Missed Classic 124: Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor - Introduction (1987)

Written by Joe Pranevich

If Infocom is remembered for one thing, it is the Zork series. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sales data: from Infocom’s first day until they were purchased by Activision, Zork-series games accounted for 44% of every game sold. And yet, the company seemed almost desperate to be known for just about anything else. After the third game was released, Dave Lebling and Marc Blank decided to launch its followup, Enchanter, without Zork IV branding, a choice that may have had something to do with that game’s 50% revenue drop. Infocom continued to push against their Zork heritage even after it became clear that they would never again have a series that inspired so much love… and sales. By 1987 however, desperate times called for desperate measures and the long-standing superstition against calling another game “Zork” had to come to an end. With Marc Blank having (mostly) left the company, Lebling working on The Lurking Horror, and Meretzky on Stationfall, the responsibility for continuing the Zork saga was left to Brian Moriarty. 

And so it was, five years (and twenty-seven games!) since the last Zork-named title, Moriarty released Beyond Zork in November of 1987. It could not have come at a more desperate moment: the year-long experiment in faster-developed games across more genres was nearly over and none of the new games were sticking. Plundered Hearts, despite being an amazing game that everyone should try, stumbled out of the gate to become their second-worst selling game to date. Moriarty did not however want to just cash in on the Zork name for a quick buck; he was intent on making a newer and better game than any that Infocom had seen before. To that end, he would craft Infocom’s first true RPG, design a new interface for text adventures (including automap!), and bring back the whimsy of an early Zork adventure game. It wasn’t just Zork, it was… Beyond Zork! (Cheesy, I know.) 

Our first Infocom game with an illustrated title screen, but only on the Atari ST.

In a strange way, of all of the games in the Infocom canon, I have played this one the most… but not in the usual way. Please humor me as I slip into a few moments of autobiography. Like many of the games in this marathon, I dabbled in Beyond Zork when I purchased the Lost Treasures of Infocom in the early 1990s. This is one of the games in that set that made the biggest impression on me: I loved the mini-map, the light RPG elements, and the overall tone. I remember wishing that the earlier Zork titles had been rewritten with the in-game map. Most of the details are vague now, but I did not get very far and I don’t remember much now. 

In around 1998, I returned to Beyond Zork in a roundabout way. I had become an open source enthusiast and Linux junkie, soon to get my first writing gig for Linux Journal, but still trying to become a programmer. I dabbled in many open source projects such as the Linux kernel (especially the m68k for Mac project), Wine, FreeCiv, and a few others. Kernel programming was challenging for me, but the Wine project appealed to someone who knew that the biggest barrier to Linux’s success would be growing a pool of software that would run on it. Wine, if you are not aware, was a cleanroom re-implementation of Windows API calls, mapping them to the equivalent Linux graphical libraries. The project still exists and is used by companies like GOG for running old Windows games on Linux and Macs. How does this connect to Beyond Zork? Although Wine was developed to support Windows, there was a hook we were working on to allow it to run DOS applications as well. Instead of re-implementing API calls, we would map DOS/BIOS “Interrupts” to Linux instead. I was one of the early developers on this and spent more time than I care to admit translating INT21 and related calls to “ncurses”, the Linux terminal library. 

For whatever reason, getting the Infocom games running in Wine became my obsession and I quickly had all of the older text-mode games working great. Beyond Zork proved to be a more significant challenge as I needed to perfect cursor movement, color, and other details. I played the opening screens of Beyond Zork over and over again while designing this feature. I still remember the town with the docks, the sailor you could say “Hello Sailor” to, the large onion, and a few other details. I got it more or less working, but then I got my first “real” job and never found the time to go back. Wine reshaped their whole approach to DOS a short time later as this approach lacked direct hardware emulation that many applications required. DOSBox was released in 2002 and solved this problem in a much more complete way. This is why I played a lot of Beyond Zork and yet why I remember so very little of it. 

The game comes with a very nice map. I bet those markings are copyright protection.

