unsuccessfully as a 16-year-old, to have them change the setting back to high fantasy. I've always wondered if that would have made a difference in sales." He was also a bit underwhelmed by Penguin's marketing and distribution.

But it could have done worse. Magazines at the time praised it and referred to it as an original action-adventure. Apparently, an expansion with more rooms was released--something I've not otherwise been able to find anything about. The game made Cole enough in royalties to pay his living expenses through five years of undergraduate school and two years of graduate school (he had a full scholarship for tuition and books); he thinks maybe $25,000-30,000 total.
  
After getting his master's degree at the University of Washington in 1991, Cole returned to Dynamix to work on titles like Sid & Al's Incredible Toons (1993) and Hunter Hunted (1996). He co-founded Monster Studios (1999-2003), Mad Otter Games (2008-Present), and DaedalusForge (2012-Present) and has credits on a couple dozen games during the 1990s and 2000s. His only return to the RPG world was in his last credited title, a 2011 MMORPG called Villagers & Heroes of a Mystical Land.
  
He remembers Kadash very fondly: "I've always felt Kadash was a genre-buster. It had legitimate elements of RPG, arcade, adventure, and maybe even a little open world, as the player could do anything in the dungeon with several sub-quests that were completely optional. Of all my games, I've always really liked how Kadash was my game."

This last bit, I'll quote without paraphrasing:

The only thing I'd like to add is that working on games in the 80s was pretty challenging as the Apple II+ had 48K of memory with a lot of that taken up by OS and screen memory. We all had to be pretty frugal with anything we did and we had to come up with some pretty interesting solution to technical problems.

I've recently worked on the Android and iOS systems and the tools available today for kids in the 15-18 year range are so much more complete. In 1983 I had to enter machine code (not assembly) into the memory directly. Today kids don't even know what machine code is. I think more kids should be encouraged (by teachers, parents, and society) to make games as opposed to simply playing them. You might be in a great position with your blog to push some of these teenagers into actually making software. I encourage you to do so.

     
I don't know how many readers I have in that age range (seriously, if I have any, please comment), but if any 16-year-olds out there think they can make an RPG of the same quality as Kadash, I promise I'll play it and write about it.

Disciples of Steel, Iron, and Leather

I can no longer see a medusa without thinking about this SMBC comic.

    

An equipment system is so essential to my concept of what constitutes a "role-playing game" that I made it one of my three core rules. Equipping my characters is one of the things that I like most about RPGs. There's nothing quite like the thrill of starting a game like Oblivion clad in rags and finding your first bit of leather armor, then your first set of boots, then your first helm; nothing quite like dropping the rusty iron dagger you started with for an iron axe, and then capping the first dungeon with--like Excalibur thrust from the lake--a steel short sword.

Many hours later, when you upgrade your ebony blade that does 35 points of fire damage for an ebony blade that does 38 points of fire damage, it's not quite the same thrill. As hackneyed as the trope is, I almost like it when a game finds an excuse, mid-game, to strip you of your hard-won equipment and force you to start over like a rank amateur. It's the only way to revive that initial thrill.
   

The party picks through enemy equipment after a battle.

   

My enjoyment of equipment is such that it causes me to slightly prefer multi-character games, since you get 6 times (or, in the case of Disciples of Steel, 8 times) the number of people to outfit with helms, boots, and belts. And I particularly like games that give you lots of slots for equipping. I fondly think of Might & Magic VI through VIII, where every character could equip a helm or crown, a suit of armor, boots, a belt, an amulet, a melee weapon, a missile weapon, a shield, and up to ten rings. In the first 6 hours of the game, practically every chest gives you something new to make your team more powerful. Morrowind, in splitting armor into about a dozen individual pieces, ameliorated some of the pain associated with a single-character game.

With these preferences in mind, Disciples of Steel is definitely my kind of game. There don't seem to be any rings, belts, or amulets, but every character gets different pieces of armor to wear on the head, body, arms, and legs in addition to weapons and shields. That's 32 armor slots for the party. Almost every combat produces a list of loot at least worth looking through.
  

My ranger's current equipment. Note that his max armor is 67 and that all his body parts have exactly that. The red indicates that his armor is better than his skill. I could equip him with worse stuff and have the same protection. I think he'll grow into it, though.

  
The selection of armor available in Disciples is pretty standard (at least so far) among high fantasy games, progressing in protective value from things made of cloth to those made of leather, studded leather, ring, scale, chain, and plate in that order. But a game as statistically-oriented as this one has a few curve balls to throw at you.

• There is no total armor class but rather an individual armor class (and hit point total) for each body part. As attacks pierce armor, they deduct from the hit point total of the underlying body part.

