BRIEFs: Crypts of Terror (1981), Devil Dwell Dungeon (1981), and Dungeons & Dragons: The Dungeon Master's Helper (1981)

       

Crypts of Terror

Canada 

Inhome Software (developer and publisher)

Released 1981 for the Atari 400/800 

Rejected For: Insufficient character development

     

Crypts of Terror is an action game in which you control a little man with your joystick, run him around a multi-screen maze, stab enemies, open chests, collect gold, and try to ultimate find the Magic Ring of Power. I'm rejecting it on the basis that its only statistic is a health meter, but at the same time I recognize that it's not a million miles away from, say, Sword of Fargoal (1982), Sword of Kadash (1984), or The Seven Spirits of Ra (1987). To argue that those are RPGs and Crypts isn't is a bit like arguing that chicken noodle soup is a soup but chicken broth isn't—technically true, but still a bit unsatisfying given how much the former depends on the latter. On the other hand, I'm also unsatisfied with games in which you run around a maze with a joystick, so between the two forms of dissatisfaction, I'll choose the one that gets me out of having to do the other.

    

The opening screen, after I killed the first enemy. Enemies resurrect if you touch their corpses.

       

Crypts is clearly based on Adventure (1980) for the Atari 2600. It's basically what you would get if you added hit points and more monsters to the earlier game. Other aspects are identical; for instance, the character can only carry one item at a time, so he spends a lot of time shuttling between the sword and the key (both of which are always found in the first room). Since every room has a monster and a chest, this gets annoying fast.

   

Combat is also annoying. The character holds the sword in his right hand, so you have to approach enemies from the left to kill them. If you approach from any other direction, or they jump on you, the character's hit points will deplete but the enemy's won't. Losing all hit points means you lose one of three "men."

     

Trying to stab an enemy while the Tree of Life looks on.

     

Chests can have food (restores hit points) or gold, which the player can spend at trees of life to restore hit points. The manual specifies that the tree of life is also called the Quabala, making it the first of two games I know of (cf. The Return of Werdna) to use this element of Jewish mysticism.

    

If this were an RPG, I'd be playing it for a while. Not only does each game require the player to explore 50 rooms, but according to the manual, to truly win it, you have to win at each of 11 difficulty levels, from "neophite" [sic] to "ipsissimus." Each win provides a code word to unlock the next level. Only by winning at the highest level is the player awarded with "the ultimate secret," which "explains the first step towards unlimited power." Fortunately, we live in an era in which we can just pluck that secret out of the code:

       

Let it be known: That there exists an ancient Order of sages. This Order has existed in the most remote times and has manifested its activity secretly under different names. It has caused social and political revolutions and proved to be the rock of salvation in times of danger. It has always upheld freedom against tyranny. The truths of the universe lie burried in a secrete system of study called the "OCCULT". The Truth is thereby kept from vulger eyes by a veil of superstition and study. The symbol to look for is a single eye! (check the american $1 bill!) [every misspelling in there is a sic].

   

So, in the end, it's like a prologue to Assassin's Creed.

         

The various levels.

      

Crypts of Terror was written by Daniel J. Dorey, who also wrote Raidus! (1982) and Bugrunner (1985) for the same platforms. He died in 2022, aged 63.

    

******

       

         

Devil Dwell Dungeon: The Clearian Adventure

United States

Independently developed; published by Computer Age Software

Released 1981 for Atari 400/800 

Rejected For: Insufficient character development

     

My definitions of an RPG require that a game offers character development in more than one statistic than a single "health" meter and that it allows the player some choice into the nature and rate of that development. I included those criteria mostly to avoid an interminable series of Zelda clones in which the character technically gets stronger throughout the game, but only in health, and only at fixed intervals that every other player experiences in the exact same way.

   

I didn't anticipate a game that failed the second criteria not because the game occurs in fixed stages, but rather because what happens to the player is completely random. That's what we have with the awkwardly named Devil Dwell Dungeon. The player guides a generic (unnamed) character through a chaotic dungeon where good and bad things happen with every step. When the bad things outnumber the good things, the character dies and you get a final score. With the sole exception of what weapon you use in combat, there isn't a single thing that happens to the character that isn't the product of a random number. It would be just as entertaining to watch the computer play this one.

     

The beginning of the game—with another way to spell the title.

       

Originally titled Ork Attack, and known in magazines by the shortened name Devil Dwell, the game's setup is that you've entered a vast labyrinth of caverns to find the Golden Septor (sic, but the game knows it because it refers to it generically as a "scepter"). After choosing a difficulty level from three options, the player begins in the dungeon with random values for strength, constitution, and dexterity (3-18), and random numbers of hit points, magic swords, normal swords, torches, rations, water, and arrows. He also has a bow. The random numbers for most of these assets are lower at higher difficulty levels. El Explorador de RPG studied the code and determined that strength isn't even factored into the game.

     

Collecting treasure is a secondary goal of the game.

       

My favorite part of the game is right at the beginning, when it has you type either "C" for "coward" and then "be free of the dungeon," or "B" for "brave" and begin the quest. If you type "C," the game then has a message for you:

   

Making me call myself a coward on the previous screen took the sting out of this insult.

