Revisiting: Adventure Construction Set/Rivers of Light (1984) (Won!)

The title screen from the original C64 version.

Rivers of Light
United States

An adventure that was created with, and accompanies, the Adventure Construction Set

Stuart Smith (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher)

Released 1984 for Commodore 64 and Apple II; 1986 for Amiga; 1987 for DOS
Date Started: 27 October 2010
Date Ended: 6 September 2015

Total Hours: 13

Reload Count: 4 in this last session; wasn't keeping track in 2010

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 34

Ranking at Time of Posting: 66%

Raking at Game #437: 307/437 (70%)

It's rare that I return to a game that I've already abandoned and rated, but if any piece of software is worth some additional attention, it is Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set and its accompanying adventure, Rivers of Light. I blogged about it in my awkward, often-confused first year, when I still thought the primary purpose of my blog was to have fun personally. Looking at the posts now, I can't believe that 9 months into the project, my DOSBox screenshots still had title bars. What was I using to take the shots? ALT-PRNTSCR? Jesus.

I'm returning to the game not because I didn't fully document it--I made up for the part I didn't play with text and screenshots from a YouTube player's winning session--but because I didn't understand its historical context. I was playing Stuart Smith's last game without having played any of his prior ones.

Prior to Adventure Construction Set, Smith's series consisted of Fracas (1980), Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1981), and The Return of Heracles (1983; links to my reviews). Each of the games is reasonably enjoyable as an RPG, but there's something more--a certain zest, a joyful irreverence--that is difficult to describe in writing and in rating scales like my GIMLET. Part of their charm is their frenetic pace. You don't have a lot of time to pause and think in a Smith game--not with 40 thieves, Greek villains, or other potential enemies wandering freely through the landscape and attacking at any moment. Combat in the games is a true "fracas"--not much strategy, but lots of fun as you and your enemy exchange blows and are often interrupted by other NPCs deciding to join the battle. Death is frequent and often random, but the games are short enough that you almost don't mind. Plus, both Ali Baba and Heracles let you play multiple characters, either concurrently or consecutively.

My character explores the Fertile Crescent in Rivers of Light.

A lot of other features characterize Smith's games: a foundation in classical mythology rather than Tolkienesque high fantasy (though this doesn't stop hobbits from appearing in Ali Baba!); cooperative or competitive multi-player options; rapid changes in scale from campaign level to room level; hidden, one-way, and otherwise often confusing portals between screens; and limited reliance on traditional RPG inventories and mechanics. In fact, it's hard to detect the influence of any previous CRPGs on Smith's series. Except for a few nods to the tabletop RPG genre in some of the attributes, you could easily imagine that Smith never played an RPG in his life.

Perhaps the most notable element of the Smith games is the way that they handle NPCs and monsters--which are essentially the same thing. There are no generic orcs or goblins in the games; each creature that occupies the world is named and has a specific set of equipment and statistics. Each belongs to a particular faction as well, and monsters of opposing factions will attack each other. Fracas allowed monsters to level-up by killing each other. I don't think the other two had this mechanic, but NPCs and monsters in all games can pick up gold and equipment. A few of them are confined to their starting screens, but a lot more have the run of the map. You could play the three games without fighting a single foe--instead, just watching as other NPCs wander along and mop up the enemies in your path.

Rats ignore my character and decide to steal grain instead.

Given how much Smith's games differ from traditional CRPGs, it's ironic that he would create the first graphical RPG construction set. (Technically, the all-text Eamon was first.) Numerous Internet pages claim that he was inspired by Pinball Construction Set (1983), but in a comment on my blog, Smith said that he'd never heard of that game; that instead, he was inspired by his previous work on an accounting program that would automatically write a report-generating program. However, in naming Smith's game, Electronic Arts was clearly referencing its previous title.

Adventure Construction Set came with two adventures: The Land of Aventuria and Rivers of Light. The former, written by EA's Don Daglow, is a set of mini-adventures that walks the player through the capabilities of the set. But Rivers of Light is a full-fledged game, based on The Epic of Gilgamesh, requiring some creativity and a good 8-10 hour investment. My previous attempt at the game ended after 8 hours, when--at least 3/4 of the way through the game--I came to an area called "Two-Hero Valley" in which you need--you guessed it--two heroes to open the way forward. I declined to roll up a second character and get him all the way to that point, although it later turned out that it wouldn't have been as hard as I thought.

A screen from the Land of Aventuria. My character icon is an axe.