• Each item has a "quality" rating, from "pitiful" to "perfection" that affects its statistics independent of its type or damage level. You have to pay attention to this, because a +5 item that's "adequate" is worse than a regular item that's "good."

     

These "shoddy" leather pants provide worse protection than better-quality pants of lesser material.

    

• The heavier the item, the greater the chance that it will screw up your chances of hiding or casting a spell.

• No matter how good the armor, the character might not be able to make full use of its protective value. The character's "armor" skill determines how effectively he's able to use a piece of armor. If you put a suit of plate on a character with 30 armor skill, it won't be more effective than a cloth tunic.

• If the armor has a + (plus) value, it not only increases the maximum protection but it effectively increases the armor skill of the character wearing it.

• Weapons and armor get damaged in combat and must occasionally be repaired. Items you loot from the battlefield come pretty dinged up already.

For weapons the considerations are more confusing, and again the manual is pretty bad about explaining what's happening. The key statistic associated with weapons is the "base hit," but I'm not sure if that governs accuracy, damage, or both. Whatever the case, the character's "base hit" increases with the quality of the weapon and his skill in that weapon type. As with armor, you can waste a good weapon on a character with insufficient skill to wield it. Someone with an "edged" skill of, say, 40 won't be able to do anything with a long sword +10 that he couldn't do with a regular short sword. He might actually do worse.

For a while, I figured there were no wands, potions, or scrolls in the game, but in some of the more recent dungeons, I've been encountering potions, so perhaps the other items eventually appear, too.
    

I'm not reloading often, but I do occasionally have to reload. This was just gruesome.

    
I've made lots of progress on quests since the last post. It didn't start out well--I had to slink away from the orc outpost north of Cartha, where I had been trying to find out what happened to some emissaries to Pallasade. I ran into a fixed battle that I just couldn't conquer no matter what I did.

I made my way to the south coast, intending to curve back around to my origin point in Farnus. My final stop was at DeMata, described by the manual as the "youngest of the 8 true lordships within Lanathor," having won its independence from Farnus 45 years prior. Once ruled by Lord Antonio DeMata, the country's throne fell to his daughter, Valencia DeMata, upon his death. Although she took the throne when she was only 16, "she has become as strong a ruler as her father was." The description caps by saying, "she often uses her womanhood to her best advantage."

I wonder what the manual means by that.

    
Lady DeMata gave me a series of quests that were easy enough that it feels like I should have started here instead of several miles up the coast by Farnus. The first was to kill an outlaw in the nearby woods named Serius Teld. He was holed up in an outpost with a bunch of thieves and centaurs.

I usually think of centaurs as good guys.

    
The battle against Teld and a host of thieves was a lot of fun for a couple of reasons. First, the game started Teld himself in a room to the north of the main battlefield. As soon as I saw the positioning, I had my rogue lock the door to the room. Teld had no choice but to pass each turn uselessly as I mopped up his forces. Then, I unlocked the door, "Power Word: Stunned" him, and killed him in a few rounds.

The mopping up part was fun, too. I tested out my mage's newly-acquired "Fireball" spell. It performs much as in the Gold Box games, doing mass damage to a large group of monsters, except that it affects everyone on the visible screen. You have to be careful where you cast it.

This screen had several more monsters on it a second ago.

   
There was one door in Teld's dungeon that I couldn't open. Trying to pick it just made it worse.
    

Insult to injury.

    
When I returned to DeMata with Teld's corpse, she said that she'd found a key on it. She gave it to  me, I returned to Teld's dungeon, and I opened the previously-locked door. A treasure hoard behind the door delivered my first potion as well as the first item--a Cloak of Concealment--that directly influences a non-combat skill. It increased my rogue's "hide" ability by 10.

One of my best treasure hauls so far.

   
Simply returning and finding the treasure hoard was DeMata's second quest. Her third was to explore a swamp to the east of the capital and find the source of some undead who had been troubling the land. Many of the undead were ghouls, who (like in D&D) are capable of paralyzing on touch, so it was important to keep them at bay.
    

    

The dungeon was small, and the undead leader turned out to be a lich. He wasn't as hard as his ghoul and gargantuan bat minions. He was very hard to hit, but he didn't do anything most rounds, and when he did do something, it was usually a weak casting of "magic bolt." It took me three tries to win the combat, but all because of the several ghouls rather than the lich. When I returned to DeMata, she suggested that the lich was probably her own father, but this otherwise didn't go anywhere.
   

Fighting the lich, ghouls, and gargantuan bats.

   

Her next quest was to retrieve her father's sword, stolen by the ruler of Teal. I wasn't sure how to get it, but I reasoned that if I advanced far enough in Teal's quests, he might just give it to me. I bought a boat in DeMata and set sail for Teal.
   

