Enchantasy: Half and Half

These battles are getting harder and harder.

     

As I start this entry, it's been almost three weeks since I've played the game. That's never a good situation to be in. When I play games for pleasure, I routinely drop them entirely if too long passes between sessions, a fate that befell Baldur's Gate III a couple of months ago (although I did get far enough to have technically "won" the game, if you regard a certain bad ending as "winning"). With Enchantasy, there's the additional difficulty of not really being sure what to do next.

   

To recap, the main character--a magician's apprentice named Chester--and his friends have been tasked by the Mages' Guild with the recovery of the Eternal Grimoire, before the forces of darkness can find it. Ancillary quests include figuring out where the forces of darkness are coming from and finding the missing prince so that his uncle Hawthorne can't seize the throne.

   

I start in the city of Portsmith. Looking over my quest list, I decide it's ridiculous I haven't rescued the missing Joey from the dungeons of Keldar, and I resolve to grind until I'm strong enough to do that. 

     

Blasting a ghost with a lightning bolt.

       

We march back and forth for a couple of hours in front of the city, fighting all monster groups, usually killing them with arrows before they reach us in melee combat (although some of them have spells or missile weapons of their own). I was just talking about how I hate archers in most games, but I guess I make an exception for my own party. There are a lot of games in which missile weapons make combat a bit too easy--Baldur's Gate comes to mind--but Enchantasy does it well, first by limiting your arrow stock to 99 (and, honestly, even that is a lot for four people to carry) and second by making arrows so expensive. In all the time I spent grinding, I went nowhere financially. Every gold piece I earned went back to arrows.

    

We gain a few levels and spend the training points. I put everything Chester earns into "Magic," while Jared (fighter) and Rodell (ranger) alternate between "Weapon" and "Bow." I mostly favor fighting skills for Shyra (thief), too. Eventually, I'm going to have to prioritize "Lockpick," "Language," and maybe even "First Aid," but for now I'm just trying to get over this hump.

    

Feeling stronger, we return to the Keldar dungeon . . . and the cursed rats are gone. The first enemy group we face is a hodgepodge of foes, including invisible sprites, which I've come to hate. But what happened to the rats? You may recall that in a previous entry, I defeated them with three characters dead and decided to reload. It's possible that the game stores enemy status separately from party status, though, and it had already marked the rats as cleared. I'll have to test that later with another fixed encounter.

      

What we find instead of the cursed rats.

      

All the other enemies we face in the dungeon are far easier than the rats, so we make swift progress, although we have to return to town for arrows a couple of times.

   

We find a lot of barrels and chests with minor treasures (keys, food, a little gold), some behind secret doors or walls that we have to blast with dynamite. You can discern these special walls via subtle changes in the wall pattern, but another way is to cast "See Secrets," which shows you everything worth investigating in the immediate area.

     

This shows me that the chest has something in it and there's a secret area to my east.

    

One wall that we open with dynamite takes us to a chest with a copper shield. Excited, I throw away one of my wooden shields, only to find that no one is strong enough yet to equip the copper one.

   

There's another thief in this dungeon, willing to sell lockpicks and train the "Lockpick" skill. Incidentally, I figure out the little lockpicking "game," but it's hard. To succeed at lockpicking, you have to randomly stop three tumblers by hitting a key. The tumblers stop on numbers between 1 and 99, and they move too fast to time exactly where they stop. You need all three numbers to be below a certain value, depending on your "Lockpick" skill, I guess. I don't know what the specific value needed is for a skill of 4 or 5, which is what I have during this session, but the only time I'm successful at lockpicking, all three tumblers had values less than 25. The odds of getting three values in a row that low are less than 2%. Fortunately, keys always work when lockpicks fail.

      

The numbers are too high and I fail.

        

We do not find Joey. We do find a teleporter to another dungeon. At this point, my assumption is that the teleporters connect different dungeons all across the game world and they're primarily a means of transportation, so it doesn't occur to me that Joey might have gone through this one, particularly since you're supposed to need a "Telegem" to open it. Instead, I waste time returning to Keldar and re-talking to everyone about JOEY and casting "See Secrets" in every house in the city.

      

Using a Telegem on a teleporter.

      

Finally, I return to the dungeon and use a Telegem at the teleporter. We're taken to an isolated section of dungeon with no outlet, so that kills my theory about the teleporters existing for transportation. We fight more battles, running out of arrows and resorting to fully melee combat (except for Chester with his power sling and spells). Incidentally, when you attack an enemy with a melee weapon and miss, the game shows an animation of him dodging out of the way. This is another thing that the author took, I think, from The Magic Candle series.

    

Behind a locked door, we find a sort-of "academy" in which every battle is with a group of "dark cadets." A chest holds a return Telegem.

      

They do not attack one at a time.

