]Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online

   

Beyond Eamon

The following systems were attempts to expand and improve on the original Eamon system with rather minimal success.

Eamon II & KnightQuest
Super Eamon
SwordThrust

Eamon II & KnightQuest

A brief history - Eamon II
KnightQuest began as a vision of John Nelson to create a "super-Eamon". The first step along the way was the creation of Eamon II, written by John Nelson, John Heng, and Bob Davis. Eamon II shows many of the features and commands of the later-to-come version 6 Eamon, but lacks the commands PUT & FREE.  It has 4 new spells: CHARM, FEAR, BLINK, & SLEEP.  It accommodates 5 personal weapons instead of the usual 4 of the Main Hall.  It has a total of 7 artifact types, including Shield, Healing, Light, & Shovel.  There are several new monster fields: Low Room, High Room, #Attacks, Greed, Hate, and Wanderlust.  It allows the adventurer to find 'friends' and take them along on adventures.  There are 4 professions: Thief, Fighter, Cleric, & Magician.  Alignments run from Lawful Very Good to Chaotic Evil.  It has an Intelligence attribute.  It runs VERY slowly and is an incredible memory hog.  This situation got worse as it grew into 'KnightQuest', and the next thing you know John got himself an IBM-PC with compiled Basic & 640K of memory.

Four disk images are available for the Eamon II system and are provided here for your amusement:
Eamon II Main Hall ● #1 Beginner's Cave ● #17 Merlin's Castle ● Dungeon Designer Diskette

KnightQuest
This is John Nelson's aborted "KnightQuest" gaming system. It contains considerable enhancements over standard Eamon, and was an attempt to approach true D&D-type gaming. However, the Apple II did not have the resources for such an ambitious enhancement. Because of an extreme shortage of free memory, KnightQuest ran VERY slowly and was very difficult to work with. Then the IBM PC with its 640K of RAM appeared, and John moved his efforts to that platform. Set your emulator for at least 3.5 mhz to get KnightQuest up to a decent performance level. Faster is probably better.

KnightQuest has gobs of new features, although I've never really tested them. There are 17 spells total: HEAL, CHARM, BLAST, FURY, SCARE, POWER, HARDHIT, LIGHT, TELEPORT, SLEEP, RESURRECT, INVISIBILITY, FORCEFIELD, DARKSEE, ATTALL, RAGE, & PURIFY.

Professions are slightly different then Eamon II with possibilities being fighter, thief, cleric, and mage. The character can be a either a Human, a Dwarf, or an Elf. The player can speak one of eight languages: Trollish, Orcish, Dwarfish, Elvish, Gerbish, Falconese, Latin, or Welch.

There are 26(?!) artifact types: Key, Weapon, Armour, Shield, Light, Medical, Tool, Read, Key, Fuel, Teleport, Sleep, Vitamin, Agility, Charm, Scary, Cont., Portal, Effect, Weapon, Food, Drink, Bank, Instruct, Resurrect, and Trap.. Again, I don't really know what all of these artifacts do. Some artifacts appear to be pre-programmed into the system: Weapon, Armour, "General1", Readable, Key, Fuel, Container, Portal, Food, Drink, Bank, Instruct, Trap.

Four Disk images are available:
The KnightQuest Master is required to run the other games.
Amateur Alley is KnightQuest's equivalent to the Beginners Cave.
Curse of the Hellsblade was converted to "regular" Eamon #206. You can read the review of that Eamon here.
Quest for the Firedragon was also written by John Nelson.

 Two custom disks are also available.
Disk 1 gives options to resurrect an adventurer, modify an adventurer, maintain stores file, change titles, change town marshal, reload store inventory, maintain system parameters, create new formats file, change character file length, change rooms file length, or print stock listings, with a small help file describing what each function does.

Disk 2 is "L.U.R.C. Maintenance" although I have no idea what that means. It lets you change the attributes of the professions, languages, spells, artifact types, etc.

Super Eamon by Little Green Software
Bob Davis wrote the following reviews of Super Eamon in the NEUC 03/1985 and 08/1985 editions. I've consolidated them to remove some redundant information, but it should give you a good idea of what Super Eamon is about.

SUPER EAMON by Little Green Software

Reviewed by Bob Davis

 

Super Eamon is a graphic version of the Eamon Main Hall available from Little Green Software. The graphics are very professional and I enjoyed the pictures of each shop, the movement of the townspeople and my character, and the format of the informational displays. Some of the extra features of the Eamon Master are:

  1. Informational help upon request.
  2. Special weapons training.
  3. Acquiring better made weapons.
  4. Resurrection of dead characters.
  5. Good graphics. I enjoyed the pictures of each shop in the main ball, along with the movement of the character from one shop to the next. Being a devote text adventure activist, I found the blend of text and graphics were very well done.
  6. Extra features in the main hall. A side alley is available for adventurers wishing to seek a better made weapon, special weapons training or to help a fellow adventurer return from the dark unknown (dead). The only complaint I have is too little options available at the bar (but I have this complaint of the text system, too).
  7. Pickpockets thrive in abundance.
The SUPER EAMON main hall will let you transfer your characters from your text main hall, but will kill them on the text main hall diskette. I didn’t deem this as particularly appropriate, but it is logical. I had a normal character who went through many adventures and had a couple abilities that were modified by these adventures so that the values were above legal limits (usually 100 for spell ability). These illegal character attributes printed as Low-med (SUPER EAMON does not print values). After conversing with Little Green Software, they provided me with the following list of ratings and values:

 

Description Spell Ability Weapon Ability
V LOW 0-50 0-10
LOW 51-199 11-24
LOW-MED 200 – 299 25 – 49
MEDIUM 300 – 399 50 – 64
MED-HI 400 – 499 65 – 84
HIGH 500 – 599 85 – 99
V HIGH 600 + 100+
I don’t know about the rest of the Eamon world, but spell abilities above 200 seems to be rather rare on the club’s diskettes.

 

Now for the things I didn’t like:

  • Having to transfer my characters from my old master to the Super Eamon master and having them deleted from the old master.
  • Being pick-pocketed by thieves to the point of having no money and not being able to do anything to prevent it.
  • Having to type in *READ* at the place where my name is to be typed to get a list of the names of all my characters on the disk. Something more appropriate (like typing in WHAT?) and easier to remember would be good for me.

Aside from these items, I like Super Eamon. It has very responsive people standing behind it. And, to answer a question some of you undoubtedly have, it does have better graphics than the previously reviewed Eamon Graphics Master. It is rumored that version 2 of Super Eamon will include adjustment of the thriving pick-pockets, extra things to do in the bar and other items. It is not known when these revisions are planned. --Bob Davis

In 1985, Little Green Software created their first graphic adventure for Super Eamon called The Haunted House. These are the images shown here.

Two disks are available to download: The Super Eamon Main Hall and The Haunted House.

SwordThrust by Donald Brown

The italicized part of this review was written by David Rugge and was originally found at http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/p,31/gameId,9997/

SwordThrust is a commercialized and enhanced version of the Eamon RPG. Your hero begins in the land of Diurla at the Main Hall, where he (or she) must register, roll up stats, equip, and buy spells before going on one of many adventures.

Like in its predecessor, your main stats are Hardiness (the number of hits you can take before you die and your carrying capacity), Agility (affects your chance to hit monsters), and Charisma (affects prices at the Main Hall and the friendliness of monsters). SwordThrust also adds another ability called Left Hand, which affects your chance of hitting with weapons in your left hand. All the standard weapon categories (Axe, Bow, Club, Spear, Sword) are inherited from Eamon and work in similar ways. Your weapon score is a percentage chance for you to hit with that type of weapon, and it has a small chance of going up each time you hit.

SwordThrust adds many new spells to the standard Eamon spellbook of Blast, Power, Heal, and Speed. Some examples of the new spells are: Charm (makes monsters friendlier towards you), Fear (makes monsters run away), Thickskin (increases your armor), This greatly expands your options in the game as well as giving you something to spend your extra gold on since the most powerful spells can cost 30000 or more gold pieces.

Adventuring is very similar to Eamon. The dungeons are all text-based, similar to an adventure game. You move and fight through the dungeons with commands like NORTH, INVENTORY, ATTACK RAT, and so on. Some improvements over the Eamon interface are that the room description and character status are displayed in a window at the top of the screen so you don't have to constantly be LOOKing to figure out where you are. Another game play change is that your character can get fatigued. When your fatigue gets too high, you pass out which may end up killing you if monsters find you. Stopping and RESTing is necessary, but it is easy to get very fatigued in a difficult battle and pass out when you have to run away to rest.

Equipping items is also much different than in Eamon. You can now equip weapons in your left hand if you don't use a shield, potentially doubling your number of attacks. Armor is also now equippable, so it is possible to find better armor during your adventures instead of being stuck with what you bought at the Main Hall. --David Rugge
---

The SwordThrust series by CE Software was a set of seven text adventures with role-playing elements, high on character interaction.

The first episode, The King's Testing Ground, contained the guide for interacting with the parser, as well as the game file interpreter required by subsequent adventures, which were data disks only. In a way they were early "expansion packs", in thin paperboard folders printed with minimal instructions. All episodes have the same cover art, only the number and title are different.

Here is the whole collection of SwordThrust adventures in original nibble (protected) format. All disks are in working order except #4. The 4th adventure has a slight bug which prevents you from suspending a game. Upon reboot, the adventure will be corrupt.

The #1 disk labeled Ctrl-C allows you to break in the Main Hall to allow variable editing of your character. If you know Applesoft Basic, then hack at the attributes of your character. Have fun!

  1. The King's Testing Ground (ctrl-c version)
  2. The Vampyre Caves
  3. The Kidnappers Cove
  4. The Case of the Sultan's Pearl
  5. The Green Plague
  6. The Eternal Curse
  7. The Hall of Alchemie

This page last updated on 01/07/2008.