Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve taken off enough of a chunk of the game to give a report, including a brand-new-for-751 section, but I’m still not yet past the “fnord” rock.

From Arthur O’Dwyer’s family tree of variations of Adventure.

(Incidentally, I’m not sure on the naming of LONG0500 above. There’s text in the November ’78 game which claims the max score is 500 yet typing SCORE says outright the max score is 501. Also, the commercial version of the game has been rescued off old CompuServe drives and likely should be added as another node off of LONG0751.)

I’ve picked up a few new readers recently, so now is a good time to re-explain my verb list. Verbs marked in green are understood by the game, unmarked verbs are not understood at all.

I don’t do this with every old game I play, but it helps with the particularly ornery ones. I typed every single verb in my standard list (see above) and checked if the verb was understood by the parser or not. (SWIM is understood only to say you aren’t able to swim, so I gave it a different color.)

The process looks like this:

STAB

Mumble? STAB?

HOLD

I don’t understand the word HOLD.

PLAY

Play what?

COOK

I don’t understand the word COOK.

Fortunately, there are two and only two well-defined “I don’t understand that word” prompts so there’s no ambiguity (I’ve played games where I’ve had to either outfox the parser or just give up).

For games with a low vocabulary count, this can help fish out the one unusual phrase a game might need early; even when the density is higher (like here) making the list can help suss out potential issues. For example, RUB is in even though it tends not to be used in Adventure variants (Scott Adams Adventureland, yes) so I need to remember to test it if an object seems like a magical candidate. BUILD is particularly worrisome because it means there’s likely some object that is not previously named that the player will be able to make out of parts (usually it’s a ladder or a bridge). FOLLOW is also fairly rare and not normally one I use; I can think of at least one game where the verb was required to solve a puzzle. CRAWL, KICK, and PUNCH are also worth noting.

The list can help in a “negative space” sense as well; I can tell we are not making much conversation, and SAY only serves to speak a particular word out-loud in the sense of a “magic word”.

While I was busy doing this I also realized something about the safe in the starting building.

GET POSTER

Hidden behind the poster is a steel safe, embedded in the wall.

OPEN SAFE

How?

TURN COMBINATION

I don’t understand the word COMBINATI.

TURN DIAL

I can’t make any sense out of that.

(Only the first nine letters are being used, hence COMBINATI.) I realized the way the safe operated was likely going to be by entering individual numbers on their own lines (like typing “42” just on its own). Because of this, I wondered: would it be possible to brute force the puzzle?

4

I don’t understand the word 4.

5

I don’t understand the word 5.

6

Mumble? 6?

7

“Click.”

With this method I was able to get that 7-22-34 causes the safe to open. This is not randomized. (I did find out how to find the combination properly, but only later; I’ll save it for the end of my post.)

The safe door smoothly swings open.

The safe includes a “rare book” which has a “HISTORY OF ADVENTURE (ABRIDGED)” which is long-ish and I have the entire thing as a text file here. This is the document in Adventure 501 that says the max score is 500; in this version, it adds:

Most recent additions include the great Castle of Aldor, the Elephants’ Burial Ground, Leprechaun Rock and more.

You’ll get to see the outside of the Castle in this post. In addition, I wanted to highlight:

Thanks are owed to Roger Matus and David Feldman, both of U. of C., for several suggestions, including the Rainbow Room, the telephone booth and the fearsome Wumpus.

This means the Wumpus puzzle I mentioned admiring in my last post was actually thought of by one of the people playing the game! Mainframe games were not produced in voids and often had multiple contributors; this includes Woods (of classic 350-point Adventure). In the interview with Woods made for Jason Scott’s documentary GET LAMP, he talks about this process, citing (for example) the passage that was too narrow to carry your lamp as something that was suggested by a player.

Back to the safe, it turns out to be useful to access because just like the thief in Zork (I assume he was the inspiration for this) you can have any objects you drop in the building noodled with. I don’t know if there’s a limit or a specific algorithm but the game is hard enough as it is without having to worry about items wandering from where you expect them. I blame the “tiny little green man” that kicks you while outside at the grassy knoll.