  
I still don't know what other CRPGs or adventure games influenced Smith, but in the Rivers of Light, we can see him making some concessions to them, such as respawning of random creatures and a more standard set of RPG statistics and RPG inventory. Some monsters still roam freely across screens and attack each other (as well as you), but in a less frenetic, unpredictable way than in the previous games. There's a clear distinction here between monsters and NPCs; the latter are immobile and can't be attacked. They just wait until you walk into their square and then offer some dialogue on title cards.

A late-game character sheet in Rivers of Light.

Rivers of Light is stronger than the other games in its mythological basis. Ali Baba was loosely based on Arabian myth, and Return of Heracles was loosely based on Greek myth, but neither game was afraid to introduce characters and themes from other traditions. Rivers is more firmly in Mesopotamia, and as the character walks the path of Gilgamesh, he must contend with some of the same foes (Humbaba, Shedu), meet some of the same NPCs (Utnapishtim, Urshanabi), and solve some of the same puzzles, like using cedar poles to cross the Waters of Death.

Meeting the Sumerian Noah.

Consistent with the era, a sword made of iron is fantastically rare and the best melee weapon in the game, and barley serves as the game's currency.

Rivers of Light begins.

      

Rather than recap all my earlier posts, I'll just quickly summarize. In choosing the character icon, the player can select any of the game's tiles, including monsters, equipment, and terrain. After the player gives a name, the game randomly generates constitution, wisdom, strength, and dexterity statistics.

Missile skill, melee skill, armor skill, dodge skill, and parry skill are all attributes that increase as you successfully use them. This is not the first time we've seen that dynamic, but it's still pretty rare for the era. Encumbrance is an issue, with every item you carry reducing the length of your turn.

A character with a skeleton icon starts the game.

          

There is an impressive variety of monsters throughout the game, some fixed, some random, including bulls, trolls, rats, asps, bandits, master thieves, ghosts, alligators, bats, and scorpion men. In one notable place, you have to fight a clone of your own character, equipment and all.

The game's action takes place between Mesopotamia and Egypt, in locations like Great Assur, Ashurbanipal's Great Library of Knowledge, and the great pyramid at Gizeh. As he explores, the player gets a number of clues and items necessary to solve puzzles in other areas. The game culminates on an island in the middle of the Nile river, where the player must use his assembled items, powers, and clues to pass through three gates and encounter the spirit of the god Osiris.

Preparing to cross the Sinai peninsula, Chester stocks up on water.

       
As I said, I was mostly there back in 2010, but I got annoyed in Two Hero Valley, thinking I'd have to build up another character until he was strong enough to make his way across the Sinai Peninsula and join the primary hero. Some commenters alerted me to a "shortcut," but I still didn't think it was worth it and declined to return to the game.

Getting "Helper" over here took a trivial amount of time.

         
Little did I know that the shortcut was laughably close to the start of the game. This time around, it took less than 2 minutes to create a character and bring her over to Two Hero Valley. There weren't even any combats on the way. I can't believe I gave up that easy in 2010.

Approaching the final area, Chester uses a "power" to quench the fire.

   

Given that your goal is eternal life, the endgame text is a little disappointing:

You have found the "sealed thing in darkness with fire about it." The essence of Osiris himself rejuvenates you. You can feel a new body forming about your disembodied spirit, bringing your seven souls back together from their wanderings.

Rapturously entertained by a chorus of your past lives giving a joyful rendition of your life and struggles, you are taken to a land of milk and honey where you are born again. Wiser now, you may retire with honor or move onward to more adventuring.

On the next screen, the character reappears in the Fertile Crescent and can run around fighting random combats or be saved to the disk for other Adventure Construction Set scenarios.

Better than the DOS prompt.

   

I gave the game a 30 on my GIMLET back in 2010. Reading over my comments, I want to make a couple of adjustments. I gave it only 1 point for the economy, reasoning "there's not much to buy," but that isn't quite true. The game does a good job duplicating some quest items among the shops and giving you backups for weapons that break or are lost. It's still not a great economy, but it's worth at least 2 points. Gameplay, meanwhile, deserves a bump from 3 to 4; on my replay, I found it just about the right challenge and length. Moving NPC interaction from 2 to 3 would be more consistent with how I've rated things since then, and the quest deserves 3 rather than 2 points for its originality. That raises the score to 34, a couple points higher than The Return of Heracles, which makes more sense.

