Dungeons Rooms (1986) preceded Dungeon Lairs (which we saw some sheets from Wednesday). It feels very much like a companion to Halls of Horror, except with slightly more fantasy-oriented visuals. The Wizard’s Study, the weird ass throne room and the morgue are my favorites, but there are a lot to love here!
Return of the Witch Lord (1991) is the second HeroQuest expansion. This is the US version, with its sad repaint of Les Edward’s superior cover painting that appears in the UK release. It’s basically the same again, ten more scenarios, but with undead. There is a rad throne room tile, too.
This re-paint has a signature, Talbot. The only artist I could initially think of with that name is Bryan Talbot. Pretty sure now, after getting a copy of Powers & Perils, that they are the work of James Talbot (who also did some Tunnels & Trolls covers, as it happens). The original Les Edwards is from Blood & Iron.
Dungeon Floor Plans: Caverns (1986) does for natural, erratic tunnels what Dungeon Floor Plans did for straight, artificial spaces. The idea was to cut them out of the full sheets and arrange them as you needed them. Of course, that might mean they worked for tonight’s session and not tomorrow night’s, but I don’t think Games Workshop minded if you had to buy another box every now and then.
Whoever owned these boxes before me tossed most of the contents of Dungeon Lairs (1987) in with this one. These move from the cut-and-play tunnels into cards for individual rooms and I think they are more usable. At the very least, they have a lot more personality. Dig that Chaos Temple and the Barrow in particular.
Being from the United States, the least interesting place HeroQuest saw release, it makes sense that I would own the two least interesting expansions to the game. This is the first, Kellar’s Keep (1991).
The smaller box contains a heap of orcs, goblins and fimir, as well as a couple new doors (entrance and exit) and some new floor tiles. There are ten new scenarios, intended to be played in order (as the Keep is a linear space). There are some new spells and items. There’s a big stone map in four pieces that needs to be reassembled, and a giant boulder trap. There are no real mechanical changes; the heroes are overpowered; the dice are random. This is pretty literally more of the same.
We don’t get more of one key thing, however: Les Edwards’ amazing artwork. For some bizarre reason (perhaps to facilitate the horizontal quest book?) the gnarly, highly detailed painting by Les Edwards was repainted with the same composition but a simpler style. It’s…fine, but I vastly prefer the original (which I have included, as originally published in Blood & Iron). Really sad they removed the falling orc and Les’ background is way more dynamic. Poor job, Milton Bradley!
Beginning in 1979, Games Workshop produced a number of box sets of dungeon tiles. The first one was D&D-branded and was basically a cardboard sheet of squares printed with a stone pattern in different colors that you could cut into corridors and rooms. Series 1, which ran across six boxes issued between 1982 and 1984, was basically the same, though new types of tiles were introduced, including water, roofing, boats, irregular caves. They are mostly cleanly designed and unexciting.
So is this one, Dungeon Floor Plans 1 (1986)! This is the start of Series 2, and is mostly the same as its predecessors. The exception is the inclusion of grunged up tiles and a sheet dedicated to unique features like rugs, pillars, corpses and such. That’s the stuff I’m looking for from Games Workshop! The previous boxes had some unique features (this box has part of a sheet from Dungeon Floor Plans 2, 1982), but they lack the personality of the later box, I think.
For you, it’s a whole day after that post on Trinity, but for me, it’s about two minutes. I definitely made a mistake in the writing sequence this time around. Deep breath. Smile.
OK! This is Moonmist (1986), a riff on teen mysteries like those solved by Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, with some light theming drawing from the Bluebeard fairy tale. The player is brought to Tresyllian Castle to help their friend Tamara, who recently married the lord of the castle. Upon moving in, she’s become haunted by a ghost, the White Lady, and has begun to fear that someone intends to murder her.
