Dark Designs IV: The Land of Beginning Again

 

Re-exploring the Old Quarter in a new version.

        

Not much of an update today, I'm afraid. I've been extremely busy with work, and I spent most of the block of time I allocated to games on Saturday to trying to figure out why my Apple II emulator wasn't working.

   

Commenters who perceived that the game looked more like an Apple II game than an Apple IIGS game were correct: Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion released only for the Apple II. I was confused because the only download I could originally find was in .2mg format, which only a IIGS emulator can read. I still don't understand the provenance of that disk. Did someone convert it to the IIGS? How easy or hard is that with Apple programs?

      

This is just a random shot of battle to break up the text.

      

Either way, I eventually found the game in .dsk format for an Apple II emulator. Then I ran into my second, and still unsolved, problem: Every time I tried to run it, the emulator said: "UNABLE TO LOAD PRODOS." I figured, okay, the disk image isn't a boot image, so I'll load an Apple II master disk, switch disks, and load the program. But then my master disk said the same thing. So did every other disk I tried to feed into the emulator, including disks that I know worked (e.g., Centauri Alliance). I Googled and came up with nothing.

   

Eventually, I got the game to load by telling Windows 11 to open it in Windows 8 compatibility mode. But this only worked once. The next time I tried, I got the same error. I fiddled with some other things to no avail. I tried different versions of the AppleWin emulator. Finally, on some random reload, it suddenly worked again. (Anyone have a hypothesis about what's happening? Did some Windows 11 update break AppleWin?) I vowed not to close the emulator for the rest of the weekend. This will probably come back to bite me. I probably should have continued to play the IIGS version, but I wanted the ability to make save states so I could more easily document different choices. Also, AppleWin makes it easier to take screen shots than my IIGS emulator does.

       

As for those characters, there's been a bit of a change in the party. As I noted at the end of my first entry, as the party gains experience, the player unlocks various multi-classes. I didn't keep track of the precise thresholds, but it's tied to the accumulated experience levels of all characters in the game roster. The classes later on the list take longer to appear than those that are earlier on the list. I had them all by the time the accumulated levels were around 42 or 44.

        

The full list of available classes.

       

At first, I thought, great, I'll make all kinds of multi-classed characters so that everyone has multiple roles. I made a paladin (fighter-priest), ranger (fighter-wizard), yakuza (fighter-thief), and sorcerer (wizard-priest). I didn't create them all at once but rather one at a time, slowly introducing them to the existing party, sticking them in the back during combat until they gained a level or two. 

      

There are some oddities, such as a "ninja" being a fighter-thief-wizard combination and the ultimate hero, the combination of all four classes, being a . . . "thaumaturge." I agree that mingling Asian and western archetypes is a little jarring. Even if you disagree, you have to admit that "yakuza" is a stupid class. I like "swashbuckler" for fighter-thief combos. I think something like "operative" or "spy" (maybe the Elder Scrolls' "agent") works well for a thief-wizard.

     

The new party takes on a warehouse full of snakes.

     

It turns out that the character creation screen oversimplifies the relationship between classes. A paladin is not just a "fighter-priest," but a class who has his own spells, including "Hone" (improves weapon damage) and "Speed," neither of which are available to my regular priest, at least not at Level 8. "Cure Light Wounds" doesn't become available to the paladin for several levels, it's possible that some priest spells ("Turn Undead?") are never available. Finally, it takes him more spell points to cast some spells. "Cure Light Wounds" is four points for the paladin and only one for the priest. This is a pretty important spell, and only being able to cast five of them at Level 4 instead of twenty makes a big difference.

   

I assume the same is true of the other multi-classes, though I didn't get a chance to explore them much. I can tell you that the wizard's workhorse spell at early levels is "Missile," and it costs the ranger three points to cast it to the wizard's one.

       

"Turn Undead" performs well against some skeletons—the only undead we've faced so far.

       

Some multi-class options still made sense to me. The non-spellcasting classes don't seem diminished by their additional abilities, so there's hardly any reason for a pure fighter or thief. I replaced them with a paladin and a yakuza. Ultimately, though, I kept my original priest and wizard. My second foursome was originally going to be Geraldus, Karamar, Georgi, and Lainea, but I ended up with a bit of a mishmash. 

    

I did all the new character creation and party-reorganization before spending time on the Apple II/Apple IIGS issue. I used CiderPress to transfer the save files over to the regular Apple II version. When I loaded it, I realized that while the party saved okay, I hadn't brought over the map files. The game thought I hadn't explored an inch of its territory. I wavered for a minute then decided just to re-explore the parts of the Old Quarter I'd already explored. This ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would—most of the rest of this session, in fact.

