I’ve finished the game; my previous posts are needed for context. You can read my complete Ringen series including the 2019 content here, and my series starting from the DOS port here.
Balrog via WETA.
Nearly to the end, this game has a serious issue with how events are triggered: it relies heavily on random number generation. This is an issue I’ve brought up multiple times but it’s worth a re-fresh:
Suppose you have an event that happens 1% of the time in your game, checking every turn. How likely is it that it will take over 100 turns to see the event?
Intuitively, many people would think it quite unlikely. Another way to phrase the question is “how likely is it to get 99% — the failure state — 100 times in a row?” This is simply .99 raised to the 100th power, or approximately 36.6%. That means more than a third of players will be failing 100 times in a row.
How about 200 times in a row? That seems unlikely, right? Well, no, it’s actually 13.4%. Remember this is a designer who likely was thinking “oh it’ll be about 50, at worst about 100” and more than 1 of 10 in players are now waiting double the “maximum”.
Surely not 300 turns in a row? That’s still around 5%, or 1 in 20 of all players. Especially in the context of a text adventure, 300 turns is a very long time.
The curious thing about Ringen is there is at least a little acknowledgement of this problem. Let me go back to the scene with Legolas appearing, and giving Sting (which turned out to be central to my last leap and winning the game).
I will try to help you out of here, but first I will try to find our mutual friend Gandalf. In the meantime, help yourself the best you can. Fortunately, I have found your dear sword, Sting. Take your magic weapon, and you will have something to defend yourself with! We’ll meet again soon!
The Legolas encounter can occur any time in the game, with a 1% chance. The source code also adds an extra condition that Legolas will appear automatically if you exceed 200 moves (what I ended up doing on a rest was just walking back and forth between two rooms, and it did take until move 201 for Legolas to show up). So, under normal play conditions most players will eventually do enough turns to see him.
The problem is that the upshot — the thing I was missing — is a random roll that happens after you get Sting. What you want to happen is have the “small trolls” appear again (the ones who thought you were a wizard). However, in actual practice, they weren’t showing up for me; at first this was just by chance, but then I went to check source code and tried to get them to show intentionally and still had enormous trouble. I went to over 300 moves without seeing them (1 in 20 isn’t that unlikely! It’s just your natural 20 in D&D!)
They see the glittering sword you are holding, shout wildly, and run away in total confusion.
In the process of doing this, one of the trolls drops some clothes. (This is non-obvious; you have to either look at the room again or return to it later and be observant.) You may recall last time I was trying to translate “trollham” and I went with “troll-skin” knowing there was some ambiguity. K had it right in the comments: you’re supposed to dress like a troll to win the battle against the Balrog. The other items you’ll need are Balin’s axe and the wizard staff (technically the One Ring because the game doesn’t let you drop it, and you need to escape with it, but the Balrog can see you either way so it doesn’t matter if you are wearing it).
Before taking on that battle, a couple more RNG instances —
Back at the dragon I was confused about an inclined room to the north where seemingly every direction drops the player back down to the start. I was a victim, again, of RNG: going north sometimes will drop back to the start, but sometimes drop into a “royal” room instead.
I may not have every room (see: RNG, even testing 20 times there’s no guarantee you didn’t miss something) and on my winning run I didn’t even bother entering; it’s just treasures like a crown and a shield. (They would help with the 200 point thing with the wizard, but a.) I didn’t bother with the wizard on my final run b.) I already had enough treasures to fill my inventory, so for any extra treasures to count I needed to cash them in at the Pawnbroker, something I never figured out how to do.)
I also had an encounter with Arwen. I believe this triggers if your points are above a certain level and then your random number gets lucky again, and it is worth mentioning because it redeems the wizard scene slightly: she gives you a tiara and tells you explicitly the wizard now wants to see you, making it not so arbitrary any more to visit him.
Ei strålende vakker alveprinsesse får se deg. Hun stopper opp og ser på deg med et fortryllende vakkert smil, og sier :
`Jeg er Arwen Undomiel av høyalvenes folk.
Jeg må straks tilbake til mine egne, så jeg har ikke tid til å prate.
Ta denne tiaraen, Ringbærer, den vil kanskje kunne hjelpe deg.
Trollmannen ville treffe deg på sitt oppholdssted. Gå dit!’Prinsessa forsvinner i en sky av flagrende gevanter.
A beautiful elf princess comes by and sees you. She stops and looks at you with an enchantingly beautiful smile, and says:
“I am Arwen Undomiel of the people of the High Elves.
I have to get back to my own people now, so I don’t have time to talk.