Unlike other Infocom games, Moonmist has four discrete mysteries with a different criminal and a different ghost for each (the path is determined by choosing your favorite color at the start). The result is that Moonmist feels rather shorter than other Infocom games. At least it does to me, because I did not know there were alternate plot lines to play through because I had a bootleg copy of the game. Thus, when I finished what I now know is the Green plot thread, I thought that was it, and moved on with my life. This week of posts has really undercut some early videogame accomplishments, lemme tell ya.
The feelies are a little odd for this one, or, well, one of them is. The rulebook has the traditional fictional set-up: the “book,” Legendary Ghosts of Cornwall. There are also letters from Tamara, a visitor’s guide for the castle and, bizarrely, an iron-on of the game logo the back of the box proclaims is, “for your T-shirt.” Admittedly, it looks pretty sharp on the purple tee in the photo, but the implication that I only have one T-shirt kinda cracks me up?
Trinity (1986) scared the crap out of me as a kid. Considering the fact that Infocom made a genuine horror game,The Lurking Horror, that’s maybe saying something. But this is a little different, a game made during the Cold War about the Cold War’s biggest bogeyman — nuclear bombs.
The game opens with the player enjoying their last moments in London before leaving for their flight home, only to be waylaid by a number of increasingly bizarre events, which culminates with the imminent detonation of a nuclear missile and the start of a presumably very brief World War III. Time slows, a door opens into thin air and you escape, after a fashion. I don’t recall much after that, and I’m not sure I played very long. I was bothered by the implied carnage I left behind and by the mix of metaphorical nuclear violence and Lewis Carroll references that I found in the Wabe to which I escaped.
I’ve often thought about revisiting it. I’ve read a bit about it, so I know that through the pocket dimension of the Wabe, you eventually interact with, witness, or nearly witness, several other nuclear detonations, both real and fictional. The last puzzle zone is the ranch in New Mexico at the edge of the titular bomb test site. I have a hunch I know how it turns out, the “twist” as it were, if you could apply such a trite term to so grim a business. That the feelies are so somber reinforces my dread. There’s a comic book history of the atomic bomb, a map of the Trinity site, a fold-up cardboard sundial that seems important for puzzle solving and instructions for folding paper cranes. That’s a reference to Sadako Sasaki, who was radiated by the Hiroshima bomb when she was two and folded over a thousand origami cranes by the time she died when she was twelve.
As miserable as typing that last sentence made me feel, I actually paused for a little bit and fired up the game to see if the intro sequence in Kensington was as unnerving as I remembered. Yup! The surface is perfectly normal, but the actions the game leads you to take are bizarre and irrational, and the events that the game unspools to keep you on task (a tide of hundreds of angry nannies block your path, grass heaves you off when you try to walk on it) would be quite funny if I didn’t know a nuke was en route. But I do, so it feels dark and perverse, like the fundamentals of reality are breaking down.
I hear a lot of people think this is Infocom’s best game. It certainly seems like a triumph of the form. I don’t think I will revisit it further.
Wishbringer (1985) was designed to be an easier game so as to introduce new players into the world of Infocom’s interactive fiction, a fact that I just learned and has diminished the pride I previously had for having finished this one back in the Apple IIc days. Womp, womp.
Now, I will say in my defense that I borrowed Wishbringer from a friend and their copy was probably pirated, so I didn’t have access to the booklet, which served as a kind of copy protection because the fairy tale in verse explains the seven possible wishes the stone contains, which in turn can be used to solve key puzzles in the game. Some of these were scrawled on the disk envelope, but some were not. The neat thing is that you can win the game without using the wishes, it’s just trickier. I got through with a mix of both, so some of my pride remains intact.
You play as a postal worker who delivers a ransom letter to the owner of the local magic shop, and are then pressed into saving the owner’s kidnapped (catnapped?) cat from the Evil One, who transformed your village into a slightly more sinister version when you weren’t looking. The ensuing adventure is pretty silly and involves quite a few platypuses, which is pretty OK in my book.
