Yendorian Tales: Book I: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

The endgame sees Zamora restored and the sequel set up.

         

Yendorian Tales: Book I

United States 

SmithWare (developer and publisher) 

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 6 May 2026

Date Ended: 19 June 2026

Total Hours: 37

Difficulty:  Moderate (3.0/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)  

      

Summary:

    

Yendorian Tales is a superior shareware game by a talented family of programmers. On the continent of Yendor, where society is divided into spellcasters and the miners who supply the spellcasters with their ore, a party of six sets out to determine why monsters have started invading the mines. Soon, the chief wizard, Zamora, is struck down by a mysterious figure, his magical orb stolen, and the party's mission grows.

   

The game combines elements from several successful commercial releases, predominantly Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988), which is replicated in the NPC dialogue and the tactical combat, and Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990), which is replicated in its axonometric exploration. The game has solid mechanics, although the sheer volume of combat gets to be too much, and the economy, initially promising, ends up hilariously broken. The story ends up being a bit unoriginal, but the game, unlike almost all its predecessors and contemporaries, has rewarding side quests.

   

****

   

I thought it was time to wrap this up. AlphabeticalAnonymous's Search for Freedom entries, plus my own Multi-User Dungeon break, afforded me some breathing room, so even though I could have stretched it into two or three additional entries, I pressed forward to the end.

     

Paltivar, the game's villain, stands by the stolen orb.

       

The main quest, kicked off by the theft of Zamora's orb, had me meeting all the scattered members of the Society of Wizards. I guess I was supposed to visit them in turn, each supplying the clue to the next. But my habit of feeding the JOURNAL keyword to everyone I met meant that I met some of them before I was supposed to. Each had a task for me to accomplish; each gave me an item when I finished, then supplied the title (but not the name) of the next wizard; each was accompanied by Zamora's voice whispering a clue as to some name or keyword.

       

Member	Location	Task	Item	Hint
Flagell  The Hermit	Cave	Kill a wyvern nesting nearby.	Flagell's Scroll	The first of last is third, and the third of first is last.
Paundor The Diplomat	Port Hope	Buy a Grapnel Arrow, use it to retrieve the Great Red Gem from a cave.	Red Powder	Half of "W" is sixth.
Bysette  The ?????	Moloch	Retrieve a ring that he lost on Blackmane.	Magic Branch	It is in the middle backwards.
Prezlin The Merchant	Duomin/New Devon	Find out what happened to Winze.	Magic Liquid	One from each end is A.
Griffin The Scholar	Athaneum	Retrieve the Hourglass of Stopped Time from the desert.	Sands of Time	He and Prezlin begin the same.
Winze The ????	Devon	Retrieve lava from the underworld.	Amulet of Lava	Eight letters make up his name.
Quai The Explorer	Cave in Desert	Kill the Cynotaur to free Quai.	Horn of Encasement	N/A

           

I had finished through Prezlin's quest at the end of the last session, though I hadn't returned to find him in New Devon. I visited the city first thing at the beginning of this session and got Prezlin's item and hint. He sent me on to the Scholar, who I already knew was Griffin from dialogue ages ago in the Athaneum.

      

That missing piece annoys me.

       

New Devon also had a side quest in which the governor wanted me to deliver a peace treaty to the king of the giants and return it with his signature. The king was happy with the terms ("Little people will stay out of the mountains; giants will stop attacking town") and signed it. I had to flee from a lot of giants on the way in, but otherwise it wasn't a tough quest. I got enough experience from it to reach Level 10.

    

The last city I had to explore was Anatolay. (I never ended up exploring the two mines that lay just outside of town.) The most important things I found here were:

   

• An enhancer who would take +2 or +3 items and enhance them to +3 or +4. This bridged the gap between the enhancer in the Athaneum and the enhancer in Port Hope. I got all my weapons and armor enhanced, then went to Port Hope and got everything up to +5. This all cost far less than it should have.

• The Amulet of Anatolay, which the governor of Port Hope wanted. When I returned it to him, I had enough experience for Level 11.

          

We're just calling them that in-universe, huh?

        

It occurs to me that most of the leveling in this game comes from finishing the side quests and not from fighting regular foes. This is good because I fled from pretty much every regular combat this session. For combats that I knew or suspected that I had to fight, I adopted a fairly simple strategy:

       

• Have my wizard cast "Earthquake" every round.
• Have my clerics cast "Critical Damage" every round.
• Have my two fighters and thief restore the spellcasters with purple potions, heal anyone who is low on health with white potions, or toss silver potions (poison) and gold potions (acid) at enemies.

         

You're goddamned right I do.

       

The economy is so broken by the end of the game that you could buy all the purple (full mana restore) and white (full health restore) potions that you could possibly need in a lifetime of adventuring, not to mention processed Nuore. Even if the economy wasn't broken, you find so many of these things that you hardly have to buy them.

      

Griffin was a pain to find because if you (L)ook at NPCs, the game tells you one person is Griffin, but you have to (T)alk to them to find out that the game is wrong. The real Griffin wanted me to find the Hourglass of Stopped Time in the desert in the northeast part of the continent. This is accessible from a mine near Giant Town (past the paleoscinus). The desert is a small region ringed by mountains with multiple caves. Dragons fly overhead constantly, which is annoying.

      

The game identifies Vincent as Griffin.

         

The hourglass is between two frozen dragons in the middle of the desert. When I grabbed it, they came to life and (instead of thanking me) attacked. I killed them, although I don't think I had to.

         

One wonders why I didn't freeze the moment I entered the hourglass's presence.

         

Back at the Athaneum, Griffin smashed the hourglass and gave me the sand. I got the final clue, but by then I had figured out that the clues spelled out PALTIVAR—an NPC I had already met in Devon. He had sent me on a quest to find his apprentice, Joseph, who in turn wanted me to find some sweet wine. Spoiler: Paltivar turns out to be the "big bad" of the game. 

       

Few games logistically explain how the evil castle is so full of monsters. This one, admittedly, doesn't explain how a single alcoholic was able to corral a bunch of ghosts and demons.

