Game 266: Die Drachen von Laas (1991)

The graphic, with no title, precedes the "title" screen, which also starts the text narrative.

    

Die Drachen von Laas

Germany

ATTIC Entertainment Software (developer and publisher)

Released in 1991 for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST

Date Started: 14 October 2017

    

Apparently, ATTIC Entertainment and its Realms of Arkania series are destined to be a big part of my life as I roll into the 1990s. Their contributions to the genre begin here, with Die Drachen von Laas ("The Dragons of Laas"), a rare RPG/text adventure hybrid that I'm able to play, slowly, thanks to some wonderfully helpful commenters (from this entry). It was apparently written in 1989 but took some time to publish.

It's good to see a text adventure in 1991. I wish it was more of a genre today. With the time and money you'd save on graphics and sound, and no longer limited by storage capacity, you could tell some truly epic interactive stories with text alone--stories with incredibly complex dependencies and deep role-playing--and you could make it available on mobile devices with virtually no loss of gameplay quality. Maybe this genre actually exists and I don't know about it? MobyGames does list at least a dozen text adventures, including some text/RPG hybrids, in the last decade. Names like Highlands, Deep Waters (2017), Choice of Alexandria (2016), and Fallen London (2009). I should investigate them.

       

The title screen of the DOS version.

     

Laas concerns two young adventurers named Smirga the Warrior (a girl) and Aszhanti the Magician (a boy). [Edit: I guess they're both boys. I don't know why I thought Smirga was a girl.] They hail from a small village named Hyllok and hope to become the most successful adventurers in the kingdom of Laas. In their quest, they are somehow destined to come across the titular dragons.

There is thus no character creation. Attributes are health, strength, fame, magic skill, hunger, and thirst, with health, hunger, and thirst rising and falling throughout the game and the others constituting the bulk of what we would call "character development." As both characters start as "milkboys" in strength, as "unskilled" (Smirga) and "charlatan" (Aszhanti) in magic skill, and as "nobodies" in fame, they clearly have a long way to go.

     

From the DOS version, the "character sheet" for the two characters, followed by the inventory screen (we have nothing).

     

While the two characters do travel together (if there's a way to separate them, I haven't found it yet), they act independently, and you switch between them with a single key. The game's textual perspective changes depending upon which character is active. For instance, at the beginning, if you walk north to Aszhanti's house, the paragraph begins "this is my parents' house" if Aszhanti is active and "this is Aszhanti's parents' house" if Smirga is active.

The game isn't fully textual. Some areas have a graphic associated with them that you can turn on or off with the flick of a key. At least this is true of the Amiga version. I'm not sure if the DOS version has no graphics or if the versions I'm finding just don't work, but either way they don't come up. On the Amiga version, the graphics are nice but usually get in the way of the text. 

Text adventures succeed or die on the strength of their parsers, and from what I can tell, Laas provides a strong one. (I still had lots of problems, I hasten to add, but I think they stem from my lack of German skills rather than issues with the parser.) Like Quest for Glory, it offers so many verbs and synonyms that the manual doesn't bother to document them all, trusting that unless the player is deliberately arcane in his word choice (PILFER THE GASLIGHT), he'll hit upon the right combination. There's nothing more annoying in a text game--particularly one in a foreign language--than pedantry, but fortunately Laas doesn't seem to care if you type NIMM LAMPE or NIMM DIE LAMPE.

     

Just a shot from the manual to break up all the text.

     

Verbs that work include KAUFE (buy), FRAGE (ask), LEG (put), SAGE (say), OFFNE (open), BETRITT (enter), SIEH (look at), KLETTERE (climb), SCHLAFE (sleep), and NIMM (take). (I think these are all first-person form, but someone correct me if I'm wrong.) The parser supports complex and compound sentences, including the German equivalents of ENTER THE HOUSE AND GREET MY PARENTS, PUT EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE LAMP IN THE BAG, or PICK UP THE SWORD, THE SHIELD, AND THE HELM, AND PUT ON THE HELM. (Naturally, as someone whose German is limited to kindergarten and schadenfreude, I'm stepping things out with less complex sentences.) If the manual is to be trusted, it even accepts modifiers to verbs like "quickly" or "quietly" so you can WALK NORTH RAPIDLY or CAREFULLY CLIMB THE LADDER.

The game offers shortcuts for a lot of common commands. Various function keys bring up a description of the current area, the characters' attributes, and inventories, for example. Directions are a breeze because the game accepts abbreviations, and with the exception of OST, they're all the same as the identical directions in English.

     

The center of the village.

      

As the game begins, the two friends meet at the town square at dawn, vowing that this is the day that they'll embark. They plan to say goodbye to their parents, grab their equipment, and go.

     

With the first rays of sunlight falling over the flat, shingled roofs of Hyllok, the ground of the village square is dimly lit. The heavy, wooden bucket hanging on a finger-thick rope above the well vibrates loudly between the posts, clattering. The large wooden palisade that surrounds the plaza casts long, threatening shadows over the ground and the houses of Hyllok. The dense ground fog, which wanders slowly outside the village on the meadows, now shines in the first sunlight of the morning and finally dissolves. The morning dew sparkles silver in a tuft of grass next to us and I watch a spider spinning a new web between the long, swaying stalks. Now the sun rises, and their rays form a bright cone of light before our feet.