The game's approach to buying and selling items is a little odd and cumbersome.

      
Aside from Rivers of Light, it's worth discussing how well Adventure Construction Set serves as an RPG maker. The answer is that while it serves reasonably well for 1984, it would have gotten outdated very quickly. The interface is quite bad, requiring (in the DOS version) the player to constantly hit the INS key to acknowledge messages and choose commands. (In the C64 version, the joystick serves as the sole input and is no less cumbersome.) The inventory system is under-developed: it has a single armor slot and a single weapon slot, the latter constantly switching between melee and missile weapons. The magic system is also bare-bones, with spells appearing as items.

But it was popular enough at the time. Ported to four platforms, the construction set generated enough enthusiasts that they formed a club, published a newsletter, and reviewed and traded adventures. It's hard to find many of them now. An ACS fan page that wants to catalog all user-created adventures has only 10 of them, almost all for the Commodore 64.

Every ACS adventure starts with an introductory title card.

 

I spent a little while on one of them: The Hobbit, by Neil Tiedemen. The description promises to replicate the book. It started predictably in the Shire, with Gandalf as a nearby NPC. I played for a while, but I was confused when I was attacked by another hobbit and had to kill him.

Where are the dwarves?

     
Later, I got trapped between a troll and a skeleton and I was killed. It seemed like it would have been a serviceable enough game, but I wasn't motivated to restart.

This didn't end well.

Contemporary reviews of the Adventure Construction Set were somewhat bad. The rudest comes from (naturally) a British C64 magazine called ZZAP!64, which made fun of the graphics and lack of sound and called it "a waste of time and money." The mystery of the review comes from the beginning of that sentence, which is, "Compared with programs already available for writing your own adventures...." What programs is the reviewer talking about that existed in 1985?

Much later, in 1989, Orson Scott Card wrote a Compute! article in which he called ACS's adventures "quite playable" but opined that the interface "was designed by the Kludge Monster from the Nethermost Hell." The best review comes from Scorpia, in the February 1989 Computer Gaming World, who extensively discusses the set's flexibility in things like graphic editing and monster behavior, but complains that even a simple project can take a long time to create.

Good or bad, Adventure Construction Set was all we had for a while. Barring some discovery based on the ZZAP!64 quote above, I think the next RPG creation kit was 1991's Bard's Tale Construction Set, followed by Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures (1993). If lists I can find online are exhaustive, there aren't really that many of them. That makes Smith's contribution all the more notable.

Unfortunately, it was his last game. Seeking financial stability, he moved on to other industries in the late 1980s. He left us a small but unique set of titles, and I'm glad I had the chance to play and talk about them all.

Constructing an Adventure: ACS Addendum

Alas, version 1.0 of this promising adventure was canceled in pre-production.

We CRPG fans like to complain about the cookie-cutter nature of many CRPG plots, which almost all involve starting off killing rats and progress to some big bad trying to take over the world. But the truth is, coming up with an original CRPG plot is hard. There are only a few that pull it off very well: Ultima IV, maybe some of the Might & Magic titles, Baldur's Gate II.

This is why I got excited about Bourbon Street Tango, the adventure I decided I would construct using the Adventure Construction Set. I started thinking about it when I saw that ACS offered a "spy/mystery" builder set. There are so few CRPGs set in the modern day, I figured I'd build one using New Orleans, 2010, as my canvas.

 

I worked out a fairly cool plot line involving terrorism. I don't want to say more, lest I decide to develop it using a different builder, but let's just say that downtown NOLA was going to be cut off from the rest of world and rife with bad guys. Fortunately, ACS provides an option for this:

"KGB agent." Isn't that cute?

One of the drawbacks of setting a CRPG in the "real world" is a lack of magic, right? Well, I had that covered. This is New Orleans, after all. My idea was that to solve the main quest, the protagonist was going to have to get into the heart and soul of the city, learning about jazz, Cajun cuisine, and of course voodoo! Why shoot terrorists when you can hex them?

A lot of the work that goes into constructing an adventure in ACS has to do with creating a gameworld and editing the terrain. My idea was to reconstruct the French Quarter, with entrances to the various clubs and shops.

I was about this time that I realized that the interface for Adventure Construction Set, while groundbreaking in its era, was far too much a pain in the neck for the modern gamer; that if I kept working on this, I wouldn't get to my next CRPG for weeks; and that even if I finished it, all I would have to show for my efforts was a module for a mid-1980s CRPG that almost no one would play. There are some things that aren't even worth the historical curiosity value.

