Glass Ravens, Combination Locks, and an Unseen Terror

If Blogger’s pageview counter thingy is even slightly accurate, then people reading this are aware that Patrick Stuart has again taken this glass dungeon mapping style (coined by him) I’ve been fucking around with and run with it.

Several features of this new concept jump out at me and scream MAKE ME REAL AND COMPLETE ME I MUST LIVE:

1) The dungeon changes completely based on the characters’ actions.

  -(corollary) The main navigational challenge is figuring out how those changes work and how to direct them with specific intent.

  -(corollary) Certain areas would be impossible to access from certain others, depending on which configuration is currently active.

2) At least one of the dungeon’s reasons for being is to imprison a powerful demon at its center. This is a trope, obviously, but combined with some other elements of the concept, it hits a very particular nostalgic note for me. I’ll explain this in a bit.

3) Whenever the dungeon shifts around them, the party remains stationary in relation to it. As Patrick explained it, room 12 is still room 12.

4) Despite this, the overall nature of the dungeon changes so drastically that the usable features of room 12 in one configuration will be different from its features in any other configuration.

  -(corollary) This concept would require a greater variety of maps and mapping styles than any single adventure location I’ve ever seen. A tower might work better, in terms of clarity, as a cutaway side-view, for example. Which means the whole thing will be super fun to map out.

5) There’s an implicit timer involved, because there’s a chance of some terrifying outsider finding its way into the dungeon every time everything shifts. An adventuring party could theoretically just wander around in there getting more and more confused forever, but in practice they’d eventually be overwhelmed by all the crazy monsters they’re letting in.

Some of the points that occurred to me while I was reading his post:

1) Variable topology can be used to make the entire place function as a giant combination lock, in which every dungeon shift basically maps to a number in the combination lock metaphor. This is related to the nostalgia I mentioned.

2) Whatever features the PCs have to interact with to change the dungeon can be made possible in only one possible configuration, and merely hinted at in all the others. These “switches” could be designed to match the configuration they work in thematically, so they act as clues as to which configuration allows you to use each switch.

3) This whole concept can easily incorporate Patrick’s original glass dungeon post, simply by using that concept for one of the configurations.

4) These mechanics can be used to forcibly split the party and make reuniting them into another challenge all its own. For example, let’s say they want to get from configuration 4 to configuration 10 for some reason or other, but they can’t do so directly because of my second point. They need to activate some sort of switch in room 3 configuration 4 to get to configuration 6, where they can reach configuration 10 using a switch in room 8. But there’s no path between rooms 8 and 3 in configuration 6. So they’d have to split up, with one or more of them (let’s call them team A) moving to room 8 in configuration 4 while team B goes to room 3 to shift over to configuration 6, so team A can hit the switch in room 8 and move everyone to configuration 10.

I’m not sure I’d understand that example at all if anyone said it to me so here’s a quick topological diagram:

******************************

So here’s the nostalgia thing I promised to explain. The name of my blog and the banner at the top are references to the shared universe of Zork and Enchanter, two series of text adventures published by Infocom in the 80s. These games did a MUCH better job of simulating the most interesting aspects of D&D than any computer games TSR or WOTC ever published.

They did this by focusing on the real core mechanic of every single TTRPG ever made: the DM (or in this case the computer) describes your characters’ immediate surroundings, and prompts you to take some action. You couldn’t get far without gathering more information by examining just about everything your in-game avatar saw. The games are all available to play for free these days, and walkthroughs are a google search away if you get stuck. You know, if you’re interested.

Anyway, there’s one particular puzzle in Enchanter (probably the easiest and trope-iest entry in either series, if you’d like to try these games out and are wondering where to start) that I couldn’t help thinking about, reading Patrick’s post.

As I remember it, there’s a hidden area under a castle that contains 1) a powerful spell you need to learn to win the game, and 2) an invisible apocalyptic threat known only as the Unseen Terror. This area was a complex of several identical rooms, cut off from the room containing both the spell and the Terror.

There are an old scrap of parchment and a well-used pencil on the floor of the entrance room to this complex. Examining the parchment reveals a flowchart-style map of this small area, with connections between the rooms drawn in pencil. The map shows the treasure room with the spell and the Terror, and is really the only way you’d know that room was there at all. The pencil and its eraser are both nearly spent, with only three uses left of each.

the map on the parchment or paper or whatever it was as viewed through a modern emulator

If you connect the treasure room (P) to the rest of the complex (which you must do to get the spell you must learn), the Unseen Terror immediately takes advantage of this and tries to escape, moving from room to room at the same speed you make your own moves. This, plus the worn out pencil, means you have a very limited number of moves in which to connect that room, get the spell scroll, and re-imprison the Terror without also trapping yourself. Variable topology as a combination lock.

Now, I haven’t played this game since I was a little kid. I couldn’t tell you exactly how old I was, but I was young enough that I was playing the game with my older brother because I couldn’t read very well yet. And I don’t remember much of anything from my childhood. And I didn’t need to look up any of that description except for the screenshot of the map. This puzzle made such an impression because it left me wanting so much more.

And this Glass Ravens concept of Patrick’s can be built up using a much more complex version of the same basic puzzle mechanic as a framework. Fuck yeah.

