Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Last column, we installed the retro game Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures from the SSI Gold Box series of computerized Dungeons and Dragons games,.We’ll take a short look at running the game in order to wrap things up in this month’s Retrogaming Revisited.
Background of the Gold Box Adventure Series
As you’ll remember from the last three columns, Strategic Simulations Inc. produced a series of Dungeons & Dragons games for DOS called the Gold Box series. They used a common game engine, and allowed you to play D&D on your computer. The final “game” to use the Gold Box engine was Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures.
Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures could be described as a game-creation toolkit. A still active online community continues to provide adventures and upgraded gameplay around this concept, and there are hundreds of modules free to download and play for anyone who owns Unlimited Adventures.
Fortunately for us Linux users, GOG.COM has a version of FRUA remastered for Ubuntu, as part of their Forgotten Realms Collection 2 (which includes several other Gold Box games) for the genuinely low price of $9.99.
Working Up the Nerve to Enter the Tomb
Last month, we downloaded and installed Ray Dyer’s version of the infamous player killer dungeon module from the pen and paper game, The Tomb of Horrors. Terrified at the prospect of entering, I ended last month’s column after explaining how to download and install this sinister module for FRUA. After an entire month of steeling my resolve, we’ll now swallow nervously, set hand grimly to hilt of sword, and press on with our decades long quest to complete The Tomb of Horrors….
Creating Cannon Fodder, er, Characters
A full explanation of how to play D&D is WAY outside our scope, but we can hit some basics in order to understand how to play FRUA. The first thing players do in a pen and paper campaign is to ‘roll up’ characters, so called because character creation is achieved by rolling dice. Your character has six key attributes, Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Constitution, Dexterity, and Charisma. Each is determined by rolling three standard six-sided dice and totaling them up. A frequent alternative method is to roll 4 dice, abbreviated as ‘4d6’, then drop the lowest.
Each strength point is roughly equivalent to bench-pressing 10 pounds of weight (strength 14 means you bench press 140), each intelligence point is equivalent to 10 IQ points (so a 16 intelligence is 160 IQ), and the rest of the scores are similar but more ambiguous. Strength affects your ability to drive a weapon through natural or artificial armor (including tough skin), and the amount of damage done. Intelligence impacts the ability to understand and use magic. Wisdom has to do with one’s resistance to magic and connection to mythical deities who bless you with a different kind of magic, Constitution is about your ability to take damage and to heal, Dexterity is your nimbleness and ability to avoid getting hit (along with raw foot speed and ability to use ranged weapons like bows and slings), and Charisma is your likability and ability to influence others.
Within FRUA, the dice rolling is done for you. Once we select Play the Game, then Create Character, we get this screen:
Fighters are just what they sound like, Paladins and Rangers are specialist fighters with added abilities, Clerics are warrior priests with magical abilities including both spells and the handy ability to ‘turn’ the undead, Magic-Users are specialists using different types of powerful magic spells than clerics, and Thieves are more accurately described as scouts/spies, although they can certainly also be literal thieves.
Races include the sylvan and naturally magic-adept Elves, the Half-elven (half-human), the sturdy Dwarves and somewhat similar, but smaller and more nimble Gnomes, the hardy hobbit-like Halflings, and (of course) Humans.
Alignment has to do with general life outlook and moral center. Lawful beings believe in structure, laws, and hierarchies. Chaotic creatures are more inclined to value individuality and freedom. Neutral lies between these two, and may represent a desire for balance, or an actual indifference. Along another alignment ‘axis’ is the more self-explanatory Good vs Evil. Make these selections for your character, then hit Done.
Computerized Dice Rolling
Now you’ll see this screen:
The system will automatically outfit you with armor it considers appropriate, represented in part by Armor Class. Dexterity, as mentioned before, can affect Armor Class. Higher Armor Classes (or AC’s) are counter intuitively LESS desirable. The system will also automatically calculate your Encumbrance, a function of your Strength and of how much you are carrying, and your subsequent maximum Movement speed. Damage represents how many dice (of how many sides) you cast to calculate the damage you do in combat with a successful blow, and THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0) represents what you must roll, on a 20-sided die, to hit a foe with an Armor Class of 0, which represents some pretty hard-core armor. The system also calculates your Hit Points, which represents (somewhat abstractly) your ability to take damage in battle. Opponents also have a set number of Hit Points. At zero HP, your character becomes unconscious (and opposing monsters become dead monsters).
Dice in D&D
D&D uses a large variety of unusual dice, not just the 6-sided dice we’re all familiar with. There are also 4-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, 12-sided, 20-sided, and percentile (100-sided), usually actually done by rolling two 10-sided and interpreting one as 10’s and the other as 1’s, or by rolling 2 20-sided dice with digits 0-9 each occurring twice, or by the rarely-seen actual 100-sided die.
Creating Your Party (Which You Will Really Fight for Your Right to….)
After creating an appropriate number of characters (for this dungeon, I’d strongly recommend the maximum of 6), you will need to bind them all together into a dungeoneering party. Click Add Character, then select characters until your party roster is filled (shown above).
Now click Begin Adventuring to enter the Tomb … if you dare!
Playing the Game Module
First, you’ll see a number of illustrated pages giving you the basics of the scenario. This module uses the original cover art by Jeff Dee, and its GREAT (shown below).
After paging through the introduction, the game will drop your party at the foot of the mountain that The Tomb is inside.
Entering the Tomb of Horrors
Brace yourself, friends. We’re entering the Tomb! From the opening screen (next page, top right).
you can position the mouse in the view area (upper left) until you see an up arrow, go forward about 9-10 times (using mouse clicks or the keyboard arrow keys) until you see a wall straight in front , then move the mouse to the right side of the view area until you see a right-angle arrow (next page, bottom left).
Click, move forward a space, turn back to the left, click forward, turn back to the left once more, and you’ll see an opening in the cliff face (bottom right).
Click up arrow again to move forward, move forward a few more times to a dead end, turn around and try to leave as you see the entrance closing up behind you, and revel in your untimely demise as you’re trapped forever inside the Tomb!
Yahoo! After all these years, I’ve completed the Tomb of Horrors! Unsuccessfully, I suppose, but completed all the same! Life is now finally complete for me.
There is also a current project called DungeonCraft that provides updated graphics and sound capabilities to run FRUA modules. Let me know if there’s interest and we might just cover that in a future column.
Other Nifty FRUA Resources
There are a LOT of resources online for FRUA, starting with the GOG.COM page we mentioned earlier and the downloadable module repositories we used. But there is much, much more to see. There are updates for the Gold Box engine, added monsters and scenery, utilities to manually change characters (a necessity if you actually wanted to start with Tomb of Horrors, as FRUA only allows you to start with Level 1 characters, well below what’s intended for the Tomb), and a virtual cornucopia of other entertaining and useful goodies. If there’s interest in a follow-up column on FRUA, e-mail me at acer11kubuntu@gmail.com, and we might just revisit the Tomb and/or FRUA in a later column!