So I'm going to keep my notes, and keep working on the idea, but probably save it for a later toolset. I appreciate all of you who said you'd play if I made it, but constructing CRPGs isn't what I'm addicted to, and it's not why you all come and read this blog. Let's move on to Alien Fires: 2199 A.D.

Adventure Construction Set: No Eternal Life for Me

I will eat, drink, and be merry--forever!

Man, I was truckin' along pretty good there with "Rivers of Light." After last night's posting, I:

1. Found a secret door that led me to a weapon called Repeller:

 
2. Used said weapon to defeat Yam the dragon.

 

3. Got from Yam's corpse the third of three tablets I needed to figure out how to survive the endgame. Here they are crudely pieced together in Word:

 

4. Followed Gilgamesh's path o'er hill and dale, and through a poisoned lake (that's where the cedar poles came in handy) to meet none other than Utnapishtim, the Babylonian analog to Noah:

 
5. Followed Utnapishtim's instructions to get a mysterious plant called a "Gray Grow Young."


 

6. Hiked back across the Sinai Peninsula and explored some pyramids, including one that took me into a mysterious valley called "Two Hero Valley."

Unfortunately, the name of the Valley didn't turn out to be a metaphor. You see, Adventure Construction Set allows you to have multiple characters active in the game world at the same time. I didn't see any point to it, but now it's clear that it's the only way to win the game.

 

Maddictra is stuck in her side of the valley now, and I need a second hero to come along and open a passage on the other side. Regrettably, this means creating a second character, and building him up enough to get the equipment he needs to cross the Sinai Peninsula to meet up with Maddictra. Am I willing to invest that kind of time? If it was a better game, maybe. As it is, no.

I tried looking for a walkthrough, but "Rivers of Light" seems to be the exception to the rule that every game has one. The best I found--and this is actually quite good--is a series of YouTube videos made by user "I Played a Thing." He's playing on an Amiga, so the graphics look different (i.e., better), but the gameplay is identical. (For some reason, he has chosen to call his character "Fire" and has an icon representing fire.) He reaches my stuck point at 06:26 in the video below. His reaction is identical to mine: "That is some bull$&%, Rivers of Light!"

He was willing to do what I'm not: take the several hours to make a second character and haul him over to the valley, so if you want to see how it ends, keep watching his videos. The summary is that you work your way through a series of gates in a valley-cum-dungeon along the Nile, ultimately meeting the Egyptian god Osiris face-to-face in his tomb.

Stolen from "I Played a Thing's" video.

 
There, you are reunited with the souls of your seven past lives and "born again" in a "land of milk and honey," according to the text anyway. In the game itself, it appears you are kicked unceremoniously back into the Fertile Crescent with no further talk of eternal life.

Well, sorry I missed that for myself.

Let me do a quick GIMLET on this game: I give it 7 points for the game world; it's the only game I know that draws on Mesopotamian mythology, and it's quite well-researched at that. (In fact, I should add an addendum to my "What Have You Learned?" posting, 'cause this game really fleshed out my knowledge of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian pantheon.) Apparently, this was a common modus operandi for developer Stuart Smith, who also created Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves and Return of Hercules, neither of which I played because they didn't receive a DOS port.

Your presence doesn't do much in the game world, though--one character continues to whine about the various threats in Assur long after you've slain them all.

Chin up, buddy. You only have trolls to worry about!

Character creation is down at a 4; all you get to select is your name and icon during the creation process, but character development uses a fairly good skills-based system. NPC Interaction gets a 2; there are many NPCs, and you learn from them, but there is no "interaction" per se. Encounters are more interesting than you'd expect, with a variety of foes, some of whom flee when wounded. They respawn, allowing lots of opportunities for skill-building, but no real depth to the encounters. Let's say 4.

Magic doesn't exist, as such. You get spells, but they only work in limited circumstances to accomplish a particular thing; there are no real tactics to the combat, so we're going with a 2 on this category. There isn't much equipment in the game, and none of it is well-described. Having weapons and armor occasionally break is more annoying than challenging. The game is interesting for being one of the early ones to assign a weight-based movement statistic, but I wouldn't say this "adds" much to the game. I give it a 3.

The economy is based on barley, which you can't accumulate much of because it's too heavy, and there's not much to buy anyway (1); there are no side quests, just steps on a main quest that, while original, has no real fulfillment in the end. There's also only one potential outcome and no replayability (2). Graphics are not distractingly bad, but there's no sound, and at least for modern keyboards, the interface sucks (2).