The feelies include a map of the village, the ransom note and a glow-in-the-dark plastic wishstone. I am extremely sad my copy lacks the wishstone.
Stationfall (1987) is the sequel to Planetfall. I didn’t have a copy of this back in the day and haven’t gotten around to playing it in more recent years. Maybe I should rectify that? Judging from the summary on Wikipedia, it seems to have some interesting ideas that likely inspired or anticipated the Dead Space series, of all things. I love the fact that your reward for saving the day last game was a promotion into a pencil-pushing desk job. Floyd is back, too, apparently!
The feelies are a little more conservative (at this late date, Infocom’s end was looming) but still pretty compelling. We have a set of three forms on faux-continuous feed paper and a set of blueprints for the titular station. The blueprints light up my love of dungeon maps and floor plans in a major way. There’s supposed to be a patch, too, but that’s missing. Instead, though, my box contains a rarity: the sold-separately map that serves as a hint book for the game. Pretty neat.
I didn’t get to mention yesterday how much I like the Star Patrol uniform and the way it combines adventure gear with janitorial coveralls to form a whole that is somehow both dashing and menial. Slightly less iconic with the clipboard than with the mop and bucket, but iconic nonetheless.
This week, I dug out some Infocom games, because text adventures are great and I feel like the world needs to constantly be reminded of the fact. First up, a classic: Planetfall (1983). The player takes the role of an Ensign Seventh Class in the Star Patrol, on duty aboard the starship Feinstein.
As you may recall, Infocom games usually come with “feelies,” a collection of props that set the mood for the game or otherwise enhance play (which basically boils down to reading text on a screen and typing in prose commands to navigate the story). The feelies for Planetfall are mood-setters and seem custom-made to occupy the attention of a kid like me on the car ride home from the computer store at the mall. The booklet includes a recruitment pamphlet for the Star Patrol, along with a jokey questionnaire (HULL is to SPACESHIP as SKIN is to: A. Glove, B. Cat, C. Thermonuclear fusion, D. Titanium, E. Burn, F. Muffin). There are three interstellar postcards in a vintage style, a special assignment task force ID card and a sheaf of note pages containing a handwritten journal (in two inks for added verisimilitude!). Judging from the journal, “You” are at wits end about your duties and contemplating going AWOL when the game starts.
Thankfully, the ship crashes not long after the start of the game. You wind up on an island in the company of a robot named Floyd and the ruins of a vanished alien civilization. In addition to finding a way to get off the planet, you also need to unravel why the aliens disappeared. There are two timers spurring you on (though I don’t think they click on until you make a certain amount of progression). The first is the plague that did for the aliens (the remaining population is in cryosleep, awaiting their robots to synthesize a cure) — it’ll get you, too, if you don’t find an antidote. Even if you do, though, the planet doesn’t have much time left as its orbit has decayed and it is on a collision course with the sun. You need to repair a whole bunch of alien tech to A. Stop the planet from burning up, B. Allow the robots to complete the cure and C. Repair your own ship. I’ve never managed to stop A., in part because some of the puzzles to do so are intentionally unsolvable, and I’m terrible at figuring stuff like that out.
Floyd is a fantastic companion, though, who mixes sarcasm and naiveté in equal parts, though filtered through a child-like personality. He often draws on walls with blue crayon, asks for the player to tell him stories and in a deliciously meta turn, if you save the game in his presence, delights that something dangerous is about to happen. Author Steve Meretzky has a great article about Floyd’s creation. I don’t want to dig into the historical record to be definitive, but Floyd is certainly a very early example of a complex videogame character who is compelling on par with those in other media. If not the first, very close to it.
In addition to magic items, spells and psionic powers, TSR released Deck of Encounter: Set One (1994, recycling Easley’s cover of the DMG) and Deck of Encounters: Set Two (1994, recycling a Fred Fields Dragonlance painting for the cover). At first glance, these seem less useful than the spell cards and in one way they are: eventually, you’re going to exhaust them. But that’s the flaw of even the best random table as well, and we don’t really complain too much about that. And between the two decks, you’re looking at about 800 encounters, so it would take a while.