Take this tiara, ring bearer, it may be able to help you.
The Wizard wanted to meet you at his location. Go there!”The Princess disappears in a cloud of fluttering robes.
Arwen Joins the Quest. From the Hildebrandt brothers in 2000 for the magazine Inquest.
Finally, the bit with the earthquake that opens a gap is not linked to the picking up the ring — it eventually just happens. This allows you to visit the Pawnbroker and the west side of the lake and the Palantir without worrying about Gollum swiping the ring.
You may incidentally wonder how I handled reclaiming the ring from Gollum. I just made sure he didn’t steal it in the first place. I don’t know the exact logic (I studied the code and I’m still unclear) but when I was ready for the final challenge, I put on the ring right before entering the earthquake passage; there’s enough time to get to the Balrog and kill it before taking the ring off, and Gollum can only steal the ring if you’re visible.
With all that taken care of, while approaching the Balrog in troll clothes he pauses, giving you enough time to act.
The Balrog seems to hesitate a bit.
What are you going to do now?
A little parser struggle here; “use axe” doesn’t work (even though that’s what you’re using), you have to “kill balrog” instead.
You attack the Balrog with Durin’s axe!
The giant monster roars furiously and strikes after you!
Durin’s holy axe seems to have a life of its own!
Suddenly it flies from your hand and hits the monster in the eye!
The monster takes a step back, loses its footing, and stands swaying.
What are you going to do now?
Using the staff, which before gave out stunning light:
The Balrog falls with a terrifying scream into the abyss.
You have defeated the Balrog!
This is not the end of the game. The fact this keeps going a little longer is arguably the classiest part of the game; not only is there one last dramatic moment, but the ending feels like a real denouement. So many of our fantasies have had an abrupt “you got all the treasures, you win”; even the ones with an “endgame” generally have not let the plot wind down gently.
You are following a road that runs east/west.
This is the widest road yet; the floor is worn from long use.
A fresh breeze comes from the east!>e
Okay.
You are walking on a wide east/west road.
A breeze is felt from the east, and there is a faint daylight coming from there!
There are multiple rooms going out and you can find some of the random treasures here; on my winning run there was a platinum egg and Boromir’s horn. Just right after the exit:
You are on the east side of the Gate Hall. To the east, the mountain opens up.
You can see the blue morning sky a stone’s throw away, from a wide portal.
Just a few more steps, and you’ll be outside!From behind the stones, a horde of Uruk trolls suddenly jump out with cries and block the entrance.
In the middle of them sits a black, shrouded figure on a black horse. It is a Ringwraith, a Nazgul!With a thunderous voice the Nazgul says:
`Stop! Who are you, walking in troll clothes?’
ha ha ha yeeeeees
You see, I knew exactly what was about to happen: while Sting scared some trolls and caused them to drop some clothing, surely it was put in the game for a nobler purpose?
Nazgul illustrated by Margrethe II of Denmark for a Danish edition of Lord of the Rings.
>kill nazgul
Sting flashes furiously, and with one blow you knock the stunned Nazgul off his horse! The Uruk trolls recoil in surprise.
What are you going to do now?
You can now go east to escape (if you do anything else, you get pelted with spears).
Du er utenfor de store portene i Dimrill-dalen.
Mot øst strekker den store porten seg, og du kan se et lite vann blinke under deg. Morgenhimmelen er blå, og den lave sola skinner på fjellet over deg. Under et steinkast mot vest gaper de svarte åpningene – dystre og skjebnesvangrende. Bare litt til nå, så har du klart det!>ø
Ok.
Du er på et platå øst for de store portene.
Under deg er den grønne dalen, og speilsjøen ligger som et prydblad og funkler under den lave morgensola; som nå endelig kaster sine stråler på deg. Intet troll kan nå deg her. Du har klart å komme igjennom Tåkefjellene. Som Ringbærer har du trosset alle farer, og fått med deg Ringen, Den Ene, gjennom de dype minene i Moria – Gratulerer!
You are outside the great gates of the Dimrill Valley.
To the east stretches the Great Gate and you can see water shimmer. The morning sky is blue, and the low sun shines on the mountains above you. A stone’s throw to the west, the openings gape black and gloomy. Just a little farther!>e
OK.
You are on a plateau east of the gates.
Below you is the green valley; the mirror lake sits like a leaf and sparkles under the low morning sun, which now finally casts its rays for you. No troll can reach you here. You have managed to get through the Misty Mountains. As a ring bearer, you have defied all dangers, while taking the ring, the One, through the deep, the mines of Moria – Congratulations!
