(Continued from my previous posts.)
I’m sorry, I’m going to have to pitch this for now. If there’s a future version with save games (or at least where the frequency of knife attacks is greatly reduced!) and perhaps less bugs I can take another swing. (ICL’s Quest which I also bailed on has had recent progress, so it isn’t impossible even given the circumstances of being on an unusual platform written in NORD-FORTRAN where we don’t have the source!)
Full setup for playing SVHA Adventure on real hardware, via Ronny Hansen.
Regarding bugs, I ran across some erratic text messages, including one that made me unsure if I was even doing the right thing or not. The snake that got chased off by the bird makes a reappearance in SVHA Adventure, and by scooping the bird back up again I was able to get past where the snake was lurking:
You’re at bottom of long flight of steps.
(This is right after getting out of Witt’s End by going southwest and reaching a new area.)
S
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. You are on top of long flight of steps going down and north. There is a strong oak door leading south, with no handle or key hole on this side of the door.
S
You can’t go through that oak door.
You’re at top of long flight of steps.
OPEN SESAME
S
You can’t go through that oak door.
Note that OPEN SESAME (prompted by the hints about Aladdin, as suggested by bananathoroughly in the comments) gives an absolutely blank prompt, as opposed to any kind of feedback if you’ve done something right or wrong. Other words don’t have the same sort of response…
ABACADARA
I don’t understand that!
SHAZAM
Good try, but that is an old worn-out magic word.
…which makes me quite worried a bug is interfering with the act working. And if not, well, I have absolutely no idea how to get through, and getting back to the particular location is a slog; you have to keep randomly going directions in Witt’s End many times, enough times that the game prompts multiple times if you want a hint at getting out!
Incidentally, trying to leave after arriving at the door is death:
N
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. The snake suddenly strikes from the fissure!! You’re bitten and pummeled and strangeled thoroughly. That must have been an irrated snake!
It might be that the only way the enter is via the other side, and the only reason I know that is yet another bug:
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
You’re in hall of mists.
Rough stone steps lead up the dome.
GET AXE
key hole on the other side. There is, however, a key hole on this side.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
The “key hole on the other side” line seems to be randomly printing from somewhere else in the text. I’m extremely patient with jank and frustration in games, but when it might be combined with a bug it becomes too much. It potentially turns getting unstuck not just “figure out what the author intended” but also “make sure to avoid memory corruption”.
And as mentioned before, there’s the extra condition of “avoid getting killed by a knife”. Original Adventure always had a dwarf appear first and throw an axe that missed; you can get unlucky and meet an orc first, meaning you will have no weapon at all. Or you can get super unlucky and die immediately upon sight of an orc, although it doesn’t matter; either way you are essentially dead.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
One sharp nasty knife is thrown at you!
It gets you!
Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to help you out, but I’ve never really done this before. Do you want me to try to reincarnate you?
One other bit of business, though: I accidentally missed an exit.
This is back where you find the ring; you can turn west to enter a Crypt, with a “vault” to the west. I wasn’t able to get any farther, though.
You are in something that seems like a chapel or something. We’ll call this the sacred chamber. There are something like an altar on the south wall, and various things on the walls that suggest a religious place. To the north is an opening from the chamber, usually barred by a gate.
The gate is up.
There’s a ring of a curious shape on the altar. It looks magical.
GET RING
OK
N
You are in small room with dirt floor.
The gate is up.
W
You are in a crypt. A coffin is standing in the middle of the room.
There seems to be a vault to the west. A passage leads east.
The vault door is closed.
The coffin is closed.
OPEN COFFIN
You don’t have the necessary piece of metal for doing that.
This area turns out to be the section taken from a Greg Hassett article in Creative Computing, July 1980 on how to write an adventure. If you’re not familiar with Greg Hassett (who at this time was 14), you can try my writeup of World’s Edge; in the article he mentions his games before that are (in order), The House of Seven Gables, King Tut’s Tomb, Sorcerer’s Castle, Voyage to Atlantis, Enchanted Island, and a machine-language version of the same game called Enchanted Island Plus.
This is not from any of Hassett’s games, but rather an imaginary game written purely for the article. The Studio-54 group turned it into a real game! Except there is some variation because holding the ring does not allow for opening the coffin (as suggested in the article) and while there’s a limited number of items to test I’ve spent a week struggling so I’m done.
I did at least get to test throwing the ring in the volcano (just in case of a Tolkien reference) but alas, nothing happens.
