(Continued from my previous posts, which you definitely need for context before reading this one.)
The spellcasting in Cornucopia, as Matt W. has pointed out, is “Vancian”, following roughly the same model as Dungeons & Dragons.
From the 1969 Lancer printing, via eBay.
Vancian is so named because of the Dying Earth series of novels by Jack Vance, where wizards memorize spells and then forget them as they are cast. Cornucopia uses casting directly from a spellbook with the same sort of disappearance effect (except for the case of levitating at the tower, as I showed off in my last post; that seems to be to allow the player to take that route multiple times without penalty).
Testing various inventory items with save-and-load. Notice the green gem, the one found hiding in a throne, being “evil” but not “magic” — how does that work?
Having such a system isn’t a guarantee D&D was involved (after all, maybe the author went right to the source!) but there’s a critter that I’m fairly sure is D&D-only.
Water Weird as drawn for the 1977 AD&D Monster Manual by David Sutherland.
Back at the kitchen (adjacent to the giant rat, which we’ll also reckon with in a moment) I was testing out GET ALL everywhere and found death.
You are in what appears to be the old kitchen. There is a flight of stone stairs leading up and doorways in the east and west walls. In the northwest corner a spring enters the kitchen and pours into a large granite basin. The water level in the basin is kept constant by a drain hidden from view.
>GET ALL
granite basin : As you approach the basin with the spring water in it a strange form rears up and grabs you, obviously some form of water weird. The strange form pulls you into the basin and you are drowned. From your sitting position you can see through a glass screen into a room that looks strangely familiar. On either side of you are further skeletons, they have a somewhat glum look on their skulls just as you do. You are dead and have become yet another trophy for the long departed owners of this place.
Fortunately, there’s a weirdly specific spell from the spellbook that immediately came to mind.
>OPEN BOOK
Opening the spell book reveals :- detect magic spell; dispel magic spell; purify water spell; dispel illusion spell; detect illusion spell; levitate self spell; detect evil spell.>CAST PURIFY WATER
The spring water is now quite pure and the water weird has been killed.
With this done, I was able to get the empty green bottle filled with water (mind you, it isn’t FILL BOTTLE or FILL BOTTLE WITH WATER, but the oddly phrased PUT WATER IN BOTTLE). This technically provides a solution for getting thirsty while going east from the dried brook, but I have yet to work out anything to do with the grate (the only thing you can find there).
The culvert ends here in a blank wall and the water disappears down a grating set in the floor. The culvert extends away to the west along a narrow ledge. The grating is of a fine mesh, such as to catch most things that would be brought along by the current of water, if there was any.
>OPEN GRATING
The grating can’t be opened or closed.
Adjacent to the water weird is a giant rat. The giant rat succumbs to simply stabbing quite a few times (with a combat scene just like Goblin Towers, or Zork) but something about this feels wrong.
>KILL RAT WITH RUSTY SWORD
A quick stroke gets the giant rat in the side and blood starts to trickle down one of its legs.
You dodge but the giant rat still manages to nip you.>KILL RAT WITH RUSTY SWORD
A quick stroke gets the giant rat in the side and blood starts to trickle down one of its legs.
You dodge but the giant rat still manages to nip you.>KILL RAT WITH RUSTY SWORD
With a deft side step you stab your sword into its heart. The giant rat slumps down dead.
This leaves behind merely a giant rat corpse, which you can pick up (it is heavy and have to drop everything other than the lamp), but I haven’t found any use for it.
My last piece of “progress” wasn’t really progress in a sense: I was able to get by the troll.
1982 AD&D Troll figure, via eBay.
The troll, remember, ate any swords I tried to use to attack it.
You are in part of a trolls lair, all manner of stuff is strewn around, including parts of its previous meals. To the west is a low tunnel and to the south what looks to be a tiny cavern. A huge and hairy troll stands here blocking your way.
I was testing out various options when I tried SMASH TROLL.
The troll breaks into a million pieces and is destroyed.
>S
You are in a small cavern which looks like it was the sleeping chamber for the troll. The only exit leads to the north. Lying discarded here in one corner is the King’s crown.
SMASH works on everything in the game, destroying the object. Important treasures? Smashable. Statue standing on a pedestal with hidden gold necklace? Smashable. Giant full sized dragon made from rock? Definitely smashable. Although you still die if you try to go south due to dragon flame. It appears that the troll stopping the player is dependent on the “troll object” being present while the dragon flame is hard-coded for going south from the dragon.
>SMASH GRATING
The grating breaks into a million pieces and is destroyed.