            

Griffin said I should speak to Winze next, but I already knew that he was dead, so I figured I could skip this quest and go right to Paltivar. I visited town after town, asking for SWEET WINE or BOTTLE in the taverns. After five or six tries, I got a hit in Stachus. Grabbing a single bottle somehow led to my having 65,535 bottles in my inventory. To add insult to injury, the game won't let us drink them.

   

I returned the bottle to Joseph, who spilled a little dirt on Paltivar: "A few years ago, I helped him round up several types of monsters for his castle. He didn't tell me where it was, but I know it wasn't on the mainland." When I returned to Paltivar's shop in Devon, he was gone, so I started searching the various caves in the desert. I eventually found the last member of the Society of Wizards, Quai, imprisoned in a cave by the Cynotaur. 

     

I think his name means "dog-bull."

          

I killed the Cynotaur in a long battle and got his horn. Quai then told me that I "did not have all of the items that [I] need." He admonished me to make sure I had spoken to all members of the Society of Wizards.

     

Just what you want to hear when you're 30 minutes away from civilization.

           

I despaired at circling all of the cities asking for SOCIETY again, but I consulted my notes and realized I hadn't actually gotten a clue from Winze or his grieving wife. I returned to Devon and spoke to Winze's wife, Joan. This time, she asked me for flowers for his grave; fortunately, I had bought a bouquet ages ago from a random NPC somewhere. When I gave it to her, Winze's ghost appeared. He had a quest: "Travel into the Underworld and bring back a small quantity of lava." He opened a portal in the north part of the cemetery to take me there.

      

I love that there's no discussion about how we're going to carry lava. I mean, we could cool it with any variety of spells, but then it wouldn't be "lava" anymore.

          

"The Underworld" turned out to be a large cave system with a lot of demons, devils, and lava beasts. Lava beasts suck because they have a ranged attack that can easily kill the last character to flee, when all of the enemies are focusing on him exclusively. 

   

There were pools and lakes of lava but no way to retrieve a sample. I had to loop the area a couple of times before I realized that one of the figures wasn't attacking me. I figured he must be an NPC and talked to him. He said he was Demonacus, "master of this realm," and that he planned to lead his demons in conquest of the world. (According to Usenet posts, in an early version of the game, Demonacus failed to appear. SW Games had to send around a patch.)

      

That's what you went with? "Demonacus?" How long did that take to come up with?

         

Demonacus attacked with a bunch of demons, lava beasts, and princes of evil, but here's where my standard combat policy paid off, and I whittled them down. Demonacus had an Amulet of Lava on him, which was good enough. It was the last item I needed for Quai, who (after I made the long trek back to him) assembled all of my quest items into the Horn of Encasement, which he promised would nullify the protections of the magic orb.

           

Demonacus and his allies.

         

It took me about half of the final session to find Paltivar's castle on the southeastern island. I had to explore multiple cave systems, fleeing from dozens of enemy battles, to even get to the island. Then, once there, I had to explore multiple caves (there are eight separate entrances on the island) to find my way to the castle—which had no entrance, so I had to explore more to arrive in the castle from the basement. Along the way, I found the second-to-last map piece. I never did find the piece covering the desert in A5.

     

A password check gets me into Paltivar's castle.

      

The castle had five levels, all very annoying for the sheer number of enemies I had to flee from. The first level was full of secret doors, so I had to test basically every wall space. There's a spell called "Reveal" that shows them, but it disappears every time you're attacked, which is always. Also annoying is the way the "Miner's Light" spell constantly wears off, and you have to wait and suffer the animation as the area around the party grows dim, then watch another one when you re-cast the spell and it gets light again.

    

I don't remember anything special about Level 2. Level 3 had a bunch of teleporters, most of which just went to other places on the same level, so I had to find the right one to get to Level 4—all the while fleeing from ghosts that continually respawn. 

     

A maze of teleporters.

       

Paltivar was standing in a large, open room, next to the orb on the fifth level. Nearby teleporters went to Devon and into the meeting hall at the Athaneum, and I thought it was nice to get an explanation of how the evil wizard had gotten around so deftly. 

        

I exit a teleporter in the Anathaneum—exactly where Paltivar exited when he struck down Zamora.

       

I buffed with healing, attribute potions, "Party Invisibility," and "Shield of Mist" before approaching him. He attacked with a bunch of archmages and princes of evil. Again, my usual strategy won the day with only a few potions required. For some reason, it was important for me for Paltivar to die to a melee attack, so after all his allies were dead, I spent some time maneuvering my lead fighter into the right position.

        

A "Critical Damage" spell reduces Paltivar's forces. My guys have "Party Invisibility" on, so you only see their weapons.

        

A message popped up when he would have died: The Society of Wizards intervened to prevent me from striking a killing blow. The message said to use the Horn of Encasement to retrieve the orb, then bring it to the healers at the Athaneum. 

     

Victory is stolen from me.

      

I had enough experience for Level 12, but I just went directly to the Athaneum, where the endgame sequence began the moment I walked into the healers' chambers. The orb helped restore Zamora. Once he was on his feet, he reunited the Society of Wizards to deal with Paltivar. Apparently, they had some kind of deal that none of them would ever allow another to be destroyed (tell that to Winze!). It turned out that Paltivar had turned evil a long time ago, and it was the Society that banished him to the island castle. Since that didn't work, they came up with a new punishment: "We decree that you shall exist for eternity in a single instant in time." With that, Paltivar slowly dissolved away.

         

Paltivar suffers a potentially-horrifying fate.

       

Question: Is he conscious for this? Because that seems pretty unfair no matter what he's done. No mortal crime deserves eternal punishment. (This is an issue I have with a lot of religious doctrine, by the way.) Anyway, a few days later, Zamora told us that Paltivar used the orb to make the fog around Yendor so thick that no ships could come and go (never mind that the fog was there even when Zamora had the orb). Zamora has recently discovered that the wizards back in the homeland of Thaine are using Nuore for "evil purposes," so he's not so sure that lifting the fog was a good thing. End of game.

     

The fog bank at the edge of the world wasn't just the developers being lazy.