     

Some advanced priest spells become available.

     

The Old Quarter is divided into two halves by a river. South of the river, where the game starts, has the shops and services. North of the river are a bunch of houses, hovels, and warehouses, some with treasure chests. Chests in this area only deliver about 300-400 gold, the same as a couple of regular battles, so they're not terribly lucrative.

   

There were a few notable fixed battles, one with a warehouse full of cottonmouths, one with another full of water spiders. I earned a silver sword in that latter one. There were many battles with fixed parties of the same character classes that the player can create. High level spellcasters are always tough.

   

Things got a bit easier when my wizard bought "Fireball," which damages all enemies in a single column, and then "Flame Strike," which damages all enemies in all columns. She can only cast either of them twice before she's out of spell points, but it was enough to get me past some of the more difficult fixed battles in the area.

      

The unapproachable palace.

        

South of the Old Quarter is the Palace Quarter, but barely any of it is explorable. The majority is taken up by Queen Victoria's Palace, and it is surrounded by a moat that we cannot cross (the game notes that the drawbridge is up). I don't know whether we'll later find a spell or item that lets us cross water. All we could do in this area was explore a couple of houses outside the moat and loot a few treasure chests.

   

The New Quarter lies west of the palace and southwest of the Old Quarter. It's here that I found the travel agency that offers the titular Passage to Oblivion, but only for 50,000 gold and the bones of a saint. I have the gold, but to get the bones, I will need to avail the agency of its less-expensive travel option to Crytus. There's also an "unavailable" ticket to "Paradise." 

      

Great, now I'll have Phil Collins in my head for two days.

            

Like the Palace Quarter, a lot of the Old Quarter is cut off by a river. I'm also having trouble fully exploring the maps because of locked doors that my yakuza cannot pick—one of the downsides to getting rid of the pure thief class. Behind a secret door, I found a stairway to the sewers, making the city at least four maps large.

   

As I wrap this up, my characters are all between 9 and 12. This is a very grindy game, not so much because it's necessary as because random encounters are extremely frequent. They can happen on every action, not just movement, so I frequently get strings of them when I'm just trying to turn around. Fleeing carries only a 50% (roughly) chance of success, and enemies get a free round of attacks when it fails, so you end up having to fight most battles.

       

My paladin character towards the end of this session . . .

           

I've only received a few equipment upgrades since the opening hours. There are four equipment slots: left hand, right hand, armor, and a ring. Rings increase an attribute; so far, I've only found strength and speed rings. There are a lot of healing potions, "Recall" scrolls that let you escape combat, antidotes, and thieves' tools. Perhaps the most valuable usable items are mana pills, as the only other way to restore mana is to return to the inn.

     

. . .. and his inventory.

      

The game isn't very exciting, but it's undemanding. It's a good game to have going when you're half-watching a television show or (in my case) the annual slate of human resources-required videos. The first Dark Design games knew enough to confine themselves to modest length, and I'm afraid this one is going to overstay its welcome.

    

Time so far: 9 hours 

 

Star Trail: Because It's There

 

This world really doesn't like elves.

      

Commenters on my last entry suggested that I should know where to go next from in-game hints. But that didn't change the fact that I didn't. With nothing more than the vague idea that dwarves were somewhere to the south in the enormous Finsterkamm range, and thus the "Dwarven Pits" must be nearby, we leave Gashok heading south. We're well-stocked with food and water, but none of the shops in town sold arrows, so my little green elf will have to fight with magic or get in melee range.

    

Two days into the trip, I can continue on the road to the southwest or go east or west along a river that originates in a mountain range. We head east, toward the head of the river. Unless I say otherwise, we take the game's recommendation to camp each evening, send someone out to find food and water (we fail often enough that we have to carry a lot with us), and send Lyra out to find herbs. We post two guards per night and fight anything that attacks.

       

This seems like a leading question.

       

In case it wasn't clear from earlier entries, simply surviving overland travel is a big part of the game. It was in Blade of Destiny, too, but there were more cities in that region, and the travel distances were shorter. In Star Trail, you could easily spend two weeks on the road between destinations. You have to be prepared for multiple hardships, including starvation, thirst, poison, disease, flooding, dangerous cliffs, and dense forests. I don't know if quicksand is a problem anywhere, but this is absolutely the type of game in which it would be. To deal with all of this, the player has to prepare the party as much as possible with equipment, spells, herbs, and healing skills. Thus, as we discussed in previous entries, my party is carrying rations, ropes, waterskins, sleeping bags, cutlery, nets, fishing hooks, tinder boxes, rope ladders, blankets, hammers, crowbars, grappling hooks, shovels, charcoal, writing utensils, and torches. This whole mechanic inevitably goes back to tabletop RPG gaming with its ropes, 10-foot poles, iron rations, and such. I doubt there's a direct connection, but I'm reminded a bit of Robert Clardy's Wilderness Campaign (1979) and its requirement that the party be prepared with every possible item for every possible eventuality. 