I’m afraid I’ve left things too incomplete to make any large conclusions, but I do want to emphasize the code is currently held together with duct tape and being run on an emulator. It is easily possible that some of the difficulties I mention are due to bugs or emulator issues and so aren’t “authentic”; this is especially possible with random number generators which are enormously finicky across platforms. (A concrete example: for a long time the Pokémon Red/Blue speedrun community banned all emulators except for a very specific one called gambatte-speedrun; every single one had different RNG than a real Gameboy, despite many being completely authentic otherwise and even allowed with other games. Now, there’s exactly two emulators allowed, and all others are banned.) Given the endgame isn’t even reachable with the current game’s state I don’t feel that bad about setting it aside.
COMING UP: A type-in, followed by the glorious return of Infocom.
(Continued from my previous post.)
The thing I’ve found most fascinating studying the various incarnations of Adventure is the almost philosophical difference in approaches to where the expansions go.
With Woods’s own variation (Adventure 430) he essentially treated it as a “master quest” version of the game, adding secrets to the underground which otherwise could be seemingly unchanged at first glance (with the only major addition being changing the starting forest into a large maze). With Adventure 448 (mostly from Brown) the new sections felt “segregated” off so that the authors had a region they could call their own. Adventure 501 (and the follow-up Adventure 751) felt like it expanded outward more than inward.
SVHA Adventure (or Adventure 360, based on the maximum score) instead seems to add interconnectivity: taking various dead ends, digging through farther, and connecting up some of the tunnels that come out as a result. There is very little interference with the “main game” (although a few rooms have tweaks) but rather there’s a new extension, as if the fictional universe the same cave system lasted for another 100 years (with dwarves, orcs and elves claiming more spaces) before the player arrived.
The upshot is this is hard to represent as a single map. I can give my original Adventure map as currently annotated. Please keep in mind I do not have all the rooms yet.
Let me explain the new isolated aspects first (although they might not stay that way) and then get into the interconnected section (where four distinct places in the cave all now link together).
The Hall of the Mountain King, as I mentioned in my last post, has the first difference someone is likely to see (“There is a barrel with a tap standing here.”) I still haven’t used the barrel anywhere yet. Going southwest, the rooms have some slight changes, with the path which normally leads directly to the dragon now with a “moist room”…
You’re in a corridor leading southwest/northeast, and rising slowly in the southwesterly direction. The walls are very moist, the reason being that mist from the northeast are condensing on the walls here.
…and while the secret canyon is there, it has the word “SINBAD” which is new.
You are in a secret canyon which here runs E/W. It crosses over a very tight canyon 15 feet below. If you go down you may not be able to get back up. The word “SINBAD” is hewn into the wall.
This place is also near the big interconnected zone, but let’s save that for now. In addition to SINBAD there is a related writing in the Oriental room now.
This is the oriental room. Ancient oriental cave drawings cover the walls. A gently sloping passage leads upward to the north, another passage leads SE, and a hands and knees crawl leads west. Among the drawings is scribbled “ALIBABA”.
There is a delicate, precious, Ming vase here!
Close to there — heading west to the Large Low Room, then north — is another new section.
This is an entirely self-contained puzzle, at first there is a room with a gate that can’t be lifted…
You are in a small room with a dirt floor. A gate is set on the way
south, and a way lead west. There is a low crawl going north.
The gate is down.
open gate
I’m not strong enough to do that, you know.
…but the text implies you just need to be stronger. A few steps away is a pantry…
n
You’re in narrow crawl space.
w
You are in a dusty pantry. There are shelves and cupboards. Nothing of
what you would expect in a pantry is to be seen. A crawl getting tighter
lead to the east.
An envelope stands on one of the dusty shelves.
…and the envelope contains a “small pill” that makes you feel stronger if you eat it. Heading back to the gate, you can then open it and go inside.
open gate
That pill surely made me strong!
s
You are in something that seems like a chapel or something. We’ll call this the sacred chamber. There are something like an altar on the south wall, and various things on the walls that suggest a religious place. To the north is an opening from the chamber, usually barred by a gate.
The gate is up.
There’s a ring of a curious shape on the altar. It looks magical.
I am unsure if the ring has any particular effect.
Finishing off the isolated areas, I’ve already mentioned the “leather satchel” found by going up from the clam area; as far as extra items go there’s a “parchment” in the volcano area that crumbles when I try to pick it up.
