(My previous posts about Cornucopia are needed to understand this one.)
1979 printing, via eBay. “Roll the dice to see if I’m getting drunk!”
So the Dungeons & Dragons references got even stronger since last time.
My main piece of progress was figuring out the stone dragon. Kind of.
>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.>OUT
The control room exit seems to have vanished.
I realized that the red button closed the hatch to the outside, while the amber button opened it. I ended up closing the hatch, then messing with the brown button, black lever, and blue lever entirely at random. I unfortunately do mean random as I was just mucking about but somehow I hit the right combination that when I went to test going south again where the mechanism previously activated, I found myself safe.
From Dave Arneson’s Dungeonmaster’s Index (1977).
You are at the south end of a large cavern. To the south the cavern narrows down to a small passage. Crouching and facing the narrow passage is a large rock formation which looks exactly like a dragon.
>S
You are in a long north-south corridor which has been carved out of the solid granite.
I somehow got doubly lucky (again, I think) insofar as there is a door that looks like it ought to be a stopping point that mentions the lever positions. This particular save game has the giant rat already dead, so I just have to hope that’s right. (Probably not, eh? I’ll deal with it when it comes.)
>S
You are at the south end of the granite corridor. The exit to the south is glowing slightly. Written upon the wall here is the following – Have you got the levers right!>S
You are in an oblong shaped room which has exits to north, south and west. The floor has a wooden trap door let into it. The room is otherwise quite bare.
The leads to a small part of the map I’ll call the Magi Area.
Going down the trap door leads to a “small dark room” with an “arch” that is blocked by a “granite block”. The game notes the block is “obviously not part of it and has been put there with the intention of stopping a through passage.” Neither the block nor the arch register as magic (or evil) and nothing I’ve thrown has had any effect.
The magi’s quarters have nothing, but there’s also a laboratory with a mummified hand…
You are in what was once the Magi’s laboratory, a strange chill comes over you in this place probably as a result of the lingering remnants of fiendish magic spells. There are exits to the west and north. There is a severed hand lying on the floor here. It looks to have been mummified.
…and a library, with a “guide book” and a “large die with one hundred faces”.
>W
You are in what was the Magi’s library – the walls were covered in bookshelves, which presumably contained many books on arcane magic. What little there was left of the shelves after the vandals left has long since rotted away, the floor is covered in the resulting dust. There are exits to the north and east. There is a small guide book discarded here. A large die with one hundred faces lies here.
The book is described as the “Dungeon Masters Guide Book”. It opens to page 739, and reading it just says it is “quite useless” as it shows “the best way to roll dice of different dimensions.” (If the water weird wasn’t enough, it’s definitely clear here what game the author was thinking of.)
The large die rolls to be 6279, and always the same number. (The description notes it doesn’t have normal side-numbering, but doesn’t say it is the same number on all sides, so I suspect the die is heavily weighted.)
>ROLL DIE
You spin the large die and it comes to rest showing the number six thousand two hundred and seventy nine.
None of the above objects (mummified hand, die, guide book) are marked as magic or evil. The hand gets marked as a treasure, so it is possible it doesn’t have any use other than getting points.
My adventures in magic-dom continued past this thanks to solar penguin in the comments, who speculated about just levitating past the magic tiles rather than stepping on all of one color.
>CAST LEVITATE SELF
As the spell takes effect you rise up in the air, suddenly an extra strong gust from the draught catches you and sweeps you towards the other end of the room, passing over the floor without touching it. The draught sweeps you out of the other end of the room and you find yourself….. You are in a strange room, it has five walls and therefore five corners, in the eastern corner is an exit which is almost totally concealed. The walls are covered in symbols and diagrams of a most arcane sort. The room is otherwise quite devoid of furnishings or markings.>EXAMINE SYMBOLS
Strangely as you study these symbols you find you start to understand them, it seems whoever used this place used the walls to take notes on in his/her? attempt to summon a demon from one of the planes of hell. The success or otherwise of the attempts is not made clear.