  

Here are some random encounters and troubles I had on the road during this session: 

     

• A forest gnome attacks in the night, strikes one character before I can react, and flees before I can engage.

• A druid of Travia asks to join our fire one night. He wants to make a soup with some herbs he found, and we let him. It turns out to be delicious, although it gives the party vivid dreams and for some reason reduces our strength for 72 hours. He's gone in the morning.

     

Even in retrospect, I don't know whether this was a good encounter or a bad one.

      

• We find a strange woman named Susan Heder sitting on the side of the road. We're curious about her, but the game has no basic "hello" in its dialogue options; you have to immediately start asking about FINSTERKOPPEN or SALAMANDER STONE or something. We try a few subjects, but she offers nothing on anything before she cuts the dialogue short, leaving us wondering what the encounter was all about.

• Mahasim's boots wear out, and he has to walk barefoot, which causes damage every day (though usually healed at night). 

     

That was a bit dramatic, Mahasim.

       

• Walking through a mountain pass, we have the option to "rope up" to prevent any individual from falling to his death. We take it. 

     

There doesn't really seem to be a downside.

        

• Random battles at night: tusk tigers, an orc patrol, harpies, and ogres. They go all right. I lose health and mana, but I generally regenerate what I've lost before the next battle. I'm saving an analysis of combat for when I've gained a few more levels.  

           

This orc battle goes relatively well.

        

I don't mind these encounters, but the frequency at which the party has to stop for the night, and the repetitiveness of the things I have to do each time, starts to annoy me. I would also note here that I have found two different world maps for the game, neither of which show the exact same territory, and neither of which show all of the territory in the game. I spend much of this session east of the edges of both maps. Furthermore, neither map shows all the roads. I spend a lot of time confused about where I am.

       

At the river's headwaters, I have choices to go northeast and south. I choose northeast, even though it takes me back in the direction I came from. I hit a crossroads with movement in all four cardinal directions. I go north for a bit, but when it becomes clear that if I continue in that direction, I'll be back in Gashok, I turn to the southeast and eventually enter the town of Reichsend, which unlike the other two towns I've visited is purely a menu town. All we can do is visit the Temple of Praios and the inn.

   

At the temple, Gordal Namir tells us the Finsterkamm range is full of evil, and Finsterkopp, the highest mountain, is the "center of all that is evil." The inn, the Pride of the Emperor, is run by Ilvina Endares. She says that Finsterkoppen is a town rather than a mountain, but she calls it a "stupid fairy tale." She gives us a couple of solid leads, though. She says we can ask about a dwarven mine in Nordhag, quite a bit to the south of Reichsend. When we ask about the Dwarven Pit, however, the specific dungeon we need, she directs us to some place called Hiltorp, "halfway down the road to Lowangen." We have a disgusting meal (something's crawling in it, the game says)  and spend the night.

          

Did you imagine that was helpful?

       

Even though I trust the Lowangen rumor more, I decide to loop there through Nordhag, mostly because it avoids backtracking, which I hate in both real life and RPGs. Even when I make a quick trip to the grocery store, I'm always looking to "make a loop out of it," sometimes at double the length. 

    

We're battered from an orc attack by the time we arrive at Nordhag. It's another menu town, with nothing but an inn (Gryphon's Fordian), run by a woman named Zuliana Saldek. She tells us that there are two roads across Finsterkamm, a well-traveled one that goes to Yrramis, south of Lowanden. The other goes more directly to Lowanden, but travelers have been avoiding it for some reason. Lowanden looks from the map like a big city, likely with a full set of services, and I'm starting to get low on rations and water. Moreover, she tells me that the pass to Lowanden goes past the dwarven town of Finsterkopp.

            

Later, in the mountain pass.