       

It sounds to me like the Society of Wizards knew exactly what was going on. But instead of telling me to "seek out this bastard named Paltivar that we banished to an island for being evil," they had to feed it to me one letter at a time.

      

Some of the items I never got around to using.

        

I rushed the ending a bit, I admit. Since I didn't explore some of the mines, I didn't find keys to almost half the cities. I didn't find the final map piece (though that might be bugged and impossible). I found but never tested a Scroll of Portals, a Scroll of Revealing (I assume it casts "Reveal"), a Ring of Protection, a Poison Trident, an Ice Medallion, and a Crystal of Power. For reasons I've mentioned, whatever they do, I didn't really need their help. I ended the game with over 300,000 gold pieces plus 52 jewels, 20 ancient scrolls, thousands of units of ore, and hundreds of excess weapon and armor items that I could have sold for a lot more. It's hilarious that four postings ago, I thought the economy was good.

     

Here's my GIMLET:

   

Category	Assets	Liabilities	Score
1. Game World	Reasonably detailed backstory of Yendor. Clear (though evolving) main quest.	Main quest is a bit unoriginal and doesn't make a lot of sense given revelations at the end. Game world doesn't really respond to the player's actions.	4
2. Character Creation and Development	Four classes, presented slightly differently from most RPGs (i.e., transition from miners to fighters, magic students to wizards and clerics). Regular leveling with palpable increase in power via boosting attributes (which in turn determine what you can wear/wield) and acquiring spells.	Fairly simple system overall. Rogues wasted as usual. No role-playing by class, race, alignment, sex, etc.	4
3. NPCs	Many NPCs scattered throughout the towns. You learn backstory and lore from NPCs. Keyword-based dialogue system like Ultima.	NPCs don't have a lot to say. Keywords, but no dialogue options or role-playing.	4
4. Encounters and Foes	A couple of dozen monsters, mostly standard D&D derivatives, but with the types of special abilities, strengths, and weaknesses that I look for.  Encounters and weapon/armor drops are somewhat randomized, though sensible for the location.	Monsters are derivative. Few non-combat encounters, and only a few light puzzles.	4
5. Magic and Combat	Tactical combat grid works fairly well, recalling the best of Ultima V. System allows for melee attacks, ranged attacks, spells, use of special items, use of throwing items. Terrain is important.  Nice variety of spells.	Combats are far too frequent. Combats take too long. By the end of the game, battles are far too easy.  Generosity of money/equipment unbalances the spell system.	4
6. Equipment	Multiple types of weapons, armor, and shields restricted by attributes. Clear statistics to help determine which item is best.  Lots of usable items, including special artifacts, to find and wield. Ability to pay to enhance items.	Restricted to only weapons, armor, shields. No boots, cloaks, helms, rings, belts, necklaces, etc. No artifact weapons/armor. Items way too plentiful and generous.	4
7. Economy	Solid complexity. Lots of ways to make money (mining, battle, item sales, gambling, selling found artifacts, side-quests). Lots of ways to spend money. For the first third, the economy is pretty tight. Have to make some tough decisions about what to prioritize.	Economy gets far too generous by the halfway point. The party finds too much and the things that it spends money on do not cost enough. It should have taken tens of thousands of gold pieces to enchant weapons up to +5.	4
8. Quests	Clear main quest with multiple stages. About half a dozen meaningful side quests with solid rewards.  Many side-areas to explore with artifact rewards.	No decisions, alternate outcomes, or role-playing.	4
9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface	Graphics reasonably good for a shareware game, particularly in the cut scene graphics. Mixed keyboard/mouse controls are easy to master and let each player use what he's comfortable with.	Keyboard buffering issues cause problems throughout the game. Sound is underwhelming; just a few effects.	4
10. Gameplay	Reasonable nonlinearity. World can be explored in any order and some of the quest steps can be done out of order, as we've seen.	Not much replayability. Drags on too long (though only a bit). Gets far too easy by the end.	3
Other/Total			39

    

The total is high enough to at least near my "recommended" threshold, which is about 40 in 1994. Yendorian Tales is by no means a perfect game, but it's a commercial-quality game that transcends its shareware origins and has a lot of innovations and surprises (albeit mostly at the beginning).

   

I was sorry that I couldn't reach any of the Smiths during my coverage of this game, as I would have loved to include their comments and recollections. My childhood memories of the times I spent with my father all involve sitting on bar stools, so I find it heart-warming that Rodney Smith managed to enlist his two sons in such a creative and educational project. I hope they look back on the experience with fondness.

       

Exploration and combat in Yendorian Tales: Book I - Chapter II.

            

I also hope it sold well, but it's hard to find any contemporary reviews. There are Usenet references to it rating well on CompuServe. One heartening sign is that the Smiths kept going; Chapter I was followed by the awkwardly-named Yendorian Tales: Book I - Chapter II (1996) and Yendorian Tales: The Tyrants of Thaine (1997). Moreover, the trio followed the example of their primary inspiration (Ultima) by refusing to re-use the engine they created for the first game. Instead, they created a fusion of Ultima Underworld and Might and Magic III/IV. Both games feature far more complex inventory and character systems, including a set of 13 skills.

        

A shot from the never-released Fourth Book of Yendor.

       

SW Games announced the development of The Fourth Book of Yendor on their web site in 1999. It would apparently revolve around missing members of the Society of Wizards. The announcement promised a "fully animated smooth-scrolling world," "non-linear quests," and a "huge fantasy world to explore." A handful of screenshots suggest they took inspiration from Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven (1998). Alas, it appears the game was never finished, and SW Games went offline sometime between 2007 and 2013.

       

****

   

Previous entry in this series

   

****

   

For further reading:

 

My coverage of the games that I think most influenced Yendorian Tales: Book I: 

 

• Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny (1988)
• Ultima VI: The False Prophet (1990)  

06/21/2026 

The Search for Freedom: Our Repeated Petitions

Which one? Frank Gorshin? Jim Carrey? Paul Dano?

