Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This is my last post on Thissala for now, although given the authors never finished it, and there seems to be content I haven’t been able to access, I can’t promise it is the last word. My previous posts on this game are needed for context.

Via S. Howlett-West Books. Prior to officially being To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book of the Riverworld series was published as two novellas; this magazine has the second.

Let me first address something I mentioned in my post last time: what happens if you die repeatedly? In Riverworld the book, it causes the protagonist Richard Burton to be resurrected, but farther down the river; in a search for the source (like Burton searching for the source of the Nile) he kills himself repeatedly in order to take the “suicide express” down the river.

It doesn’t happen like that here.

KILL ME

As the darkness of death fades, and the light intensifies, you find yourself falling quickly at first then slower, then slower still until you find yourself looking down on a strange land. Below is a river, a long river, so long that even at this height the river stretches forever. About 1 mile from each bank of the river is a tall mountain range. You slow more until you are about 1 foot from the ground, and then you lite gently on the surface of an eerie world.

Western extreme of the bridge
There is a broken down wooden bridge here that crossed over to the other side of the river

KILL ME

As the darkness of death fades, and the light intensifies, you find yourself falling quickly at first then slower, then slower still until you find yourself looking down on a strange land. Below is a river, a long river, so long that even at this height the river stretches forever. About 1 mile from each bank of the river is a tall mountain range. You slow more until you are about 1 foot from the ground, and then you lite gently on the surface of an eerie world.

Thick mist
The ground, and the river, are almost undistiguishible here due to the dense fog that surrounds you. Upstream, you can barely make out what appears to be a bridge heading to the other side of the river.

You reappear at some random place on the west side of the river, and the three coins (dime, penny, quarter) re-materialize somewhere in Riverworld to be picked up. The only problem is the boat. If you’ve used the boat to the tower, and then escape, the boat stays at the tower! That means you are stuck in Riverworld and have to reload a save game. (I also, oddly, had one of the three coins not appear, which made me suspicious of a secret room, but it could easily be just a bug. You can re-suicide to get the coins to move elsewhere, though.)

The boat does have a delay when you push a button, so if you actually do feel the need to ride the suicide express, you just need to remember to press it after arriving at the tower.

Inside the little boat
You are standing inside the little boat that floats on the great lake at the end of the river. There are two buttons here, on marked “T” and the other “S”, although no explanations are given.

PUSH “S” BUTTON
Beep

DISEMBARK
After a momentary delay, the boat glides off quietly towards the shore

The Silver tower
You have reached the silver tower in the middle of the lake. You are standing on the lake level platform. The platform continues around the tower at this level in both the clockwise and counterclockwise direction. There is a second platform visible high above your head

I finally got by the pirate who was stabbing me, via that magic of the game being glitchy or at least confused. I reloaded a different save to go over to where the pirate/rat/spider were and for some reason one of the enemies (the spider) was missing. This was enough for me to win the battle.

ATTACK RAT WITH SCIMITAR
Your attack with the scimitar has been completely successful. The rat falls to the ground dead. As you look at the body, it disintegrates.

LOOK
In a notch in the wall

W
The Pirates Den

N, S, E, and W from the den lead back to the notch. I’m guessing the authors planned to mimic the pirate of Adventure but never finished adding the feature in, so the Den is just a description-less room.

Next up: two easter egg areas. First is from the lingering ghost of Adventure, which clearly held strong over these authors. You can use the magic word XYZZY…

XYZZY
You’re in Debris Room.
You are in a debris room filled with stuff washed in from the surface. A low wide passage with cobbles becomes plugged with mud and debris here, but an awkward canyon leads upward and west. A note on the wall says “magic word XYZZY”.

XYZZY
You’re inside building.
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.

…and using XYZZY a third time just sends you back to where you left from. This all raises a question: what is the earliest XYZZY easter egg? Is it this one? That is, not just a game that’s a derivative of Crowther/Woods, but one coded from scratch, that implements the word anyway. Acheton says

I’m afraid that magic word hasn’t got enough power to work in this universe.

and Zork has a voice that says “Fool”, but is there another one I’m missing from ’78-’79 that did more? I haven’t tested XYZZY everywhere.

From Dennis Donovan’s 1978 map of Crowther/Woods, via Facebook.

ASIDE: There was an odd period in the 1990s where XYZZY easter eggs were so prevalent a list was developed of every occurrence; you can find a modern compilation via David Welbourne. I remember when So Far (1996) first came out it seemed like a statement that XYZZY was not an understood word. (“That’s not a verb I recognise.”, with the British spelling, since Graham Nelson used that spelling.)

The other easter egg comes from an undescribed exit at the mountain right before the bridge. The text says “highest plateau” but the game didn’t really mean that. I will give the text in its entirety.