      

Finally, we come to a door with someone crying and calling for help behind it. It's Joey!

       

How you doin'?

    

He thanks us for his rescue and runs off, saying he can find his way home. It's always a bit unrealistic when NPCs do this, but I'm so thankful that I don't have to escort them that I let it go.

    

Back in Keldar, Joey's mother gives us 25 gold pieces and some experience points. Finally, a quest solved!

     

Note Joey standing next to her.

      

Now that I know better how dungeons work, and particularly the uses of "See Secrets," I decide to search the dungeon at Macino again for the burglar Blaze. It's mostly a waste of time. There's still a door that no lock or pick will open (including my skeleton key), so maybe he's behind there. I do find a secret passage I had previously missed, but it just leads to a chest with a broadsword, which none of my characters can lift.

    

Back in Macino, I decide to take another round of the city, asking about Blaze and searching for, I don't know, a key to the locked door or something. Most people still insist that he's in the dungeon; but Worrell still thinks that he's dead and buried on a small island.

        

Worrell sticks to his story.

      

On the west side of town, behind a locked door that I never opened during previous visits (a sign outside says "Closed for Repairs"), I find a ladder down to an alternate section of the dungeon. It dumps me in a room with a single battle and no apparent exits, but I soon find a secret door on the north wall. That leads to a room with another locked door--that won't open to keys, picks, or even my skeleton key. Maybe I need a higher lockpicking skill to even try? I don't know. I have to give it up for now.

      

My excitement was short-lived.

     

My re-exploration of Macino does produce, in a healer's treasure chest, an ointment. I've found plenty of medicines, salves, and potions, but no ointment until now. I know someone who's been asking for one--a sick woman back in Keldar. She gives us a Telegem (yay) for it but also enough experience for a couple of characters to rise a level. I go to the training center next door and train Chester in another magic level, and guess what spell comes with it? "Unlock Magic." Alas, this does not turn out to be the solution to either of the locked doors in Macino, and I end up wasting another trip to that city.

       

I wonder where Rick Abel got the idea for all of these side quests. It certainly wasn't from Ultima V or The Magic Candle.

        

Looking over my quest list, I decide to head next to the Forest of No Return, south of Keldar, where I'm looking for a magic horn. This is the first time in the game that I've done any serious non-city, non-road exploration. Consulting the map, I follow the road from Keldar to where it ends after crossing a river. I follow the coast south, stopping at two wells. One poisons all of us and the other gives us +5 temporary armor class. 

   

The forest turns out to be a maze (as the name suggests) with a precise path. The accumulation of combats forces us to turn back to Keldar for arrows and healing several times. At first I try fleeing from most of the battles, but it turns out you lose 5 experience points every time you retreat.

      

I'm ready for combat.

    

At length, we come to a hut in the middle of the forest. Inside, we find the body of Mage Riddick, a Council member. Among his belongings, we find 15 gold, a hunter sling (better than my power sling, it seems), and 3 food. A well in his back yard fully heals us. 

      

Rudimon told me about this, but I can't believe they just left his body here.

       

We finish the forest maze but find nothing else that leads us to the magic horn. Perhaps Riddick had it and it was stolen when he was murdered, or perhaps I need to go through the entire thing again, searching every stump and pile of dirt.

    

Towards the end of this session, I realize I've been under-utilizing my mage. Part of the problem is that maximum spell points are so low that you can only cast a handful of offensive spells per battle. On the other hand, magic potions are so cheap that I should probably fill my inventory with them every time I'm in town. I recently got some mass-damage spells for the first time: "Lightning Storm" and "Flame Frenzy." Battles are definitely getting harder, scaling with my party's leveling, so I need to start increasing my firepower.

       

I can cast three of these before having to sleep and recharge.

      

I still like the game a lot, but man I wish I didn't keep running into walls. When an NPC in Ultima V said you'd find something at a particular place, you damn well found it there, and without a lot of fuss. At least Joey is finally free.

   

Time so far: 16 hours

What's on Draft?

Since the beginning of the year, I've managed to post every 2.5 days according to my usual schedule, alternating two primary games, every fifth post could be anything. But I've been away for the last two weeks, and while I did manage to get most of those two weeks pre-scheduled, it's all fallen apart here at the end. My flight home from New Orleans was a mess--I ended up having to drive from New York to Bangor--and I've been behind the curve ever since.

     

I went combing through my drafts to see if there was anything I could whip together. (Spoiler: I didn't find anything, and I ended up writing this entry on drafts.) Here’s what I have, in roughly descending order of recency:

     

• One paragraph on Syndicate.

• One paragraph on Enchantasy.

• Four paragraphs on Betrayal at Krondor. I stopped when I decided to read the books first.