       

Guest post by AlphabeticalAnonymous: 

 

As we have finally defeated the evil wizard Macabath and lifted the curse he placed on Smythetown, the city gates open, and we are finally free to explore the wide world. Our goal in doing this remains the same: to somehow find and defeat Kamazol, or at least prevent him from conquering the living world from his home in the land of the dead. However, we have few clues on how to accomplish this; the best hint seems to be rumors of a confederacy of rebels, all adorned with viper tattoos. A member of this group cryptically told us that Arthur (who lives in a blue house) will rendezvous with us and give us further instructions. 

      

Emerging into the fresh air, at long last.

              

We emerge from the town onto Devor Isle on the world map, where we are greeted by a tinny rendition of "Greensleeves" and a small window depicting our surroundings. Like the rest of the game, the design is tile-based, and we can only see 7 x 7 tiles at a time. The documentation tells us that the whole world is only two 32 x 32 screens (and three continents). Our party is represented by a small person carrying a sword and wearing a jaunty green cap, which displays a few frames of walking animation as we begin to march around. As we go, we’re treated to the occasional pleasant sound effect, such as birds tweeting and ocean surf roaring. The manual helpfully describes what we can expect:

         

On the north-west tip is located Smythetown, the island's main community . . . South-east of town is Darkenwood Forest, where it is rumoured that vicious Ogres roam. To the south of this is Ugoomba Swamp, next to Lake Lzumba. Beware of the swamp, for many dangerous creatures lurk within, so avoid it if at all possible. On the south-eastern end of the isle are the North and South Carpalas Mountains, separated by the valley of Hsaktoth. Past the mountains, to the east, Gustav's bridge leads to Raksta Isle.

          
In towns or dungeons each step takes just one minute, but outside the time per square depends on the type of terrain we’re moving across. In the grassy fields near Smythetown, moving one square takes 25 minutes of game time. In the nearby forest of Darkenwood, one step is roughly 1.5 hours. So each tile in the world map is something like two kilometers, more or less. Nonetheless, it quickly becomes apparent that this island is on the smaller side. Only five steps from Smythetown is Darkenwood, and directly south of it Ugoomba Swamp is only seven by five tiles.

As in the catacombs (but unlike the town), random encounters with monsters frequently occur out in the world. Each region of the map seems to contain a few different combinations of adversaries (just as each dungeon level has its own unique set of monsters). Each encounter is a variation on a theme: they ambush us, or we detect an ambush, or we hear them coming and set our own ambush, or we’re all just tossed directly into combat. As we head into the swamp, a "Scuzzball" approaches. The manual describes these as "big, slow, powerful, yucky." This green blob has 26 HP, 2 armor points, and is indeed big; I think it’s the first enemy since the Insane Creature in the jail that occupies 2x2 tiles in combat. It only provides 3 XP per character. Soon thereafter we face five vipers (fast, easy to kill) and two crocodiles (slightly tougher, but no real challenge).

      

Fighting scuzzballs in Ugoomba Swamp. Despite the graphic, it takes up 2 x 2 spaces.

      

We’ve heard of Ugoomba Swamp before: scrawled on the wall of the Insane Creature’s jail cell was the message, "The cape is in Ugoomba Swamp." The world map only allows us to Move, Search, or Encamp, so clearly we need to search the swamp. This doesn’t take long: in the southwest corner of the swamp, we find a "Red Cape." It can be readied as can other usable inventory items, but there’s no clue as to what it does. At any rate, it does not seem to affect any visible character statistics.

    

RIP, Superman?

       

We continue on, and about ten steps past the swamp we find what can only be Gustav’s bridge. The bridge is guarded by some trolls who are also large, 2 x 2-tile enemies. I don’t seem to have taken any notes about that combat, so I presume they didn’t pose too much of a challenge. Past the bridge lie the green fields of Raksta Isle; we go north through a narrow mountain-lined pass, at the end of which is our second town: Hythenforge.
    

At least I remembered to take a screenshot of the bridge battle.

       

This port city has a different layout than Smythetown but many of the same amenities: Bob's Training Center, the Jolly Orc Tavern, Art's General Store, Omar's Magic Store, the Inn of the Fallen Leaves, the Temple of the Rising Sun, Joe's Weapons & Armor, and another town square. Directly west of the magic shop, we find the Hythenforge Weight Training Center. There, we are asked "Do you want to exercise now?" and when we say yes, "It will cost us 200 gold to train him." Agreeing turns out to result in a +2 permanent bonus to the character’s Strength: definitely worth the price! 

      

So strong! Though I do admit it came on fast.

       

In Hythenforge we also find a number of other unique locations and encounters:
      

• "There is a gigantic boulder here blocking the entrance to a dark tunnel. Try as you might, you cannot do anything to even so much as budge it." As I write this, realize that I still don’t know what this boulder or tunnel are about.

• A "small, locked combination safe" behind a secret door. If we answer that we want to open the safe, we are prompted to "Please enter the combination." We have no idea what it might be.

• Not far away, behind another secret door: "How strange! In this secret little shoppe, there is a gnome selling Riddle Books—only 500 gold pieces." We hold off for now.

• A set of deserted docks, with a layout reminiscent of Phlan’s docks from Pool of Radiance.

• A small, empty guard post. This never amounts to anything.

• Another secret room warns us: "Beware the Riddler!!"

• A series of locked and secret doors, ending in a larger room: "This is a torture chamber, hidden away in the corner of the city. Instruments of death line the walls, but it is otherwise empty. A piece of paper in the corner catches your eye. You pick it up and read it. It simply says: "PERSISTENCE IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS—perhaps the torturer's motto, you think to yourselves." Even now I’m not sure whether this meant something, or whether we were supposed to do something here.

• "In the corner of the town square is a statue of the city's mayor, Melvin B. Hythen.

• "On the wall is written: Riddle-de-dum, riddle-de-dee, Buy a riddle book, It's worth the fee."

        

Was this room here merely to provide atmosphere?

      

Examining the automap, I think it is clear that there are more hidden rooms north of the torture chamber. We find no secret doors from within that room, but from the main corridor in the city we find our way in. There: "A smoky face appears in the air before you. 'Welcome ignorant ones. I am the Riddler, and you have entered my lair. KEEP OUT!' It then disappears as it is dissipated by a weak gust of wind." We move forward a few squares. "The smoky face of the Riddler appears once more. He has a riddle for you: When is a wall not a wall?"