The nice thing about these encounters is that they are more fleshed out than random encounter tables. You have some situational context, treasure and so on all in one place, all organized thematically. Even in the specific material on a card doesn’t work, the amount of information gives you material to work with on the fly. TSR produced a lot of crap utilities designed to separate players from their dollars, but this one is genuinely pretty good. I wouldn’t mind a modern iteration, maybe in the mode of Monster Overhaul?
Along with the encyclopedia of magic items, one of my absolute favorite 2E products was the Deck of Magical Items (1993). Like the spell cards, these originally came in a gigantic box with a plastic tray, but it also included a little cardboard treasure chest that would fold up into a little filing cabinet with dividers and all.
Now, granted, the box only contains the magic items from the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Tome of Magic, which is nowhere near as thorough as the Encyclopedia. However, having the party’s magic items on a stack of cards is an excellent, quick reference, especially when planning, far superior to crabbed notes on a character sheet and flipping through the DM’s books. They work far better than the spell cards. And they’re just a great reference. Top shelf, the best of the 2E card products. Would buy again.
Wizard Spell Cards (1992, Fred Fields cover?) and Priest Spell Cards (1992, Carol Heyer cover illustration) seem like a good idea: take all of the spells from the Player’s Handbook and Tome of Magic and put the information on cards for fast reference. But in practice, problems immediately surface.
For one, are cards really faster or easier than a bookmark in the rulebook? I’m not sure. What happens when you have two players with wizards. Do they share cards? Are the expected to buy their own boxes? Then there is the matter of the cards themselves. What do you do with them? Keep them stacked by your character sheet? Sleeve them in plastic pages (awkward, since they are index card size, not baseball cards)? Do you file them back into the larger box when not in play? How big a stack of spell cards can you have before the book is definitely faster and easier? How do you deal with spells that are not in the two covered rulebooks?
All these questions have no definitive answers — every player is different! But I think they illustrate that the gap between the perception of utility and actual usefulness is pretty wide here. Similar issues cropped up in 4E with the decks of power cards, and will probably pop up again sometime down the line. And the problems will likely remain.
The spell decks initially came in big boxes with plastic trays. They proved unwieldy and the products were later sold as the Deck of Wizards Spells and Deck of Priest Spell, with all the cards filed in a cardboard, treasure-chest styled box, complete with dividers, a la the Deck of Magical Items. They were joined by the Deck of Psionic Powers (1994, cover recycling Keith Parkinson’s painting for X11) which collected powers from the Psionic Handbook, Dragon Kings and The Will and the Way.
The Wizard’s Spell Compendium (Vol 1 - 1996, Vol 2 - 1997, Vol 3 and 4 - 1998) and the Priest’s Spell Compendium (which I do not own) is a project similar to the Encyclopedia Magica (though, in my estimation, a slightly less exciting one). It collects every magic-user spell from 1975 to 1995 (though at least some spells published in 1996 products made their way in) but omits some systems that stray too far from the game’s core Jack Vance-inspired magic (spellfire magic, for instance, and the psionic-laced magic of Dark Sun’s dragon kings). Many of the spells were updated for consistency, which is nice, and there are references to the original source for archival purposes. The spells are listed alphabetically with little icons to indicate if they are from a specific campaign setting.
It’s a pretty massive, exhaustive and slightly exhausting project. I appreciate that the books exist (if for no other reason than for the fun selection of art by Ken Frank, Arnie Swekel and Glen Angus). As an aid for play, though, I find these a good deal less useful than the magic item books. Management of spells is one of the most tedious tasks in D&D in my humble opinion and a gigantic heap of all the spells ever is…not as helpful in practice as they might seem.
