Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post, please read that one first.)

I got through a major bottleneck — the ice river — and the game more than doubled in size. I also know, sort of, what the overall quest is now, and it isn’t just grab the loot.

Just to give a sense of scale, here’s the full map zoomed out, with the new rooms marked in dark or light blue (except for lairs, which are all marked in red):

At the very least, while it’s still obviously possible, I think this is a little hefty for a lost type-in. I had this concern while researching because the other game I’ve seen a disk “published by Brunswick” (apart from Boothman’s own work) is the game The Dungeon of Danger. We know where The Dungeon of Danger came from: a book in the Mostly BASIC series by Howard Berenbon. It came out originally for Atari computers in 1980, then was ported to Commodore and Apple. The CRPG Addict has written about the game here.

Via Apple Rescue of Denver.

Picking up right where I left off, the first issue I managed to tackle was the mysterious “1 gold piece” objects lying around; I went through all of these commands and nothing worked.

take gold
take 1
take 1 gold
take 1 gold piece
take gold piece
take coin
take money
take cash
take gold coin
take peice
take all
tak gol
ta go

(It’s actually a two-letter parser. I’m guessing this is why potions use SLURP rather than DRINK, since DR is already taken for DROP.)

Thinking perhaps the author was D&D inspired, I tried

take gp

and it worked.

When you’re at one of the Beings (as I’ll call them) and you take an item, if the item is considered “valuable” and the Being is unfriendly they won’t let you take it. Gold pieces aren’t valuable enough to fret over, it seems.

While I might need to care in a winning run, I subsequently have ignored the money. It (along with some of the treasures, and the “minor” monsters like the ogre) gets randomly distributed, and I think it is just a matter of points.

With that resolved, I went back over the object list…

bottle of wine, meat, plank of wood (2), rug, crystal ball, dagger, potion, silver thimble, brick, silver sword, some rope, green moss, silver trinket, green treasure, old manuscript

…as well as the verb list, and tried to test things together.

take, use, open, break, drop, look, close, slurp, give, inspect, pull, score, bash, list, hello

USE will be handy momentarily. BREAK is mean to work on an object being held — I don’t know which yet. SLURP on the unlabeled potion I had access to had no effect, and the game says “you got the wrong one!” INSPECT is the game’s version of EXAMINE, LIST is INVENTORY, and BASH is the combat verb.

Without aid, you can bash nothing.

This was cryptic since it seemed like maybe I was supposed to use a brick to bust open a secret wall? Or just bash a bottle of wine on someone’s head, bar fight style? BASH is instead usable with the silver sword, and I was previously envisioning some kind of epee. Instead, I guess it’s Cloud’s sword from Final Fantasy VII.

This vaporizes the sword and the Being and is usable only once. Trying to use a dagger in the same way gets a similar message, but the dagger just gets dropped on the ground and no slaying occurs. My best guess is that some of the Beings can be befriended but some cannot, so the silver sword needs to be saved for a Being where you can’t make friends and you need them to let you pick up whatever is nearby. Or maybe it’s just optional for points!

What’s not optional is we need to get by the ice river. (Importantly, “ice” river, not “frozen”. I was thinking of slipping on thin ice, but it is a flowing river, just with ice in it.)

The one bit on the map where you don’t have to worry about crossing, because you can access the other side via a different route.

I went through every item I had available trying to USE it or simply be holding it and walking in the relevant direction. While nothing worked I was suspicious of the rope’s message on USE, which was different than the others:

Can’t use it on anything.

USE SWORD, for comparison:

I can’t use one of those.

I tried USE in many of the rooms (with the traditional mark-as-you-go method) but realized about halfway through why the game gave me 2 planks of wood rather than just 1: they want you to make something by combining the three things. I was still thinking “frozen” river, so, maybe, snowshoes? Instead I got a raft.

This let me open up the two blocked exits from last time.

I took what turned out to be the long route first (“Cavern of Rototars”) so let’s follow that way and loop back to the “Long Twisting Tunnel” at the end.

This is a place where a sword is required, as the Being won’t let you take the potion. Too bad the potion is the wrong one (at least on the save file I was playing with, maybe there’s one good “random” potion and the rest are bad).

Moving on, up some stairs to a new area…

…and to the first object of interest, a magic talisman.

Cool symbol, don’t know what it signifies, am happy to take guesses. USE TALISMAN gets the standard “I can’t use one of those” so it isn’t like the rope. HELLO TALISMAN:

Don’t bother, it doesn’t understand English.

Fair. Moving ahead are two more Beings, Xeginem the mysterious and Minitex. Xeginem has one nearby chamber marked “Cavern of Xeginem’s dog” and south of the lair of the Minitex is “the cave of many Minitex”.

Don’t know what a looney is, there’s also a leper in the earlier section but I don’t think it’s a “leper” like from English. The response here might be wry humor.

An item close by of special note is a red book, which asks you to return it to its owner. One supposes this would be Remesis the red, but I haven’t had been able to test this theory yet.

Along a side route there’s a castle.

The rooms are colorfully described, including a kitchen with stale bread, a pantry with a washing board, and a zombie butler, and a blue book.

The blue book almost certainly goes to the blue Being, or rather, Zezotim the blue. However, I also haven’t gotten test it yet. (Sorry! This session had a lot of mapping. To be fair, the player’s “energy” level has started to be an issue. I don’t know if I’m just supposed to optimize my moves fast or there’s a recharge, like a potion I haven’t found yet.)

Turning in an entirely different direction — west of the Minatex — leads to a “dwarf with cold feet”, some “black grapes”, and a travel agent.

This bizarre … encounter? … in-joke? … drops the player in the last section, the area of the dread Elmralat. The game gives more warnings than any of the other Beings, and it just sits there and acts grumpy, just like all the other Beings.

Three last points:

Point 1, nearby the Elmralat is a bag of sapphires. It gets treated differently from other treasures, because if you drop it somewhere random, a “small elf” appears, takes it, and runs away saying

Ha ha,I shall hide it better this time!

(I still don’t have a treasure “storage” area and don’t know if there even is one.)

Point 2, Elmralat seems to be referenced in that manuscript from last time.

In times of yore
Tehre was remembered
a magical cone,which
so say many, did hold
Three Brothers,in
Comp’ny with another
Held afore from him
Who bears the Elm
And in a secret
place was hid it.

The “Elm” is likely “Elmralat”, yes? I’m unclear how this translates into action, but I can move on to point 3, which is I found the magical cone. If you read back in this rambling mess of a travel blog, you’ll notice I said the ice river leads down two paths, and I started by taking the longer one. The shorter one is only two rooms: a passage leading to a dead end.

I’m guessing since I have the green treasure for returning the green book, I’ll get a blue treasure for the blue book and a red treasure for the red book, and they somehow get inserted into the cone and represent the Three Brothers. There are so many other things going on I doubt that’s quite the ending of the game (what’s the talisman for?) but I’m hoping this won’t take too much longer. I went into this game expecting the same kind of public domain one-shot I got from Alien and instead I got an epic that kept sprawling, even if it is mostly exploration and unhelpful creatures.