• About 1,600 words on Wizardry: Curse of the Ancient Emperor for the Game Boy. I began playing it back in April when I wanted a Wizardry fix. I've gotten through three levels, but I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it.

• A few paragraphs on Monster Combat (1980). I can't remember why I stopped writing about that one. Was it ever on my list? 

• A paragraph on Star Saga: Two - The Clathran Menace (1989). It came up on a random roll earlier this year, but I must have gotten distracted by something else.

• Part of an entry titled "The Most Criminal RPG." This was going to be a thought experiment about what game allows the player to commit the highest number of crimes as defined by the FBI's NIBRS offense categorization system. I do want to finish this someday.

       

Ha. Back in November, I started writing an entry called "The Halfway Point" in which I was going to announce a change to how I approach the master list. I guess I thought better of it. My justification of the title is interesting:

    

For a while, I've been regarding this year, and the impending 500th game, as the rough "halfway point" of my blog. In my mind, my list has always had about 1000 games; 1993 is about the halfway mark between the first year of CRPGs (1975) and the year I started the blog (2010); and if I keep blogging for exactly as much time as I've already blogged, I will wrap up at just about exactly when I turn 65 years old. There are a lot of holes to poke in this math--RPGs might have technically started in 1975 but weren't widely available until the 1980s; my list has closer to 2,000 entries these days; by the time I reach 2010, there will be another quarter-century of RPGs ahead of me, etc.--but I still can't shake the feeling.

     

In May 2023, I got pretty far into a post called "character tendencies" in which I wanted to start a discussion about the "default" character that we tend to play. I don't even remember writing this. I had identified eight characteristics that I see in the default character, including:

    

7. He hates archers. Cowards, hiding in the bushes and sniping away with their little bows instead of facing him man-to-man. If he has the opportunity, he attacks them first.

     

I almost whipped that one into shape for posting, but I didn't want to publish it with no graphics, and graphics always take the longest part of any entry. Continuing on:

• A December 2022 entry called "Axe" in which I went on about my new wood stove and how much I liked chopping wood for it. I worked most of the material into this Bloodstone entry, more than a year later.

• "Game 470: Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete." That didn't turn out to be Game 470, and I subsequently deleted Minotaur from my list entirely. I think that whatever I was using as a source no longer defined it as an RPG.

• "Game 462: Runestone (1985)." No idea.

• "Game XX: Phantasy Star (1987)." I was apparently prepared at some point to give a certain subset of readers what they wanted. I must have thought better of it.

           

I got nearly 2,000 words into "Game XX: Lamia (1987)." Most of those 2000 words are taken up by analyzing the game's opening screens and the chronology of UFO sightings that they offer. Representative sample:

    

1948.1    CAPTAIN THOMAS MONTEL OF THE U.S. AIRFORCE ENCOUNTERED A U.F.O. AND AFTER CHASING IT WITH HIS F51, HE CRASHED AND DIED BY UNKNOWN ORIGIN.

    

It was Captain Thomas F. Mantell, and he was with the Kentucky Air National Guard, and the reason for his crash and death is fairly well known, but otherwise, yeah. Some Kentucky Highway Patrol officers noticed a big round object in the sky and called over to Fort Knox. They already had a squad of F-51D Mustangs in the air, and they were ordered to check it out. They confirmed the object above them, but it was too high to safely approach without oxygen. Mantell insisted on going after it anyway, blacked out, went into a spiral, and crashed. Most skeptics today think they saw a Skyhook weather balloon.

    

I don't see any sign that I actually started playing the game. I'll have to get back to that one.

     

• A December 2021 entry in which I tried to analyze games' subtitles. Like, if the subtitle is longer than the main title, does it say anything about the game's quality? Why do we know some games more by their subtitles than their main titles? I probably stopped because it was boring as hell.

• "Shadows of Darkness: So You Don't Want to Be a Hero." This was going to cover the thief character, but I ran out of steam with the game. Hey--perfect example of what I was talking about with subtitles!

• The next entry in my Pool of Radiance replay that I abandoned. Honestly, when I started that series, I thought there would be more fun crossover facts between the CRPG and the module. There really weren't.
  

• "A CRPG Addict Goes Tabletop, Part 1: The Origins." Oh, I had an epic series planned back in 2021. I obtained all the original D&D books (including Chainmail) and was going to write about them in Part 1, then write about an actual tabletop session that I had lined up with a professional dungeon master. But the professional DM decided he didn't like me for political reasons and canceled the session. I've always meant to try again with someone saner.

• "Make Me Another." I didn't recognize that one. It wasn't about alcohol--it was about remakes. I was going to set down some Rules (e.g., "Improved graphics and sound are never a good reason to remake a game"). I must have lost interest.

• Two separate entries, four years apart and apparently completely ignorant of each other, about different magic systems in CRPGs.
  