While you can smash the grating that “can’t be open or closed”, it doesn’t allow leading to any new areas, so that seems to be wrong. Smashing the tree still results in the player dying if they try to climb the tree.
You are at the centre of the Royal Gardens, there is a tree here in full bloom, the blooms are pink. The perfume from the blooms is very heady. The base of the tree is circled by some kind of goo, within this goo there appear to be many jewels.
>SMASH TREE
The tree breaks into a million pieces and is destroyed.>U
You get up into the low branches, it seems the tree is somewhat sentient and resents this. The tree shakes you from its branches and you fall into the goo at its base, which is extremely corrosive. From your sitting position you can see through a glass screen into a room that looks strangely familiar. On either side of you are further skeletons, they have a somewhat glum look on their skulls just as you do. You are dead and have become yet another trophy for the long departed owners of this place.
This presents an unusual dilemma: what if SMASH is the legitimate and only method of solving some puzzle in the game, in an intended way? (Surely the troll isn’t.) Would I be able to tell? Will doing things the “right way” nonetheless feel like cheating? If nothing else, I now know it’s just a treasure past the troll and not some long branching path.
I’d like to close out by listing out all the obstacles I’m stuck on and theorize about solutions. The evil tree seems like a good place to start.
A 1st edition D&D treant, art by David A. Trampier.
And yes, the tree is detected via spell as evil:
>CAST DETECT EVIL ON TREE
Surprisingly for something so marvellous the tree seems to have an evil awareness.
You can die by a.) climbing and being dunked in the goo, which dissolves you b.) trying to get one of the gems in the goo, which dissolves you, c.) falling unconscious from the tree’s perfume, and falling into the goo, which dissolves you.
If you try to set it on fire with the torch the tree “shies away” from the torch and “no matter what you do you just cannot set fire to it”. The goo itself is not flammable. I do suspect fire is involved in a solution still somehow, just in needs to get conveyed to the tree in a more forceful way (and before you ask, THROW TORCH AT TREE just gets the response “Dropped”).
Next up is the stone dragon at the cave. Going inside, I mentioned three buttons and two levers.
>ENTER OPENING
You are in a small spherical shaped room inside the dragon’s head. In front of you are two round windows which look out into the cavern you have just come from. Just under the windows is a small desk with a chair beside it. The desk has three buttons which are coloured red, brown and amber, the desk also has two levers coloured black and blue. It is quite warm in here, the heat seems to be coming from below.>PUSH RED BUTTON
There is a click and then a low wheezing noise.>PUSH AMBER BUTTON
There is a click and then a whooshing noise.
The brown button causes a click no matter what sequence I try to do things in, and the levers just pull (or push) and then move back to the center with no apparent reaction. I’ve tried quite a few variations followed by testing going south past the fire (in the hope something happened silently) but no luck with that either. I suspect I’m just missing the right permutation of moves, though; I don’t have much to work with other than brute force testing.
Other than those two spots I’m stuck on small things, or what might not even be puzzles:
- The statue facing west only yielded the necklace; I don’t know if there’s some other secret involving the statue moving.
- There’s a small alcove seen when entering the fungus elevator; that might simply be the elevator entrance that can reached from the throne area, though, and not really a puzzle.
- The area with the gold card can only be left (at the moment) via using up the card at a door. The gold card does seem to be a treasure so I must be missing something. Also, what does the “that will do nicely” message mean?
- There’s a “compost heap” at the garden I haven’t been able to do anything with.
- I still have a fountain at the garden to deal with. There’s pirahna protecting some gold coins, and there’s a “water jet” at the fountain in the garden still awaiting an item. I suspect I will know the item when I see it (and it will help with the fish problem may influence the empty brook).
The card is solid gold with an ebony edging and writing on one side in a bold gothic script which reads ‘Admit one only’. On the other side in almost microscopic letters it says ‘that will do nicely’, the meaning of which seems quite obscure.
There is a lovely carved stone fountain here, it is quite a rude design. The jet of water is so large it could easily support a small object if placed exactly right. The pool at the base of the fountain has many gold coins that have been tossed into it. There are what appear to be goldfish swimming about in it.
>PUT BOOK ON JET
It would just fall off the jet of water, so there’s no point.
I get the uncanny feeling this is one of those kind of games where there’s “wrong” ways to solve things and you can easily put the game in an impossible state with a wrong solution. Maybe I can get the giant rat to follow me over to the tree and distract it? Or make friends with the troll?
Renga in Blue 
’that’ll do nicely’ (also known as ‘that will do nicely’) was the catch phrase for the American Express charge card in the UK in the 1970s, used in TV ads.
