Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Greetings, Halfling. I an Gandalf the Grey, your guide. Your task is to find the 5 objects and cast then all (alive or otherwise) into the Cracks of Doom in order to destroy, once and for all, the terrible power of the Dark Lord.

Commodore PET version, from Retrocollector.

This is not the first or even the second Supersoft game we’ve looked at using an outside franchise. Pythonesque wasn’t licensed (and is a loose enough adaptation of Monty Python it likely didn’t need to be) while The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was (yet suffered a lawsuit anyway, ending in destruction of product). The Hitch Hiker business clearly would have left Supersoft skittish. Hence, this game is also known as Cracks of Fire, with the Tolkien references torn out. Given the Tolkien Collector Guide was unclear if the Cracks of Doom version even came out (see picture above), it clearly is the rarer of the two.

This is the second adventure game Bob Chappell wrote after The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (His first game generally was Nightmare Park.)

The “treasures” you are collecting this time are items “forged of Mordor” and your goal is to tote them over to the “cracks” nearby where you pitch them to their destruction. This is an alternate universe Lord of the Rings where Frodo starts from the center of Mount Doom and works his way out. The alternate reality aspect threw me for a loop; even if you try not to think about it too hard, there are some deeply odd moments, like a weirdly passive Saruman the White hanging out near both Shelob and Gollum. Look, it’s just easier to talk about the game in context–

You (Frodo) start out at the Mountains of Mordor. Two moves to the east lands you at “the very edge of the Cracks of Doom”, where the Evil Artifacts go. Found there are a small sphere where if you drop it you get a key (exactly like Valley of Cesis) and a manuscript.

Regarding “brandish it high”, the game helpfully comes with a verb list (if you just hit ENTER with no prompt) and the verb BRANDISH is on there. We’ll be using it soon.

Also outdoors you can find a “majestic falcon” near a “smooth blood-red pebble”. Just north of that is “the Red Book of Middlearth”.

I don’t know Gollum being bound only by the “.i.” means a three-letter word with an i in the middle, or just some general word with an i in the middle.

Going down a hole at a “swampy stretch”, reveals a sleeping orc captain near a locked portcullis, and a “rune tablet” in an adjacent room. The tablet says…

Read the rune tablet.

…which I suppose is meta? As I already mentioned I found a key, and it does fit the portcullis, but opening it awakens the guard. With the items seen so far, it doesn’t end well.

Fortunately, even without applying the key, there’s one more place to explore, a very tiny maze.

As usual, despite being small this took a while to get mapped out in a sensible way. Important items lying around are: a brown weed, some rotting orc meat (“looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!”) and the Phial of Galadrial. Yes, it’s just sitting there. (The phial ends up being essential to carry everywhere.)

There’s also a gargoyle with a missing eye, but the red pebble occurred to me as a good replacement candidate.

Pushing the nose of the gargoyle then drops you to your death. You need to push the eye instead in order to open a passage to the east, but I didn’t discover that until later, so let’s save that bit of exploration for just a moment and head back to the orc captain. Remember the cryptic instructions about using “brandish”?

After this happens, orcs start rushing at you at random through the game. They serve the function of the dwarves of Adventure (or Vogons of Hitch Hiker’s) where you need to be paying attention and BRANDISH PHIAL at the right moments, lest you die. It is surprisingly hard to keep from messing up and sometimes immediately after killing an orc another one would come.

Don’t get excited: we aren’t recruiting an undead army. Rather, we are reading the tablet that said to read the tablet. I did figure this out quite quickly but only in a sense of not having many options. I don’t know how the clues connect.

There is a deep rumble and the east wall slides back.
A harsh voice croaks

The Dead Marshes….

Not much here. First, there’s a troll. Give it the meat to get by. (The screen below shows up simultaneously fending off Orcs.)

Past that you can find a iron fist (“forged in Mordor”) which is our first anti-treasure. I confirmed you can bring it to the Cracks and toss it in for 20 out of 100 points. I am saving it in case it is needed for a puzzle.

Moving on is an “elven crystal cup” (sure, why not) followed by the Balrog, wielding that most dire of weapons, the gosub error.

I don’t know why a weed would help with a Balrog, I was just trying everything I had.

Note also: the Balrog killing you on a give turn is random, and this randomness can trigger when you enter the room. Since you presumably need to enter the room to defeat it (I have not defeated it yet) that means the RNG can just decide to kill you.

With that charming enemy left on the back-burner, let’s proceed to the area past the gargoyle, Minas Morgal.

The sequence is whiplash-inducing. Starting at the far northeast, there’s a dwarf; as the room is titled Crystal Offerings, you’re supposed to GIVE CUP and you get a hat in exchange.

The hat incidentally has a feather that can be removed separately…

The Feather of Thorondor

…and taking the feather back to the falcon gives the message that the falcon picks up the feather and the binding spell breaks (this doesn’t happen with other items). Is this a good thing or does it softlock the game? In Tolkien, Thorondor is the king of the Eagles in the First Age, but I honestly don’t think it helps to dwell too much on the lore as it might be misleading.

From the Lord of the Rings collectable card game.

Moving on, there’s another dwarf with a pipe. Give him the brown weed and he’ll drop off a globe of green fire.

Past that is yet another dwarf hanging out at a Cave of Crystal Presence. I haven’t found anything useful there.

Once past the three dwarves we get into more hostile country, with a “rock-hewn chamber” and a wolf pelt. Taking the pelt reveals a Palantir.

This feels like it ought to go in the Cracks of Doom, but if you try to carry it around, it’ll eventually “affect your mind” and then “seriously damage your mind” up to where you can’t reach the Cracks in time: the Palantir kills you.

Past that is Shelob. Shelob you can defeat with the phial, but it has the same RNG as the Balrog and can kill you when you enter.

But still, she was there, who was there before Sauron, and before the first stone of Barad-dûr; and she served none but herself, drinking the blood of Elves and Men, bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness.

(That’s from real Tolkien, not the game.)

Off by a lake you can find Gollum. I have not managed to get him to acknowledge any actions.

Just a little further, Saruman the White is just hanging. He also doesn’t acknowledge your presence.

There’s some “strange fruit” just past that was poisoned by Saruman, so he’s still evil. Finally, the most cryptic room at all in this section:

You can take the slates, but you can’t read them or “inspect” them. I am quite befuddled.

Since that was quite a few random elements, here’s the list of objects so far, excluding already-used items: 7 slates, strange fruit, wolf fur, Palantir, iron fist, globe of green fire, dwarf hat, feather.

Spots of confusion are: the Balrog, the falcon, the dwarf at the Crystal Presence cave, Gollum (with the “.i.” clue), and Saruman.

The inventory limit is four (the game logically says you are “only a Halfling and cannot bear more”) so I haven’t tried every item on every obstacle yet (like the green fire on the Balrog) but nothing strikes me as an immediate obvious combination. I did try the “phial” on Gollum to no effect.

One last element I should highlight is there is a built-in help feature and it works differently than any I’ve played for the Project. Usually such hints have been contextual (based on what room you are in); here, the game asks if you want help from Gandalf, and if you say yes, you get the next hint out of a pre-made list. So there’s X hints behind the scenes that get revealed one by one, and that probably make some kind of walkthrough (I haven’t checked in enough to spoil, but I did check enough to see if this was the kind of game where essential info was in the help command).