       

Assuming you choose "B," you find yourself in a dungeon. It's a mix of corridors and doorways. The player controls the character through numeric commands, to wit:

 

• 0. See a list of commands. 
• 1. Go forward.
• 2. Go left.
• 3. Go right.
• 4. Open a door or chest.
• 5. Commit suicide (the message you get is "Suicide Is Painless," the title of the theme from M*A*S*H).
• 6. Light a torch. In the first move of the game, and any time the torch goes out, this is literally the only move you can make. You can't even commit suicide in the dark. If your torch goes out and you don't have another one, you have to reset the computer, I guess.
• 7. Leave a room.  

       

The game's response to anything other than "6" if it gets dark.

      

The rest of the commands are combat commands and represent really the only choices the character has in the game:

 

• 8. Avoid the monster.
• 9. Shoot an arrow
• 10. Check the character's status.
• 11. Fight with a normal sword.
• 12. Fight with a magic sword. 

          

Checking my statistics. There's a door to my right and a corridor straight ahead.

     

Any time you make a move, enter a room, enter a corridor, or exit a room, any number of things can happen, including:

   

• A monster attacks. Monsters, in order of difficulty, are orcs, wolves, skeletons, and slimes. You can also get attacked by an "unknown" monster.
• Your torch goes out. 
• Arrows randomly vanish.
• The magic disappears from magic swords.

      

I wonder if the dung caused that.

        

• Normal swords suddenly dissolve.
• A thief steals all your accumulated treasure.
• Some kind of mist or fog raises or lowers attributes or hit points.

      

PCP smoke will do that.

        

• Something spoils your food or water. 
• A "flux" causes the dungeon to re-arrange itself. 

   

In rooms, you can encounter chests or tunnels, which usually have some kind of item or treasure. Rooms occasionally also have a wall of buttons from 1-20, which you can push to get a random item or encounter.

   

As I say, the only real choices are in combat, where you have to decide what weapon to use, although I don't see any reason that you wouldn't just always use a magic sword unless you didn't have any. They don't wear out or break, at least as far as I could tell. Sometimes random encounters relieve you of them, but I never had anything happen to one sword (normal or magic) that didn't happen to all of them.

        

I am responding to the orc attack by using my regular sword.

            

There's no point in trying to map anything, since every time you move to a new area, the game just randomizes what you see. You can't explore in any systematic way. You never reach the end of a corridor. The game isn't even capable of regenerating the previous area once you exit combat; thus, every combat victory is accompanied by a message that the battle somehow transported you to another part of the dungeon.

    

If you want a deeper analysis, I would direct you to El Explorador de RPG, who either won the game or manipulated something to get the winning screen. I played honestly for a while, then started cheating with save states, but I never found the Golden Septor (it's supposed to appear randomly in a room), and I'm not willing to put in any more time trying. Whether you find the artifact or not, you get a final score based on how much treasure you collected, how many enemies you killed, and how much time you spent in the dungeon (the last one subtracts from the score). The score is translated to a title, from "Stable Cleaner, Class 9" to "Superlord of the Superlords." You can't save the game, so any achievements would have to be earned in one session.

       

"King's guard" doesn't sound bad, but it's only one step up from "stable cleaner."

       

The game was written in BASIC by a Chris Clearo (given as "Clero" on some of the materials). I can't say for sure, but I suspect the author is John Christopher Clearo, who died in 2004 at the age of 48. His obituary indicates that he would have been attending Catholic University in D.C. when or shortly before this game was published, and Computer Age Software was only about six miles away. He went on to serve as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, then retired and ran some kind of business in San Antonio.

       

Clearo's headstone presumably does not say this.

      

My guess is that Clearo expanded on type-in games available at the time; Devil Dwell suggests some DNA from The Devil's Dungeon (1978) and Quest 1 (1981), the former in the commands and the latter in the types of inventory and treasures available. It's an interesting idea, but it needed more player agency and less randomness.

   

******

      

       

Dungeons & Dragons: The Dungeon Master's Helper

United States(?)

Kinetic Designs (developer and publisher)

Released 1981 for Atari 400/800 

Rejected For: Not a game

    

This one isn't even a game; it's a utility intended to assist dungeon masters playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. And it doesn't even do much of that. It has exactly two functions: a "character creator" that randomly rolls the standard set of D&D attributes (strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity, charisma) and then tells you what character classes you're allowed to choose; and a die-rolling function that just generates a random number between any two numbers you input. That's it. It doesn't save anything or help you at all with equipment, spells, or combat. Anybody reading this could probably write a more useful version of the program.

      

At least he's got charm.

      

Curiously, one of the character classes is "normal man." Was there an edition of D&D that allowed you to choose this option if no class's prime requisites were met?

   

The "Kinetic Designs" referenced is definitely not the later United Kingdom company. A note in the code says that the program was "obtained by Ace through the Jacksonville [Florida] Atari Group," so it was probably someone's local label. I can't find any evidence that it was sold, which is probably a good thing, as I doubt that TSR would have been mollified by the copyright nod on the title screen.