The Fertile Crescent setting is unique, a least.

 

Finally, on gameplay, although you can theoretically explore the entire game map from the outset, in reality you need to visit the various cities and dungeons in a specific order to progress through the game. Until the moment it throws the "two heroes" curveball at you, the game is fairly easy but not overly so, and it is reasonably brief. But there is no replayability to it (3).

Final Score: 30. It was brief enough that I would have finished it if it hadn't been for the game's sudden surprise, but it wasn't enjoyable enough that I mind watching the end on someone else's video.

I'll play with the "construction" part of the software and then move on to Alien Fires.

*****

Nearly 5 years after abandoning the game because of "Two Hero Valley," I returned to it and won. I used the updated posting to discuss the totality of Stuart Smith's contributions. Read it here!

Rivers of Light: Western Civ Redux

I pity early players of this game, who didn't have Wikipedia.

Pull up your chairs, kids, and join me for a lesson in the history and mythology of Mesopotamia.

In my last posting, I was just getting acclimated to "Rivers of Light" and had solved my first series of quests. With the proceeds, I was able to buy my first armor, a "billowy shirt." I found a cache of bee honeycombs that each sold for 20 sacks of barley (the unit of currency in this game), with the drawback that I can only carry one at a time and have to fight a bear every time. Nonetheless, I collected and sold enough to outfit myself with a proper sword.

One of the game's several stores.

My swimming skill enabled me to cross the Tigris river to the city-state of Great Assur (which you may remember from high school as the capital of ancient Assyria).

I'm not sure trolls were part of Assyrian mythology.

A woodsman told me of several regional problems, including a statue of a winged bull that recently came to life, and a fearful beast called Humbaba. It's nice when all of your side-quests in a given area are announced at the outset. Other plaques and people nearby fleshed out the backstories of these three threats.

The winged bull statue turns out to have been a representation of Shedu, a Babylonian deity. Shamash, the God of Justice in Babylonia, brought it to life, and it flew off with the doorman to the Royal Library, along with the doorman's key. Shedu proved to be a bit difficult. It killed me a bunch of times before I decided to retire to the original area and boost my skills a bit before attempting it again. In the midst of this, I discovered that some "red clay clods" I had previously found actually boost your health significantly before battle. Using one of these, Shedu became a bit easier. Oddly, it respawned after I killed it, but I didn't need to fight it again since I had found on the first corpse the Royal Key.

Humbaba is mentioned in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh as a giant guarding the Cedar Forest who is slain by the hero. The first few times I approached him, he killed me with a spell, but after I received a sun amulet from the god Shamesh by leaving some bee honey on his altar, I was able to kill him, and I got a cedar pole in return. No idea what this is about.

The dragon is called Yam, a Canaanite god of river and sea. According to Wikipedia, he is associated with storms and storm-related disasters. Although not specifically described as a dragon in Canaanite mythology, Wikipedia says his analog in Babylonian mythology is Tiamat, who of course becomes a dragon in Dungeons & Dragons mythology. A plaque in the game told me he could only be defeated through a "weapon of Sir Adroit and Cunning's." Having no idea where to find this, I was forced to move on.

In the library--which turned out to be none other than Assyrian King Assurbanipal's Great Library of Knowledge (which still survives today as a ruin in Nineveh)--I exchanged the Royal Key for a spell called "Shabrir Begone" and some of my grain for a broken tablet, which read: "To pass the first gate, one must take a regal key to the glyph room. There one must... [the rest garbled]." More important, I read a series of tapestries recording messages from the great god Ea that heretics have stolen "three great shapes" and used them "as profane keys of passage through a mysterious trio of gates." There's also a note about Gilgamesh, who was seeking the secret of immortality himself to heal his friend Enkidu; and also one about Utnapishtim, who saved humanity from the Great Flood and now lives forever. Sounds like I'm getting closer to my quest!

In the Arabian Desert, I killed a bandit and took his camel, which allowed me to cross the Sinai peninsula into Egypt. Crossing the Sinai Desert meant staying constantly hydrated, which was tough because the water along the way was possessed by Shabriri demons; fortunately, I had the "Shabriri Begone" spell from the library and was able to force them to take physical form and kill them.

On the other side of the Sinai, I found the great pyramid at Gizeh, rife with thieves who stole everything not nailed down, including my camel.