This does not burn the levitate spell, so it still is usable to go back up the tower (you can’t carry everything at once, so dragging stuff to the cottage for points requires multiple loads).
Unfortunately, I have been unable to summon the demon. The symbols are not marked as magic, or evil (!). There is no illusion in the room. (I have been checking, still, despite the dispel getting used up back at the countryside. For one thing, it is possible you aren’t supposed to pass through that room at all, and another, DISPEL ILLUSION and DETECT ILLUSION are separate spells, and it may be there’s an illusion later that you can detect but don’t need to kill entirely in order to bypass.)
Speaking of spells, the one that’s been burning a hole in my pocket, er, spellbook, is DISPEL MAGIC. I can use it on the rune sword, for instance, and it gets totally destroyed; you can also cast it on the spell book itself to cause it to consume itself in a fireball. (It’d be amazing if this was the intended use for the spell! I’d have to be near the end of the game, though.) The complex is otherwise filled with quite a few non-magical things (according to the spell) so I haven’t found any other effects.
I’m still not ready for hints, but anyone who hasn’t looked at a walkthrough is welcome to chime in with ideas in the comments.
Hundred-sided die, via Board Game Barrister.
Renga in Blue 
Found the demon. You can’t do any summoning because the demon is already summoned and still hanging out!
No spoilers here, just a general comment: I find it interesting that Cotton was so influenced by D&D, yet by the time he wrote Cornucopia he was still sticking to the traditional adventure genre, only adding inrelatively minor elements like the weird magic system and these cheeky references. Supersoft themselves had already released a few RPG-ish titles by this time, which they marked as clearly separate from their adventure line, and that was somewhat unusual in itself in that era. You’d think, having obviously been exposed to at least Zork, that he’d have gone down that route instead, or at least tried something more akin to a “text RPG”, à la Eamon.
To clarify: Having already been exposed to Zork, meaning that he also would have been likely to have seen some imported US CRPG titles on Apple II or PET by that time.
I don’t think he had access to Apple II.
RPGs on PET were extremely rare, and weren’t anywhere in the same ballpark as Wizardry or Ultima.
https://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/2013/02/game-85-dungeon-1979.html
The speculation about him having access to someone with an Apple II goes back to how he knew about Zork to begin with – the early UK Apple II importing scene (I posted an ad showing that they were importing Barbarian Zork much earlier than previously known), and the seeming obscurity of the mainframe version in the UK at the time. The sophistication (or lack thereof) of the CRPGs he may have seen isn’t really relevant. He must have at least known they existed, as Supersoft themselves had already released a few. That’s why I thought it was curious that he chose to express his D&D fandom through shoehorning some stuff into a traditional adventure, rather than trying his own hand at some form of RPG. I probably didn’t express myself clearly here. Just a minor point of curiosity, anyway.
Just as point of interest: PET RPGs weren’t really that rare. Explorador lists around 30 if them just up to 1982, and that’s not including numerous lost ones. This includes all (I think?) of the Apshai-related titles, which were widely available, heavily influenced by D&D, and included just the sort of descriptive room text that Cotton seemed to be attempting here.
Cut myself off there (maybe I should do that more often?): Explorador also notes an obvious Apshai influence on Halls of Death, Supersoft’s first RPG from 1980.
I’d forgotten that the rat was made of porcelain (sic). In the midst of an old fashioned looter versus troll RPG I remembered you can smash the thing to pieces. Brian Cotton must have been a fan of instant mashed potato given the amount of Smash around in this game as you previously observed, unless the original didn’t work like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBRCZLzn5pM
SMASH is still the only way I’ve got past a certain puzzle, but it seems to be a totally optional one.
I don’t think you’re meant to smash the rat are you? I am now carrying its carcass. On a bit further I seem to remember entering the dragon and climbing around inside when I first played this back in the eighteenth century or so.
No, I didn’t smash the rat. I just killed it fighting with the rusty sword.
Found the mirror, went to visit all the locations, now unclear what pulling the rope did and where a weight goes.