 

Mark your calendars: 16 May 2026 is MUD Day!

On 16 May 2026 from 18:00-21:00 UTC (14:00-17:00 EDT in the U.S.), I will be playing the original Multi-User Dungeon (1978), as hosted on British Legends. (I will subsequently post an entry about it.) Create an account, join me, and help mimic the original multiplayer experience of this landmark game.

Star Trail: Not Starting Over, Just Going On

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.

        

I ended my last entry frustrated with Star Trail, primarily because (although I didn't emphasize this well enough), I felt like I was having to repeat too many things. Because I somehow broke the intended quest sequence, I had to repeat Lowangen twice, and for various reasons I documented earlier, I had to repeat the Netherswamp three times. I have quit entire games rather than spending an hour re-doing something that I've already done, let alone the multiple hours involved here.

        

At the end of the last session, what was blocking me from progress had to do with the game's two options for movement. I had been using the one that moves the party in discrete squares, like most "blobber" games before Ultima Underworld upended that entire convention. The other option is continuous movement, which I do not like here because it causes the screen to bank as you turn right and left, as if the entire party is riding a motorcycle. Nonetheless, there are some encounters that only trigger when you're in this latter mode, including one that was vital to rescuing the lost soldier Agdan, reuniting with the rest of my party, and getting the hell out of Lowangen.

     

There we go.

         

A vital chest, half-buried in the swamp, only activates if the party is in continuous mode. Even then, it's a struggle; I had to approach it from multiple directions before it finally triggered. 

 

Defenders of the game will find a way to justify this, but I don't think it's generally good game design to offer two movement modes and then penalize the player for choosing one of them. This chest wasn't the only thing affected by the mode. Other small treasures—ones that I didn't find while stepping on every square—now activated. Railings between walkways and water squares were now suddenly passable. The door to a nearby building that had not previously responded now gave me an infinitely-repeatable (I assume) battle with zombies.

     

The chest had a document that talked about the ecology of the swamp rantzy and the fact that "potent transformation magic is possible" when binding the beast to a heather bush. 

     

Good thing killing the bush was never an option.

              

My next task was to find heather, which involved revisiting pretty much every part of the map until I got a message that there was some growing along the shoreline. One more complaint I have about this game is that some special encounters are visible in the game window and others just require you to stumble upon them. That's not so bad by itself; it was true of Wizardry and The Bard's Tale and every Gold Box game. But Star Trail makes it a bit harder by filling in automap squares that you've only looked at, regardless of whether you've stepped in them. This makes it difficult to keep track of places that you haven't yet explored. I could overcome this problem by making my own maps, but that seems silly with what is otherwise such a solid automapping mechanic.

     

Now, I don't know what the hell was happening with this heather encounter. The game told me there were 20 heather plants, and it gave me options to take a closer look at them or to pull them out of the ground. Either way, I had to specify a number between 1 and 20. Every single one that I tried to look at said, "It is a particularly strong plant." Every single one that I pulled out of the ground said: "You discover nothing special besides the fact that the bushes are extraordinarily strong." However, when I pulled #18, the game told me that: "The rantzy you are carrying gives a single loud howl and then goes all slack." The best I can figure is that the game was running an "Herb Lore" check in the background, and I was supposed to notice something special about #18 when I looked at it. Still, making me go through all 20 of the damned things seems silly; was there a clue I missed somewhere that #18 was the answer?

       

If they're all "particularly strong" then none of them are particularly strong.

       

Curing Agdan was then a process of double-clicking on the right heather, which was difficult because I had 18 of the damned things and they all looked the same. I reloaded and went right for #18, then used it. I got a fun cinematic of Agdan throwing off the net we had trapped him in, then turning back into a human, albeit a naked, wounded, and diseased one. We dealt with the latter two conditions the next time we camped.

      

I like how he collapses after the transformation and thus ends up the way he started.

            

We exited the swamp to the northwest, which required us to take a long loop to the north, then east, then south, passing through Gashok (which seems like a lifetime ago) on the way back down to Lowangen. It took about two weeks. Agdan kept getting diseased from walking barefoot, so we stopped in Gashok to buy him some boots and pants before continuing on.

         

And some rations.

      

Some notes on the road:

   

• I've leveled Gnomon high enough in "Survival," "Track," and "Bind" that he almost always finds water and food when we camp. I believe finding water keeps us from drinking out of our water skins and finding game keeps us from eating rations. I suspect only "Survival" is really necessary, but I found the manual's description of the other two ambiguous enough that I've been putting points into it. While we're on the subject of skills, what does "Orientation" actually do?

     

A typical night on the road.

      

• We had to reload one night after being attacked in our sleep by a pack of eight tigers. That's a lot for five characters, one of them unarmed. 

• A man asked to join us one night to share our fire and a bit of food. We agreed. He told us about the surrounding area, which filled in the travel routes on our map. But he also stole 20 gold pieces when he left.

     

"Could you stake a fellow American to a meal?"