        

I'm surprised how much I like the pseudo-pointillist/digital airbrush style.

       

We think it over, and then (with a marked lack of confidence) answer WALRUS. Unfortunately, this seems to be incorrect: "You have failed to correctly answer one of the Riddler's riddles. The floor beneath your feet slides away revealing a pit. You fall several metres before being impaled on sharp, poison-tipped metal spikes. You are all killed upon impact. Your adventure ends here."
       
After reloading, we reconsider our options. We’re still roughly 400 XP from leveling up, but we can at least better equip the party. We have a lot of gold saved up, and with the new strength bonuses from the weight training center a number of the party members can equip better weapons and/or armor. We buy +1 armor, +1 shields, and +1 hammers for most of the party—only poor Becket, my cleric, is too weak to equip any worthwhile weapons (or most armor). We’re ultimately left tougher, and still with over 1000 gold in our pockets. 
     

Significantly better options than we had in Smythetown. Asterisks indicate items the current character can't equip.

     

We then continue systematically exploring the town. In the southeast corner is some sort of residential district. Through a door here, we find that:

         

An old lady ushers you into her home. You tell her briefly of your quest. She says, "Surely your quest will take you overseas to Shylyllia Isle. If you do me a favour, I will make sure you get across safely for a small, nominal fee. I have a friend who's a captain down at the harbour. Do this: go to the bottom of The Pit in the Forest of Shadows, and slay the Pitbeast. Then go to the docks and my friend the captain will be waiting. You'll need some viper tattoos to identify yourselves as allies, or he won't speak with you though. The Pitbeast has been terrorizing townsfolk for weeks now, and has forced us to temporarily close the harbour. It comes up out of the Pit every so often, taking back sacrifices to feed upon. We would all be grateful if you slay it. Good Luck!" As you leave, you notice a tattoo of a viper on her arm.

         
The next door is locked, "and you have no key that fits the lock." Isn't that the whole point of being able to pick locks? The next home we come to is deserted. And beyond that, we are told that south of us "stands a large blue house."     

        

The game tries to gaslight us: that house is green.

       

Regardless of color, this must be Arthur’s house. As instructed, we say WHITE KNIGHT SENT ME and are ushered into the house. Although he still says suspiciously little about Kamazol or the fate of the world, Arthur gives us our next set of instructions.

        

When you reach Birshada on Shylyllia Isle . . . seek out Dorf. You must first get a Viper Alliance tattoo. Search the Riddler's Den—he is rumoured to possess such tattoos . . . Dorf can also teach you the art of mountaineering . . . . recover the Red Sphere. Dorf can tell you about it . . . do not trust ANYONE without the mark of the Viper. Take these weapons and armor. There's no time to lose! Go find Dorf!

       
He then hands us a +2 hammer that I give to Durkon, a set of +2 chain armor that goes to Tyrion, and a +1 broadsword that Elphaba takes up. Our choices seem clear: to advance, we need to both (1) slay the Pitbeast, and (2) successfully visit the Riddler. Since we know that Riddlebooks are available for sale in town, the latter option seems quicker. 

        

I didn't have a better place to include this shot of the mountain pass to Hythenforge.

      

We head back to buy a Riddle-hintbook. "'Enjoy your purchase,' squeals the gnome, grabbing your money and running out the way you entered." We are slightly dismayed to find no new items in our inventory, but (hoping that the hintbook will invoke itself automatically) we head back to meet the Riddler. When we step into the riddling square and are asked a riddle, the following unexpected event occurs (as with most other encounters, this is all conveyed entirely via several short screens of text).

        

Your Riddle Book jumps out of your pack and begins to glow! It flips open to a page near the middle where one phrase seems to stand out from all the others. You ponder the word, then place the Riddle Book back in your pack. The book says "[whatever the riddle’s answer is]."

            

Let's hear your best alternate answers to this one in the comments.

        

The face says, "Very good" and vanishes. The process repeats as we cross through twelve different riddle squares. We see a few repeats, but the riddles we see (with answers provided here; highlight to read) are:

     

• What do you get when you cross an Orc with a Dragon? (A: Fried Orc)
• How long was the Hundred Years War" ? (A: 121 years)
• Who is the author of this game? (A: Howard Feldman)
• You don't get down off a horse, you get down off a? (A: Duck)
• What has hands and a face, but is neither human nor animal. (A: Clock) 
• When is a wall not a wall? (A: When it is a secret door)
• Why did the bird fly to Aegea for the winter? (A: Too far to walk)
• Why did the chicken enter the Portal? (A: To get to The Other Side)

         

A few of these riddles are funny, one or two I could guess the answer to on my own, but I don’t think anyone could figure these all out correctly on their own.
     
At the end of this passage, a single square is left unexplored. Entering this "hidden shack" reveals the Riddler in his home. Despite his deadly defenses I’m still expecting a civilized conversation, so I’m heartened when he tells us that "You are wise indeed, I grant you." Rather to my surprise, he goes on to say that "you shall never get my treasure! You shall now die." I hadn’t even realized that he had any treasure, aside from perhaps being the owner of some tattooing equipment. He flings a hidden knife at Elphaba, who dodges it (presumably after a dexterity check). We then enter combat.      

       

I knew the Riddler was a criminal, but I never thought of him as a common pickpocket.

       

The Riddler has 200 hit points and 5 armor points. I was hoping for a man in a green suit covered with question marks, but instead he looks just like one of the Smythetown Sentry guards. He is moderately tough, rarely misses, and hits hard. Each successful attack does 8-12 damage (even after our armor bonuses). A new game mechanic is also revealed: in addition to losing hit points, each of his attacks results in the theft of 20-40 gold. The thefts are more of a curiosity than a hindrance, since we have over 1000 gold. In any event, he isn’t a serious challenge and goes down without much trouble.