• "America's Second-Greatest Gift: Character Development in RPGs, Part 1." My notes don't indicate what Part 2 was going to consist of, why I chose that master title, or what I thought America's first-greatest gift was. Oh--probably jazz.

• "Legends of Valour: Won!" No, it's not this entry; it's an earlier draft with different text. This actually happens a lot: I begin writing about a game and then later forget that I've already started an entry.

• "Revisiting: The Bard's Tale II: The Destiny Knight." I had plans going all the way back to 2020, apparently.

• "Game 384: Phalsberg (1986)." There's another one. I started that entry on 7 October 2020 but later published a different first entry in February 2022. Curse the duplication of effort!

• "Enchantasy: Quest for the Eternal Grimoire (1993)." Son of a bitch. I got 1,000 words into this back in 2017.

• "An Avatar talks politics." Oh, yeah. That would have been a good idea.

• A long tribute to Roger Ebert and how he had influenced my own reviews and writing. I started it just after he died in 2013 but failed to finish it while the moment was ripe.

• Entries started and abandoned for Destiny (1985), The Koshan Conspiracy (1992), Quest for Power (1981), Shadowkeep 1: The Search (1993), Super Tritorn (1986), Dragons Shard (1992), Sea Rogue (1992), Fountain of the Gods (1988), Enchantasy (1993), The Dark Wars (1991), Journey into Darkness (1986), Bronze Dragon (1985), and others. For some of these, I later posted real entries. Some I decided weren't RPGs and deleted them from the list. Some I was under no obligation to play in the first place. Some--who knows.
  

• "Bottoms Up!" A very old draft going all the way back to 2011 in which I waxed about the qualities of a gimlet and the difficulties involved in choosing your "default drink." Oh, and it looks like I also re-started an entry on the subject in 2015, titled, "My Limey, Limey Love" (bonus points to anyone who knows what song I was riffing on there). I have to level with you: there was a time in which I may have had a slight alcohol problem. Getting off the road all the time really helped with that.

• "Today's Graphics." This April 2014 draft was apparently inspired by a Reddit post in which someone asked what games should be remade with "today's graphics." The top-voted responses were from only a few years prior, which of course led me on a rant about how there was nothing wrong with the graphics of Morrowind (2002) in 2014. Of course, if someone posted the same question today, the top responses would probably be games like Skyrim and Fallout 4. 

• "Andrew and Me." Ah, the article I was planning to write about Andrew Schultz, King of the Walkthrough. That was all the way back in 2013. He responded to a bunch of interview questions, too. I feel like a dick for never publishing anything.

    

There are more, but--as you may remember--the whole reason I'm writing this ridiculous entry is that I'm pressed for time. So I'll leave you with a quote from a 2018 draft that is titled simply "Screw." I think I make a good point here even though I no longer remember why I was trying to make it:

A friend comes up to you and does the old spot-on-the-tie trick. You both get a chuckle. A stranger does it on the street, and you want to punch him. This is because you know what everyone instinctively knows: you have to earn the right to screw with people. You don't get to do it right at the outset. Andy Kaufman had to pay his dues on the circuit, and Saturday Night Live, and Taxi, before he could expect people to pay him for just being crazy. Joaquin Phoenix had to get successful at regular acting before he could make I'm Still Here. Whether he should have or not, John Romero could advertise an upcoming game by saying, "John Romero's about to make you his bitch." Imagine if a brand new developer tried that. And yet many of them, completely ignorant of the concept of "sweat equity," try to do exactly this. They want the world to reward their cleverness for composing "4'33"" without having to compose six regular albums first.

      

When I wrote that, I was in the middle of Sandor (1989) and Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. It's a probable 12-to-7 that I was ranting about David Bradley in some way, but I don't remember the specifics.

    

My sincerest apologies for this half-assed entry. I promise to return to the normal schedule on Friday with more on Enchantasy.

Brief BRIEFS: Doomcastle (1982), Hack Lite (1989), Time Warrior (1990)

      

Doomcastle

United States

Independently developed; published by Sunshine Software and Futura Software

Released 1982 for TI-99

Rejected for: Too much of a pain in the neck

     

This brief BRIEF is technically crossing a line that I haven't crossed in 14 years, but perhaps it's time. I cannot argue that Doomcastle is not an RPG, and I can't argue that I can't play it, as El Explorador de RPG not only played it but offered detailed instructions on how to play it. The issue is more that I'm not willing to follow those instructions, which involve downloading a gigabyte of files onto my computer and installing some new dashboard software, all to play a simple variant of Quest 1 that El Explorador already played in sufficient detail that I barely need to play it myself.