      

• On the way back to Lowangen, we came to a river crossing with a ferry, but no ferryman in sight. We had options to wait for him or just operate the ferry ourselves. I chose the latter, and there was a fun narration as we misread the currents, couldn't control the ferry, overturned in the river, and Toliman drowned. I promise that after we get out of Lowangen again, I'll try to roll with character deaths and get them resurrected, but in this case, I just reloaded and waited for the ferryman, who charged 3 silver pieces per person and got us all to the other side safely.

     

Option #3: Not a good idea for airports, not a good idea for ferries.

     

• A forest gnome continues to appear every once in a while when we camp, strike one blow (usually against Gnomon), and then flee. 

       

I feel like we're becoming friends.

     

Once we got back to Lowangen, I kept running into the orcs and had to turn around. I couldn't remember the exact route we had used to escape the city in the first place. Fortunately, I had a saved game from just before we left, but it took me a while to remember that. Once I figured out the correct route, I was able to re-enter the city using the tunnels.

     

Master Eolan was delighted that Agdan was rescued. I'm curious what happens if you return to Lowangen with Agdan still in rantzy form. In any event, Lyra and Lilii Borea rejoined the party, and we got the hell out of there at last. I felt a little bad about leaving them to the mercies of the orcs, but I don't think we were meant to solve that quest.

      

Get me the galloping @#&% out of here.

          

We were on our first segment out of the city when we were interrupted by a cut scene. An evil wizard appeared in front of us: "Halt! Stay where you are!" He went on to demand the Salamander Stone, and we had options to give it over or refuse. The former response ("That stupid old rock! There, take  it!") was honestly tempting, but I did what I thought I was supposed to do and refused. This brought us to a battle with six "combat magicians" and four or five rogues. I tried my own tactics; I tried the computer's tactics; I tried auto-combat. Nothing I did would let me even come close to winning this battle. Most of the time, I couldn't even act. The mages generally petrified and blinded most of my characters in the first round.

        

The impossible (for me) battle.

      

I'm sure it's possible to win this fight for some players, perhaps if they spent some time building the party to higher levels, but my impression is that it's not meant to be won. Thus, I grudgingly reloaded and handed over the Salamander Stone, easily the most troublesome MacGuffin in RPG history. They also took my fake one, I later discovered.

        

"The mages disappear to the west," the game said. I didn't know if we were supposed to follow them or what. West at the time was back to Lowangen, so I reluctantly went there and back through the tunnel. No one had any new dialogue options about MAGICIANS or anything. I asked Dragan about the Salamander Stone. He made me run an annoying errand only to just give me the same hint about the Orc Death that he would have given before we recovered the stone weeks ago. (Just to be sure, I went to the Orc Death and found nothing.) I reloaded from outside Lowangen and took paths to the northwest and southwest. I even ran around the Netherswamp again. None of it was to any avail. I guess if I'm meant to find the stone again, it will be part of a longer journey to the west. 

       

Dragan's "errand" had us jumped by thugs—who then released us without doing anything to us. I don't really know what this was about.

      

Whatever the solution, I hope it will keep. I had already decided that after I got out of Lowangen, I was going to go after Star Trail, the throwing axe, for which my next move was to ask around Tiefhusen. I had also decided I wasn't going to be in a hurry to get there. There are supposedly valuable side-paths in this game, and I thought I'd try to find some of them.

    

I began by taking us back to Gashok, where it was fortunately market day when we arrived. We spent some of our money on magic potions (I'm sick of running out), extra boots (they keep wearing out), a fishing hook, sleeping bags, and a few other sundries. I ran into encumbrance problems here despite the Girdles of Might (the metal armor I got from Ailian Silversprings' allies weighs a lot), and I spent a lot of time shuffling items.

      

Reaching Gashok again.

      

Tiefhusen is west-northwest of Gashok. The world map shows a road leading from Gashok north to where the game began. Tiefhusen is on a parallel northern road. On the world map, no road connects them without going south all the way to Lowangen and the Netherswamp. I decided to see if there was anything west of the road north of Gashok, if that makes sense. I figured that the worst that would happen is I'd end up in Kvirasim again, in which case I'd reload (if literally nothing had happened on the way) or make my way back. 

   

I continued on for a while, getting whacked by forest gnomes, fighting nighttime enemies (I used computer combat for a lot of them), dealing with occasional diseases, building my herb stock. I needn't have worried: there were plenty of western routes. I took the northernmost route possible, exploring every spur that I found along the way. 

   

We crossed a muddy area in which Gnomon sank in the mud, but we rescued him with a rope. It was a waste of time. The road ended in the "Brinask Marshes," and we had to turn back. I later discovered Gnomon had lost his shield and axe in the mud. Fortunately, I had spares.

      

We did get a warning.