We’re rewarded with 84 experience each, a locked chest containing 900 gold, and then a second, unlocked chest "on the Riddler's lifeless corpse." It contains 837 more gold pieces (written as "GP" for perhaps the first time in the game), a speed potion, and a piece of paper with the number 3126 written on it. In a final amusing (but nonsensical) twist, we are told that "You all feel more Intelligent after successfully answering the Riddler's riddles. +2 intelligence and +2 wisdom for all!" To complete the Riddler quest, the number 3126 is of course the combination to open the safe we discovered earlier. It provides us with yet another 5000 gold, "and six self-adhesive tattoos of the Viper Alliance symbol. You each apply one to your upper forearm. Doesn't look half bad." My kids are always finding and bringing home self-adhesive temporary tattoos; if these viper tattoos stick on half as well, then we should be in no danger of them wearing off anytime soon.
         

The Vindow Viper? [Chet  here. I would have captioned this: "Dream about a reefer five feet long . . ."]

          

With no other obvious leads in town, it’s time to set out in search of the Pitbeast.

      

Time played: 25 hours. 6 party deaths. 2 reloads. 2 crashes. 

    

****

    

Previous entry in this series

 

Next entry in this series 

06/18/2026 

 

Game 579: Multi-User Dungeon (1978)

 

          

Multi-User Dungeon

AKA "MUD1" 

United Kingdom

Independently developed

Written in 1978 for a DEC PDP-10 at the University of Essex 

Date Started: 12 June 2026

      

*****

 

MUD Day is Saturday, 20 June 2026!   

 

Join me in the Multi-User Dungeon as hosted by British Legends.

    

I will be in the game from at least 18:00–22:00 UTC. 

 

See the bottom of this entry for further instructions and matters of etiquette.

 

****** 

     

In some ways, the entire history of CRPGs can be seen as an attempt to mimic the narrative flexibility of a tabletop RPG session. If we were to judge CRPGs solely against this aspiration, however, we must regard them as a dismal failure. Fifty-one years after the first "pedit5" player fought a goblin in a hallway, the average CPRG player still can't smash a window, light a fire as a distraction, or trick a bandit by pointing behind him. Not only can the most powerful character in Skyrim not make his own bid for the throne, he can't even speak his own dialogue to his wife. If he could, she wouldn't be able to respond.

      

CRPGs have always worked within these limitations by adapting only certain aspects of the tabletop experience. In the early days, some games focused on logistics and combat. They let the player imagine his own game world, motivations, and dialogue, stuck him in a wireframe dungeon, and simply tried to replicate the mechanics of tabletop combat. These games, for whatever reasons, are the ones that were affixed with the "RPG" label. A second effort, just as valid, involved minimizing the mechanical content and emphasizing the narrative content and flexible role-playing through verb-noun commands. Its flagship product was William Crowther's Adventure (1976), later called Colossal Cave Adventure, the inspiration for Zork (1977) and an entire line of adventure games, both text-based and graphical. Although we later regarded them as a different genre, the intention of the creators was no different than that of the creators of Wizardry or Ultima. Here's a quote from Dave Lebling, one of Zork's creators, in the December 2015 U.S. Gamer:

      

The kind of D&D I played was sort of a slight twist on regular D&D, which at that point was still in the boxes. It was the old, old, old D&D. The dungeon master who ran our group way downplayed the number parts. It was all about storytelling for him, because he loved to just talk and evoke the environment you were in and all that, instead of, oh, well, you have a +1 and he's got a -2 . . .

     

All that numeric stuff really pushes you away from the story and into the nerdiness, if nothing else. I mean, it's nerdy enough without the numbers, but it gets even nerdier with it. That was a good D&D sort of background in terms of trying to create a story, instead of trying to just be obsessive about the numbers.

       

If history had gone another way, we would regard Zork, Spellbreaker, and King's Quest as "CRPGs" and everything this blog has been covering for the last 16 years as something else. "Battle simulators," maybe. Quest for Glory would be regarded as an "RPG-battle simulator hybrid." This blog would be the "Battle Simulator Addict."

     

Although later commercialized by Infocom, Zork began as a team effort on the PDP-10 mainframe system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before TSR, owners of Dungeons & Dragons, threatened the creators with legal action, there was a period in which the game was called Dungeon. It was this version that made its way over ARPANET and various other file-sharing networks to University of Essex student Roy Trubshaw. An instant fan, he started building his own adventure game in 1978. Because he envisioned it as a game in which multiple players could interact in a Dungeon-style game world, he called it Multi-User Dungeon (MUD, later MUD1 to differentiate it from other games of the same style). He was joined in 1979 by Richard Bartle, who took over as the primary developer of the game when Trubshaw graduated in 1980. That same year, the University of Essex connected directly to ARPANET, and Multi-User Dungeon was playable by a global audience (for more on the birth of MUD, I recommend Jimmy Maher's excellent article on the subject).

     

MUD retained Zork's well-written and evocative descriptions of places, inventory puzzles, and a general "main quest" to collect as much treasure as possible (oddly dumped into a swamp instead of stored carefully in a trophy case). But it also added elements more suited to CRPGs, including experience and leveling. The multi-player aspect ensured that each player faced a world of human-controlled NPCs whom he could fight, engage in alliances, and rob.

        

Starting out in MUD.

       

The official MUD changed hands several times in subsequent years, from the University of Essex (1979-1983) to the Dundee College of Technology (1984-1987), to CompuServe (1987-1999). CompuServe renamed the game British Legends, which was subsequently adopted by Viktor Toth when he rewrote the game in C++ and made it available online starting in 2000. (During this time, "MUD" changed from a single game to a genre with many descendants; we'll cover that next time.) That brings us to the present.

    

The game begins with a quick character creation process. The player gives himself a name and designates a sex, and then the modern incarnation, at least, emails a password that will work until the player does something to kill his character permanently. The character has attributes (strength, stamina, and dexterity), and the game tracks a score based on his various accomplishments.

      

My mess of a partial map.