History

I shouldn’t have to remind you that Brian Moriarty had quickly become one of the best game designers that Infocom ever had. Wishbringer (46 points) and Trinity (53 points) have been two of my favorite games in the marathon so far. Wishbringer is a Zork prequel in just about everything but name, managing to capture the spark and whimsy of Zork for a slightly younger audience, while hinting at adventures yet to come. (I am vaguely sure that Zork Zero will more or less write it out of canon, but I will learn more about that a few games from now.) Trinity remains perhaps the best-written adventure game of all time and I regret not scoring it higher. That game gave me nightmares, but has stuck with me even as most other games in our canon have faded away. It also ensured that I could impress my wife when she didn’t think I knew what the word “gnomon” meant. 

We know that in mid-1986, planning began for most of the 1987 games. Steve Meretzky, as previously discussed, pitched Zork Zero as one of several options for his next game. Thanks to Meretzky’s meticulous hoarding of his design documentation, we have feedback from his peers on why that game wasn’t selected. Dave Anderson stated that it was “too soon” for another Zork, which is surprising as 1986 was the first year without such a game. Jon Palace remarked that Zork Zero would probably sell well and have the enthusiastic support of Marketing, stating that “a boring hit sounds better than an interesting maybe.” Jeff O’Nell and Amy Briggs both wanted another Zork game, while Dave Lebling was completely against it. 

Perhaps surprisingly, it was Mike Dornbrook that got part of the winning idea when he wrote:

I think it would be good to introduce new features at the same time - multi-player mode, graphical puzzles, role playing, or whatever. Done well, this could sell 100,000+ and boost sales of Zork I, II, and III due to publicity.

From here however, the stories of Beyond Zork and Zork Zero get murky. Meretzky ultimately selected Stationfall (and I documented several of his other options here), and Moriarty got the Zork title. Either because of Dornbrook’s suggestion, or independent of it, Moriarty decided to make Beyond Zork into a RPG. Was this his first choice? Did he, like Meretzky, have a list of games he could have made and this was selected? While there is no indication of bad blood, it might be notable that Meretzky not only picked Zork Zero for his next game, he started it at least two months before Beyond Zork was released and without building on any of the continuity or features of that previous game. Meretzky’s documentation trove includes a note from Moriarty offering to help him with adopting Beyond Zork’s graphical and technical innovations, as well as with importing the Beyond Zork saved character into the later game. Other than the obvious fact that Zork Zero did neither of those things, we do not see a response to this suggestion in the leaked documents. I have emailed Brian Moriarty if he would be willing to discuss his development process with us, but as of press time he has not written back. 

Moriarty in 1984.

Regardless of the process for getting there, Moriarty was tasked with arguably the most important project of 1987. More than any other game on their aggressive release calendar, Beyond Zork had the capability to bring back many of the now long lost Zork gamers and a real chance to be the breakout hit of the year. All he had to do was the impossible and make a game that would please everyone, in record time, with new ideas and technology, on a shoestring budget.

The first decision that Moriarty gets (deserved) credit for is making Beyond Zork a RPG. As we saw, Dornbrook may deserve some credit for the idea, but the best inspiration for making Beyond Zork into a true RPG may have come from a much more legendary source: Zork I, itself. While Infocom had quickly moved away from RPG elements, the original Zork had a surprisingly robust combat engine and several monsters that could be defeated either through puzzles or brute force. This engine included a hidden “strength” statistic, variable weapon power, a potential to stagger an enemy with a lucky hit, and more. Our character in that game became stronger by collecting treasures: the higher our score, the higher our combat rating was and the easier it was to defeat the various enemies. Almost all of this was well-hidden and abandoned for every subsequent game, but for the tens of thousands of people that may not have played an Infocom game since Zork, he might have thought this a welcome return to form. 