I assume the escaping the bit where there’s someone who runs in and teleports out with a gold door, you’re supposed to have found the “prototype box” for teleporting mentioned in the manual … somewhere by now.
As I recall the weight is tied to the rope. I suppose that the clue is the carrying ring. You can then visit the location with the dais and find it has descended throught the floor. I am not back there yet as I am still carrying the dead rat around (as you do).
Is it possible you could post your current inventory? Even having looked at the walkthrough, this one is convoluted enough to make it hard to figure out where you really are in the game, if you’re missing anything, etc.
Yes; I know what you mean. I am finding it hard to gain a feeling of self amid the surroundings. The whole thing feels fragmentary and I can’t work out an order to combat the problems. My inventory as it stands is: spell book, rusty sword, flaming torch, rune sword, lamp, green bottle filled with water, emerald rod, sapphire rod, painting, Fabergé egg, plastic bag, brown sack, old diary, dead rat, small note, tiny whistle, gold card, magazines. I have also found the large weight (used to lower the dais), gold bar (I haven’t worked out how to bring it back to the secret room yet), user manual and folded note (ditto) and I think that’s it so far.
my additions are a 100-sided die, a guide book, a mummified hand, a gold necklace, a large green gem, and counting the one I used SMASH to get (which may or may not be legit, still can’t tell), a gold crown
Roger, just as two general interface hints, F5 is cued up to the command EXAMINE ALL and you can also down-arrow to pull up the last command you did (helpful for setting the mirror destination)
Okay, I’ll stay mum for now to avoid any spoilers, but there is something that I just realized from going back over the walkthrough, and I think you guys should know it: The fixed version was a real brute force solution to certain problems (Alex said that himself, and wasn’t really satisfied with it), and ends up changing stuff and eliminating/ruining something in the process. He actually gives an alternate method, which preserves one of the main puzzles in the game, but it requires playing from the beginning on an un-fixed version and then utilizing the Dosbox-X debugger. Just let me know if you want more details. I’ll go back and check his detailed notes in the CASA forum again later, just to be sure I’m getting it all right.
I know what Rob’s talking about, and in addition to everything he wrote (with which I agree), I’ll also add that solving the puzzle in question is, in my opinion, something we could also reasonably simulate for you in the comments here.
A it was in the grain store with the sword I suppose this makes me a cereal killer.
Actually I have used the gold card to open the door that leads to the hall south of the throne.
Fznfu cvenuan. Gur cvenuan ner fznfurq vagb n zvyyvba cvrprf naq ner qrfgeblrq. Gnxr pbvaf. Lbh thrffrq vg, gur cvenuan rng lbh.
Yeah, this just isn’t a very well-designed game…
I’ve got some time now to do some more exploring and I’ve just hit upon the foulded (sic) room. I am guessing that this should be the fouled room. What are the bets that the room was spelled correctly in the original version?
haHA, got through the troll the correct way!
it’s, uh, actually a pretty hard puzzle, it just happens there’s a troll in a game from the late 90s that gets defeated in more or less the exact same way
Can you explain what the reasoning behind this puzzle is? Because it’s the exact opposite of how a D&D troll would react. They’re supposed to have night vision.
the “logic” is pretty tentative. It worked in the 90s game (Enlightenment) because the troll gave off its own light, and it ran with the idea that grues will kill absolutely anything in darkness it can get to
in this case, the troll is already in darkness, so why wouldn’t the grues get it before (or one of the other critters)? The game doesn’t go all out and say it’s a grue in the darkness, so it must be something more along the lines of this game’s version of the grue chasing around people that move around, so when the player reaches the troll they were hanging around with bated breath, and when the lights went out they thought the troll was too irresistible to pass up
it’s really tenuous and I got it by luck
Weird. The walkthrough just says “the troll walks away”.
“Darkness falls, you hear a few tentative steps in the dark and then a very loud crunching and chomping, it then goes very quiet.”
Technically the troll does walk away, just not very far.