I left with a steerage ticket on a cargo ship. I return in my own clipper.

    

When I'd last visited the island, Lord Rathbone had asked me to deal with a medusa in a southwestern swamp. I had left it alone at the time, fearing I wasn't strong enough. 

The random combats on Teal were bloody impossible and occasioned several reloads, but I eventually made my way to the swamp lair. Predictably, the game alerted me to a number of "statues" as I explored the lair.
   

    
The random combats in here were quite easy, usually one snakewoman or a couple of bats at a time. I might return here if I need to grind. I was worried about medusa herself and her petrification abilities, but as it turned out I was able to kill her in a single round, before she could act. The pirate king was pleased.

She was feeling fine before I blasted her with a 20-point "Magic Bolt."

   

He next wanted me to find a chest he'd buried on the DeMatan coast after a pirate raid years ago. I took my ship back to the mainland and walked up and down the coast until I found the chest. He was happy to get it back.
   

     

Next, he asked me to find a mate for his parrot, Folly, whom he had found in the southern tip of the island. I wandered around that area, reloaded after several deadly combats, and eventually the game told me that I'd caught a parrot.
   

The glorious life of a Disciple of Steel.

   

When I turned in that quest, Rathbone handed me a "+50 two-handed Sword of DeMata" and told me to "bury it so it can never be found again." I decided to take it back to Lady DeMata instead, partly since the game doesn't have a mechanism for burying things. DeMata took it and gave me another quest to find an "ancient holy city" called Terine on an island to the northeast.

But I returned to Rathbone instead, curious how he'd react at my disobeying his orders. He simply said, "thank you," gave me a reward, and moved on to the next quest. Apparently, taking the sword back to DeMata was close enough to burying it.

Rathbone's next quest was to clean out a thieves' guild in Teal. I found it, but...
    

     

I'll have to come back here later. I decided for now to head back to the orc outpost north of Cartha, where I'd started, and try to finish the Farnus quest. Since I left there at the beginning of this session, I've allocated several dozen skill points and am considerably stronger.

Miscellaneous notes:

• The experience point rewards for quest completion are pretty miserable. They start at 20 for each lord's first quest and go up by 20 for ever subsequent quest, but a single battle can easily deliver that many points. However, most of the best equipment is found in the final combats of these quests.

• Even though he's only "competent" in "disarm," my rogue has been doing a good job on traps now that my ranger's "perception" skill is high enough that he almost always finds them.

   

The disarm mechanism.

   

• I know I keep saying it, but I want to emphasize how much little messages like this make a difference in the quality of the game world and the atmosphere of dungeons.

   

Whether that fright translated into lower combat effectiveness, I cannot say.

    

• The dungeons have been small enough, and the auto mapper works well enough, that I haven't had to map. While I do enjoy mapping, I'm not going to do the work for no reason.

Navigating by auto-map.

    

• Since I filled up on food and water 12 game hours ago, the meters haven't budged an inch.

• I mentioned that you can talk to people in many of the shops. Most of them just say that their leader is the best leader that they've ever had, but I've had a few people "hesitate" and act like they wanted to say more before ultimately deciding not to. I suspect a higher charisma score might loosen their lips. I really wonder what that's about.

   

Or maybe I need to get him drunker first.

   

• Almost all enemies leave corpses. Some of them, you have to return to a lord as proof of the quest completion. I've become obsessed with the idea that some future lord is going to ask me to kill random beasts and return with their corpses, much like in Akalabeth or Ultima, so I've been saving one of each kind of monster in the guild vault.

• It turns out the next skill level above "competent" is "a disciple." I'm not sure if there are any levels above that.

  

      

I'm still enjoying the game quite a bit. I like that the quests are of varying length and difficulty and that so many of them are inter-related. The constant sense of character development is fantastic. But I'm starting to get a little antsy. So far, the quests don't seem to be tying together into a unified plot, and I haven't reached the end of any lord's quest thread yet (I assume they have an end, as they've all been customized, non-repeatable quests). I haven't even had a reason to explore the game's system of assassinating lords or besieging castles, although I suspect some of the quest threads are going to end with this, and I'll ultimately have to make a choice between lords.

Still, the idea that this game made someone's "worst" list is crazy. It's hands-down the best game so far in 1991, and it would have been a strong contender for "Game of the Year" in 1990. Anyone who would rate this game low doesn't want an RPG at all. He or she wants an adventure game with maybe some RPG-style attributes. Sure, the game could use a little more in the way of actual "role-playing," but for core RPG mechanics--character development, combat, spells (the subject of the next post), and equipment--I've rarely seen it done better.