Beyond Zork

Thirty posts in and I still haven’t written a single word about what this blog is named after.

For those not in the know, Popular Enchanting was a fictional magazine in the world shared by the Zork and Enchanter series, as well as a few oddball games that didn’t really fit with the rest, like Wishbringer (or Return to Zork for that matter).

These games were produced by a company called Infocom, which specialized in these text-based adventure games that are now referred to as Interaction Fiction (IF). It really is a medium unto itself, distinct from both gamebooks and videogames, IF's two closest relatives.

No computer game has ever come especially close to the experience of playing a tabletop RPG with a real life group of actual people, but the best IF games can get pretty close to what a game with one PC & one DM feels like. You get a brief description of your surroundings, and a prompt to tell the game what you want to try and do. You get to examine whatever you want to more closely, and most objects have hidden details for closer inspection to reveal. Of course, if you thought of doing something that had never occurred to the programmer, the game would just sort of tell you it was confused, and the game certainly couldn’t use your first adventure to feel out your interests and base a campaign around them, but those games were always about exploring and figuring out how to deal with weird shit in the same way that D&D is about those things at its best.

I first played re-releases of these early IF games as a tiny child in the mid-80s, through my older brother since I couldn’t read yet, so I suppose this was my earliest exposure to anything like the RPG format. To be honest, I didn’t completely make the connection for a long time, but I’m glad I finally did. My D&D games have gotten to be a lot smoother and more fun since I decided that mapping and navigation should skip the complications and just use the Infocom flow chart method, and I’ve looked to these games for inspiration in both designing and running puzzles.

These games were commercially viable when they first came out because computer graphics hadn’t yet evolved to the point where they could do a good job of evoking a setting (Infocom started publishing games the same year Rogue came out). The only images that computers were good at displaying back then were so abstracted that blocks of text were actually much more immersive.

Years later, I discovered that the internet had spawned a hobbyist-driven revitalization of IF, much like the one that D&D experienced with the birth of the OSR. There are thousands of short games, many of which push pretty hard at the edges of the medium, freely available on the Interactive Fiction Database. I’ve only ever played maybe a couple dozen of them, but there’s a few of them I’d recommend no matter how much or little experience you have with IF games.

Uncle Zebulon’s Will — Of all the games I’m writing about here, this is easily the closest in feeling to those early Infocom pioneers. The IF format is better at implementing puzzles than any other type of adventuring challenge, so that’s what those games, and this one, give you. UZW also has the same computer-nerd-when-that-was-weird sense of humor that permeated the Zork universe. The end of this game implies one or more sequels, and it’s a little sad that they never happened.
Unlike the other games on this list, this one’s old enough that it was written in a language called TADS instead of one called Inform, which means that you have do what this page says, instead of just playing the game in a browser window. It’s a little bit more of a pain in the ass, but it’s still free, and I think it’s worth it.

Beyond the Tesseract — This is another puzzle heavy game, but it’s a little more abstract due to the subject matter. Basically, if you’ve ever been disappointed at how far Shadowrun fell short of how cool the hacking stuff could have been, you need to play this game.

Photopia — This was the first of the experimental IF games that I really got into. The narrative keeps switching back and forth between the story of a teenage girl’s senseless death, and the interactive stories she uses to entertain the much younger girl she babysits. I guess you could say that it’s sort of like Maus and Memento and The Books of Magic all at the same time but that wouldn’t make any god damned sense. If nothing else, the storytelling portions are actually a pretty good example of how to DM an immersive game.

Lost Pig (And Place Under Ground) — First off, pretty much everybody loves this game, even people who usually give zero shits about IF. You are an orc who had one job; to keep track of a pig. The pig is now lost, possibly in a place under ground. Your name is Grunk. This game has a few classic puzzles, which are fun, and a well-written gnome NPC, but it’s really the orc’s POV narrative style that makes it shine. From the game:
>LOOK AT GRUNK

Grunk orc. Big and green and wearing pants.

Speaking of point of view narration…

Heroes — This game is based on classic D&D tropes just as closely as Lost Pig. The goal of the game is to recover a certain piece of treasure. Standard enough. This game’s twist is that you need to attempt the heist as each of the former members of an adventuring party. They all interact with their environment completely differently from each other, not just in that their abilities differ, but also in the strikingly different ways they perceive the same set of surroundings. An object that is crucial to completing the heist as the enchanter will completely escape the notice of the thief, for example.

Galatea — This IF piece really isn’t a game in any traditional sense. There isn’t really a goal in particular, except to satisfy your own curiosity as the player, but there is a seriously well fleshed out NPC/magic item to interact with and learn the story of. That’s all there is, really, but I think it’s probably good practice to try and make sure at least one side element (room, NPC, item, spell…) of an adventure is just as detailed as this game’s namesake.

The Edifice — This game uses a narrative device that basically amounts to time-traveling reincarnation to take you from our early hominid ancestry, through a few of the most important advances in the development of the human race. There’s also a really elegant built-in hint system that offers you help, if you need it, without doing what most of the IF with hint guides do and breaking the fourth wall. This is another game that plays with the narrative voice to be more immersive, in almost the same way Lost Pig does. Nowhere near as funny though.