      

After about three weeks on the road, following a northern loop that took us past a lake, we landed in the city of Tjolmar. It was a modest-sized burg, not a menu-town, with the typical services. It had a lot of temples—Ifirn, Firun, Rahja, Ingerimm, others—an herbalist, a couple of inns, a couple of taverns, and a couple of smiths. There was no weapon/armor shop, but there was one business type that I don't think I've encountered before: a bank called At the Dreaming Mummy. Here, we could deposit and retrieve items. That could be useful, but it raises a lot of questions. Is the vault linked with other banks in the game? Are there other banks in the game? How often do I expect to be back in Tjolmar? It's not exactly in a central location. This sort of service in Gashok would make more sense.

         

I would pay real money to see Bangor Savings Bank rename itself "At the Dreaming Mummy."

           

Talking with NPCs, I receive no news about STAR TRAIL or SALAMANDER STONE. I also asked about TJOLMAR itself, and the best I can say is something seems to be going on. "There used to be almost fifty dwarves living in Tjolmar up until a short time ago," NPCs told me more than once. "Nowadays, there are only about ten left." Others said: "Things went too far when the orcs appeared. Apparently, it was something to do with an ancient artifact of Umrazim." Yet another: "People used to be a bit nervous here, since that thing with the orcs happened." These comments resulted in no new dialogue options, and I wasn't able to find any encounters related to them. People kept telling me to see the "pileworks," but I don't even know what that was.

      

That's ominous.

      

We visited a tavern where one dialogue option (RAHJA, a god) seemed out of place, and before we knew it, we had spent the night in a brothel.  

       

To be fair, this kind of thing has happened to me in New Orleans.

         

There was one house with a magically-locked door. None of our resources or spells would allow us to penetrate it. In fact, even attempting to cast "Foramen" drained our health. 

      

The result of casting "Analyze" on the door.

       

We reluctantly moved on, unable to figure out anything else to do. We were at the far western side of the map at this point, not too far from Tiefhusen to the southeast. I decided to head there but explore any side roads or spurs on the way. The road paralleled a river. A day into the trip, we reached Norhus, a travel stop where we could stay at an inn, switch to a ferry, or continue on foot. While talking to the owner, Endor Jorndal, he had a response to INGRAMOSCH: "That's more or less the chieftain of those Tjolmar traitors. He just went back to Tjolmar a short while ago after hiding out in Lowangen for quite some time."

   

What?! My random exploration pattern somehow landed me in the town where Ingramosch had gone, and I missed him? And what's this about "traitors"? I realized I hadn't asked everyone in Tjolmar about INGRAMOSCH, so I turned around and headed back to the town and started feeding the word to everyone.

      

One wonders how most dwarves smell.

      

I didn't learn much. The owner of one inn said that Ingramosch used to hang out at the temple of Rahja and that his house was "right by the old bridge," which would have been more helpful if there were any bridge in the city. (The house with the magically-locked door is at least near a river.) The priestess of Rahja said that he hasn't been by in a couple of weeks. "I think he tried to recruit compatriots here," she added. Is that why there are no more dwarves in town? Another NPC told me that he had a quarrel with other dwarves recently, though, and that he "used to be with that female smith a lot." But the only female smith, Halrima, had nothing to say in response to his name. In response to DWARVES, she said: "All that talk about the traitors of Tjolmar is poppycock." I couldn't get out of anyone what the so-called treason was actually about.

       

Could you elaborate on the whole "traitors" thing?

         

This may be one of those situations where you have to ask multiple times, but remember, NPCs end conversation after a few keywords they don't like, and you can't try again until the next day. Saving and reloading gets old in these situations. Anyway, I hadn't intended to pursue this part of the quest yet, so after running out of ideas a second time, I hit the road again for Tiefhusen.

    

I guess I've gotten to the point that I don't mind travel as much as before. There's always a sense of possibility, and the little things that happen on the road can be fun. But commenters have talked about side-dungeons and stuff, and if these exist, I've been spectacularly unlucky in finding them.  

   

Time so far: 37 hours 

Arena: Urban Sprawl

 

The character arrives in Shornhelm, my first Elder Scrolls city.

       

We've had several comments to the effect that the opening Arena dungeon is very hard. I unwittingly contributed to that sentiment with my first entry, in which I reported fairly rapid death after only a couple of goblin battles and one attempt to sleep. What I should have made clear is that by that point in the entry, I had already accomplished my primary goal of describing the backstory and the basic mechanics. By the time I died, I wasn't really trying. I hadn't even saved.

   

In this session, I finished the dungeon. It was only one level, and it took me about an hour to explore the entire thing. I'm not saying it was easy; character Levels 1 and 2 were particularly hard. Every enemy seemed capable of halving my hit points with a single hit, and I was still getting used to some of the mechanics. For instance, I didn't yet realize that when an enemy is around a corner and you can only see part of him, you don't need to charge past him until he's fully in view and then turn around (the game doesn't offer a "strafe" option) [Ed. Yes it does; I just didn't try enough keyboard combos]. As long as you can see any part of him, you can attack him perfectly fine through what looks like a solid wall.

   

I also didn't realize there were perfectly safe places to rest, but the game eventually clued me in.

        

Kind of makes sense, I guess.

      

Ultimately, the dungeon isn't big enough to be truly difficult. With the ability to save anywhere and reload in a few seconds, the level could have been full of liches, and I think I still would have made it. I would have just run past them.

