Badh'r Kilnfest

Bard Song No. 4 was both awesome (walk around and your character's heal) and the tune was (oddly enough) Hungarian Dance No. 5 (print out the PDF on the link for more fun!) making the game an instant hit with me. The thing that really sold me on Bard's Tale, however, was that you could important your characters from Wizardry, which was the first game that I owned. Ah yes, my first computer game... Talk about your giddy Christmas mornings! To this day, I remember Christmas 1982: Blinking in amazement at the green CRT monitor of my Apple ][+, so much of who I am starts at that moment.

On the whole character import business: my friend, Mike, tipped me off to the fact that the character info was stored on track 12 of the diskette as ascii and that I could edit the attributes with a hex editor. It was pretty cool when I transformed Dave Farber's characters from totally bad to totally awesome by adding a '9' in the billions column for experience. It was even cooler when I realized that all of the 6502 machines worked the same way and that track 12 on data diskette for Bard's Tale for the C64 had the same info, so that I could jack up Ben Loggin's character's as well. It was even even cooler cooler when I realized just how lazy the software Engineers at InterPlay were and that we could do the same trick for Wasteland and a bunch of other games as well. Can you believe that Dave Farber actually remembers that I did this? This was his fond memory of me at our 10 year high school reuinion. I could  make some observation about this and how it foreshadows my later career in I.T. Actually, I have made those observations.

What I don't talk about (quite) as much is the ontological status of my elite Wizardry characters as they went from one universe to another. First of all, their classes changed. Sancho did the best: changing from a Ninja to a Monk; continuing to fight without weapons. Similiarly, Thesseus went from being a Samurai to being a Hunter, and suddenly picked up the ability to do critical hits. But Mulchaly went from being an awesome Bishop to a lousy Sorcerer, and Xerxes (Mr. Tiltowait) as a Magician was a total failure.

The other train of thought was about the social problems in Skara Brae. First of all, there were four major religious denominations slugging it out in the middle of the square. Secondly, there was a huge monster problem in the street. Third, the sewers were a complete mess. Finally and most importantly, everyone was trapped inside the city walls: How was the city continuing to feed itself? Who was cleaning up all these dead bodies? How come the store fronts were never attacked?

My favorite MUD for dealing with these questions was Nanvaent, which every so often would change radically and then certain elements of the game would go away: like quests (e.g. the Slann quest - in which the extraterrestrial origination of the Slann are made clear), monster classes (e.g. after Jurassic Parks there was a short-lived "summer of Dinosaurs"), sub-games (e.g. the book store where you could publish your novel), or whole regions (e.g. Sweetwater)

What was I talking about?