   

The game has a curious publication history. It was written by Samuel Pincus, an occasional editor of 99'er Home Computer magazine, who also wrote Starship Concord (1982) and Newton's Revenge (1983). Advertisements show it released by Sunshine Software of Hoffman Estates, Illinois, as early as March 1982 for $15.00. By the following year, it was being offered by Futura Software of Fort Worth, Texas, for $19.95. A 1984 TI-99 user's guide has it offered by "Ehninger Associates," which given its Fort Worth address is, I guess, just Futura under a new name.

          

An action shot, courtesy of El Explorador.

     

As El Explorador's coverage shows, the game involves a quest to recover 4 royal sapphires from a dungeon of 58 rooms. It has all of the features of this line of games, including a small number of monsters, each of which responds best to one of the game's combat options: melee, normal arrows, magic arrows, and holy water. This one adds a "death curse" to the list. Things happen in quasi-real time. Attributes are strength and dexterity. There's a shop to which you can retreat from the first room and stock up on items, plus purchase potions that permanently increase your attributes. You find treasures in the rooms. Yada yada yada. We've seen it all before with Quest 1 (1981), Super Quest (1983), Dragon Quest (1983), Dungeons, Dragons, and Other Perils (1984), and Cavequest (1985), not to mention the entire Dunjonquest line, of which these games are a simplification.

    

I don't know. If someone can find a .dsk version that I can play in Classic99, I might look at it. That isn't a challenge. I swear if the first comment is a link to one, or I get an email four hours after I post this, this blog is finished. Wait like three months, at least.

   

****

      

This is a DOS port of an Amiga adaptation of a mainframe variant of another mainframe game.

       

Hack Lite

AKA HackLite, later version known as Hack Lite II

United States

Independently developed; Home Brew Software (publisher)

Released 1989 for Amiga; continually updated into the 1990s; DOS version released in 1992.

Rejected for: Insufficiently distinguished from its base game

       

Look, I can't keep playing every roguelike out there. Compared to the world of RPGs at large, Moria and Rogue are basically the same game, let alone all the minute variances of Rogue, Hack, and Angband. A few new monsters and items of equipment do not make a brand new game.

   

This one has been on my list forever. I've attempted and failed to emulate the Amiga version in the past despite help from several commenters. I only recently found out that the Amiga version had been ported to DOS by the same author, Alan Beale of Raleigh, North Carolina.

       

Starting out as a gangster. Is a gat too much to ask for?

       

The name is a bit confusing, as it plays less like Hack (1984; link to my coverage) and more like an early release of NetHack (1987; link to the first version I covered); it has clearly taken some influence from the latter. We see it first in the character classes. Hack gave you six (cave-man, fighter, knight, spelelogist, tourist, and wizard); early versions of NetHack got up to 12 (archaeologist, barbarian, cave-man, elf, healer, knight, ninja, priest, samurai, tourist, valkyrie, and wizard); Hack Lite uses NetHack's list but adds "gangster." I guess the game is a bit more generous with equipment, as my gangster started with a Ring of Strength, a Ring of Regeneration, and a Ring of Fire Resistance.

MobyGames's summary indicates that the first version of Hack Lite didn't have these "enhancements" from NetHack, but I apparently stumbled on version 2. That means that the two versions of Hack Lite are likely more different from each other than Hack Lite is from NetHack..

        

The game is not kidding about the death screen looking nicer on the Amiga.

      

I couldn't really detect any differences in gameplay between Lite and NetHack. The keyboard commands seemed the same; the types of enemies I encountered on early levels and the types of equipment I found seemed the same. I had a little dog following me. The difficulty seemed about the same. There was some more color in this version of Lite, but nothing like the Amiga version, which replaces the ASCII characters with actual (if small graphics). I'm still trying to win NetHack 3.1 legitimately, though. I can't have every game focused on the Amulet of Yendor.

      

*****

    

I'm already confused.

        

Time Warrior

United Kingdom

Independently developed; published by Zenobi

Released 1991 for ZX Spectrum

Rejected for: No character attributes or development

     

This game is part of an ambitious but ultimately little-known fantasy universe by author Frank Oliver. It includes the self-published novels Axe: A Tale of Carthelion (1985) and Shades of Evil (1985), a 1987 graphical adventure game for the ZX Spectrum called Axe, this game, another Time Warrior that's either a port of this or a remake for the Amiga, several accompanying soundtracks, and a variety of short stories and re-issues of the two original books. If you want to try to straighten it out, have a look at the Shades of Evil web site, where most of the material is offered for free. 

      

You have to admire a book called Axe that puts a picture of a halberd on the cover.

        

I don't quite understand the common themes; I'm frankly not even sure that they're all part of the same universe. I started trying to untangle it but stopped when I saw that Time Warrior isn't really an RPG. It's a text adventure with occasional graphics in which the character has an inventory but no attributes or leveling.