You are in a small chamber filled with large boulders. The walls are very warm, causing the air in the room to be almost stifling. The only exit is a crawl heading west, through which is coming a low rumbling.
Near the entrance lies an old withered parchment.
There are rare spices here!
get parchment
At your touch the parchment withers into dust. Something was written on it.
There’s also a new zone that I found off Witt’s End, the “maze” that just loops you around (and where the original way to escape is to not go east).
You’re at Witt’s end.
There are a few recent issues of “Spelunker Today” magazine here.
sw
You are at bottom of a long flight of steps leading south and up. A corridor leads north, but obviously curves a lot further on. There is a waist-high column in the middle of the floor. On the pillar is placed a crystal(?) stone about two feet in diameter. There are tiny flickers of light in the ball, it looks like pictures of rooms. This is obviously the great palantir of Osgiliath, which was lost in the kin-strife in Gondor in Third Age 1635 !!!!!!!!!
s
You pass fissures and cracks in the wall along the stairs. There’s a large one on the east, but it’s too small for you to worm through. The snake suddenly strikes from the fissure!! You’re bitten and pummeled and strangeled thoroughly. That must have been an irrated snake!
Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed. I might be able to help you out, but I’ve never really done this before. Do you want me to try to reincarnate you?
The palantir is obviously of great interest…
…but let me mention three points on the snake first:
1.) Is that the same snake as the one that got driven off by the bird? Do I need to take the bird with me, perhaps?
2.) The problem with the bird again being helpful is that this is an instant death — there isn’t an obstacle that you then react to. Original Crowther/Woods was quite good about avoiding instant death; it would have a beat along the lines of a dwarf appearing or it being dark before you hit inevitable doom. The instant death is much less fair (especially given that this game has no save game facility).
2b.) In order to cope with the lack of save games I have been saying “yes” to the resurrection question. In nearly every other Adventure variant I would say no and just restore my save game, but the combination of no-saved-games plus instant death makes it the only practical way to handle things.
3.) Perhaps it is possible to reach this spot before facing the snake, and it will be clear? That would represent the kind of softlock I associate more with the Cambridge games like Hezarin.
Now, on to the palantir. It gave me some trouble operating it; I eventually realized it was fishing for “look direction”.
LOOK EAST
The stone starts searching in that sector.
A room underneath a grate. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A cobble crawl. The stone shows
plain nothing.
The stone found nothing in that sector.
The odd sequence here indicates it is doing some sort of “step by step” search where it somehow has the map subdivided into “zones”. This will be important later.
LOOK NORTH
The stone starts searching in that sector.
A ledge in a rock wall. The stone shows
A brass vessel stands in a corner.
In a pit with ice walls. The stone shows
A ruby sparkles in the middle of the room.
LOOK SOUTH
The stone starts searching in that sector.
The stone found nothing in that sector.
West gets the most information
LOOK WEST
The stone starts searching in that sector.
In a throne room. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A corridor with fairyland carvings. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A brightly lit dancing hall. The stone shows
plain nothing.
A corridor with grotesque statuary. The stone shows
plain nothing.
The stone found nothing in that sector.
I wasn’t able to get any other results. Note the similarity with Adventure 366 (which also has a palantir) but also the difference (this one can’t be used to teleport … I think).
Time for the big interconnected section:
I have a hard time capturing this as they are drawn on my map in very different places, but it interconnects with
a.) the “wide canyon” south of the Bedquilt area which previously was a dead end
b.) the “crossover” near the two mazes which normally led north to a dead end, but now passes through
c.) the vending machine in the “all different” maze
d.) the Giant Room with the eggs
Let’s start with the “wide place” canyon, which has a hole that goes down:
You are in a narrow corridor going southeast-northwest. There is an awful smell. There is a hole in the ceiling, but you cannot reach it.
SE is a room with an even more awful smell, and NW is a dungeon.
You are in someone’s dungeon. There are cells on both sides of the corridor. Most of the doors are rusted, but small windows give you the opportunity to check out there is nothing of interest inside. There is one door that may be unlocked, however, and inside this cell you can see a form huddled on the ground. The corridor goes southeast-northwest.
The celldoor is locked.
I have yet to bring keys over to this room, but it is an obvious next step in my gameplay (I kept getting hit by dwarves, and also orcs which work more or less like the dwarves).
