I did finally work out the objective before finishing the game:
Step 1.) visit the residences of Oldorf, Snotgurgle, and Lynxor.
Step 2.) take all their stuff.
You never meet any of these … people? … wizards? … robots? … although you do reckon with a few security systems. Full spoilers ahead.
Via the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.
Upon arriving at Oldorf’s Castle, I found a wide-open area with no enemies or obstacles, just things to look at and secret passages to open.
Puzzles remained relatively simple. There was a room with “SHAZAM” on the floor, and while it didn’t do anything in the room it was in, saying SHAZAM in an adjacent room with suspicious footprints led to a skeleton key.
In a closet, going “UP” stated I wasn’t strong enough, but switching to the Strongman let me enter a secret room and find 5 gold coins.
Eventually, after looting everything I could find, I found my way down some stairs to “Snotgurgle’s Small Palace”.
You see a valuable cross upon entering the room, but need to realize that since your party isn’t automatically taking it, the cross must be out of reach. Using MOVE TABLE and MOVE CHAIR as the Strongman resolves the situation.
In addition to a talking pillar (where my Cleric’s ability to SPEAK came in handy) I found the surreal “Plains of Oxyxidies”.
Heading north, I had to do battle with a “Opthaplebian Eye-Sentry”:
I had to use the Wizard’s catch-all CAST ability here. It always felt uncomfortable to use since it can substitute for “real” puzzle solutions, but the manual does state there are scenarios where only the Wizard can succeed, and I’m pretty sure this was one of them.
After defeating the Eye-Sentry I found some magic mushrooms and took one. The game helpfully says “BAG LIMIT = 3: POSSESSION LIMIT = 1”.
If you come back here twice you can grab the other two mushrooms. However, if you’re holding more than one mushroom, later someone confiscates all of them, because you exceeded the possession limit. I guess this was meant to be a drug joke.
After the strange trip to Snotgurgle’s, I found my way to “Lynxor’s Caverns”. It was the only place of the three that felt properly protected. I had to use my gladiator to KILL a buzzard upon entering, and to take down some snakes later.
I had missed the “Sceptor” from Snotgurgle’s on my first playthrough.
There was only one place I got “properly” stuck, and that was a door requiring a tiny key. Scenarios where there is a puzzle to solve but it’s not certain where the puzzle might be can be very trying, although in this case I needed to just go to a “Merlinian Room” a few steps away and have my Magician cast MAGIC.
Having grabbed all that I could find, I went to “Sunshine” (the Wizard needed to CAST to pop open the last door) and made my exit:
For fans following the discussion in my last post, the Elf does get used one more time, but it’s in a way consistent with just sending the Elf solo to grab some gold in a small hole.
…
Without the character switching, this game would have been fairly bland; even though you could theoretically switch any time to test (say) if the Magician’s MAGIC skill does anything in a particular spot, the odd character restriction led me to only try it in appropriate places, and the game was set up in an easy enough way that it was never too difficult to work out what those places were.
I did also appreciate the solve-everything spell the Wizard had, especially since it didn’t *quite* solve everything (for example, at one point you encounter Lynxor’s “pets” which look like Egyptian cats, and while the Wizard can take down one of the pets, the Magician has to take out the other). I never did get close to running out of Strength; the game was relatively generous with it.
Weirdly, one thing I did miss was picking up items. While it seems like a convenience to dispense with needing to get stuff (and in general, why would your party leave behind treasure?) fighting my way to a ruby and then being denied the actual act of TAKE RUBY made the game feel slightly less like an adventure; less like I was “in a world”, so to speak.
Oldorf’s Revenge clearly had some grounding in RPG lore, and this game represents another “alternate universe” route that adventure game history skipped over. CRPG players are used to the many-characters-in-one aesthetic, but here it was a rarely-seen oddity. The good news is the same schtick shows up in the second game from Highlands Computer Services: The Tarturian. To get there, we’ll need to make it to 1981, and we are getting closer! I’ve got a challenge I’ve been putting off, but now is the time.
Je bent nu in je eigen huis. Er is een slaapkamer op het zuiden en een kleine hal oostelijk. Er is een deur die naar het westen leidt. De deur staat op een kier en een gure wind blaast zand en stof naar binnen. Door een raam kan je een bos zien.
Renga in Blue 
Bag and possession limits seem like they’re something out of fishing? Though according to this: https://fishuntamed.com/bag-and-possession-limits/ usually it’s the other way round–you can possess more than you can bag, because the bag limit is daily so you might have yesterday’s catch and today’s.
There may be a drug-related pun about the crime of possession, though.
The fact it’s specifically magic mushrooms made me think it was somehow drug-related, although when they get confiscated it does feel a little like the fishing limit thing.
You can EAT mushrooms to recover some strength, so you can eat the first two and take the third with you.
I only realized this on seeing the CRPG Addict’s play of this game, but a “snotgurgle” is a particularly nasty relative of the troll in the book Gnomes by Wil Huygen. (You know, that coffee-table book with an extremely elaborate ecology of gnomes that ends with the environmental homily about why gnomes shake their heads.)
I was going to say “that doesn’t sound familiar at all” but then I pulled up the cover and it looks very familiar. I must have read it in my childhood somewhere.