Defender of Boston: Not Lovely, but Crafty

 

There's a lot to unpack in this paragraph.

    

With eight hours invested in Defender of Boston, I still barely know what to make of it. It is simultaneously brilliant and amateurish, meticulously detailed and riddled with errors. Part of me wants it to be over, and part of me wants it to never end.

    

I corresponded with author Tim Wisseman after my first entry, and he said that he based the themes and mechanics on the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG (1981), which is itself based on the Basic Role-Playing rules first developed for RuneQuest (1978). This explains the attributes and skills in Defender; not all of those used in Cthulhu appear, but those that do appear are in Cthulhu. Defender also uses the tabletop RPG's crafting and chemistry systems.

      

Karem Bradshaw fills in some of the island's lore.

     

But the game interface is completely original. Wisseman admits that he "really didn't know what [he] was doing." I covered some of the odder elements, like the outdoor movement system, last time. That really doesn't work very well, although like most things in this game, it is more sophisticated than I realized at first glance. The character's movement speed is affected by terrain, injury, energy level, encumbrance, and the enemies and NPCs around him, and making it real-time is supposed to (and does) increase the anxiety level when the character is approached by eldritch horrors. It's still unsupportable, but it does have a certain logic.

    

In fact, that's true of most of the game's elements. Most times that you encounter something that at first seems stupid, it later turns out to make a certain amount of sense. Early in this session, for instance, I was attacked by a lion as I wandered from one place to another. I laughed at the absurdity of a lion in Massachusetts and mentally chided Wisseman for not creating a sensible game world. Later, an NPC told me that some animal rights activists had kidnapped some animals from a circus in Boston and released them on the island. You get a lot of whiplash like that.

       

Oh, my.

       

Thanks to the map that BillBull dug up, I was able to explore most of the island over about three game days, speaking to about a dozen NPCs and exploring that many locations. The game's lore is complex and deliberately confusing, meant to be pieced together through a variety of clues, including NPC dialogue and found journals and notes. I'm still not on the verge of fully understanding the plot, but the initial quest to learn the fate of Fred Black has morphed into a tangled web of Deep Ones, aliens, and government conspiracies.

        

The island has numerous caves with drawings and petroglyphs.

      

The best I can tell, Rock Island has been the epicenter for paranormal activity for centuries. Caves on the island have petroglyphs of aliens and monsters. A stone tower, which may predate the pilgrims, may contain a gateway to another world and/or the key to saving this world from disaster. Residents have experienced odd events almost annually, such as Naomy Machentar, who was picked up bodily by a gust of cold wind last winter and dumped into a cemetery with two broken legs. Mysterious lights in the sky and mysterious creatures in the forest are so common that almost everyone has a story about them.

    

On 13 July 1921, an explosion lit up the island and drew a host of men-in-black to the island, plus some bird-watchers, whose arrival mysteriously preceded the disappearance of all birds except owls. A few days later, Fred Black found a mysterious box-like device with colored lights on it, but it appears the men-in-black kidnapped him, killed his wife, and seized the device. They've tried to keep people away from the Williams farm by spreading a story about anthrax, and from the stone tower by telling people it's structurally unstable.

    

Every resident so far has been a bit loopy, but the three most suspicious are Scotty, Bob, and Andrew "Dice" Kennedy. They seem to be collaborating on something; Bob, at least, said that he and the other two "have things under control." Something weird is happening in Scotty's house; when I visited, my character nearly had a breakdown over one room's angles or something. I found a bunch of mysterious equipment there and a radio set. Kennedy also had a radio.

       

The MIB agrees with me about Scotty and Bob. And I get attacked by a lion.

     

Moving from place to place brought me in conflict with a lot of creatures, including wild dogs, bushpigs, bears, wasps, rat packs, and the aforementioned lion. As I explored areas, I started finding weapons that I could use instead of punching and kicking. I upgraded from nothing to a bull whip to an axe. Later, I found firearms and ammunition. The combat system is relatively original and complex for a shareware game. I assume it's an attempt to replicate the tabletop RPG's rules. You lock on to nearby enemies by clicking on them. You then select either a melee or missile weapon. Either way, a combat panel comes up giving you a few options, including aiming and attacking. As you strike successful blows, the enemy's health meter depletes.

