Fallthru: Won!

Getting "HOME!" is my reward. You know, Fallthru, I could have done that at any time by just shutting off the game.

Let's recap because it's been a while: Fallthru is a text-based RPG that features an enormous (perhaps infinite) but mostly empty game world. There are only a few dozen key plot locations, which you find through lore, exploration of road networks, and an artifact called a Weyring. The rest of the "squares" are generic forests, roads, paths, farms, and desert. As you explore, you meet warriors who challenge you to duels, and by defeating them, you increase your "level"--the only character development in the game except for a hidden accuracy statistic that indicates how good you are with a throwing knife or bow. Unfortunately, I capped at Level 76. You also meet wandering civilians who ask for gold, food, or water, and being charitable occasionally nets you a reward, like a gem or a special item. It also keeps your status "honorable," which is a prerequisite for some of the quests.

Exploration is logistically annoying because you have to keep an eye on food, water, and fatigue meters and keep an inventory of food and water. You can only carry so much in your hands, and a lot of the game involves shuffling items between your hands, backpacks, and burros. Hunting creatures that appear in specific zones is a good way to build resources and make money in the early game, but once you're strong enough, fighting warriors has better financial rewards.

Navigation is a bit of a pain, too--not complicated, just boring--although the "Wherstone" (giving you geographic coordinates), the "Flyr" (allowing you to move up to 20 squares at a time), and the "Navaid" (allowing you to navigate thick wilderness areas) all come along at just the right times.

My crude map of the overall game world. Everything is compressed and proportions are a bit off, particularly for the desert, in which locations are much further north. Note that to the north, east, and south, terrain stretches endlessly (or, at least, more than double what's shown here). Click for a larger version.

Fallthru is definitely a text RPG, not a text "adventure." There are no "puzzles" except some light problem-solving that depends on mapping or the right inventory items. These inventory items are primarily keys, necklaces, and rings that occur in bronze, silver, and gold varieties. They open access to various dungeons, some of which offer small navigational puzzles and invariably end up giving you another item that, in turn, gets you into another dungeon. Unlike most standard RPG dungeons, Fallthru's are quite small, generally only have one monster (if any), and typically only have one thing worth retrieving.

There is no information offered about the main character and his quest except a vague goal to get "home." "Home" always appears in quotes, suggesting something else is going on.

When I last posted, I was stuck. I had some clues as to what to do next, but I couldn't find key locations or items, including the castle Morag, a golden amulet, enough rubies (100) to purchase a gold ring (which I needed to get intel from a sage named Prothan), and the password to the Silver Way.

Shortly after posting last, based on a hint from Commenter X, I returned to Thun, took the bronze ring out of my backpack this time, and found a secret passage that led to a treasure trove, including an emerald, which I needed to decipher runes. I just didn't know where any runes were.

I wandered the desert and used the Weyring to find the three oases (a process that took forever) but didn't find anything there except exorbitantly-priced food, water, and oil. I also found a path I'd missed near the cleft in the great cliff. I assumed it would take me to Eyry, where I could find an opal scimitar. But when I tried to explore the paths, I kept falling and dying.

In desperation, I looked for hints online, only to find that there weren't any--at least, not this far into the game. A few message boards covered only earlier puzzles.

I had just typed up a posting titled "Fallthru: Give Up, Turn Off, Drop Out," announcing a hiatus in the game until I could get more hints, when I hit upon the idea of looking for hints in Fallthru: The Mentat Warrior, Paul Deal's novelization of the game, published 13 years later. Using the search feature on my Kindle, I tried PASSWORD and found a passage in which a character obtains the password to the Silver Way from runes on a place called Hi'mtn. The book didn't give the password itself, but this was a crucial location name I'd been lacking, and the INFO command in-game told me that Hi'mtn was in the desert--clearly what I was supposed to be finding around the oases. Unfortunately, the Weyring didn't recognize the name, so it didn't do me any good.

I kept searching, this time for MORAG--a castle I had a lot of lore about. Based on what I found, the book renames the castle to "Mordat," but it still references the "misty domes of Morag," somewhere west of Targ. That was something to work with. I returned to Targ in the southwest, headed west, and eventually found the castle with my Weyring. Searching it produced the golden amulet, an artifact that heals wounds, prevents injury, and makes the wearer immune to poison.

On the way to Targ, I'd talked to a warrior and gotten a bit of lore I previously didn't have: that there was some cave nearby called "Dre'cave," guarded by a "invisible killer." Again using Targ as the origin, I staked off in random directions, using the Weyring to ask WHERE IS DRE'CAVE before I finally found it to the southeast. The "invisible killer" turned out to be poison fumes, but my golden amulet protected me. I descended into the caverns and found a hoard of 100 rubies. That was a relief. I thought I'd have to fight warriors for hours and hours to get enough rubies to buy the gold ring. With the 100 I found, I returned to Triod and bought the gold ring.

At this point, lots of paths had opened up. Figuring the golden amulet would protect against injuries from falling at the Eyry, I returned and found I was right. I climbed to the right cave and got an opal scimitar. I took it back to Or'gn and used it to cleave the chains from the vault, only to find myself slaughtered by the demon Zugg--clearly I was here too soon.