        

My final map of the dungeon.

     

In fact, I got to Ria's teleporter in only about 10 minutes by (this time) following the left wall. I decided to turn around and clear out the dungeon first, but here's the thing (and please tell me if I'm wrong): I don't think this is the kind of game where you have to clear out the dungeon. The extra experience and treasure are nice, but there are endlessly-generated experience and treasure everywhere. Thus, there's no reason to explore any one particular place past its objective. It's a little like Telengard or Dungeon Hack in that regard.

          

Ria's portal.

       

Enemies were limited to goblins and giant rats except a couple of times when I tried to sleep, and some spellcasting humanoid blasted me out of existence before I could blink (or take a screenshot). I never encountered any of them during regular exploration. At first, I thought the dungeon must respawn, as enemies kept re-appearing in areas I'd already explored. But by the end of the level, I was convinced that they just roam quite a bit. 

  

Some miscellaneous notes about the dungeon:

      

• I like the sound: echoing footsteps, creaking doors, grunts and squeaks of enemies getting closer.

• There are lion's head decorations all over the walls. I don't remember lions being mentioned in the Elder Scrolls universe before.

     

Two piles of treasure and yet another lion's head emblem.

        

• I didn't find an elven sword this time. I did find a longsword, a short bow, and a belt. All of the armor pieces I found were metal and thus forbidden to my battlemage.

• "Fire Dart" worked really nicely, but I could only cast one or two between rests.

• If multiple enemies are near each other, you can damage them with one swing (and, presumably, one spell). 

• Secret doors seem to open when you walk into them. I mostly bumped into them by accident. I'm not sure that any part of this dungeon was accessible only by secret door; I think they just offered shortcuts to areas I could access the long way.

• Other than the first cell door, there were no locked doors, locked treasure chests, traps, or anything that theoretically would require a thief.

• There were a lot of places where I had to swim, and many of those had enemies waiting on the nearest platforms. 

        

A rat waits to attack as soon as I crawl out of here.

       

• I found several crystals, and the manual is silent on what they do.

• I kept all the equipment I found, including what I couldn't use. I never developed any encumbrance problems.

• Getting in and out of inventory is a tad annoying.  

• Enemies have a way of sneaking up behind you and hitting you before you're even aware. One second, I was walking along; the next, Ria Silmane was telling me that all hope was lost. 

       

I got to Level 3. Each time I leveled up, I could put 6 points into my attributes. I decided to always put 3 into my primary attributes (for the battlemage, strength and intelligence) and the other 3 in my lowest attributes. 

       

After killing two goblins.

       

The first time I rested after I leveled up, Ria appeared and elaborated on the main quest. She said that the artifact that Jagar Tharn used to banish the emperor to Oblivion was the Staff of Chaos. It is now the only thing that can bring him back. Knowing this, Tharn has disassembled it and scattered its pieces across the continent. She divined that the first piece was in a place called Fang Lair, originally inhabited by the "Dwarves of Kragen," but abandoned after a Great Wyrm took up residence there. She knew it was in the Dragon's Teeth but nothing about its specific location. "Perhaps there are sages or scholars who would know of this place." Obviously, there's a Tolkien homage here. I don't remember the term "Kragen" before, but I think the Dragon's Teeth are the range west of Skyrim. Markarth in Skyrim is at their base.

           

There are even markings on the staff where it was segmented.

      

When I took the portal, I found myself in a snow-blanketed city called Shornhelm, NPCs roaming back and forth everywhere I looked. If the dungeon felt a bit like Ultima Underworld, this part of the game felt more like Legends of Valour. The automap of the city, pre-filled with building footprints but not the names of businesses, showed the same sorts of connected buildings, walled buildings, courtyards, and other interesting shapes as the Valour map.

   

As I explored the city, there were some interesting visuals—trees, stone statues, canals, fountains, gas lamps, clothes lines strung across the street from second-story windows. But there was also a certain uniform blandness to everything, and if commenters hadn't already mentioned this, I think I would have figured out fairly quickly that the cities in this game are procedurally generated. The types of locations must be fixed, but they're distributed randomly across the city for each new game.

       

Walking past two very different types of statues outside a temple. I swear I've seen that second one somewhere before.

       

I soon found out something vital: If the building has a shingle hung by its main entrance, it's open for business, and double-clicking on the door lets you in. If it doesn't have a shingle, it's a private business or residence, and double-clicking on the door attempts a burglary. I hadn't been in the city for more than five minutes before I tried to enter a random building, heard "stop thief!" somewhere behind me, and was dead before I saw the guard attacking me. I guess capital punishment is the default for everything in Jagar Tharn's Tamriel.