 

Weapons realistically run out of ammo, after which you have to load the right caliber one bullet at a time, each one taking a few seconds. This is realistic: you find boxes of rounds in this game, not magazines. I found that I'm far more likely to miss using a firearm, but when I hit, it does significantly more damage.

      

After a few misses, I kill the wild dog in one shot. I'm badly injured, though.

      

Enemy blows affect not only your health, but also body part-specific damage tracked by a paper doll at the top of the screen. Yellow areas of the body are injured but will heal over time. Red areas are badly injured and will get worse without healing. Injured legs are especially bad because they get worse as you try to walk on them.

    

Healing depends on successful use of the crafting system, which I also assume comes from the tabletop rules. There are five crafting menus: "Mix Medicine," "Make Explosives," "Field Engineering," "Cooking," and "Butcher." I think the latter two are available to anyone, but the first three are dependent on "First Aid" and "Chemistry" skills and don't appear at all if the skills are low enough. Within each menu are recipes for a variety of items. For instance, a "Stomotic Elixir Drug," which cures an upset stomach, requires a can of beer, a bottle of sulfur, and a bunch of berries. "Nitrex Explosive" requires a bottle of acid, a lump of saltpeter, a bag of sugar, and a bottle of iodine.

        

This healing broth drink cures injuries to the body. I badly need it for my head, waist, and leg.

         

You find most of the recipe items just searching the ground outside. Various reagents and bits of junk pop up as you walk: hemlock, poison ivy sprigs, ears of corn, bits of barbed wire, seawater, swamp water, pinecones, and so forth. Other items are in people's houses or the general store. The "Field Engineering" button lets you turn barbed wire into iron wire and iron wire into lock picks. (This was an important discovery, as there are a lot of doors on the island to pick.) You can make explosives, fuses, and detonators independently and them bring them together to make bombs. I haven't found any use for bombs yet, but the system is pretty cool.

         

Picking locks is just a matter of time and patience.

        

After my introductory session last time, I began exploring the island somewhat systematically in east-west strips from the north down. Scotty's house is on the north coast, and it was there that I experienced its oddities and picked up some weird equipment and a green glowing stone. Scotty tried to warn me about the men-in-black wandering the area. There was a crop circle near his house.

    

The men-in-black were reportedly staying in an old farmhouse that used to be occupied by a reclusive family. I tried to visit, but they shot at me as I got close. One of the funny things about this game is that you can have conversations with people even as they shoot at you. While one of the MIBs, Nick, was pumping me full of lead, he warned me of a mob presence on the island. I eventually had to flee.

   

On the way to another location, I met a shirtless man named John Wilets in the woods. He spoke like he had been living there for years, cut off by society. He claimed that "the Great One from far away has come near to stop those who eat all things" and that Bob had "trapped the black one from under feet." He also told me that the men-in-black had taken Fred Black to the north. Later, I met Wilets' wife, and she claimed he had only been missing for a few days. The Wilets home was oddly filthy, so perhaps they just live like that.

           

I'll bet he's just hiding from the Britannian Tax Council.

      

You can only explore dark places in this game with light sources, and you can't celebrate when you find candles or a flashlight because you also need matches and batteries, respectively. But once you have all of that, things open up. On a revisit to Andrew Kennedy's house, I was able to explore the dark parts. I found a weird object called a "p vortex inductor." Using his radio, I was able to send a mission report back to the Foundation, but I got no reply. Kennedy had a safe, but I couldn't figure out how to open it.

   

Eventually, I came to Bob's house. The stone tower is technically on his land, and Bob said that his father, Uri, warned him that the tower would be vital some day to the preservation of the world. Bob tried to warn me away from the investigation. In his journal, he claims to have invented "anti-dimensional shift glasses" based on his father's design. He claims to have used the glasses to shoot a Deep One in the head and kill it. "The elder sign is in place," his journal mysteriously reports.

      

Approaching Bob's mansion.

         

Black's house also had a mysterious document called the Pisro Scroll. It seems to be in German, but not good German, and a lot of it is just nonsense. If my German readers think it makes any sense and is worth translating, I'll take another shot at it.

       

This reads like gibberish to me.

          

I had been saving the Black farmhouse for last, assuming that I'd find plenty of clues there, but the place had nothing at all, just a description. After thinking it over, I decided to head back to the men-in-black house, which I hadn't explored at all, and try again. Night fell on the way, and any question about whether the "Deep Ones" were real or imaginary disappeared when I encountered one in the forest. The very sight of the creature made me sick, and it didn't respond at all to my weapons. I ended up dying and having to reload.