      

The beginning of the game, I think.

     

The title screen is as confusing as the makeup of the so-called universe. I guess maybe Time Warrior was supposed to be a series title and this game was called Dark Staff. A second part called The Door to Knowledge was supposed to be released later, but I can't find any evidence that it was. I have no idea what the "Day of the Druiand" business at the top of the title screen is about.

     

I had trouble emulating the game so I didn't get very far. I was relieved to be able to reject it.

     

****

    

Sorry for the short post, but I'm finishing up my New Orleans vacation and didn't have time to put anything else together. I'm heading back home today (Sunday) and should have some time to get back into Enchantasy tomorrow.

Game 527: The Quest for the Holy Grail (1981)

         

The Quest for the Holy Grail

United States

HHH Enterprises (developer and publisher, first edition); Superior Software (developer and publisher, second edition)

Released 1981 for Apple II

Date Started: 23 July 2024

Date Ended: 1 August 2024

Total Hours: 3

Difficulty: Easy (2.0/5)

Final Rating: 16

Ranking at time of posting: 118/538 (22%)

       

One of the greatest cons ever pulled was convincing a large portion of the public that the Holy Grail was an actual thing--something that could be retrieved by Indiana Jones or Robert Langdon--and not just a weird plot device of 12th-century French literature. It is the subject of numerous myths and conspiracy theories. Heinrich Himmler sponsored an expedition to find it. Numerous churches across Europe claim to possess it. There's a rumor that it's in Fort Knox. This cannot be stressed enough: There was never anything to find or possess. The Holy Grail was invented almost 1,200 years after the death of Jesus Christ, and it wasn't even "holy" at first.

         

We don't know when the first grail story was written. We do know that in the 1180s, French poet Chrétien de Troyes began work on Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal ("Perceval, or the Story of the Grail") using some lost text as a source, but he never finished it. In it, the naive young knight Perceval happens upon a mysterious castle owned by the Fisher King. The king invites Perceval to dine with him. During the dinner, a servant walks into the dining hall carrying a lance with blood dripping from its tip. He is followed by two more servants carrying golden candelabra, and they are followed by "a girl . . . holding a graal-dish in both her hands." The word means "cup" or "dish" in old French, going back to the Latin gradalis. It isn't the Cup of Christ; it isn't holy; it isn't even the.

    

It certainly isn't the secret to eternal happiness.

       

The episode is deliberately meant to be confusing. Perceval has all kinds of questions--Who is the Fisher King? What is his real name? Why is he injured? What was the purpose of the little procession? Where were they going? Why is the lance bleeding? That dish has food in it! Who are they taking it to?--but he sits there in silence because he's been warned that to ask too many questions is rude. Unfortunately, the whole episode has been purposefully designed to make him ask questions--it's the only way to break a curse--so it's with more than a little consternation that the Fisher King and his staff watch the silent youth ride away the next day.

    

The graal here is just a prop--one of many that Perceval sees during his visit, and if Chrétien hadn't called it out in his subtitle, we probably would have thought no more about it than the candelabras. When he died and left the work unfinished, dozens of authors stepped forward with their own fan-fiction, which of course had to explain why the graal was of particular importance. Some of them went pretty wild with it, and I wish I could spend time talking about all the variants of this story (look up Diu Crône or Perlesvaus if you get a chance, or Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, where the grail is a stone), but for our purposes, the most important bit is that an author named Robert de Boron, writing about 10 years after Chrétien, had an "aha!" moment and drew a line between the graal and Jesus's cup at the Last Supper, and he we are. At some point, some moron decided that even the innocent Perceval was too worldly to be the knight that solves the quest, so the useless Galahad appeared and has contributed absolutely nothing to the Arthurian cycle ever since.

      

Neither has a certain 1975 film.

      

One constant remains in almost all the Arthurian stories of the Grail (and the non-Arthurian ones need not be considered, as the Grail is an Arthurian plot device; it would be like considering Mjollnir without any connection to Thor): The so-called Quest for the Grail, holy or otherwise, is never about finding the Grail, or possessing it, or bringing it back to Camelot. It is about understanding its mysteries. In Chrétien, those mysteries are pagan; in de Boron and his followers (including Malory), they are Christian. The quest is about being worthy enough, whether by blood or deed, to stand within the Grail's presence. It is about concluding a ritual that must be concluded for a stasis (represented in some sources by the wounds of the Fisher King and the ailing of his lands) to be lifted. It is a fictional object, and I am an atheist, and yet even I bristle at the sacrilege when some adaptation has the hero touch the Grail or--gods help us--drink from it. That's the kind of imbecility that got Perceval in trouble in the first place.