      

We take this less-traveled path, getting attacked by harpies at several points. Eventually, we reach the town and mountain of Finsterkopp. (Sometimes. Other times it's Finsterkopper and still other times, it's Finsterkoppen. I'm sure there's some German reason for the inconsistency.) As rumors had it, it's populated exclusively by dwarves. We make the rounds:

    

• We have to knock on most doors twice, once regularly, and once "with vigor." Most of the time, no one comes to the door no matter what. At several houses, old dwarves offer us their sheds for lodging. This turns out to be good, as there are no inns. But there are so many of these houses that it's frankly annoying.

     

If the game had offered a setting to "always knock with vigor," I could have shaved an hour off this entry.

      

• A random dwarf disparages Xamidimura's Sword of Artherion as "elvish work." 

     

Tough talk from a town that doesn't even sell weapons.

      

• Ogrim, son of Olgosch, runs a smithy. We have him repair Mahasim's sword, which involves leaving for a few hours.

• Blackbeard's Tavern. The bartender, the eponymous Blackbeard, gives us nothing. None of the other patrons want to speak to us. But Toliman earns a couple of gold pieces with his lute.

     

That's not bad considering how they feel about elves.

        

• The Red Earth Tavern, run by Dragoran, son of Denderan. He won't even talk to us. Despite the graphic showing a lot of other revelers, the game indicates there's no one else in the tavern.

 

A couple of guards block a tall passage leading to what I assume are the mines, possibly the Dwarven Pit I'm supposed to find. They won't let us pass because we have Toliman, an elf, in the party. I back off and try the "Camouflage" spell, which I was just reading about in the manual. Even though my best character (Toliman) has only a -3 skill with the spell, it works. It makes him look like a small child (the source of the bugged party portraits I talked about in the first entry) for 15 minutes. 

      

Great. Now we look like a party of traffickers.

     

We head back for the entry way, and now they have a problem with druids. We repeat the process on Lyra and finally make it through.

   

We enter a large, open, roofed area, which at first I think is a dungeon, particularly since the name is "Finsterkopp Pit," but it's just more town. There are another couple dozen houses, complete with the "knock vigorously" nonsense.

     

The graphics are kind of cool here.

       

This part of the town has a few more services, though:

   

• Arombolosch Ironarm, a smith. We don't need anything else fixed.

• The Hammer and Anvil tavern, run by Vothan Dengeler. Toliman makes a few silvers doing somersaults.

• Xagula, daughter of Xebrima, runs yet another smithy. 

• A general goods store (finally) run by Gundgrima. I'm able to restock my ration packages and buy a new pair of boots for Mahasim.

• A healer named Thoram, son of Cadrima.  

• A Temple of Ingerimm, where the high priest is Inradon Xermosch. I start to wonder if some kind of random combination of syllabus isn't responsible for all of the game's proper names. In response to DWARVEN PIT, he says: "We do not enter there. It's definitely not forbidden, you understand, but it is a holy place." This gives me a little hope that I'm in the right place.

       

I still don't know if this is where I want to be.

      

The area has a stairway descending deeper. Even though it still says "Finsterkopp Pit" when I arrive, I'm hoping it's the so-called Dwarven Pit. Unfortunately, I don't get very far. Lacking lockpicks or a key, we bash in the front door to the dungeon. We find ourselves in a square room with four braziers and a door locked solidly. The game tells us we'll need a key to open it. We have options to search the braziers or shift them out of place, but doing this with each of them only causes us to dirty our hands and jam our fingers.

     

Well, that seems pretty conclusive.

     

Having explored all we can of Finsterkopp for now, still not knowing if its "Pit" is the dungeon with the Serpent Stone, we leave town headed for our original destination of Lowangen. I figure there's probably a hint or a key there, maybe from the dwarf Ingramosch.

   

We backtrack to the main road. Two days into the journey, we're attacked by a large patrol of orcs. It does not go well. In contrast to the easier battles we've been enjoying lately, in this one, we seem to fumble every spell and miss every attack. They're gone on a reload, but as I look at the game map, I realize that Lowangen is farther away than I thought. Weeks, probably. I completely lose heart in the thought of all of those rote foraging and sleeping cycles, only to perhaps have to turn around and head back to where I came from. I end the session early.

       

The party is swarmed by orcs.

         

I still have a lot of game to go, but I have to tell you, I'm finding Star Trail boring. Weird and boring. Blade of Destiny had so much more vigor, with clearer direction (though still not very clear) and more interesting things between locations. I like some of the random encounters here, but so many are just baffling. What was that druid about? What was Susan Heder about? I also don't know why the authors decided to make Star Trail so spread out, to turn it into a hiking simulation, and to make key services so inconsistently found. I'm looking forward to seeing what dungeons are like, but not much else.