       

Exploration in MUD takes place in a world called The Land, not as interesting as Zork, but realistic in its general design—except that dozens of adventurers are for some reason tromping through its fields and forests. Every player begins in the safety of the Elizabethan Tearoom but is flung into the world when he exits the room to the west. From wherever he lands, he can explore a world bounded by dense forest to the north, a wall to the east, more dense forest to the south, and an ocean to the west (the ocean is not actually a boundary, as we'll see). Within this world are a mine, a railway connecting the mine to a jetty, a crumbling ruin, a mausoleum, a misty graveyard, a cottage with almost 20 rooms, a hut, a cave, and various other features. Because the scale is inconsistent and directionality is not always reciprocal (i.e., you may leave one area to the east and arrive at the next via the north) or even two-way, the game is difficult to map. I did it (using Trizbort), but the resulting mess makes me think that the map is better thought of in figurative terms than literal ones. Indeed, if you Google MULTI-USER DUNGEON and MAP, you are less likely to find a neat arrangement of blocks a la Shay Addams's Quest for Clues and more likely to find the conceptual map created by Trubshaw and Bartle and published by Bartle in the September 1984 Micro Adventurer. It was this map that alerted me to additional explorable space beyond the western jetty.

    

The map referred to in the preceding paragraph.

       

Descriptions of these locations are generally well-written and evocative, which is slightly ironic because when many people are playing, so many messages are flying by that it's hard to remember where you are at all, let alone read the description. Some examples:

    

• Study: This is the old study used by the gravedigger who once owned this cottage, where he read up on his craft. It is decorated in sombre colours, and the windows are small and dirty. On the south wall is a large bookcase reaching up to the ceiling, made of an enchanted oak.

• Sundial in pine forest: This is part of  a large pine forest. To the northeast, the forest opens up onto a magical glade, but in the other directions is more forest, some of it too dense to allow passage. Before you stands an old, stone sundial, overgrown with ivy. The sundial has no gnomon, so cannot tell the time.

• Waterfall: Before you is an awe-inspiring sight; a waterfall plummets over a cliff and explodes in a dazzling crescendo of rainbow colour on the menacing rocks below. 

             

To the west is more game to explore.

        

Navigation in this world is with commands of a few words. Directions are simple: N, E, W, S, NE, NW, etc. If you get lost, OUT will move you, screen by screen, back to the Elizabethan Tearoom. SWAMP will move you, screen by screen, to the swamp. Other commands will be familiar to players of text adventures: GET, DROP, INVENTORY, LOOK, OPEN, UNLOCK, and so forth. The game deliberately hides some commands for puzzle-related reasons. For most commands, you only have to type as many letters as are necessary to distinguish a unique keyword: DR(op), L(ook), I(nventory), and so forth.

       

Of course, many of the commands are used to solve puzzles. Twenty years ago, on a blog called "kfsone's pittance," Richard Bartle offered: "The mausoleum is the only place in MUD1 (or MUD2) that has actual puzzles in it. I put it in specifically because people wanted puzzles and I didn't, so I showed them what a pain the world would be if it were all puzzles by giving them the mausoleum." There are indeed a bunch of puzzles—or perhaps, more properly, "riddles"—in the Mausoleum, each one written on the wall next to a tomb:

   

• MUD's rats reproduce fast! They reach sexual maturity in 35 days and give birth to 14 pups every 21 days. If you took one newborn rat home with you, how many rats would you have after 98 days?

• In what year was the following phrase first documented: tent all all all all tent (& / pospos)?

• K rymsramo vkx k uajcan dkcmocmf tcov ovuaa xvadvauqx dycmocmf ko k oyrw. Wamakov co kua acfvo jaooaux. Tvko kua ovaz?

• Find Milne [NDDL XKXAYB DX NK TAH JIWCO RZBS AZ B JASVKUFH JL VD] [ZLNZ HELAMH NN ZS TOB DIUGM LBHS AL B FAQNGQXT HZ RZ]

• Leave the Mausoleum by way of the cricket chirps: 19.64/s, 0.36/s, 19.64/s, 19.64/s, 0.36/s, 3.57/s. Where are we?

• For your birthday, I can make you the 52607th Duke, the 31870th Queen, the 1835th King, or what numbered prince?

          

The mausoleum riddles.

         

Typing the literal answer gets the associated tomb to open up, with some kind of treasure or encounter on the other side. I solved three of these but have no idea on the rest. 

   

But of course there are other puzzles in the game—those that involve the intuitive use of objects and the parser to produce results, just as in any text adventure. Some of the many that I annotated while exploring the land:

   

• How can I see in the dark, for all the many places that require you to see in the dark? 
• How do I get across the ocean to the other island or to the shipwreck seen from the shore?
• How can I pry up the golden bolt in the railway track? 
• How can I get a piece of valuable ore out of the mine's walls? 
• How can I survive the trip to the bottom of the cliff at Lover's Leap? 
• How can I unchain a sacrificial blade from an altar?
• How do I get the ruby out from the eye socket of an idol?

    

And this is in addition to all of the "what am I supposed to do at the . . . " questions that could be ended with a variety of locations (e.g., "sundial," "shrine," "badger's sett") and "what am I supposed to do with the . . ." questions that could be ended with a variety of objects and creatures. 

          

I have solved a number of these puzzles, and more besides, but I guess I won't be offering the solutions in my blog entries. It's against the etiquette of the game. While I normally don't shy away from spoilers for old games, here for the first time I'm entering a shared space, and I feel I must bow to the old adage of "When in Rome . . . " I suspect that somewhere out there in Internetland is a detailed spoiler site, but if so, it's not on the surface web. It's somewhat impressive that this information hasn't been widely spoiled on some GameFAQs site after nearly 50 years.

       

It was worth a try.

       

While we're talking about shared space, I should make it clear that these puzzles exist for every person simultaneously, and most of them can only be solved by one person. If someone else gets to the Mausoleum before you and opens all the doors, tough luck. If you need the axe to break down the door to the Royal Bedchamber but someone else got to it first, you'd better find some other place to explore. Resets of the game world do happen, specifically:

  

• When enough treasure has been dumped into the swamp that there's hardly any left.
• When someone with administrative power commands it.
• When nobody has logged in for a few minutes.

   

The third stipulation means that they happen relatively often these days, but it might be that they don't happen at all during the Saturday afternoon that many of us are playing.