A tiny little man dressed all in green runs straight at you, shouts “Phuce!”, aims a kick squarely at your kneecap, misses, and disappears into the forest.

Speaking of “phuce”–

You’re at top of steps in back of Thunder Hole.
The only way past the wall is through a tiny locked door.

UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY

The tiny door is now unlocked.

PHUCE

You feel dizzy…Everything around you is spinning, expanding, growing larger…. Dear me! Is the cave bigger or are you smaller?
You are on a wide ledge, bounded on one side by a rock wall, and on the other by a sheer cliff. The only way past is through a large wrought-iron door.
The door is open.

GO EAST

You are on the western shore of an underground sea. The way west is through a wrought-iron door.
A high wooden structure of vast proportions extends into the water.
The door is open.

PHUCE

You are again overcome by a sickening vertigo, but this time everything is shrinking… I mean, you are growing. This is terribly confusing!
You are at the western tip of the Blue Grotto. A large lake almost covers the cavern floor, except for where you are standing. Small holes high in the rock wall to the east admit a dim light. The reflection of the light from the water suffuses the cavern with a hazy bluish glow.
There is a small wooden boat here.
The only way past the wall is through a tiny open door.

This is back at the door where you start by growing with mushrooms, shrinking with cake, but then finding a small door to still deal with. No real logic: I was just trying all the magic words everywhere. This breaks into the grotto I dropped a picture of last time.

Manifested!

To move the boat around you need to be holding the wooden pole; I solved this puzzle “passively” by having the pole in my inventory by accident when I tried to move around in the boat. There is a hint — the wooden pole has the text “_ R O _ _ O” suggesting the word GROTTO.

ENTER BOAT

You are now sitting in a small boat.

GO EAST

You have poled your boat across the calm water.
You are on the eastern shore of the Blue Grotto. An ascending tunnel disappears into the darkness to the SE.
There is a jewel-encrusted trident here!

As I was remembering, this links together two distinct parts of the map, the outside section to the area with the “rainbow” room and the Lost River and the “too bright” corridor and the “tongue of rock” with the whiskbroom sitting there and the bat cave with the shovel. I’ve done my best to show a merging of the two sections:

In one case I simply missed an exit (near where the passage got too bright, you can go north to a ledge and find a wooden casket). The grotto connects with the shore with the trident, as already shown, plus you can go:

a.) South to a “gravel beach” where there is an “apiary” with bees; I was able to bring the flowers I found outside and distract them, revealing a treasure (a honeycomb).

You are in the Apiary. The walls are covered with colorful, intricate, flower-like patterns of crystallized gypsum.
There is an active beehive nearby. The bees hum protectively around the hive.

THROW FLOWERS

The bees swarm over the fresh flowers, leaving the hive unguarded and revealing a sweet honeycomb.

The flowers have a “!” mark but that apparently isn’t good enough to determine if something is a treasure. If you GET TREASURE and it picks the thing up then you know it counts for points.

b.) North to a “dark cove” where you can walk up a “basin” to eventually find a fountain of wine. You can climb up at the fountain to get to the place where you can find the cask. I haven’t experimented with this section and if you need to do some fancy shenanigans to safely get the cask to the wine yet.

c.) North from the trident to a “Bubble Chamber” that has a green stone. Hang out at the green stone long enough and you’ll start to feel unhealthy.

You are at a high rock on the NE side of a watery chamber at the mouth of a small brook. An unknown gas bubbles up through the water from the chamber floor. A bluish light can be seen to the southwest.
Nearby, a strange, greenish stone is glowing brightly.

I remember (from 501) this is because the stone is radioactive and needed to be stored in a special container. I’m not sure if I’ve seen the container yet.

d.) Past the radioactive stone is a “Fairy Grotto”…

You are in the Fairy Grotto. All around you innumerable stalactites, arranged in immense colonnades, form elegant arches. On every side you hear the dripping of water, like the footsteps of a thousand fairies. A small stream runs from the SW corner. A bright glow emanates from the south side of the grotto, and a steep passage descends to the east.