             

The NPCs are generated as well: Barbara Wicking, "the city-state thief"; Mordard Wicksley, "a typical mercenary"; Belladonna Hawkton, a fieldhand; Alabyrick Hawkwing, a squire; Victoria Yeomhouse, a guildmaster. (Even in that small sample, you can see how the prefixes and suffixes come together; I'm sure I'll meet a Wickhouse and a Hawksley at some point.) They each have a little elevator speech ("I got into Shornhelm a little while ago, looking for some excitement"; "I work my heart out during the harvest and starve in the winter") in response to "Who are you?" You can also ask where things are, which gives a defined list of topics. It is pre-populated with lists of inns, temples, and stores, or you can just ask for the "nearest" of anything. Sometimes, the NPCs give you a generic direction ("try to the east"), and sometimes they mark it on your map for you. I wonder if personality plays a role in this. "Fang Lair" is also on the list; more on that in a bit.

       

I wouldn't be so quick to admit that in this town.

        

The final bit of NPC dialogue is for rumors; you can ask for generic rumors or rumors about work. NPCs kept telling me that a mysterious woman named Rogue Gondywyr at the King's Dragon had a delivery job.

        

About one-quarter of the city.

       

The main benefit of procedural generation is that the cities feel realistically large (if artificially square). It takes about 40 minutes game time (and about 2 minutes real time, with no obstacles) to get from one corner to the other, which seems reasonable for a medieval village. There are probably around 100 buildings in it. It also removes a certain pressure from the player to see and do everything, explore every corner, talk to every NPC just in case he has a quest. The player ends up treating the city like he would a real city: asking for directions and homing in on the places that have the services he needs. At the same time, there's no real fun in exploration, and I'm betting that the game is too early to do fun things like vary the architecture when I get to Elsweyr or Black Marsh. Still, I could envision a good game that balances hand-crafted and procedurally generated content. I think it's possible that Starfield did that quite well, and the only reason I don't think so is that I disliked so many other aspects of the game.  

         

Even the tavern names are procedurally generated.

       

My first priority was to sell my excess equipment and buy the armor that I didn't find in the first dungeon. NPCs directed me to the Basic Weaponry Store, which despite its name had leather boots, greaves, cuirasses, pauldrons, and gauntlets as well. Even after those purchases, I had 1,790 gold. I began to wonder if Arena set the Elder Scrolls trend of giving the player enough money to last the rest of the game in the first dungeon.

      

Being a battlemage is cheaper on the wallet than some other classes.

          

I next followed directions to the mage's guild, apparently the only guild in Arena (no faction quests here). There, I realized my 1,790 gold wouldn't go that far. It also wouldn't identify (at 200-270 gold pieces each) the crystals that I found in the dungeon. I did determine that my longsword was a Longsword of Lightning and that two bracelets were a mithril bracelet and an elven bracelet. I should mention that there were "steal" options in both the mage's guild and the weapon shop, but crime is something I'm going to have to investigate later. So is spell-making. Be patient.

        

I'm going to have to come back.

           

The King's Dragon, in one of those oddities you get with procedural generation, shared its building with another inn called the King's Bird. You'd think that would cause some confusion. I started clicking on NPCs to find Rogue Gondywyr, but instead, she "approached" me (a message came up with no visible NPC) when I clicked on the bartender. She offered me 57 gold pieces to take a dagger to the Restless Ogre. "If it isn't [there] by Sundas, 6th of Hearthfire, my life ain't going to be worth a copper," she said. That's tomorrow.

   

I did the quest, and besides the 57 gold pieces, it gave me enough experience for Level 4. It's hard to imagine that it's going to be worth it to do too many of these, though. 

       

Yeah, walking from one building to another really took a lot out of me.

      

I got some interesting responses to asking about Fang Lair:

   

• Chrystyna Ashham, the interpreter: "There ain't no such thing!"

• Agrane Yeomford, the historian: "Isn't that just a legend?" 

• Ysyn Hearthston, the cook: "No one's heard of that in the past 500 years." That seems like a paradox.

• Mordyval Gaersley, one of the personal priests of King Rodore: "I honestly have no idea. Try someone else. Maybe they can help." I wonder what King Rodore is the king of. 

• Morgorya Hearthwing, the thief: "You wouldn't be the first searching for that. Why don't you try somewhere in the cities of Hammerfell. I heard something happened there."

• Uthane Buckingcroft, the city-state historian: "Have you tried asking at a temple? They seem to know everything." I did, in fact, try asking at a temple, but I couldn't find any NPCs in the temples. Indoor NPCs don't really have dialogue options anyway; they just give you one line. 

• "Try the local inn. Tales are flying back and forth about something unearthed in the province of Hammerfell. Maybe you should check there." 

            

Rochester looking dapper in his full suit of leather.

       

After typing all of that, I realized that the same NPC will give you all potential responses to a location if you just keep re-selecting the same dialogue option. They never seem to kick you out of the conversation, unlike NPCs in some other games we could mention. 

   

I got my answer about the king when I double-clicked on a gate (thinking it was the gate out of town) and found myself in the king's audience chamber and saw King Rodore before me. "It is well known that Shornhelm is currently at peace with its neighbor, North Point." Part of me wonders if even that is procedurally generated. The king had nothing to say to me except to suggest I explore the surrounding wilderness. "You may come back with something useful." 

        

Approaching the king.