Smirga pokes around with a stick in the crevices of the paving stones, as she slowly rises to speak: "So now it's time. It's a strange feeling to leave home and not know what's coming."

"Yes," I murmur, nodding at her. "Do you really think that we are mature enough to undertake such a journey?"

"Please, not again!" Smirga complains as she stands up. With her hands on her hips, she now stands in front of me, blinking in the sun. "We agreed! Let us finally setout before today's day is over again. It will probably take a while to convince our parents and pack our backpacks. Besides, I should still go to Foroll, the blacksmith, and pick up my new dagger as well as the sword."

"Oh, yes," I say, jumping up. "I must also briefly go to Mygra."

"What more do you want with that charlatan?" Smirga asks, squinting her eyes a little, her hands still resting on her hips.

"Magic!" I replied, and smacked Smirga lightly on the side. "Come on. Let's go."

   

I made only a couple of changes to that text from what Google Translate produced. So far, the translation has been easy and clear. But slow. Zardas did me a great service by extracting the text from the game into a notepad. I brought it into Word (201 pages) and cleaned up the extra line breaks and whatnot. When I encounter the text in-game I have to find it in my Word file, copy and paste it into Google translate, and then copy the result back into Word.

Following the narrative above, I head north into Aszhanti's parents' house, where we are welcomed by Sklar and Phira and given some food. I successfully enter my first command with NIMM EI (take egg) but immediately run into a problem with NIMM BROTCHEN (take the bread roll); the game replies "Das habe ich nun nicht verstaden" ("I do not understand that"). After some investigation, I realize that characters that simply look similar aren't going to do it: I need the diacriticals and everything. Fortunately, the game has remapped my keyboard to a typical German keyboard (among other things, Y and Z are swapped), where an ö is mapped to the semicolon. Thus, I soon have successfully typed NIMM BRÖTCHEN and I have the bread roll.

Meanwhile, mom is asking what's wrong because clearly something's up. I quite literally translate "tell Phira that we are going" (SAG PHIRA DASS WIR GEHEN), and damned if it doesn't work. She says something like, "My God, children. That is far too dangerous--to be left at the mercy of Laas." I relate the same to Sklar, my dad, and he's more practical: "I've been thinking for a long time that you two will not last forever in our little Hyllok. I was the same when I was your age. What can I say? Go on your adventure, and when you've had enough, just come back home."

North from the main house, in Aszhanti's room, is a piece of paper with an unsuccessful attempt at a spell. Reading it (LESSE PAPIER) produces the credits for the game, which I'm guessing is a bit of a joke. We make an unproductive visit to the henhouse. Asking for money produces nothing ("you have your allowance for this month!"), so we leave. For some reason, Sklar accompanies us back out to the town plaza.

     

This reminds me how a paper with the credits for Zork was found in a mailbox near the starting area.

    

West of the plaza is Smirga's parents' house, and I switch to her when we enter. Her mother, Agima, is cleaning, and her father, Har, asks what we're doing up so early. They have the exact same quotes when we inform them of our imminent departure. We head up to Smirga's room, which is a mess, decorated with the skins of beasts she's already hunted. The game makes a point of saying there's a chest of drawers in here, and I can open it, but no combination of commands I can divine will allow me to successfully search or look inside it. Downstairs, we snag a salami from the pantry.

      

Smirga's house.

      

In the southwest of the town square is a smithy where the smith, Foroll, wants 7 "Gerfs" for some weapons. I'm not sure where to get the money just yet. Next to the smithy is the house of Mygra the sorcerer. He asks what we want. I try asking for spells but he just ignores me.

Mapping is clearly going to be a pain. The game's squares exist at different scales and thus don't arrange neatly around each other. For instance, from the central square, I can go north into Aszhanti's parents' house and then east into the henhouse. Or from the plaza I can go east to the main entrance of town and then north to "hill country." Both the henhouse and "hill country" are one square north and one square east of the plaza, but clearly I'm moving a greater distance if I go east then north than if I go north then east.

East of the village square is the exit and the beginning of our adventure:

    

In front of us lie infinitely wide hilly meadows, the up and down of which resemble the waves of the sea. The lush green meadows are littered with colorful flowers and here and there one can see bushes and narrow trees, whose branches swing from the wind. A large flock of birds sweeps across our heads to the west, and their chirping mixes with the sounds coming from Hyllok. I turn around and see the village square and the surrounding houses. The gravel road we are on leads straight further east. "Where shall we go now?" I ask.

     

Almost immediately, we were attacked by a raubfliege, which I guess translates to something like "monstrous fly." The game asks me what weapon Smirga should wield: "hands or flee?" I say hands. It then asks what spell Aszhanti should use, but offers only "nothing" for an option. Over the next few rounds, Smirga bats at the fly with her fists while Aszhanti just stands there. It takes about 12 rounds, but we win! Albeit with hit points reduced to 12 and 9 from the original 20 each.

      

My unlikely victory over the fly.

     

Clearly, I needed to accomplish more back in the village with the smith and the mage, and perhaps there was more to find in the houses. My major weakness here is clear: a lack of understanding of the right verbs and nouns for my own inputs. Despite the examples the manual offers, I'm not hitting upon the right combination of words to search for things and ask for things. I'll be grateful for examples from my German-speaking readers, but honestly, this would be a great occasion for someone else to play the game and write about it, and I just comment on the summary. Any takers? Otherwise, we're in for a long slog.

Time so far: 4 hours