         

I guess there's no question that they're real.

        

The men in black were hostile when I returned to their house, so I killed three of them with an axe and then set about exploring the place. There were rooms suggesting they had been doing experiments on someone or something and keeping someone prisoner. I couldn't get through the door of a large vault in the house, but I did find a "mission journal." It indicated that the men-in-black were part of something called Operation Nightbird, an attempt to recover an alien spacecraft that had crashed on the island, apparently causing the explosion on 13 July. The Artifact that Fred found was from that crash. The MIBs decided to send an antagonizing letter from Fred to some local mob characters, leading the mafiosi to kill Fred and his wife without implicating the MIBs. They are now investigating Scotty and Andrew Kennedy and managed to figure out the combinations to both of their safes.

         

Dealing with the MIBs with my axe.

        

I returned to Kennedy's house and opened his safe with the combination, revealing a map of the island (it's now part of the interface, and I can find my position when I look at it), a Geiger counter, and a book called the Sussex Mystro. It describes the Deep Ones, or Children of Dagon, and the dangers they pose. It particularly warns against the Black Goat of the Woods and its young ones, "the trees that walk." 

      

The map is a nice touch, but like everything in the game, it's a little too small and hard to read.

           

On the south side of the island, I found the mob house and a "mob journal" which detailed their activities on the island, including shooting Deep Ones for target practice! None of the mobsters wanted to talk with me, but they didn't attack me, either. One of them, Lefty, did say that he saw the MIBs digging a hole somewhere on the eastern side of the island. I had found a shovel in the MIBs' house, so that made sense.

       

The mafia goon is cagey.

         

As I continued to explore, I started digging at each new location, and this paid off when I dug at some ruins near the Black farm. I found a large brass key near an old willow tree.

    

I headed back north and first used the combination provided by the MIBs to open the safe in Scotty's house. His journal mostly detailed his electrical experiments, which I couldn't follow, but it suggested he belonged to some group called the Esotoric Order of the Golden Twilight, perhaps a group of paranormal researchers and enthusiasts.

       

Bob's journal.

       

The large brass key unlocked the vault in the MIB house. There, I found a tank with a "membranous octopoid" floating inside it. "You feel the dark cloud of an unspeakable alien intelligence learing [sic] at you unseen with an unquenchable hatred," it said. There was an option to open its container, which I did, and the thing somehow immediately escaped, destroying the room on the way out.

       

I free a hostile alien and am rewarded with a Super Simon.

        

In the rubble, I found Fred Black's artifact--a boxlike object with four colored buttons. I reloaded, but there was no way to get it without also freeing the creature. I hope I was supposed to do that.

      

Open puzzles include:

    

• There are reports of a "criminal" loose on the island. Bob may be hiding him in his house. There's a locked door in Bob's house that Bob won't let me open. I need to distract or kill him.

• A lighthouse on the north coast had something horrible happen in the past. When I tried to visit, I couldn't get past the door lock, but that was before I realized that picking locks was just a matter of patience.

• In a cave, I found a stone disc on the floor with a pentagram symbol. Moving it released some kind of black ooze that drained my life away. I reloaded and left it alone, but I wonder if that's the thing that Bob has trapped. Can I kill it? Should I leave it alone?

        

Note that the items in the room suggest a particular pop culture icon died here.

    

• I have no idea what to do with a ton of odd equipment I've been picking up, including the Pisro Scroll, a Geiger counter, a spark coil, a loading coil, a glowing green stone, the Artifact, a p vortex inductor, a hormonic emi sender, an extorneutronic gun, and a scalar altogenerater. I guess I just need to start using them in various places and see what happens.

     

All of the mysterious items have their own interfaces.

     

Of course, there are still probably places that I haven't explored yet in my fairly cursory first run of the land. 

     

By far, the oddest part about this very odd game is the way NPCs tend to follow you after you've talked with them. I have about half a dozen trailing me at any given time, and I can only outrun them with a very fast pace. They generally catch up whenever I stop. At first, I was wary of them, but now I like to think of them as my fan club, excited to see if I solve the quest.

 

I'm glad you all could be here.

      

Let's see if I can win it in one more. 

             

Time so far: 8 hours