Another entrance to the same complex is the vending machine. That’s been a popular place to muck around, since the vending machine gives entirely optional batteries for lamp extension (in other words, in a walkthrough there’s no reason to go in the all different maze!) This version of the game adds a hole where the player finds out after (by seeing it in in a mirror) they are very dirty:
As you look behind the machine, you see a small hole in the floor. It is just big enough for you to get through. From what you can see, there is no chance of coming up this way if you go down.
D
You are at the bottom of a narrow shaft. You cannot climb up the shaft. A corridor leads to the north.
N
In a niche in the corridor there is bolted a highly polished steel mirror on the wall. The corridor goes north/south here. As you pass the mirror, you see a black and ominious figure there. After checking behind you, you find you have seen yourself. That shaft must have been a chimney!
(I have yet to get here with water — again, no save games, plus getting hit by axes. It does appear “clean” is a verb but just going nearby to a waterfall doesn’t work, you have to be carrying the bottle.)
N
You are in a well lit room. The walls are hung with fantastic draperies, (to heavy to carry), and there are rich carpets on the floor, (also to heavy to carry). At the opposite end of the room there is what appears to be a decorated throne. Beside the throne is a table covered with velvet. On your side of the room is also a table covered in velvet. There is an opening to the south, the throne is to the north.
A five-armed chandelier made of gold, furnished with strips of other precious metals, is standing on the table.
On the throne sits a lovely elven princess, clad in some green garments. She eyes you warily.
If you approach, she leaves through a curtain to the east, but trying to follow lands you outside.
You are at the throne in the throne room. The throne is of such magnificent splendour that it is hard to take your eyes away from it. Added to this you have the table beside it, covered in a kind of velvet that gives out its own soft light. To the south is an opening in the wall. The draperies to the east and west might also cover doors or openings. A scepter, wrought from mithril, inlaid with gold, and encrusted with diamonds almost as clear as silmarils, lays on the table.
E
There must have been magic at work. As you walk through the draperies and the opening behind it, you find yourself in free air. Behind you is a blank mountain wall, in the middle distance you can see the building from which you started. The building is to the northeast.
Heading west rather than east leads to a “rune room” with Viking runes, and more branches. You can meet back up with the dungeon by going east and the southeast; going northeast instead leads to a torture chamber.
You are at the branching of the corridor. One path leads southeast, one leads west and steeply up, and one northeast.
A graphnel with a suspicious rope coiled at the end lies in a corner.
NE
You are in what has obviously been a torture chamber. Chains hang on the wall, different “implements of the trade” are spread across the floor and shelves. A reek of blood still lingers in the air, and there is an oppressive gloom in the room. An exit leads south, another east. Hovering slightly above the floor, a whitish apparition emerges before you. A low, rasping moan is heard, the sound sends a chill all through your bones. You can, somewhat undistinctly, hear words. It sounds like: “Give back, give back, oh give back my body to me. Nobody will pass whom won’t do so, nobody will pass on this way …”
(I haven’t gotten any farther past this section.)
Turning back to the rune room and going west instead leads to a ballroom and another instant death. You can reach the same ballroom approaching from the south (which enters via the “crossover” route) so I’ll show that version off:
You are at a crossover of a high N/S passage and a low E/W one.
N
This seems to be the start of a finely hewn corridor, leading northwest. A narrow corridor goes to the south.
NW
You are in a corridor with finely chiseled steps. The corridor goes up and north, and down and south.
N
You are at the southern end of a brightly lit hall. Steps lead down to the floor, which is bare and obviously designed for dancing. To your right a balcony goes round the east side of the hall. The balcony entrance is northeast, the steps go north. To the south is an opening to a corridor. On the other side of the hall another staircase goes up. On the floor a merry band of elves are dancing, forming intricate patterns. They see you and beckon for you to come and join them. An orchestra with gleaming instruments is at the balcony, playing a lively tune.
NE
You stand at the balcony behind the orchestra. There is some unrest among the musicians. Suddenly, it turns out that both the dancing elves and the musicians are orcs. Those in the orchestra are small and delicate, they throw away their instruments and scurry out of the room. The others stand at the floor and throw knives at you. Their aiming turns out to be exceedingly accurate.
I think the solution here may be (as we’ve seen in other Adventure versions) to get two types of enemy together. If the dwarves are chasing us, and we walk into the ballroom (or balcony) with the dwarves in tow, I suspect they will fight each other and we can get away. Or maybe the death will just be more colorful.