   

For these reasons, many players eschew the puzzles and focus on the social interaction and player-versus-player combat. Talking with other players is a bit like having a conversation in the early days of chat rooms. Everyone is talking at once, some of them sending direct messages, some shouting to everyone playing the game. You talk to a particular person with the syntax:

 

TELL Chester, Hello! How are you?

   

Or you can just shout to everyone:

   

SHOUT I don't know how to play this game!

   

You can FOLLOW a specific user if you want to see how they do things. You can HUG, KISS, and TICKLE people, which seems to confer points to their score. You can GIVE them things and also try to STEAL from them. Of course, you can also ATTACK or KILL them. I'm told that it's against etiquette to attack anyone more than two levels below yours, but I don't think anything in the game prohibits it.

                 

A brief conversation with another player. She probably would have been creeped out if I'd TICKLED her.

        

Other players aren't the only ones you can attack. There are a handful of monsters in the game, including a zombie, an ogre, a dryad, a giant spider, one or more vipers, and a bunch of rats. Most of these enemies won't attack unless you instigate it. I had more success when I started combat than when the enemy did; I think it may be because when the player starts it, he can specify a weapon (ATTACK RAT WITH AXE), whereas the game doesn't always seem to assume the player is using a chosen weapon when he's just defending himself. I'm not entirely sure.

       

Once combat begins, it proceeds in rounds, sometimes dozens of them, as the game describes the action: "You narrowly side-step a limp slash by the zombie"; "You hit out at the rat with a mighty punch!"; "The savageness of a blow by the ogre sends you sideways." The underlying rolls aren't really transparent, but they seem to take into consideration your weapon, level, strength, and dexterity. Your stamina is your hit point reservoir, and you die if it reaches 0. You can FLEE combat to avoid this, but the action causes you to leave your entire inventory behind, and you lose points. To recover your stamina, you need to SLEEP and hope no one kills you in your slumber or leave the world entirely and don't log in for a while (you restore one stamina point per minute).

       

A very long, and ultimately fruitless, battle with an eagle.

          

Equipment-wise, you don't have much to help you in this game. There are sticks all over the place, and that's the best weapon that most players will get. Once you reach the third level, you can use an axe in combat, but as far as I know, there's only one of these in the game. I never found anything that seemed like a traditional RPG weapon or piece of armor, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. 

        

The overall goal of the game is to amass as many points as possible—or, more specifically, to amass as many points as necessary to reach the rank of wizard (i.e., "make wiz"), which essentially makes you invisible and gives you some administrative control over the game world. The three major ways to gain points are:

 

• Drop treasures into the swamp; the value of this is commensurate with the value of the treasure. I think the most I got was around 100 points, but there could be more valuable treasures than I've found. You can check the value of your carried treasure with the VALUE command.

• Kill Enemies, which give you a handful of points (e.g., 8 for the rats).

• Kill other players, which gives you 1/24 of their score.

• Solve certain puzzles.

         

I gain points, and level up, by setting a dryad  on fire.

         

Certain point thresholds are accompanied by title upgrades: "novice" to "warrior" at 400, to "hero" at 800, to "champion" at 1,600, and so forth. Leveling up is accompanied by increases in the game's attributes. "Wizard" or "witch" (for female characters) is at a distant 102,400 points. I managed to achieve about 1/100 of that score in a few hours of gameplay in which I explored mostly alone and wasn't attacked by any other players. I think a truly dedicated player, creeping online in the dead of night like me, taking advantage of frequent resets when no one else is online, and just dropping treasure after treasure in the swamp, might be able to make it to the top in a week or two of furtive playing. Obviously, it would have been much harder when players were always attacking and the treasure wasn't all yours.

 

My best score as of this entry. Shortly after this, I had to flee from a dwarf and got knocked down to about 1,260 points.

        

There are spells in the game, but not in the traditional RPG sense. They're all focused on interaction with other players. Each has a percentage chance of working based on the character level. SUMMON, when successful, will make a player drop his entire inventory and teleport to you. FORCE makes another player do a particular command. WHERE tells you a player's location. You can change a player's sex with CHANGE, put him to sleep with SLEEP, and DEAFEN, DUMB, BLIND, CRIPPLE, and (mercifully) CURE him. WISH, which works 100% of the time, lets you ask a boon from any player with the rank of wizard. That doesn't mean they'll grant it 100% of the time.

   

There are a lot of things I don't understand. Rules seem to change on the fly, I suppose based on a wizard who activates one of the game's switches. Creatures go from docile to hostile. Fighting between players is disallowed and then suddenly allowed. A B-52 bomber flies overhead and drops a payload (not kidding). You occasionally run into a beggar; sometimes KICKing him gets you points, and sometimes it provokes a tough combat.

      

There are two types of death in the game: One from battle, which is permanent (you have to create a new character), and one from environmental damage, which is temporary (you have to leave the game for a while). Environmental deaths include jumping off a cliff without a parachute, slipping on rocks, entering the gassy marsh with a lit torch, and a variety of other mishaps.  

      

Having played for about six hours now, and having mapped a decent portion of the game, I can't help but feel there are depths to it that the casual player doesn't experience. There are strange messages, entrances to the underworld where dangerous enemies await, and an entire continent across the sea that I still don't know how to get to. I feel a bit like the Man in Black in Westworld, insisting that there's a deeper level, a greater meaning. The distressing thing is, I'm not sure experienced MUD players will even tell me whether I'm right or wrong.

      

What is this "emerald and red" message about?

                

That will suffice for a long introduction. I'll have more after "MUD Day" on Saturday, 20 June, when I will be playing the game at least between 18:00 and 22:00 UTC (14:00–18:00 EDT, 11:00-15:00 PDT, 20:00–00:00 CEST, etc.). I hope many of you will join me to help me experience the game in proper multi-player mode. If you do decide to join.

 

• There are instructions here.
• To abide by game etiquette, no attacking players more than two levels beneath you.
• I'm told it's against the rules to play two characters simultaneously.
• And no verbal abuse.

   

Whether online or for my next entry, I'll see you soon!

   

****

   

Next entry in this series.

   

06/15/2026