SwordThrust

by Donald Brown

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.

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

Commentary

In 2003, Dave Rugge wrote this description and review:

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

Review

SwordThrust is a good text RPG but would have been much better if there had been more adventure modules to play.

The Good SwordThrust improves on its predecessor Eamon in almost every conceivable way. You have more spells and more combat options available to you, such as the ability to wear more types of armor and wield two weapons at once. The adventures were also a lot more difficult and detailed, with better puzzles.

The Bad The only problem with SwordThrust is the lack of adventures available to play. There were only 3 adventure modules written for the game, and no dungeon designer disk to allow players to design their own dungeons. So after you finished all three adventures you were stuck with nothing to do, while if you played Eamon instead, you had 20 or 30 adventures to play (a lot more were developed after 1981) and could make your own when you got bored.

The Bottom Line SwordThrust is a fun and detailed text RPG set in a fantasy universe. With a wide variety of combat options and spells, there was a lot of game play in a small package. Too bad it didn’t come with an adventure builder.