To summarize my open problems, I need to handle:
a.) orcs in a ballroom that kill me
b.) a snake that kills me
c.) locked door at the dungeon (which I just haven’t brought the keys to yet, but I’m sure the thing inside will kill me)
d.) what to do at the torture room
e.) reading the parchment without it “withering away”
f.) applying SINBAD and ALI BABA (no, rubbing the lamp doesn’t work)
g.) the elf in the throne room and the magic exit
Some of these I have strong leads for, just I need to grit my teeth and boot up another game from the beginning in order to do a test. I think the dwarves are rather deadlier than in the original (they hit more often) and the previous game didn’t have orcs; while orcs work much the same as dwarves, it means there’s even more enemies to cope with and potentially be killed by.
There is a dangerous orc in the room with you!
One sharp nasty knife is thrown at you!
It misses!
You’re in slab room.
This means even though it seems like a simple thing to bring object X to place Y I have had multiple attempts in a row foiled by a stray thrown knife.
This post assumes some familiarity with the original Adventure; if you haven’t yet seen, my series on the Software Toolworks version (the only one that paid the authors Crowther and Woods) is a good place to start. Otherwise, onward–
Via Ronny Hansen, a setup for playing SVHA Adventure on ND-10 hardware.
Recently, two articles dropped on spillhistorie.no, both by Robert Robichaud (the same Rob that frequents the comments here). One was on the game Ringen, the Tolkien game in Norwegian that I’ve written about before. However, I had very little information to work with and was only able to play by going through a particular section preserved on VikingMUD, then making guesses about the game. The real Ringen (actually 1983, not 1979) has now been preserved and I am excited to play it. However, doing so requires playing in Norwegian so it will need some preparation time before I get there.
The other post was on a game written in English (later translated to Norwegian, but the translation is lost), so I can get to it right away. I’m going to summarize from the article and add some details, but you’re better off reading Rob’s article first and coming back here.
Back? Let’s reach back in time…
…and the late 1950s.
As a computer, the TX-0 was somewhat odd as it was built for a special purpose. It was, however, a truly programmable computer; it had a good directly driven CRT display, and – most important – its circuits were all transistorized. Moreover, it was available! I could sign up for time and then use it solely for my own purposes.
— Norwegian Computer Technology: Founding a New Industry
Yngvar Lundh, fresh from studies at MIT, went back to his home country of Norway to establish a computer presence there while working for the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He led the team on Norway’s first full-fledged computer, Lydia, a classified project used to analyze the sound of Russian submarines; this was followed with SAM (Simulation for Automatic Machinery) also intended for naval applications.
A group photo uploaded by Yngvar Lundh himself to Wikimedia, with members of the SAM team in 1962. Yngvar is on the far right. Note the similarities with the TX-0.
Per Bjørge (fifth from the left in the photo) went over for a year of study at MIT and returned in August 1966; after he returned, work on SAM-2 started, with Per Bjørge on the day team and Svein Strøm on the night team.
The computer was taken on “tour” to visit the institutes of Norway, and while on tour, Per Bjørge (another engineer who had spent a year at MIT), Rolf Skår (yet another) and Lars Monrad Krohn (who did a collaborative project with MIT) talked with a former-student-turned-entrepreneur who convinced them to form their own company. Hence: the start of Norsk Data, which not long after came out with the Nord-1, essentially a direct commercial conversion of the SAM technology.
They had early financial troubles, although development of their own time-sharing system helped and their Nord-10 minicomputer had good sales to universities. (Also helpful: they landed a contract at CERN. While the leaders of CERN first were more interested in getting a computer from the MIT-affiliated DEC, Norsk Data had DEC’s price sheets so were able to undercut them by 10%.)
From Wikimedia.
The important point in the story above is the cross-pollination from MIT. When ground zero for adventures happened there, it makes sense adventure would make their way over to Norway. Compare this with Italy where their first-known adventure came from an author who saw a variation of Crowther/Woods at a trade show rather than on some local mainframe.