To go along with the exciting new genre, Moriarty brought a more obvious change to the Infocom formula: a new semi-graphical interface. While Trinity experimented with simple control over text positioning, Beyond Zork required complete control over the text mode. It used simple ASCII graphics (leveraging a custom character set for line drawing) but divided the screen into segments for descriptions, input, and a mini-map. Beyond Zork would also be the first Infocom game with mouse support, allowing players to select where they wanted to go by clicking on the map. This was a far cry from the graphical games released by their contemporaries, but leveraged the portability of the Infocom engine to bring these graphic primitives to any platform that supported them. While the game itself would not include graphics, Beyond Zork was the first game to have a graphical title card (only released for the Atari ST); all releases after Zork Zero would include the same. These changes required a newer ZIP interpreter and for the second time this year, the code was forked. This new “XZIP” format would be the standard for a short time, becoming the platform for the “Solid Gold” re-releases, Border Zone, and Sherlock. 

1986 was like another country.

Development on Beyond Zork began around September 11, 1986 and completed just over a year later. After a series of duds, finally this game can, at least, be called something of a success. Total sales prior to Activision’s accounting team taking over ended at nearly 46,000 copies sold, ranking it the 15th best selling game at Infocom– not bad for its twilight years! Even better, it appears to have had the expected knock-on effect on sales: Wishbringer and Zork I (no doubt helped with their “Solid Gold” releases, more on those soon) both had a resurgence in interest. Even Spellbreaker was suddenly selling better! At a difficult time in the company, Brian Moriarty stepped up and delivered a rare but necessary hit. 

Despite the success, not everyone was happy. A marketing note, included in Meretzky’s files, suggests a different view: Beyond Zork was too much a sequel to Spellbreaker, a game that few players played, and not enough a sequel to Zork. It was hoped that Zork Zero could finally be the ultra successful return to basics that Infocom truly needed. We’ll get to that story in a few months.

Beyond Zork represented a needed uptick but is still small compared to their hits of the past.

Boring title pages are becoming the norm.

The Manual & Feelies

Dark times have fallen upon the Southlands of Quendor. All the enchanters have disappeared without a trace. Monsters roam the countryside. The taverns are filled with disturbing rumors and unsavory characters.

A simple peasant like yourself knows better than to get involved in the affairs of wizards. But everyone you meet seems intent on testing your abilities to the utmost. You find yourself drawn into a web of fantasy and magic, solving puzzles, seeking treasure, avoiding traps, and fighting monsters. Your strength and power grow with every encounter, until the most fabulous treasure of all-the fabled Coconut of Quendor-lies within your grasp. If only you can survive long enough to claim it!

Beyond Zork comes with a manual and two “feelies”: a map of the Southland of Quendor and a booklet entitled “The Lore and Legends of Quendor”. Looking at the manual first, it is fairly typical for an Infocom manual with a brief preface, a sample adventure, and other instructions. Reading through we are told immediately that this is not a typical adventure and even regular Infocom players should pay attention, so I do!

The default settings for function keys.

We learn the following:

• As described above, Beyond Zork includes mouse support!  I have been unable to get the mouse working in Boxer, but if I had it working, I’d be able to use it to click on the mini-map instead of specifying a compass direction. We can also navigate using the numeric keypad.
  
  
• We are warned that the in-game mini-map will not be sufficient and Infocom still recommends that players make their own maps as they explore the game.
  
  
• We can configure the function keys (“F1” and friends on the top of an IBM keyboard) as macros for frequently used commands and other text. 
  
  
• There are many new commands for knowing our attributes and being notified when they change. We can also switch to the legacy Infocom Interface (without the automap), put different things in the upper left “priority” box, and even zoom out on the mini-map.

Everything else looks fairly normal.

I love a good bestiary.

In the spirit of Zork manuals gone by, our first feelie is the “Lore and Legends of Quendor”, a bestiary of monsters and things that we may discover on our travels. This appears to be perhaps most inspired by the “Infotater” (aka the “Field Guide to the Creatures of Frobozz”) included with Sorcerer, except larger and with more details. Inside are twenty-four things we may encounter in no clear order, from “Grue” to the “Coconut of Quendor”. If my theory about the connection with Sorcerer is correct, this will also serve as a form of copy-protection as something in the game can only be tackled with the details included within. We learn, for example, that the “Christmas Tree Monster” is scared of caterpillars, that a “Manx” can be used to search for chocolate truffles, and that “Dust Bunnies” are weak against static electricity and lemon-scented sprays. I’ll have to remember to check this whenever I stumble upon an unfamiliar beastie. 