If there is a single 2E D&D product that transcend editions, it’s the four-volume Encyclopedia Magica (Vol 1 - 1994, Vol 2-4 - 1995), compiled by Dale “Slade” Henson and illustrated by Arnie Swekel. Over 1500 pages, it collects every magic item created for the game in official sources, including RPGA products, the various TSR magazines and the slightly different Basic game items. All the items include their abilities and the original descriptive text. No attempt has been made to revise, rebalance or otherwise monkey about with them. Some items are ridiculously overpowered and remain so. Some are very stupid or silly. The book makes no judgments.
It’s a titanic work. It’s hard to express the importance of magic items to the game; you could maybe boil the game down to its essence by calling it system of rules that are broken by magic items interacting with monsters. Magic items are the prime mechanical method characters distinguish themselves from each other. The same is true, to perhaps a lesser extent, of the campaign worlds themselves — what magic items are lying around and why implies much about the nature of a given world. These books give you the keys to all of it — the mightiest characters, the lore-iest worlds, the Macguffin-est quests.
There’s not much more to say. Useful to every player of any edition. The Encyclopedia Magica is one of the greatest D&D publications of all time.
Finally, this week, we have Magical World of Monsters (1992), a collaboration between artist Erni Cabat and writer Daniel Cohen.
I hadn’t heard of Cabat before I went on my spree of buying up all the Daniel Cohen books I could lay my hands on. Seems he spent most of his career in advertising and only began illustrating toward the end of his life (he was also a ceramics artist, collaborating with his wife, Rose, who had a pretty significant career of her own). In addition to Monsters, he produces Magical World books for prehistoric animals, carousel animals and dinosaurs, all in the same basic format. His style is rather hard to describe. I suppose I would start with “garish.” They’re a swirling combination of texture, pattern and unusual color choices that are difficult to visually parse. There is so much detail in the Medusa head, for instance, and the tonal range so compressed, that my eye can’t stop in any one place for long, to the point that it seems like her hair of snakes is perhaps really squirming. The sense of motion in all of these pieces almost verges on vertigo. They’re pretty amazing!
The selection of monsters seems mostly governed by what Erni wanted to paint. Cohen is there to provide the slightest bit of context. It all hangs together fine, Cohen knows who the star is here.
I have to say, the only thing Cabat’s art reminds me of is the amazing box art from the D&D Computer Labyrinth Game. To my knowledge, the artist is still unknown. I wonder if it could have been Cabat?
Now, unlike Michael Newton’s book of hope, I appreciate the clarity of this book’s title: Encyclopedia of Things that Never Where (1985). Stating that definitively really gets all that belief malarkey out of the way and lets us appreciate these things on their own imaginary terms (as Georgess McHargue encouraged us to do on Monday).
This book is more like a collection of several small topical encyclopedias, each discrete from the others and in their own alphabetical order. Nor do they necessarily make a perfect or intuitive sense all the way through. Things of the Cosmos is mostly gods of major mythologies, but also King Arthur and his knights. Things of the Ground and Underground collects faeries and tree spirits, but also the manticore, Minotaur and Sphinx. Things of Wonderland seems to imply things from literature, but really it collects all manner of fantastical places, from fiction, but also from legend. Things of Magic, Science and Invention could just as well have been called Things and left it at that; it collects notable items, from Thor’s hammer to Jekyll’s potion to the many unusual uses for nails. Things of Water, Sky and Air covers all the creatures not detailed in Earth chapter — Grendel is here, griffins, too, and all the sea serpents. Finally, Things of the Night details the undead and other creatures who hide from the sun, whether they go bump or not.
Robert Ingpen’s art throughout is a pure joy. There are so many illustrations, the book is awash in them, and they’re all amazing, often subverting expectation but also remaining recognizable. There’s a warmth to it, like sitting by a fire, and he has a real talent for collaging together different elements that feels less museum-like and more evokes the crowded study of an eccentric scholar. I can’t imagine the amount of time it took to put together this portfolio, but it was well worth it. It’s a treasure.