   

Time so far: 14 hours 

The Results Are In (Part 1)

 

Readers validated my preference.

         

I waited until I didn't get a response for 24 hours to analyze the results. Overall, I got 615 responses, which is about half of the unique visitors per day, but about two-thirds of unique visitors who stay for more than two minutes. That's not a bad response rate. Shame on the rest of you.

   

Here are some top-level results:

   

Game of the Year 

    

Betrayal at Krondor fans may have been vocal in the comments, but on the survey, it got fewer votes than "no opinion." The plurality went to Dark Sun, with 40% of total votes and 49% of those voting for one of the four nominees. The second-highest number of votes were from those who wanted me to award "Game of the Year" two years in a row to the Ultima Underworld series. I get the sentiment; the games are that ground-breaking.

       

Votes for "Game of the Year."

        

There were impassioned write-ins for Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness, Lands of Lore, Perihelion, Ultima VII, Part Two, and Unlimited Adventures. I agree these were all good games, but I think I covered why I felt they were not GOTY-worthy.

   

In the end, I'm going to go with my original inclination to give the award to Dark Sun. It is what I like most in a role-playing game: Lots of statistics, tactical combat, inventory upgrades, dialogue options, meaningful encounters, and a setting that fires the imagination. To get a perfect 100, a game just needs to do more of these things. 

 

Where You Come From 

 

Okay, mea culpa: I should not have conflated "where do you live?" with "where are you from?" Nor should I have conflated "country" with "nation" (man, are some people sensitive about that).

   

There were some surprises here. I figured at least half of my readership was from the United States, but it's only 38%. The second-highest number of readers are from Germany (13%); that article in Der Spiegel really paid off. The expected succession of English-speaking countries follows, with Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia all between 3% and 5%. Finland, Poland, Spain Austria, Italy, Brazil, Sweden, and France all contributed between 10 and 20 readers and 1-3% each. There's a very long tail of countries with less than 10 readers and less than 2% of total readership. On the entire continent of Africa, I have one reader in South Africa. I also have very little readership in Asia, aside from four in Japan, one in Singapore, one in Malaysia, and perhaps one in Türkiye depending on where he is.

         

I need billboards along the silk road.

            

Here's something that I thought was an oddity: Except for one reader from Peru who insisted on the grave [Ed. My error: the acute] over the "u," not a single reader rendered the name of their country in native form. That is, I didn't get a single Deutschland, Polska, or España, with or without the tilde. Now, I know that you all knew that you were responding to an American survey, but it makes me curious how often the natives of a country use exonyms even to themselves. In the United States, no American would ever think of his country as Los Estados Unidos unless he grew up speaking Spanish, nor would he say Les États-Unis in conversation with another American unless he was making some sort of affectation. I would bet that fewer than 5% of Americans are even aware of Měiguó, Yhdysvallat, or Bandaríkin, among many others. Is this the same in your country, or do Germans casually use "Germany" even to other Germans?

    

I remember saying this before in a random entry, but it has continually surprised me, in this era of personally-defined pronouns, person-first language, and land acknowledgements that some movement hasn't arisen to eliminate exonyms. Other than Türkiye, I've never even heard of a country that seems to care.

      

That's why I write my blog in Tennessee.

       

In the United States, I have readers in all states except Arkansas, Connecticut, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Rhode Island. The totals mostly follow population trends, with Texas and California at the highest (which is impressive, as I forgot to add it to the selection list for the first 25% of results). None of our territories are represented except for one reader in American Samoa. I have only one respondent each from the two states that matter most to me, Maine and Louisiana.

      

Sex

    

Well, there's no avoiding it: the CRPG Addict may as well be a frat house. At least 92% of readers are men. I have fewer women than those who didn't want to give their gender at all. I have almost as many readers who identify as non-binary than I have women.

    

This imbalance raises two possibilities. One is that my readership is simply reflective of the overall RPG gamer population. I went searching for statistics on the issue and found various sources that estimated the overall computer gaming population at about 50% women but the population of RPG players specifically closer to 18-25%. (I put this aside to research more later; I'm declining to cite sources because I don't want to get into a long argument about validity right now.) Either way, that's a lot more than the 3% who responded to my survey.

       

However you look at it, this blog is a sausage party.

       

I'd be interested in any follow-up comments (feel free to email directly) from women readers regarding their thoughts on the disparity. I feel like the commenting system successfully hides the commenter's sex (unless you're commenting with an account that includes your actual name), and in 16 years of doing this, I've never seen any gender-based comments between readers, certainly nothing that would rise to the level of harassment or "toxic masculinity" or whatever. I like to think my own writing is relatively free of anything that would turn away women specifically, but let me know if I'm fooling myself.

