Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

The grey-rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

— Return of the King

So I haven’t made that much progress, relatively speaking, but I have played enough to get a sense of what I’m up against.

From the movie version of the Lord of the Rings map.

Last time I mentioned investigating the area west of the Shire for any places of interest. There is, at least, the tower where the Grey Havens are visible, but the area seems just to be a lot of rooms with nothing of importance to the quest.

You’re in the Grey Havens.

N
You’re standing on a foreign shore.

S
That way you’ll leave Middle-Earth.

SE
The hills here are too steep for you to climb.

E
You’re standing at the foot of a slender tower.

NW
You’re standing on a foreign shore.

N
You’re wandering aimlessly through north-western Middle-Earth.

Trying to map things out, the grid broke down; the game does not let you drop items (“That won’t help you.”) so I can’t do item-mapping to be exact about it, but I did enough to confirm the weird connectivity of one of the “foreign shore” rooms (look on the bottom):

I think the author’s intent is simply to avoid feeling like there’s a wall (when there isn’t on the real map) while subtly shoving them eastward towards adventure. The issue with this in practice is that adventures can have clues anywhere, and while I’m leaving this section for now as a map-making mess, I can’t know for sure there isn’t some odd hidden byway until I’ve beaten the game.

With that out of the way, the obstacles I had were the Willow, the Barrow-Wight, and one of the ringwraiths. I managed to get by the Willow via book knowledge:

You’re walking through the Old Forest.

Overcome by a sudden drowsiness, you rest against a huge willow-tree.
Slowly you sink away into a crack in its bark…

S
You’re stuck in the bark of Old Man Willow.

TOM BOMBADIL
As you cry out for help, a man (or so it seems) appears, singing merrily.
Indeed, it is Tom Bombadil. With his song, he makes the willow-tree let you go.
You may call upon him, if you should fall into danger while still near.

Reading this text after the fact, I found CRY HELP specifically works, but many other variants don’t so it was much faster to just go straight for the end result, so to speak. This also confirms this is definitely an outside-knowledge kind of game, but this seems completely in line with the intent of the author.

From the 2024 HarperCollins cover of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

ASIDE: I don’t normally do a random call for comments, but I am morbidly curious what people think about Tom Bombadil. That section of the book always came off to me as walking into a different story, somehow (even though Bombadil helps with the next part which then gets the hobbits their weapons).

“The next part” is referring to the barrow-wight, where you can TOM BOMBADIL your way out again. I was slightly puzzled at first because Frodo technically cuts off the hand of the barrow-wight first before calling in the calvary, and trying to do that in the game just kills you.

You’re standing among misty barrowdowns.

A tall dark figure like a shadow against the stars leans over you.
You’re in the power of a Barrowwight!

You find yourself lying on a stone bed.
A sickening pale hand is holding a shining sword, ready to pierce you!

TOM BOMBADIL
With a loud crash the barrowdown bursts into rubble.
The Barrowwight wails as it vanishes in the mist.
At your feet you discover a shining sword.

GET SWORD
It’s yours now.

There are no other Hobbits; it’s just us, somehow starting with a bow and arrows (which I incidentally have yet to use — the ringwraiths laugh them off). In the events that are to follow it strikes me we’re more like Aragorn, except we start in Hobbiton? The author clearly wanted to include all the places in Lord of the Rings but wasn’t worried about playing loose with the capabilities of the characters.

You know what the ringwraiths don’t laugh off? The sword from the barrowdown.

You’re on the Weathertop.

A dark shadow is creeping up the hill!

KILL SHADOW
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.

My first ring! And now with the sword you can go back and kill the riders on either side of the Brandywine bridge; rather than HIDE, type KILL.

A ghostly rider is galloping towards you!

KILL RDIER
With a ghastly cry the ringwraith falls.
Among the now shapeless garments you discover a golden ring.

All that running around and Frodo could have just stabbed them! What was he thinking!

With all that out of the way, I was able to find a jewel along the road, and a side cave with a glowing staff. A third rider guarding the path to the east fell easily to the blade.

Things still were “dense” enough in this section I thought the game would keep it up, but then the rest of my map (for my first trek farther) went like this:

While some directions were blocked, the map opens up from here to its full 36 by 36 glory (or something — the tangled exits on the foreign shores now makes me unsure). Again, the “zoomed-in” perspective now seems the wrong way to look at the game; from a practical perspective, I think trying to map the entire game in Trizbort may be a problem and I need to switch to filling in grid square colors instead.

You’re following an east-west trail.

E
You’re following a narrow trail through the hills.

E
The path splits up in two directions.

E
You’re at the fords of the river Loudwater.

E
You’re looking over the beautiful valley of Imladris.
Rivendell should be near.

E
You’re following an east-west trail.

E
The path splits up in two directions.

N
You’re following a north-south trail.

N
You’re wandering through a small forest.
There’s a lot of dead wood lying around.

The dead wood is an object that gets used just a bit later, going through the “High Pass of the Caradhras” where there is a blizzard.

You’re on the high pass of the Caradhras.

E
Snow is falling in big flakes.

E
You’re caught in a terrible blizzard.
If you don’t make fire soon, you’ll freeze!

MAKE FIRE
You burn all the wood you have.

E
Snow is falling in big flakes.

E
You’re on the high pass of the Caradhras.

This is the extreme version of the “fan fiction shortcut”, where the entire map of Middle Earth is considered more or less a given, and where the game becomes more vivid is for a player who knows the word “Caradhras” in the first place. (That’s the mountain where the Fellowship gets stalled by a blizzard, and Frodo (who gets the vote as Ring bearer) decides to take Gimli’s suggestion to pass through Moria instead.

Past the blizzard is the “old forest” where the player can have a run-in with a spider which is a lot easier to handle than the equivalent puzzle in the Melbourne House game The Hobbit:

Among the trees you discover huge cobwebs.

Suddenly you hear a rustling sound behind you!

KILL SPIDER
The hideous black spider is now dead.

Then lots of “path”, and more “path”, and even some “turn” in there…

…and the path I took ended at, somehow, Smaug.

Far to the north you can see the Lonely Mountain.

N
You’re passing through the ruins of Dale.

N
You’re following a north-south trail.

N
You’re facing a grey wall of rock.
In it you discover a small hole.

N
You bump into a wall of rock.

E
Your way is blocked by a wide river.

W
In front of you are the broken gates of the Lonely Mountain.

I’m afraid that Smaug has noticed your approach.

Wait, aren’t you supposed to be dead?

To be fair, we didn’t have the One Ring to start with, and Frodo (if that is even our main character) is able to take down ringwraiths with ease, so this is a “parallel universe” Lord of the Rings where Smaug is still around, and where all the rings need to be cast into Mount Doom, not just the One Ring.

I’m going to try using a color-grid next time and see how it goes, but I’m afraid this might be a scenario where I need to swap between big-scale view and small-scale view at a moment’s notice.