The “Discipline Crab” doesn’t have any obvious clues on their card, other than the suggestion that we shouldn’t corner them.

The included map also looks amazing and another throwback, this time to the map included with Zork I. (Or more accurately, to the map included with the re-release of Zork I from 1984.) This map depicts the “Southland of Quendor” including five towns, two castles, and a lighthouse. None of the locations on the map are labeled, except with an odd depiction of a compass. I have absolutely no recollection of this map before today and I am uncertain whether it didn’t come with my “Lost Treasures” boxed set, or it did and I didn’t realize. 

I have always been confused about Zork geography, in large part because I don’t think we’re supposed to take it seriously. The original Zork I map depicted the “Great Underground Empire” and environs as being on an eastern continent, with the ocean to the west. Wishbringer took place on the island of Antharia and the included map suggests it is a barrier island on the east coast of a continent, with the ocean to the east. Beyond Zork’s map also features the ocean to the east. I’m not sure whether this game solidified the geography or whether I’m misremembering clues from the various games, but later depictions of the GUE would be of a large ocean with settlements on both the eastern and western shores. I should do a special post eventually to work out the geography. I believe– but am not certain– that Steve Meretzky created his own map during the development of Zork Zero to tie all of this together, but it may have been earlier.  

And that’s it! All we have left is to play the game.

Zooming in on the compass reveals… a mystery. What could those be for?

I find this font more difficult to read than the default DOS one.

Playing the Game

“Our doom is sealed.”

   Y’Gael turned away from the window overlooking the Great Sea. “The Guildmaster nears the end of his final quest,” she said softly, “When he succeeds, for succeed he will, our powers shall cease to be.”

   The silence was unbroken for a long minute. Then a tiny voice near the door peeped, “Forever?”

   “No.” The old woman leaned forward on her staff. “The Age of Science will endure long; no one in this room can hope to outlive it. But our knowledge need not die with us – if we act at once to preserve our priceless heritage.”

   “Wherein lies your hope, Y’Gael?” demanded a salamander in the front row. “What Magick is proof against the death of Magick itself?” 

    Y’Gael’s dry chuckle stilled the murmur of the crowd. “You forget your own history, Gustar. Are you not author of the definitive scroll on the Coconut of Quendor?”

   A tumult of amphibious croaks and squeals drowned out Gustar’s retort. Y’Gael hobbled over to a table laden with mystical artifacts, selected a small stone and raised it high.

   “The Coconut is our only hope,” she cried, her eyes shining in the stone’s violet aura. “Its seed embodies the essence of our wisdom. Its shell is impervious to the ravages of Time. We must reclaim it from the Implementors, and hide it away before its secrets are forgotten!”

   A shrill voice of a newt rose above the cheering. “And who will steal this Coconut from the Implementors?” he scoffed. “You, Y’Gael?”

   The violet aura faded at his words. “Not I, Orkan,” replied Y’Gael, shaking the lifeless stone and replacing it with a sigh. “The fabric of Magick is unraveling. We dare not rely on its protection. Another champion must be sought; an innocent unskilled in the lore of enchantment, who cannot know the price of failure, or recognize the face of death.” 

   Orkan’s squeal was skeptical. “Suppose your champion succeeds in this hopeless quest. What will become of the Coconut?”

   Y’Gael turned to face the sea once more. “It will await the coming of a better age,” she replied, her voice trembling with emotion. “An age beyond Magick, beyond Science, …”

So much text just to get to the title screen!

 Before we even get to the title screen, we have a ton to unpack.

We open with an assembly of enchanters, all transformed into various kinds of lizards, discussing the imminent destruction of all “Magick”. We already know how the guildmaster’s quest ended because we lived it: that is the plot of Spellbreaker, the final game of the Enchanter trilogy. I love this detail actually because it continues the trend started in the previous trilogy: just as Zork III and Enchanter took place simultaneously, so too does Spellbreaker and Beyond Zork. This scene however may have been more than a little confusing to players whose last Zork game was Zork III from 1982. I would not be surprised to learn that many players started the game quite confused.