     

You can imagine my reaction, then, to a backstory that says, "The quest is to locate the Holy Grail, the golden cup that holds the secret to eternal happiness." I can almost see the Fisher King doing a face-palm. No, it didn't really affect my enjoyment of the game, such as it was. I just wanted an excuse to write about the Grail.  

    

Superior Software was a rare company that made its programs completely transparent to the user.

          

The backstory in question comes from the introduction to The Quest for the Holy Grail, an early adventure-RPG hybrid recently analyzed--it feels like I say this a lot lately--by El Explorador de RPG, whose entry offers a more thorough analysis of the specific statistics and mathematics than I'm going to attempt. Authors Thorne D. Harris III and Mark Ben Hattier advertised it as "fully listable and modifiable," which no doubt contributed to the fact that the most common extant version online has its title and victory screens vandalized by some "warez" jackass; as El Explorador points out, it's possible that he may have made changes to the contents of the adventure as well. Fortunately, reader LanHawk was able to locate a clean copy for me. Not only does this copy have the proper screens, it includes in-game documentation that the more common version does not. 

         

Character creation has you either roll random values for bravery, fame, wisdom, virtue, and wealth (the first four on a scale of 1-5; the last on a scale of around 100-600). Well, it's clearly supposed to roll random values, but you always get the same ones no matter what. You can also just type in your own values if you'd like. El Explorador noted that this ability reminded him of the character creation process in The Temple of Apshai, and Harris told me that he had indeed played that game.

           

I'm lonely, but at least I'm not sick.

       

The game begins at King George's Inn, where you have the option to hire additional people for your party, including a barber, a minstrel, a juggler, a jester, and a friar. Each of them has skills useful for various encounters. You can also buy up to 6 unknown potions for 10 gold pieces each. There are other random encounters to be had in the inn--a wizard threatens you and your bravery goes down; a barmaid flirts with you and your wisdom goes up (?)--if you linger.

    

The game then takes you to a relatively faithful map of Great Britain, though denizens of the Scottish Highlands may have some objections. Seven monasteries--all claiming to have the Grail--are marked on the map: St. Ben, St. John, St. Sebastian, St. Stephen, St. Michael, St. James, and St. Mark. These do not correspond, as far as I can tell, with any real locations. The location of the Grail is randomized for each new game. Your location is represented by a little blinking dot. You start in the center of the island, in modern-day Yorkshire.

      

How is there no St. George?

      

Your first choice is the monastery that you want to visit. The little dot moves across the map and, as it does so, is frequently interrupted by random encounters in the forest. Some examples:

    

• A rabbit blocks your path. You can either kick it aside, spear it, go around it, or ask your companions to help. Whatever you do, the rabbit could be a regular rabbit or a killer rabbit (the only nod to Monty Python and the Holy Grail that I saw, though I'm hardly an expert on the film). 

       

Except I didn't know it was innocent until now.

       

• A dragon blocks the path. There's a chance that it will just kill you instantly. Otherwise, you have options to fight, walk on by, or ask your companions for help. A minstrel seems to help in almost all these cases, but I'm not sure how. Maybe he lulls the dragon to sleep with a tune.

       

The dragon encounter is one of few preceded by a graphic.

       

• You find a tavern. Some of your companions might disappear permanently. You might meet Sir Lancelot, who tells you a letter that the name of the monastery with the Grail contains.

          

The game features the trope of the ale-loving friar nine years before Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

      

• You meet a fair maiden. You can approach, walk on by, or ask your companions for help. She may turn out to be an innocent maiden or a seductress or witch.

• You come up against a man-eating tree, a group of sirens, a cesspool, or the Black Knight. You can fight, walk around, or ask companions for help.

      

How do you fight a cesspool?

     

• You find a chest that may or may not have gold pieces. Sometimes the chest is covered by a tangled mass of vines.

    

Your choices in these encounters can make your attributes go up or down, although not always in predictable ways. You might lose bravery for trying to kill what turns out to be a regular rabbit or gain fame from trying to walk away from a killer rabbit, having it attack you, and then winning the subsequent battle. I lost 2 virtue and 2 fame for just opening what turned out to be an empty chest. Successful outcomes tend to reward you with bravery, fame, or wisdom. 

       

The game frequently recaps your status.

     

When you finally arrive at a monastery, you have to pay to enter unless you have a friar with you. The monastery says you have to leave by sundown, which is enough time to search three rooms of five: kitchen, library, chapel, great hall, and room of penance. Like the wilderness, these come with their own random encounters:

   

• You meet a peasant girl delivering eggs to the monastery's kitchen. The game has you automatically violate her, without even a role-playing choice, and consequently lose all your virtue.

• In the kitchen, you find a pot of stew. You greedily grab it and burn your hand, losing wisdom.

• In the library, you accidentally open the "Necronemcon" and get cursed for a decrease in random attributes.