The pyramid held so many references to different mythologies (including a pre-Mummy shout-out to Imhotep) that even I got sick of looking them up on Wikipedia. This is where I left the game for the night.

Two notes on gameplay, though, that I missed to tell you in my first posting on Adventure Construction Set: first, there are two types of weapons, melee and missile. For melee weapons, I've gone through a large bone, a flint knife, a sword, and now an iron sword. For missile weapons, I've found rocks and bows. You have an associated skill with each that increases as you score hits.

Second, this is the first game I know (although I'm probably just forgetting one) to attach a weight to the items in your inventory. There's a little "movement" bar on the left-hand side of the screen that gets shorter as you carry more stuff. Eventually, you can't move unless you drop some of it. Unfortunately, it counts your barley (the game's currency) as weight, so you can't get too rich.

My melee skill has already maxed out at 100, which is a good sign that the game isn't going to last that much longer. If the next post is a "Won!" you'll know I was right.

Game 29: Adventure Construction Set (1984)

Tintagel?

It turns out I'm about three years off on this one. My general rule is to play games in order of their original publication, not in order of their DOS release. In this case, I mis-coded the game in my master spreadsheet. It probably worked out for the best because it's not on Wikipedia's list, meaning I would have missed it on the first pass and probably would have relegated it to one of my July "backtracking" posts. Now I can give it the proper attention.

The primary purpose of Adventure Construction Set is to allow prospective dungeon masters to create their own CRPGs and offer them up to their friends. According to Wikipedia's entry on the software, it was inspired by the Pinball Construction Set from 1983. ACS was first released for the Commodore 64 in 1984; the DOS version (which I'm playing) came out in 1987. Its age shows after three years, unfortunately, as the interface is a bit clumsy and the commands and graphics not nearly as robust as some of the other 1987 CRPG offerings.

We have yet to see a spy/mystery CRPG in this blog.

I wouldn't normally play Adventure Construction Set as part of this blog except that it came pre-packaged with at least one pre-made adventure called "Rivers of Light." I say "at least one" because all of the other write-ups mention only "Rivers of Light," while the main menu seems to offer a second one called "Land of Aventuria." I'll check that out after I finish "Rivers of Light."

You press INS to continue a lot in this game.

"Rivers of Light" involves nothing less than the quest for eternal life--no pretense about making the world a better place for this PC. The character creation process is a bit odd: you can select your character's icon from a large variety of different warriors, wizards, monsters, and objects, but you don't get to customize anything about his or her attributes; the game rolls these automatically for you.

Some of the available character icons.

You begin with no equipment in the middle of a colorful landscape in what I suppose is the Fertile Crescent. (Those must be the Tigris and Euphrates rivers running by the cities of...Baghdad and...um...Ur?) The annoying aspect to the interface is that you have to keep hitting the INSERT key where you would normally expect to type ENTER. I'm sure this was optimized for some early IBM keyboard, but it doesn't work well with my laptop. One would think I could edit the DOSBox keyboard mapper to help me with this problem, but I seem to be having issues with it. I'm sure I'll figure it out.

The game is organized into a series of screens. You transition between screens via little "cave" icons. Fairly quickly in my adventures, a series of related quests became clear: a hunter has lost his statue of the Mother Goddess and needs a replacement; an old woman in a cave will fashion a likeness of the Mother Goddess if I drop an animal bone on her altar; a nearby troll wields an animal bone as a weapon.

Putting all of this together yields the acquisition of "swimming skill" from the hunter, allowing me to swim across rivers. Oddly, this skill appears in your inventory as an "object" that you "use."

As you kill creatures, move about, and solve quests, your various skills increase. I was recently lauding 2400 A.D. for offering the first skills-based character progression that I'd seen, but I guess Adventure Construction Set beat it by a few years. Your life force (hit points) regenerates as you move around.

In the first hour of gameplay, I haven't died, and my dress-clad female PC, armed with a flint knife, has managed to do her share of ass-kicking, but a comment a reader left on a previous game leads me to expect an increase in difficulty soon. So far, the best I can say about the game is that it's "inoffensive." I don't expect a title marketed primarily as an adventure-builder to yield major rewards in the single-player campaign department, but who knows? Maybe it'll turn out to be a spiritual ancestor to Neverwinter Nights.

Here's a question for you: if I take the time to develop a little adventure using the Adventure Construction Set, will any of you download the game and play it? Or would it just be a waste of time?