Probably a stupid question, but… Can you use the levitation spell to go down the hall without stepping on any tiles?
tested just now, and yes! it leads you to a brand-new room
Calling the parts of hell “planes” may be another D&D borrowing (in Dante it’d be “circles”). On the other hand, if it is, I think Cotton is playing loose with alignments again–the Nine Hells (lawful evil) had devils, demons (chaotic evil) are from the Abyss. On yet another hand, I don’t know/remember whether the D&D of the time would’ve had exactly those planes and alignments, and anyway it’s probably easier to say “a demon” because outside D&D and related things there’s usually only one devil, and any subordinates would be demons.
I looked at Cornucopia’s CASA page, and the game apparently has a bug (in an area you’ve not yet reached). The walkthrough includes a DOSBox-X debugger command to work around the bug, which I’m happy to share (if it would be helpful) when you reach that point and assuming you encounter the same bug.
Alternately, the CASA page also has a “fixed game” download (that you an access without needing to access the walkthrough or game map) as a different workaround means. Though apparently the “fixed game” download requires playing through from the beginning (i.e., if you use the “fixed game” to load a save from an “unfixed” playthrough, the bug would persist).
Incidentally, the walkthrough is not a “full points” walkthrough (even after working around the bug). Seems perhaps this game has some truly unsolved mysteries.
I’ve been playing the fixed version (I linked in my first post). I’m not sure about Roger.
I’d missed that, my apologies!
no worries! and I didn’t know they actually hadn’t got full score (I thought they had)
I assume they did, at least, get the Cornucopia? since there’s a “main objective” that’s what I really care about
They did get the Cornucopia, yes.
This seems like a very weird implementation of a magic system. You can use this one spell over and over to move around or solve puzzles, but all the others disappear from the book after one use? Maybe the origin was D&D “Vancian”, but it comes across as kind of haphazard.
Those LJN AD&D figures were killer, btw. Probably the best line from the the big fantasy toy boom of the early/mid 80s.
agreed! At least I didn’t ever think it was played “straight” because there’s no memorization phase (it works more like scrolls in D&D … a spellbook is the thing you’d memorize the spell from)
Levitate self in the tile room (as solar penguin figured out above) doesn’t burn the spell either, btw
only doing it “wrong” where you don’t solve anything burns the magic
The AD&D Monster Manual credits the water weird to Ernie Gygax (Gary’s son) and has “purify water” kill the weird, so this is as good a proof as you’ll find of D&D lineage.
In my original comment I didn’t ride my hobbyhorse about the Vancian magic system, but now I will: It’s not nearly as prominent in the Dying Earth novels as you might think. In the first story of Dying Earth Turjan of Miir has to choose which spells to memorize, and the second is memorably based around Mazirian the Magician using his memorized spells to overcome obstacles, strikingly enough that you can see how an entire magic system was inspired by that one story. But I don’t remember the Vancian system coming up in any of the rest of the stories in that book, and in Eyes of the Overworld there is only a little bit about it in the last section where Cugel, not a magician, can only “encompass” a spell or so at a time while greater magicians can only encompass a few. But it seems like Vance largely didn’t bother with it when it wasn’t interesting. The last two books don’t use it at all, as I remember, and anyway were mostly published after the original D&D books. (One part of them, published in the early 70s, introduces IOUN stones which were imported into D&D apparently with Vance’s explicit permission..)
I feel like the author may have been looking at that exact picture when he wrote it.
Assuming matching to d&d lore, any thoughts on the tree or the troll? Wasn’t able to get fire to work on either.
I remembered that the annoying thing about trolls in D&D was their ability to regenerate. I looked it up, and the only things that can stop this from happening are fire or acid. If the fire doesn’t work here, and there’s no acid in the game, I would guess the troll is just a generic obstacle rather than a D&D-derived monster, so you’ll have to try something else.
Having SMASH work on everything, seemingly as an invitation to softlock, is a truly bizarre game mechanic. I’m really starting to get the impression thst this isn’t very well-designed. Much more of this, and I’ll just go ahead and read the CASA walkthrough so that you don’t have to waste weeks and weeks on it, since it’s trending in a direction where I don’t think I’ll really want to play it myself…
the goo from the tree is acid
I tried scooping with the green bottle but no luck
but that still suggests maybe defeating the tree first will lead to something that can help defeat the troll
Fire was the only idea I had for either one, though as Rob points out maybe acid helps on the troll. Any chance of poisoning the sword and getting the troll to eat it? In Tolkien sunlight turns the troll to stone, in which case smashing it into a million pieces might not be so wrong, though it seems to be kind of not stone right now.