 

The relationship between player sex and chosen character is interesting. Of the 17 women who responded to my survey, 15 preferred to play a female character (one didn't care, and one preferred a male character). Male respondents, on the other hand, were 21% likely to prefer a female avatar, and another 34% were at least open to it (the remaining 44% preferred men). Non-binary respondents generally preferred "the opposite sex" (67%), which I don't quite know how to interpret. (The fault is mine, of course, for not leaving enough options on the question.)

 

Your Favorite RPGs

       

This one took a lot of data-cleaning, as I made it a free-text field. If you put two games, I counted them both, but if you put more than that, I just counted the first one. In the end, I'm pleased to say that Baldur's Gate was the clear winner with 38 votes, followed by its sequel with 37. Number three was also an Infinity Engine game: Planescape: Torment. The Top 10 list includes only one game that I've never played (the original Fallout) and otherwise aligns well with my own idea of the best RPGs.

        

Your favorite games.

       

The list is definitely biased towards older games; the only candidates in the last decade are Baldur's Gate 3 (10) and Disco Elysium (6). Having just finished Pillars of Eternity, I was surprised that I didn't get a single vote for it, although there is one for its sequel. I really enjoyed the first game, particularly the depth of its lore, its replayability, and its role-playing options. (I looked at a walkthrough when I was finished and discovered that I had missed three joinable NPCs.) I confess I didn't know half of what was happening in combat. 

 

     

Other Findings

    

• The average (mean and median) age of readers is 45, which makes sense given my content. 87% are between the ages of 37 and 56. Only 13% are at or above my own age of 53. I have no readers under the age of 19 and only one over the age of 68. I would like to hear from that 81-year-old reader. You would have already been an adult when the first commercial RPGs were released; how did you get into what was, at the time, a young person's hobby?

        

Our heavily-clustered age distribution.

       

• Most of my readers are long-time readers. Half of them started reading before 2015. The mode (71 readers) was 2012. 62 people (the third-highest total) have been with me since the first year. I gained only 14 new readers in 2024 and only 13 in 2025. I wonder if I should do something to ease new readers into the blog; comments are welcome there.

• Well over half of readers check in every 1-3 days, though they're divided by those who read everything (34%) and those who pick only the ones they care about (22%). I guess an awful lot of people are still getting the blog via RSS, which I should have asked about.

• Only 4 respondents use a translator to read the blog. For 52%, English is your first language, and for 47%, you read the blog in English anyway. 

• Not a lot of duplication on favorite entries. The highest-voted was 6, for my winning entry on Ultima VII: The Black Gate; another four voted for the "Summary and Rating." Fate: Gates of Dawn showed up a lot, but for different entries. 

• A third of respondents have never commented, and half commented only "very rarely." I enjoy my frequent visitors, but it's a sign of a healthy blog to have a diversity of comments. I encourage those of you who never or rarely post a comment to do so occasionally, if only to highlight something you agree with. No blogger can get enough of those.

• People overwhelmingly (74%) felt that my standard goal of one entry every 2.5 days was just fine. Part of me wants to hear more from the dozen or so respondents who think that goal is "far too little." You have time to read 2,500 words a day?

• Respondents were supportive of occasional guest entries, which corresponds well with my plan.

• Of respondents who even knew what I was talking about, 79% of them were perfectly okay with taking a filet mignon, putting it in a blender, and serving it as a shake. Well, technically, the question was about soft-serve ice cream, but it's basically the same thing. Here's a good article for you soft-serve lovers, by the way.

• 38% of my readers prefer sweat to sweaters. 

• Among my readership, I have 44 game developers and 7 game producers or executives. I assume we're just waiting for the ink to dry on those consulting contracts. 

• Most of my readers are non-religious of one type or another, to a far greater extent than population demographics would predict. I wonder if I've just scared away most of the believers with my ungodliness.

• I'm saving responses on virtue, ethics, and religion for a juicier posting later on. 

• My default character is usually a paladin, which was the second-highest vote-getter among respondents (111). Mages were first (199); druids (23) and priests (24) were lowest. My apologies for not including a "ranger" option, though. 

• Readers are well-adjusted when it comes to the amount of time they spend on games. 43% would like to spend more time gaming, and 38% are comfortable with the time they currently spend.

     

I'm still working on some of the more complex questions, but I thought I give this to you to chew on in the meantime. 

Game 567: Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

Softdisk misses out on the opportunity to emphasize the "IV" in "oblivion."