Highest plateau
You are on the highest plateau, which is considerably larger than the two lower ones. Directly below you you can see the Dipestia which flows from the NE to the SW where it curls around Major mountain, to south. Across, but higher up the northern face of other mountain, there is an observation booth with what appears to be a small gnome looking out at you using binoculars. Directly below the observation booth, at the level of the ledge you are on, is a wooden drawbridge. The drawbridge is in the closed position, forming a path accross to Major mountain

U
Top of the mountain
You have reached the top of the lesser mountain, on the eastern edge.
There is a trail here that heads due west.

W
Eastern edge of the caldera
You are standing looking down into a great caldera.

D
Caldera (east)
You are in the great caldera of the minor mountain. To the west you can hear a beautiful but faint sound – a sound unlike any instrument or animal ever heard.

W
Caldera (west)
You are in the great caldera of the minor mountain. There is a trail leading up the western slope of the caldera. Set in the ground is a 5 foot monument of marble in the shape of a man. From the sculpture eminates an outstandingly beautiful sound, unlike any other known to humans. The tone, pitch, and volume change constantly, but the rate of change appears to be dependant to your proximity to it. Engraved in the front of the sculpture is a dedication.

READ DEDICATION
It is with great sorrow, that here, at this location, on the twenty-fifth day of July, in the nineteenth hundred and eightieth year, we dedicate this sculpture in appreciation of a departed contributor to this endeavor. Swept away by the lure of self enrichment through further education with the eventual goal of making big bucks, he has left us.

We shall miss you Big Jim.

Though you are gone in being, the Thai will always remain

At least we have a date of one of the game sections! (25 July, 1980.) What I don’t know is which of the authors (David Auerbach, Paul Chiasson, and Peter Macaulay) this is referring to! Or if it even is one of those authors, and this is one of those things where someone who gives lots of suggestions is uncredited.

With all that wrapped up, there’s two puzzles lingering that Rob hinted at in the comments. One of them, I’ll admit, I still wasn’t able to solve with the ROT13 hint Rob gave; somehow there’s a parser command that puts the washer and the fuse together, and then it installs in the fuse box…? Given the result is a single treasure, and we still have the treasure destination, I’m fine leaving that puzzle be. (I’m guessing the answer will show up in the comments, so check there if you want to know. Look, I’m doing engagement!) The puzzle I did manage to solve involved the skittish hen.

FEED HEN WITH CORN
The hen does not trust you, and refuses the food.

Somehow way back in my early days of playing I tried just leaving the corn here but not coming back (because I forgot about it while mapping a billion rooms, maybe). If you leave the corn and do come back, you get a golden egg.

Inside the hen house
Sitting in the corner, eating some dried out corn, is a large hen.
Sitting on the shelf is a small nest
It contains:
@In the middle of the nest, where the hen used to sit, is a beautiful golden egg.

Huzzah, another piece of score that only registers when you are holding it, because we can’t get into the bank (where the treasure probably goes). With that, let’s summarize all the sticking points:

1. getting the teleporters to work

2. the bank

3. the mysterious box in the church which counts as a treasure but kills you

4. getting the treasures back past the bridge where the gnomes stop you (probably using 1)

5. the dowel/cylinder setup

6. the curtain with the hooks

7. the north exit mentioned in the Kitchen which isn’t there

That’s less than you might think! The desert had no real puzzles and I have found no use for the hammer or the key. Of the above issues, I’m pretty sure 7 is a dead end (unless there’s a wizard cheat code or someone can just hack a 32-bit Eclipse), but I still feel like the other six may plausibly have a real solve in game; just neither me nor Rob can find it. A thread for a future explorer to pull, perhaps? (Or at least someone who can figure out Data General binary files.)

You might be able to guess already I don’t recommend this game for the general public. I found the whole process of “digital archaeology” fascinating while contextualized in a historical sense — playing a game with no clear ending just like the players of the early ’80s on a mainframe did — and the prose was pleasant enough despite the typos, but it wasn’t enough of a reward for mapping and more mapping and more mapping. It’s like some musicians started with an ABACA formula but got stuck in B with a 2 hour guitar solo.

Coloured rock canyon
You are standing on a North-South track in the middle of a sandstone canyon. The rock walls on either side are veined and banded with varied hues of sandstone, mainly reddish shades which lie between roseate and ocherous, but with occasional streaks of bluish-gray and green, which seem to indicate the bedding-planes of an upper Triassic, or possibly lower Lias, series of sediments. The colours appear to be glowing in the strong sunlight. It is altogether a beautiful and somewhat awe-inspiring sight.

(Someone got to show off their geology skills, though!)

I don’t want to discourage people from trying too hard, because I really would like an answer to those questions! Maybe one of the unaccounted-for authors (David Auerbach, Paul Chiasson) is still alive and will Google themselves, and we’ll finally get the story on what happened.

The lore of Thamos and the flute never came up past that parchment, so I’m not going to mention it other than leaving this image of a sci-fi opera version of the Mozart music, T.H.A.M.O.S. At least it isn’t as weird as Help, Help, the Globolinks!

Coming up: a recently rescued lost Commodore PET game.