Also as far as trolls having night vision goes, IIRC somewhere in the canon there’s a game where you can get night vision… and moving around in the dark still gets you eaten by a grue, because having night vision doesn’t mean you can fight a grue.
Thanks for the heads up about F5 Jason. It has opened up a lot more of the game in a very short time. There are a number of hidden parts to rooms that aren’t even suggested.
I have nothing useful to suggest, but “WHERE ARE THE CHEETOS? CAN I HAVE A MOUNTAIN DEW?”
“they’re *right next to you*”
I haven’t tried it yet but have you tried using the detect magic spell on the ice guardians which appear to the east and west of the magic circle when you are in it? I have only experimentally been to this section so far so I didn’t have the book with me.
If I were playing an extremely D&D-derived game and I saw a mummified hand, my first thought would be to chop my own hand off and stick the hand on the stump. Though the fact that the hand doesn’t show up as magic or evil might suggest it won’t work.
I have just discovered a use for the DISPEL MAGIC spell; I am not sure if you have come across this wrinkle yet. Wear the plastic bag then enter the mirror after the first rub, then cast the spell and the countryside morphs into a square room with a large steering wheel on one of the walls. Oh not that old chestnut again, the old cyanide gas, secret room and plastic bag routine I don’t hear you cry…
you must be way past me, heh
I did manage to get the transport box, get past the idol and get the stuff there, explore the ice area (but get stuck, only found an ice key). Have not found a plastic bag or the ice guardians you mention.
re: the transport box, I’m guessing you already know this now, but
oynpx ohggba va gur vpr nern gnxrf lbh gb gur frperg ebbz, ohg vs lbh chfu vg ntnva lbh tb gb gur fxryrgba ebbz, naq vs lbh chfu vg lrg ntnva lbh tb onpx gb gur frperg ebbz; fb lbh pna hfr vg gb fxvc hfvat gur tbyq pneq ba gur fybg
No I must admit I hadn’t found that particular button. Cheers. I had noted that the GC appears in the alcove after use. I haven’t tried it yet but I wonder if gur cynfgvp ont nyfb jbexf ol gur gerr jvgu gur tbb. Univat fcha gur jurry va gur fcner ebbz but nothing seems to happen and you have a choice of asphyxiation or cyanide poisoning.
Oh, that’s great! I think you managed to solve one of the main things that Alex was never able to figure out.
Reffering to Jason’s rot13 button stuff, just to be clear. Makes me wonder if you guys can work a few other things out here, or if they’re just bugged…
Strange, but my initial reply here (before the clarification) had disappeared. Anyway, it was noting that Jason seems to have solved one of the main issues that Alex could never work out.
When I played this years ago I know I managed to ragre gur qentba ohg V pna’g erzrzore ubj V qvq vg. Vf vg whfg enaqbz be vf gurer fbzr ohggba gb chfu?
Ha ha as usual I solved it after posting the last. On the head now.
I shall carry on tomorrow.
So this game did the joke of bypassing a “step on the right tiles” puzzle 33 years before Undertale?
There’s a strange discrepancy with one thing that Jason did in this room and Alex’s walkthrough, but I’m not really sure if it matters.
Feel free to spoil whatever it is.
With a game this difficult and Alex apparently figuring it out solo, it’s perfectly normal to have a few things off (especially when there’s bugs and it is unclear the difference between a feature and a bug).
He used JUMP instead of the levitation spell, to the same effect. He only uses that spell once fairly late in the game. In fact, looking through it again, he only uses all the spells once each in the whole solution. This would indicate to me that, with that spell at least, Cotton was allowing you to use it once as an alternate solution in a few different places, only to find out you had softlocked yourself later by wasting it in the wrong spot. Thus, its reusability in the DOS port is probably a bug that turns out to be a bit of a useful cheat. I could be wrong, though.
It’s way too specific to be a bug, I think. None of the other spells are set in such a way you’d need to repeat them as part of the regular play (I mean, it’d help to not burn DETECT MAGIC, but that’s not part of a structural sequence to the game).
This game kind of seems like accidental Ferret.