       

We'll have more about the calendar and time system later, but for now, suffice to say that time doesn't pass too quickly in the game—about 12 minutes of game time for each minute of real time. I did all of this in one day and had time to spare. If I hadn't been leaving the game window to type this entry, I might never have experienced nighttime.

     

The world started to get darker starting at 17:00. By 19:00, there was no light except in an immediate radius around me. At 20:00, hostile enemies start appearing on the streets. At first, I thought, cha-ching!, but it turns out they're a bit tough for a Level 4 character. 

      

What's even the point of having a walled city?

       

Miscellaneous notes on the town:

      

• NPCs stop and face you when you get close. They stay stationary until you walk away from them. That's a refreshing contrast to a lot of games, where you have to chase them down. 

• NPCs indoors don't have the full set of dialogue options. They just shout one line at you. Most of them are rude.

    

Personality is my worst attribute.

      

• If you find a location on your own, the automap does not record it. You have to type it in. [Ed. Or right-click on the shop door. Thanks, Karth.]

• There's a haggling mechanic in shops, but as with many games, I'm not sure it's worth the time. One side effect is that even if you don't haggle, you have to accept the sale price of items twice, which is a little annoying.

• There's also a damage/repair system, but the armorers want multiple days to fix even slight amounts of damage. I have to spend the week in an inn just to get my longsword sharpened? 

           

Good thing time passes slowly in the emperor's prison.

      

I spent the night at an inn; no rumors about Hammerfell, no matter what the NPCs said. You can book rooms in quality from a "single" (10 gold, at least in this case) and an "emperor's suite" (75 gold). You hit the "camp" button and appear in the room automatically. All the rooms look alike, but I guess the amount you pay affects the quality of rest and the number of hit points you restore.

        

This "emperor's suite" needs some work.

        

In the morning, I headed for the exit. I hoped once I got outside, the automap would tell me where I was in the world, but it didn't—until I checked the manual and realized that you have to right-click on it to get the world map. I could have done that from within the town. It turns out that Shornhelm is in the middle of High Rock, home of the Bretons, one of the smaller provinces, which itself has 31 cities. Just for fun, I clicked on Skyrim, and damned if Whiterun, Riverwood, Riften, Windhelm, Winterhold, Dawnstar, Solitude, Markarth, and Dragon Bridge aren't all there, in roughly the locations you'd expect, in 1994. There are, I should add, lots of smaller towns that aren't in The Elder Scrolls V (e.g., Black Moor, Graniteshaft, Dunstad Grove, Laintar Dale), but you could chalk that up to 200 years having passed and smaller cities being abandoned or renamed.

       

My current location.

        

Commenters have told me—and I have no reason not to believe them—that you cannot walk from one city to another in Arena no matter how long you're willing to spend. Each city in this game is apparently like a planet in Starfield, with an infinite amount of procedurally generated landscape around it. On the province map, there's a road heading southeast from Shornhelm that goes to a village called Markwasten Moor. In the real world, there's no road. I walked southeast from the city for about 10 minutes and passed plenty of trees, buildings, NPCs, inns, fenced-in fields, walled compounds, and ponds. I even got onto something that looked like a road at some point. But the automap continued to place me solidly in Shornhelm.

      

Wandering outside of the city.

         

There were oddly no monsters in the wilderness. Maybe they only come out at night, like in the towns? I know there are random dungeons, but I (without trying very hard) didn't find any. I'll explore at least one or two random dungeons at some point, but for now I clicked on Hammerfell and deliberately chose one of the smaller towns (Riverpoint) rather than a large city. The game said it would take 13 days to travel there, but there's no cost to travel in Arena, no food to worry about, and no chance of disease, drowning, or other calamities on the road. Saying all that makes it sound like I'm taking a dig at Star Trail, but I'm honestly not. Those survival elements can be fun, too. It's amazing how much variety we get under the large umbrella of "CRPGs."

        

Most people online seem to think The Elder Scrolls VI will be set in Hammerfell. I'm still hoping for (but not expecting) Akavir.

        

Before I wrap up: a commenter sent me a link to a translation of the French version of the Arena manual. It has a lot more detail on the backstory, to wit:

     

• Talin's last name is Warhaft. 

• Jagar Tharn used to be head of the Elder Council.

• He couldn't just kill Emperor Uriel because Uriel had used the Amulet of Kings to cast a spell that would alert all of his imperial guards if he died.

• The heir at this time is Uriel's daughter, Princess Ariella Septim. One wonders what happened to her between this backstory and the beginning of Oblivion. During that game's prologue, Uriel mentions that his sons are dead, but he doesn't say anything about a daughter. 

• It was Talin Warhaft who accidentally gave Tharn the idea to replace the emperor. During a banquet, Talin recounted a story in which he and his friend, Marten the Blade, were threatened by bandits. Marten cast an illusion spell to make himself look like the bandits' leader.  

       

I was about to post a fan theory that the "Marten" of this story later entered a holy order and became the "Brother Martin" of Oblivion, but the story makes it clear that Marten was older than Martin, and that he had a son and retired. Still, one wonders why all this good material was cut from the English versions of the manual. 

       

Time so far: 3 hours