        

Dark Designs: Passage to Oblivion

United States 

Softdisk (developer and publisher)

Released 1994 for Apple II

Date Started: 25 January 2026

           

The original Dark Designs trilogy (Grelminar's Staff, Closing the Gate, and Retribution), all from 1990-1991, were competently-programmed "afternoon RPGs" that drew inspiration from Wizardry, Might and Magic, and Phantasie. They were published by Softdisk, one of several disk magazines available at the time. When you're getting new games every month for a flat subscription fee, you don't really expect them to be epic, and in that sense, the original trilogy's 4-7 hour playing times and 30-31 ratings on the GIMLET are actually quite good.

     

The first three games are all the more notable for having been written by a young John Carmack. He was long gone from Softdisk by 1994, enjoying the accolade and profits from Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but he remains credited for the engine. During the three-year gap, Softdisk apparently received hundreds of letters from fans demanding more Dark Designs games. Development was taken on by Peter Rokitski, who had been hired as the magazine's principal programmer after Cormack's departure. He had already resurrected a previous Carmack trilogy, Catacomb (a third-person shooter), with Sylvan Idyll (1992), Ether Quest (1993), and Sand Trap (1994). By the end of the second Dark Designs trilogy, as bulletin boards and the Internet brought the diskmag era to a close, Rokitski was essentially Softdisk's only employee, handling the duties of programmer, editor, quality tester, and assembler.

    

That was us! Only it was "Agamon."

       

The original Dark Designs trilogy concerned an invasion of demons through a planar gate. In Grelminar's Staff, the party searched the ruins of Castle Grelminar for the artifact that would close the gate. In Closing the Gate, they, well, did that. In Retribution!, they pursued the archmage who had opened the gate through a portal and into a hell dimension to get revenge. That archmage was called Agamon in the original series but is for some reason called Agamol here. The author likely got confused between "Agamon" (the wizard) and "Agamal" (the castle where he lived).

      

Ah, the problems faced by fantastical worlds.

        

The sequel series picks up "many years later" in the city of Tarador, where "good Queen Victoria has suddenly begun to act very strangely." She has ignored her duties and has created an army of strange creatures. "Whispers . . . have it that she has been possessed by the spirit of Agamol." The main PC is an adventurer with a friend who works at the royal palace. His friend appears on his doorstep one day, dying, saying that "the only hope for Tarador is the legendary Potion of Salvation." Legend has it that the potion is in Oblivion, "from which no one has returned (alive)." To get there, the party has to arrange passage from a "travel agent," who is demanding 50,000 gold pieces and the Bones of a Saint.

   

Gameplay begins in Tarador with a default party, but of course I dumped them and created my own. Character creation involves rolling five numbers between 3 and 18 and allocating them to strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, and piety. From there, you choose one of four classes: fighter, thief, priest, and wizard. Although the party can hold only four characters, there is room for 15 on the roster. The game instructions suggest that if the combined experience of the characters on the roster exceeds a certain value, prestige or multi-class characters become possible.

        

Creating a new party.

        

New characters start with nothing but staves, and the early game is brutal. It reminds me of the first Might and Magic, where you have to either keep reloading or keep remaking characters as you ever-so-slowly amass experience, gold, and equipment. Random encounters are frequent and deadly; no place is safe, and enemies might attack on any movement, including turning and winning a previous battle. Of particular difficulty is poison, which many enemies can deliver and no Level 1 party can possibly cure. You have to return to the inn frequently to restore hit points, which costs 50 gold every time (fortunately, most battles produce more than that). You can save anywhere, which makes it a little easier than Might and Magic, but character deaths are written to the disk immediately after battle. The game even deletes all your gold as battle begins and doesn't restore it to you until it ends. That way, if you open the disk drive (or kill the emulator) to prevent a character death from saving, the party has no gold when you reload.

      

Carefully exiting the inn.

      

As with the first trilogy, exploration and combat mix Wizardry and Phantasie elements. Instead of a wireframe first-person view or a top-down view, the game offers both, side-by-side. The top-down view shows an 18 x 11 grid, with unvisited squares obscured. A marker indicates special encounters or treasures. You get frequent atmospheric messages as you explore, the text making up to some degree for a lack of graphics.

      

Text offers what graphics cannot.

              

All controls are handled via intuitive keyboard commands. The options are usually on the screen in case you forget. You can bring up an in-game help menu with the ? key in case you forget anything. Until late in this session, I didn't notice that there was a S)earch command for secret doors.

      

But it was pretty obvious that one was here.