No doubt, we are the “champion” that the wizards are searching for. But what kind of champion are we?

We have some admin before we can begin.

Unlike in Zork, we have to create a character before we can jump into the game. Fortunately, we have a few choices how we can go about this, including several pre-built characters. The game doesn’t feature classes a la Dungeons & Dragons, but we do have six attributes that will define how we interact with the world. How much these stats can change during gameplay isn’t clear yet, but presumably there will be a leveling system of some sort. 

Our six stats are:

• Endurance
• Strength
• Dexterity
• Intelligence
• Compassion
• Luck

The first four of those are typical Dungeons & Dragons stats with “Endurance” standing in for constitution. A separate “Luck” stat is rarer in RPGs, but not unknown: it appeared in Chaosium’s 1981 Call of Cthulhu tabletop system, as well as JRPGs like the original Final Fantasy. “Compassion” is less common as a statistic and I am uncertain even what it means in context. No game system that I can find used such a stat in 1987; the earliest appearance may be 1991’s Vampire: The Masquerade where it was used to determine whether a player could resist dark impulses. These attribute scores also appear to be percentile instead of based on dice. If anyone has a deeper insight to the game system or its inspirations, I would love to learn more.

Six prebuilt characters.

Before crafting my own, I take a peek at the pre-generated characters:

• Lucky is high on luck and endurance, but low on everything else. His or her compassion score is especially low. 
• Tank has high endurance, strength, and luck, but almost no intelligence or compassion.
• Muscles has endurance, strength, and dexterity, with again nearly no compassion.
• Nimble focuses on dexterity and luck, with strength and endurance okay but with nearly no compassion. I am sensing a trend. 
• Genius has high intelligence and luck with lower scores elsewhere. Compassion is still the lowest, but is not let at the default 1% so that is something!
• Saint focuses on compassion (hooray!) and endurance, with no particularly low scores otherwise.

We are also given the option to randomize our character, allocating the 66 starting points willy-nilly across each of the stats. All of the pre-built characters also total 66 points so no one type starts off with an advantage over the others. I appreciate the balance.

Once we select all of the scores, we are prompted to select a gender and are given a default name. Oddly, both male and female characters have the default name of “Frank Booth”. It’s almost like they didn’t expect anyone to play as a woman!  I assume that Frank is a reference to the 1986 film Blue Velvet (which I have not seen), but looking him up on Wikipedia suggests that he is not a nice person:

Frank Booth is an over-the-top, crazed, loud, foul-mouthed and psychopathic gangster, drug-dealer and pimp, who is the central figure in Lumberton, North Carolina's criminal underworld.

Why would Moriarty choose that name for Beyond Zork’s central hero? Researching a bit further, it appears that different versions of the game had different default names, but none of them included a female default. The version included in the Lost Treasures set uses Frank Booth, but earlier versions used “Buck Palace” instead. Infocom fans would remember Mr. Palace as the “fighting letter carrier” in the B-movies portrayed in Hollywood Hijinx. That name doesn’t make any sense in context either. What was Moriarty thinking?

For my playthrough, I intend to honor Plundered Hearts and name my female protagonist “Dimsford”. I created a well-balanced character with 11 points in each stat, including the much-maligned “Compassion” statistic that most of the default characters ignored. I am looking forward to kicking ass and potentially finding other places where Moriarty didn’t consider that we might be playing as a woman…

Beyond Zork has a surprisingly robust character creation process… no, wait. That is Baldur’s Gate 3.

 

We can finally play!

From the start, it doesn’t look like an Infocom adventure game. This isn’t a surprise to me because I’ve played it before, but the screen is divided into three sections: a description in the upper left, a mini-map in the upper-right, and the normal text adventure stuff at the bottom. It’s remarkable how quickly this doesn’t feel quite like any Infocom game that has come before.