This had the most satisfying ending I’ve seen in a text adventure for a while. Despite the action being steps forward, there’s something much more dramatic and tangible here than the usual passage (with the brief tangle with the Nazgul at the end).
It almost makes up for the terrible RNG parts. There’s no real “points” here to balance, but I did have multiple hours wasted on what turned out to be bad dice rolls, and the game was never transparent about what was going on behind the scenes. I think the intent works better in a computer lab: multiple people playing in such a setting are more likely to collectively trigger certain events, so if one person meets Legolas the others know he is around somewhere.
The treasures came off as superfluous, even with the point-total aspect to the wizard (why should I care about the platinum egg on the way out?), but again, there’s a collective-group sense to them: if this is a game people are burning processor power over a whole semester on, forcing the addition of a restriction to computing time, an extra element other than just beating the game helps.
If nothing else, it helped I felt like I was “in the world” of Tolkien more than Ring Quest, despite that game’s bigger sweep of focus (and boosted ability scores handed over to Frodo, who was able to solo the Balrog).
Checking against the MUD, the author included many of the same rooms, but mixed up their geography. I still don’t know where to find the sulfur in MUD-form (to get by the dragon) or how to find the name on the third riddle (it would be amusing if it could be brute-forced just like Ringen; there’s no apparent wizard substitute on the MUD). As you can just walk out of the region in the MUD it loses much of its tension. The original product was in the end more satisfying, even if I had quite slow progress due to the Norwegian.
Original notes for translating the room descriptions to MUD form.
Coming up: A completely unknown and undocumented game by a (relatively) famous company. It hasn’t even been mentioned in this blog’s comments before.
Renga in Blue 
I agree about the ending. I was surprised that it kind of kept on going, and it made the whole thing feel more rewarding. I think Halvor’s writing was pretty decent by the standards of the time, and the Tolkien atmosphere was strong.
A few bits and pieces:
– One thing you missed is that you can connect the entrance to the final section up with the rest of the map. There’s a wall that’s described as being very dirty, and if you wash it with the water you can put in the bottle from the little pool, it reveals a keyhole. If you use the key on this, it opens a door that passes through the tunnel that’s described as too dark and full of cobwebs to bother with.
– The trap/maze: You have to call for help here, and a comical scene ensues where Sam suddenly pokes his head out of the bushes and points out an oppening to the south. You have to specifically “kryp” (crawl) there and it takes you back to where you entered the trap. Now the funny thing here is that this introduced a bug in the port, as you can actually “kryp s” from anywhere in the game and warp back to this same spot! I found it useful at times.
– I thought the portrayal of Thorin (which is anachronistic, isn’t it?) here as grim and greedy was interesting compared to his much more famous role in Melbourne House’s game. I think you just “gi item”, btw, as far as I recall.
– As I mentioned before, there’s a weird “bonus” encounter with Gandalf you can have, by using one item in conjunction with another, but the details are escaping me now. The bottom line is that it creates a flash of light which reveals that one of the items is actually a treasure, but then Gandalf suddenly shows up, says he’s been looking for that, and grabs it from you and takes off, leaving you with a measly 5 point bonus. The whole thing seemed kind of odd…
– One other thing that got cut from the port are some recurring messages that you hear the “troll drums” beating from the depths of the mine, signaling that they might show up and attack at any minute. It was basically just for atmosphere, so was probably removed to save space.
my key was on the other side of the lake, so that would not have been terribly helpful!
Was there any way to get the ring back from Gollum?
Haha.. Yeah, you’re right about the RNG issues here. I was pretty lucky in my playthroughs, but I can see how the chances are good that it’s going to make something or other a real pain. There was no save game feature in the original either, so it definitely had to be played in that communal way of the mainframe era.
IIRC, there’s no way to get the ring back, so it’s a softlock. However, once you have Sting (I think), you usually end up in a luridly described fight scene with him where you end up driving him off and keeping the ring. But there’s another outcome where the ring ends up bring dropped and lost in the struggle, so there’s still some RNG chaos at play even then
When the troll drums are beating it’s ominous, but when they stop it’s worse
because that’s when there’s a bass solo
The Hildebrandy illustration: Setting aside the inherent weirdness of Arwen being part of the Fellowship (?? I guess is what we’re supposed to get from that?), why is she wielding a flaming sword, of all things?
That Nazgul illustration is pretty cool. I don’t know if it’s really a woodcut or what, but it sure gives the impression of being made out of insubstantial black smoke or something.
*Hildebrandt, of course
Knew I had to share the Arwen one when I saw it, odd choices
The Danish lotr images are all very good