         

For combat, I've faced giant spiders, cottonmouth snakes, rats, fighters, wizards, bards, thaumaturges, necromancers, samurai, paladins (!), and ninjas. Gods know why the city is so violent. Battle shows the characters facing each other in ranks. It suggests a tactical map, but the only movement characters and enemies can do is between the front rank and the rear rank. The rank determines whom you can attack and who can attack you.

        

You specify an action for each character—attack, cast a spell, use an item, change weapons, move forward, or move backwards—and then execute. The game threads your actions with the enemies' in initiative order. It's basically Phantasie with the battle screen rotated sideways so the line between the parties is vertical rather than horizontal.

      

Bob has chosen to attack and now must specify the target of his attack.

      

Battle is rewarded with experience, and if the enemies aren't animals, gold and items, which you can then equip or sell at the item shop. My characters slowly amassed better weapons, armor, potions, mana pills, and attribute-boosting rings. 

     

Battle against a larger group. 

     

Running from combat only has about a 50% success rate, and if you fail, the enemy gets a free round of attacks. Every time I met a spider or snake, it was an agonizing decision whether to stay and almost assuredly get poisoned (even if I won) or try to flee. 

      

Eventually, I stabilized my party at Level 3 and started doing more than just shuttling between the inn and the weapon/armor shop. The opening map, the "Old Quarter" of the town, appears to be 32 x 32. You can't leave the map to the north, east, or west, but to the south is a new map, the "Palace Quarter," and gods know how many others from there. Some of the encounters I found in the Old Quarter were:

    

• Ivanna's Inn, where the party can rest and restore spells. The inn has several locked rooms, which my thief opened with a lockpick. Some of them had chests of gold. Some chests are trapped, but I think the only way to remove them is with a spell I don't have yet.

       

0.764% closer to my goal.

        

• Alain's Armor and All. They sell basic weapons and armor, potions (including one-use antidotes for a hefty 250 gold), speed and strength rings, recall scrolls (100% escape from battle), and horns, which I have no idea how to use. They don't seem to work in combat or out of combat. Anyway, since you can find most of these items in battle, the store is more useful for selling than buying, at least after an initial visit.

      

Getting equipped.

       

• Pat's Pub. It costs 20 gold to get in. There's a kitchen in the back with a few storerooms. One hallway has a fixed encounter with three fighters, a hierophant, and an illusionist. Elsewhere, a beautiful belly dancer named Natasha will offer hints if you buy her a drink. From her, I've learned that holy symbols cast the "Bless" spell; "Mark" and "Teleport" will be useful in getting back to Crytus, which is an island of "excarnation"; saints have been interred on Crytus; smugglers use the island in the Meriwyn as a treasure trove; and when you use a travel agent, you are sent immediately. 

     

Could I at least know what kind of drink I'm buying?

      

• Vyzap's Vault of Knowledge. They sell spells. This has been my biggest expense so far. At one point, I was up to nearly half of the 50,000 gold I would need, but I spent it all on spells (including, finally, "Cure Poison"). The store starts with only a couple of selections and then sells more and more as time goes by. I don't know whether the offerings are tied to character levels. So far, there haven't been a lot of great mage spells—no mass-damage, for instance.

• The Bent River occupies some space in the north part of the quarter. The game says we can't swim. I don't know whether there's another way to navigate it.

• The Temple of the Dog offers healing (at a reasonable rate of 1 point per hit point) and services to cure paralysis, stoning, and death—all way too expensive for the party at this point. 

• A warehouse north of the river has an encounter with 11 water spiders, the biggest single party I've faced so far. 

       

I hope you all enjoy being poisoned.

      

• Many houses with multiple rooms and treasure chests.  

            

I still have quite a bit to explore, even on the first map. I keep running into parties that are slightly too high in level for me, even though by the end of this session, my characters were between Levels 5 and 8. As I prepared to wrap up, I tried creating a new character, and suddenly I had a bunch of new options: paladin (fighter-priest), ranger (fighter-wizard), sorcerer (wizard-priest), yakuza (fighter-thief), hierophant (priest-thief), and illusionist (wizard-thief). So now the game has me questioning whether it's possible to win with the bland starting party. Certainly, I don't think there's enough for a thief to do that it's worth having a pure thief. 

       

A bunch of new classes become available. I wonder whether this is all, or whether combinations of three classes become available later.

        

It's clear that Oblivion is going to take longer than any of the previous three Dark Designs games, primarily because of the grind factor, but in that it at least provides an experience closer to the games it's emulating.

    

Time so far: 4 hours