If only it was this easy.

Prothan in Woren knew how to defeat Zugg, and now I had the gold ring I needed to talk with him. I journeyed east to that city and visited his manor. He related that to defeat the demon, I'd need a jeweled talisman from a cave 187 legons east and 203 legons north of "Spectacle," but first I'd need to follow the silver way to Sorf and learn where to find a gold key that opens the cave's gates.

Prothan spells out the endgame.

For a while, I was stuck again, not knowing where to find Hi'mtn and get the password for the Silver Way. I re-checked the lore on the oases, and saw that the entries noted that they were good places for "information," which I hadn't found. Returning to the desert, I re-visited the oases and this time thought to say HELLO in the markets, where the proprietors told me the distance from their oases to Hi'mtn. I journeyed to the convergence of these distances, went up the mountain, and (using the emerald from Thun) read the password to the Silver Way on an obelisk.

Before I remembered to get the emerald out of my pack.

Now I know why it wasn't in the book.

Fortunately, there was also a Silver Way station on the mountain. I entered, used the password, and found myself presented with a variety of numbered options for fast travel, but I'd already been to them all! However, noting that there were some gaps in the numbers, I tried numbers not listed and finally found the way to Sorf.

Sorf ended up consisting of just one room with a "locatrix" that gave me the coordinates to dig in the desert for the gold key. It was only because I had the diamond in hand that it did so; without the diamond, it just gives a bit of doggerel.

Alas, I don't have a loaded gun.

With the gold key, I set out to find the location of the Spectacle. INFO said that it was a waterfall in the Fariver where the highlands transitioned to the rainforest. Crossing the bridge to the south/east side, I worked my way up the river until the rainforest disappeared and I found the "Spectacle" location. Making my way from there to the coordinates given by Prothan, I found a cave called Estcave.

Estcave ended up being a real pain in the neck. Various passages required me to doff all my equipment, so I ended up reloading and just dropping everything but the lamp, the gold amulet, and the gold key at the entrance. A series of downward passages culminated in an area where I had to drop even the lamp before heading down into the darkness and feeling around to find the talisman. With creatures attacking me in the dark, I had to choose random directions until it finally returned me to the chamber with the abandoned lamp. I died and had to reload several times during this process.

A bit of description in Estcave.

The first time I exited the cave, I found that because I had dropped my navaid, I couldn't successfully find my way back to the cave to retrieve my dropped stuff. I had to reload an earlier save (thankfully, I'd been backing them up), journey all the way to the cave again, this time keep my navaid with me, and repeat the whole process. At last, however, I emerged with the last item I needed before the endgame. I just had to make the long trek back to Or'gn (with the all-too-frequent stops for food, water, and rest).

Back in Or'gn, I healed, saved, struck the chains off the vault, and plunged in. The battle with the demon Zugg was quite long and I had to reload once when he killed me. It took maybe 25-30 entries of FIGHT before I finally got the best of him. (Like all enemies in the game, I didn't kill him; he just fled when his health got too low.)

And after I leave, he presumably vacates his little corner and slaughters the entire population of Or'gn.

With the demon out of the way, I triumphantly stepped up to the raised platform, entered a spinning golden vortex, and . . . got a simple message that said, "you are, at last, HOME!" No explanation for the game world, where I was, why I was there, or anything else whatsoever.

That's not cool, Paul. After 26 hours, you needed to provide a bigger payoff.

(Looking for more answers, I read the last few pages of the book. Like the game, it ends at the vault, but instead of going "home," the characters get transported to yet another world. Reflecting on their adventures, they determine that they were probably dead all along, and their consciousnesses are stuck in a virtual reality overseen by the "Mentat master" from Faland. The book ends on a bit of a cliffhanger as they decide to start exploring their new reality.)

So a very unsatisfying ending to an interesting but flawed game. Looking back on what happened during this last session, it strikes me that the crucial piece of information I lacked was the general location of Morag castle. As soon as I found that, everything else opened up. I suspect it was part of the lore bank and I just missed it. Either that, or the game really expected you to wander around typing WHERE IS MORAG in random locations until you happened to wander within 100 squares of it.

For the record, the range of X coordinates with anything useful in them went from 0 to 1188, and the range of Y coordinates went from 85 to 1213, giving us 1189 x 1129, or 1,342,381 squares/screen/pixels/whatever in the "active" game world. I pushed the borders for a couple thousand squares beyond that and never found the northern, eastern, or southern borders (to the south, the coordinates happily went into the negative numbers), so my hypothesis is that the game just keeps generating new coordinates indefinitely (or, at least, up to some never-reachable maximum). 

There were a couple of bits of lore that never resolved into anything, including a note that the "Golden Way runs through Sorf" (just the Silver Way was there; the only Golden Way was the portal at the very end, in Or'gn), a sign that pointed to "Sturk Beach" but never delivered anything, and a note that there were ruins in the mesas to the northwest, where I never found anything. If I missed anything there, it wasn't crucial to winning the game.

Final thoughts, and the GIMLET, coming soon.