With all that established, our story now turns to the Norwegian Institute of Technology. A group there calling themselves Studio-54 had a hobbyist/hacker culture and access to a ND-10 (via strong connections with Norsk Data; some members did work for them). One member of the group, Svein Hansen, discovered Crowther/Woods Adventure on a PDP minicomputer. While the minicomputer was intended for “serious” work at the school, he had access via Studio-54 to a ND-10, leading Svein to convert the source code in 1979. Once the port was made, there became the irresistible urge to add things to it, hence other members of the group (Nils-Morten Nilssen, Ragnar Z. Holm, Steinar Haug) piling in with new rooms, puzzles, and treasures. From the game’s own introduction:
This ADVENTURE is based on the ADVENTURE originally written by Don Woods and Willie Crowther, later expanded by Bob Supnik and Kent Blackett, and still later expanded by Nils-Morten Nilssen and Svein Hansen. In the present version some of the added features are taken from an article by Greg Hasset in Creative Computing, which added hitherto unknown parts of the cave. Many thanks to Greg!! This version is reprogrammed by Svein Hansen, and maintenance and extensions is presently handled by him. The program is written specially for NORD computers in NORD-FORTRAN 77. As Svein Hansen is responsible for this version, any inconsistencies and non-answers that might surface are best reported to him, either directly or through RSH, Norsk Data A/S, P.O. Box 25 Bogerud, OSLO 6, Norway. Personal message from Svein Hansen: Although I am responsible for this version, some of the added features are not my own. They are the lunatic and weird outcroppings from the minds of the Studio 54 Hobbies Group at the ND.10-54 community at NIT, Trondheim, Norway. Any nervous breakdowns, downbitten fingernails and suicides etc. resulting from these ideas ARE NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY !! Blame it on that sneaking, no good group that are ever trying to write more vile computer games.
This version of Adventure eventually made its way back to Norsk Data and was sold in a “games pack” compilation as SVHA Adventure.
Now, while the game has essentially been restored (after much suffering) with 70 new rooms and 20 new items/treasures, there’s a bug that means it is “impossible to escape” with two of the treasures (I don’t know yet what that means yet other than two can’t be deposited at the starting building). I’m just hoping the endgame is traditional and not something mind-blowing that we’re missing!
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.
Time to first change? A single turn. But not a major one this time.
You are inside a building, a well house for a large spring.
There is a set of keys here.
There is a shiny brass lamp nearby.
There is food here.
No bottle! That’s just outside, though. I don’t know why.
You’re at end of road again.
s
You are in a valley in the forest beside a stream tumbling along a rocky
bed.
s
At your feet all the water of the stream splashes into a 2-inch slit in the rock. Downstream the streambed is bare rock.
There is a bottle of water here.
I’m almost wondering if it was a hacker-experimenter type change rather than one meant to affect gameplay; that is, if you’re mucking about changing the code of Adventure for the first time, one of the easiest things to do is to take an object and try to move its starting room and see if it works. So there might not be a “reason” for the change in a traditional sense.
Going on in, the first change otherwise I’ve found happens at the Hall of the Mountain King, where there is a barrel with a tap.
You are in the hall of the Mountain King, with passages of in all directions.
There is a barrel with a tap standing here.
A huge green fierce snake bars the way!
In the area with the clam I found a path leading up to a knapsack, but that was otherwise just a dead end. The most significant change I found was starting at the “crossover” near the mazes (all alike, all different) where heading north is normally a dead end.
HOO-HAW!!
You are at a crossover of a high N/S passage and a low E/W one.
…ok, HOO-HAW? I don’t know.
n
This seems to be the start of a finely hewn corridor, leading northwest. A narrow corridor goes to the south.
The finely hewn corridor is new, as is everything after.
nw
You are in a corridor with finely chiseled steps. The corridor goes up
and north, and down and south.
n
You are at the southern end of a brightly lit hall. Steps lead down to the floor, which is bare and obviously designed for dancing. To your right a balcony goes round the east side of the hall. The balcony entrance is northeast, the steps go north. To the south is an opening to a corridor. On the other side of the hall another staircase goes up. On the floor a merry band of elves are dancing, forming intricate patterns. They see you and beckon for you to come and join them. An orchestra with gleaming instruments is at the balcony, playing a lively tune.
n
You go down to the dance hall floor. The elves turn suddenly out to be orcs, all of them shouting and reveling at the way they fooled you. They grab their knives and hurl them at you. You stand a fair chance of landing a job as a pin cushion.
Grisly! Unfortunately, the game lacks a save game function, so it’s been slow going checking where changes might be. I can cut-and-paste walkthrough sections, but that technique only works if the RNG is consistent (otherwise I end up getting walloped by a dwarf axe somewhere in the process). It took Rob a month to get through everything, so this might turn out more difficult than your typical Adventure expansion.
I’m especially looking forward to finding the Greg Hassett section mentioned in the instructions (apparently they just lifted the “theoretical” game from an article and turned into a real one) — hopefully next time!
Renga in Blue 