If Cotton is being strictly D&D, the tree shouldn’t be a treant, because treants are chaotic good and shouldn’t show up on a detect evil. However. Shame the tree doesn’t appear to be anywhere near the dragon because the controls sure sound like you’re sending fire somewhere, and sending it at the tree might be helpful if you could do it.
Metagaming, it seems like the conversion process to the surviving version introduced some bugs in the older games (at least one player remembered being able to get the pooping horse to appear in the previous game), so I wouldn’t be stunned if the “everything is smashable” bug is new to this version, which as you say suggests that maybe there is one thing you can solve by smashing. The fact that removing the troll object solves the puzzle and removing the dragon object doesn’t probably means that there is a way to remove the troll, and not a way to remove the dragon. By the same token I guess the solution to the tree probably doesn’t involve removing the tree, but the response to trying to light the tree on fire does suggest that that’s being recognized as an attempt. Hm.
Btw, evil treants are a thing in D&D, just not until 2nd edition. (They’re big in Ravenloft.) I can easily see one landing in Dragon Magazine though or as a homebrew.
I did manage to get through the dragon but it was a literally random series of pushes and pulls so I’m not sure what worked. Probably no update until tomorrow.
Well FFS this parser is a pain. You can purify the water in the kitchen. A spring is described as emanating from the NW corner and filling a basin. I have an open empty bottle. FILL BOTTLE, I don’t understand fill. TAKE WATER, the water trickles through your fingers. PUT WATER IN BOTTLE, I don’t understand in. DRINK WATER, mmm that’s better, I was quite thirsty. TAKE WATER, there is no water you can take. So one drink from a constantly flowing stream removes the water as an object, despite the fact that it is still described as flowing into the basin and the basin is still full. The water level in the basin is kept constant…..clearly not.
huh, I got PUT WATER IN BOTTLE to work after killing the water weird (you should try GET BASIN if you haven’t seen the weird yet)
It doesn’t give a prompt though! It is just a blank line and then I checked and the water is now in the bottle. Even works if the bottle is closed.
This is very odd. If you DRINK WATER all the water from the spring and consequently in the basin disappears. If, however you PUT WATER IN BOTTLE first, then go to the grain store, drop the bottle and come back you can DRINK WATER FROM SPRING. So drinking it without filling the bottle first renders the game unwinnable as there is no water left, but if you fill the bottle first the water is still there as an external object.
Okay, went ahead and read everything on CASA. I think I’ll need to lie down now for a while…
No spoilers, obviously, but here’s the basic deal: This game is a ridiculous mess and was only (partially) “solved” by expert coder Alex decrypting much of it and then hacking some stuff in by brute force, while having to leave certain issues unresolved. I’m not saying that there’s nothing interesting in it, but I think Cotton was in way over his head at this point, ultimately rendering it an exercise in absurdity.
Just my own take, of course. If you want hints, I’ll try to help out.
Ha! I hope it doesn’t drive you over the edge Rob!! A couple of things to consider with these revisited “Classic Quest” DOS versions…. I am guessing these ports were done by Supersoft and not Cotton himself. These DOS versions have not been foolproof with their porting. Certainly not play tested to completion. The DOS version of Witch Hunt was also bugged but they figured out how to fix it by using one of the other non-bugged versions available for comparison.
Unfortunately, Catacombs and Cornucopia only have the DOS versions available currently. So there are no other comparisons that can be made with other possibly functioning versions and fix them properly. (if possible) Without additional versions to compare against, we don’t really know who to blame in this case, Cotton or the party responsible for the DOS port. (probably both)
When you have at least 3 of the 5 “Classic Quest” DOS versions being unwinnable out of the box, that doesn’t bode well for the porting job not being a large part of the issue.
Very good points. I went back and looked through Strident’s excellent chronology of Catacombs on 8bitag, and it is interesting to note that the adventure author Jim MacBrayne, in both a letter he wrote to Micro Adventurer and personal correspondence he had with Strident, seems to indicate that he had solved both Catacombs and Cornucopia in their original form back in the day, so you’d imagine that they must have been much less buggy. Also, being a 32k disk-only release, Cornucopia was probably capable of being a bit more verbose and complex than you’d normally expect from a PET game. It’s unfortunate that the Classic Quests versions of these two titles don’t seem to have been properly reviewed in the mid/late 80s, unlike a few of the others in the series, but it’s unlikely game reviewers of the time would have tested them extensively enough to notice all the bugs and other issues anyway.
DOS conversions are often buggy in my experience although in the hands of a consummate programmer they can still play smoothy. Jon Thackray’s DOS port of the T/SAL mainframe version of Hezarin is the only version that survives and given the sheer size of that game it is to his credit that there are very few bugs or even typos in it.