…and if you try to keep going, you end up down a corridor that’s too cold to walk through. I think I have seen the right item for this elsewhere but I haven’t tested it yet (you’ll see later).

Going south from the Fairy Grotto you get stopped because it is “too bright”; a similar message happens elsewhere, so this is clearly the same place being linked two ways.

That’s enough of that section. Let’s hop up to the swamp. It relates to the cloth bag that was part of the “Witt Construction Company”.

You are at the edge of an open area of wet sand. The dense foliage appears to grow thinner towards the northeast. A small sign stuck in the muck reads: “Site of Proposed Municipal Parking Lot — D.M. Witt, Contractor.”
Foul smelling gasses bubble up through the wet sand.

I decided to put construction together with the construction site to see what would happen.

As the grey powder mixes with the bubbling quicksand, the whole mixture gradually thickens to a rocklike hardness.

This opens a brand new section; going north no longer sinks you in quicksand.

First comes a ravine:

You’re in an open field on the south side of a deep ravine. South and west the land is an almost impassible swamp. To the west the ravine merges with the swamp; some distance to the east it ends abruptly at the foot of a sheer granite cliff. A dry drainage pipe six inches in diameter emerges from the base of the cliff just above the floor of the ravine.

You can go in the ravine but you can’t get out again with anything being held. This is unfortunate since the ravine has a statue (a treasure).

You are at the east end of a steep ravine, near where a drainage pipe emerges from a rock wall.
There is an ancient marble statue lying here!

Following the ravine further leads to death; I don’t know if exit is about climbing up or about surviving the “wet and treacherous” area to the west.

Ignoring the ravine, you can also go east to find a “cliff” with vines; climbing the vines reveals a rope, and for a while I thought that was that. (Incidentally note: no TIE or UNTIE on the verb list. I tried playing the flute and that didn’t cause the rope to levitate, so I don’t know how to get it to work. I assume THROW makes it happen somewhere?)

I admit my next piece of insight came from the map, but given you could buy it from CompuServe to accompany your gameplay I just consider it a “supplement”. Notice there seems to be a hole/entrance next to the vines. It isn’t there in the regular description!

You are at the foot of a towering cliff. The sheer rock face is partially obscured by thick vines growing up the cliff.

MOVE VINES

Parting the vines reveals a narrow crack in the face of the cliff.

This allows winding around the ravine, getting a “four-leaf clover” on the other side. You can also walk farther and find a lair.

You are in the lair of Ralph the Giant Centipede. The air reeks with the stench of rotting bits of flesh. Giant centipedes, in general, are not partial to visitors.
A golden fleece is lying nearby!
A giant centipede is eyeing you with a none-too-friendly look.

You can take the fleece and it is rather like taking the cloak from the Wumpus. (Incidentally, I suspect either the cloak or fleece or both protect from cold — I just haven’t had a chance to test it yet.) The centipede starts to chase:

The incensed insect is in full gear now. If you don’t move quickly, his monstrous mandibles may masticate you into murky mush!

JUMP

You are at the bottom of the ravine with a broken head.

I’ll have to play around with this later. The game is large enough that it takes a while to get items together to test a theory. Since I had the boat access I grabbed the whiskbroom and shovel and tried using them in various places, getting a hit with the broom at the “dusty room” above the Complex Junction. (This is one of the standard Crowther/Woods rooms, just it has been repurposed. Adventure 448 had a similar puzzle.)

You are in a large room full of dusty rocks. There is a big hole in the floor. There are cracks everywhere, and a passage leading east.

BRUSH

Brushing the dust from one of the larger rocks reveals some carved characters.
In the rock is carved the inscription:

In Memoriam:
John Dillinger, Liberator of the Little Man.
Died: 7-22-34.

…and that’s how you figure out the safe code if you aren’t brute forcing it. Either that, or you take a wild jump based on the Dillinger Society poster and try the death date. I wonder if anyone did that to solve the puzzle!

I’m not really “stuck”, but I have a lot of moving parts to coordinate now and I’m trying to get through without burning too much lamp power. I have five theories about the area past the chapel (“fnord”) but I need to juggle objects to get them in the right spot in order to test any of them.