• In the library, you find a map to the Holy Grail (as with Lancelot's clue, you can only make out one letter). The game has you automatically steal it, which costs you almost all your virtue but raises your wisdom.

       

That narrows it down to two.

      

• In the library, you find "books to aid thee" and your wisdom goes up.

• In the chapel, you're asked to donate even more money to the collection plate for a chance to gain virtue.

• In the chapel, there is a funeral for a brave peasant who challenged the Black Knight. Just watching the procession, your bravery goes down.

      

That seems a little arbitrary.

       

• In the chapel, you join monks in prayer and increase your virtue.

• In the great hall, monks are shooting dice. You can join in (and have a chance to win or lose about 150 gold) or decline. Declining increases wisdom.

• Wandering into the Room of Penance, you are mistaken for a sinner and tortured by the monks.

• In the same room, you find a maiden who the monks claim is a witch. You can free her, with consequences depending on whether the game decides she is a "true witch" or not.

       

Potions, which you can purchase at inns, can sometimes forestall the negative effects of these interactions.

     

A potion neutralizes the "Nemocron."

     

When you're done with the monastery, you can set off for a different one, re-enter the one you just left (for another donation), or save the game (the only place you can do so). When you reload, you'll be back in a tavern again and have a chance to recruit new companions.

    

When you finally find the monastery that has the Grail, you get a "strange feeling" when you enter any of its rooms. Only one room has the Grail. The game asks whether you want to use a potion to aid your search or donate some money to the poor box for a last-minute boost in virtue. You then get a choice to humble yourself, take a potion again, or "summon thy bravery and fame" to aid in the search. I'm not sure exactly how these options affect your ability to find the Grail. When I got to the monastery that had it, I took a save state, tried all the options, and found it no matter what I did. However, my attributes may already have been high enough. I suspect that as long as at least one of your attributes is over a certain threshold, you're able to find it.

        

The final game options.

      

The endgame shows a series of screens of different colors, then an image of the Grail with beams of light coming out of it. Finally, you're taken to a recap of your statistics. At least the game doesn't say that you drank from the Grail.

    

The glory of the Grail.

      

The Quest for the Holy Grail isn't much of an RPG, but I don't think that's what the authors were going for in the first place. I think the chaotic randomness of the game is intentional. There's a certain fun in watching your statistics rise and fall in response to the game's fortunes and misfortunes, but for the most part the encounters and their results are too random to allow for any real strategy or role-playing. An expanded game of this nature, with more varied encounters, more role-playing choices, and a more interesting combat system, could be authentically enjoyable. I was struck by how much it anticipated the later Legend of the Red Dragon (1989) in many of its elements and its overall tone. As for Grail's own sources, I can't identify any for sure. In a vague way, it feels like a "campaigner" (see the glossary). I would have said that the authors could have been exposed to the Robert Clardy titles or (as El Explorador guesses) to the Maces and Magic series, but when I asked the principal author of any previous games he had played, he mentioned only Apshai.

     

My final statistics.

          

The game has an interesting origin story, told to me by Thorne D. Harris III, a New Orleans-area attorney now in his 70s. In 1980, Harris developed a brain tumor and went through a 12-hour surgery to remove it, which caused deafness in one ear and paralysis in half his face. In the midst of a long recovery, his wife bought him an Apple II to give him something to do. He taught himself programming from books and magazines and started writing a legal column for Nibble magazine.

      

A 1982 ad for the game.

             

In 1981, Harris was joined in his recovery by his brother-in-law, Mark Hattier, then 15, who had broken his leg in a motorcycle accident. Hattier learned to create graphics in Applesoft Basic, and the two of them decided to collaborate on a game. They initially called their company HHH enterprises (Harris, Hatier, and a third friend, Burt Hortsmann), but someone beat them to that trademark, so they went with Superior Software, Inc. (not to be confused with Superior Software, Ltd. or Superior Software, Inc., out of Minneapolis). They published programs from several other authors throughout the early 1980s, selling their titles primarily through magazine ads. These included Asteroid Belt (1982) and Doom Valley (1982). Superior's philosophy, as articulated by Harris in a 1982 letter to Softside magazine, was to publish its games unlocked and freely listable and modifiable, so that budding programmers could learn from their inspection of a game's code. They also offered a portion of the royalties to anyone who wanted to write new modules and encounters for Grail, but Harris says that no one ever sent anything in. Harris became something of an expert in software law and wrote The Legal Guide to Computer Software Protection (1984) and The Software Developer's Complete Legal Companion (1994). Hattier went to Harvard University, became successful in finance, and according to Harris is now "semi-retired" in New Orleans.

    

I'm coincidentally in New Orleans as this entry publishes, trying to get the first four Riftwar books read before I start Betrayal at Krondor late next week. I think I'm going to make it.