I begin the game on a hilltop in front of a tree. Climbing it doesn’t do anything, but then I remember that I may just not have enough dexterity. Descending the hill, I emerge into a small town. There’s a wharf off to the east where I discover a sailor, painting a flying galleon on canvas. I bid him “Hello Sailor” as I remember doing a million times before, chuckling to myself that it doesn’t really do anything and I’m just a geek for these Zork references. Consulting my map, I guess I am in the town labeled “I” on the map as that is the only one with a long wharf, but I could be mistaken.

“Motif #1”, a surprising seaside destination for aspiring artists.

I know I’ve just gotten here and I’m going down a rabbit hole immediately, but this whole setup and town reminds me very much of Rockport, Massachusetts. An hour northeast of Boston on Cape Ann (the lesser known New England cape), this town is famous for its seaside views, long wharf area with shops and restaurants, and “Motif #1”, the so-called most often painted building in America. I didn’t make the connection as a kid– and I could be hallucinating– but something about the artist and the wharf and the description just gives me this impression. If Mr. Moriarty answers my email, this is one of the questions I will ask him.

As I stand there gawking, a piece of driftwood floats by so I pick it up. It is a “shillelagh”, a word that I needed to look up as a kid and probably would have needed to look up as an adult. It’s a type of Irish club or sometimes a walking stick, but I’ll just call it a club because I cannot even consistently spell “shillelagh”. I wield it as my weapon as we never know when we might need to beat someone over the head in an RPG.

Just south of the wharf is the “Rusty Lantern” pub. Its namesake rusty lantern hangs on a signpost outside… or it did until I grabbed it. Picking up everything that isn’t nailed down: that’s the mark of a true text adventurer. I head inside and hope that no one noticed.

Inside the tavern is a group of bandits by a fireplace, plus a bearskin rug. I have a very dim memory (reinforced by reading the monster list) that we can walk on the rug to get a static electric charge. That would really zap a dust bunny! I don’t actually remember if I ever found a dust bunny in my previous playthroughs, but the idea makes sense. The bandits toss me a dagger in warning which I also pocket. Is that stronger or weaker than the club? There doesn’t seem to be a way to know. 

I continue through the pub into the kitchen, flashing back to a certain teapot-shaped cafeteria in Nord and Bert. Inside the kitchen is a cook and a giant onion. The cook offers to give me the onion if I fetch him a bottle of wine from the cellar. Cutting the onion with the dagger seems to be the correct approach, but the cook will not let me do it right now. We’ll have to buy the onion first! I head down stairs to get him some wine.

As soon as I go down, the map changes. I guess the overworld and “dungeon” maps are handled differently? We immediately get into combat with a rat-ant and die. I have to restore. The next time, I forget to wield the club. I die again. This game is unforgiving! 

That was quick.

Should I not be here yet? Fighting the rat-ant is an exercise in frustration. Even if I save scum, I rarely manage to hit it and when I do I rarely manage to hit it twice before I die. Once in a while, I’m attacked by a “discipline crab” instead and occasionally I can wait around the room a turn or two before I am attacked. With only 11 hit points and low stats, I die over and over again. When I finally defeat the rat-ant, the crab shows up on the next turn to take me out instead. It takes me plenty of dying and restoring, but I am eventually able to defeat both monsters and begin to explore the basement. 

Should I have come back later? Or is save-scumming the way to win difficult combats in the game? Was there a trick that I could have used to defeat both monsters? If there was, I missed it. 

We won!

Defeating our foes allowed us to gain a level, increasing endurance (but no other attribute) by four. Given that I was dying so quickly, a few more hit points will come in handy if we meet any more beasties! 

Taking stock, I can finally grab the scroll that I saw on the ground when I first arrived, as well as a tiny crown dropped by the crab. The scroll is the “scroll of refreshment” and has the word “Jukes” inscribed on top. On some of my attempts to defeat the rat-ant and crab, I had grabbed the scroll and found a different word on top. I suspect that the magic works are randomized each playthrough. Leaving this room in any direction takes me into the dark, but our rusty lantern still works and we can continue onwards. 

Since I will shortly discover that the basement layout is also changed every time we reload, I’ll just narrate the rooms I find rather than how they are connected to each other.

• Next door is a “Throne Room” and apparently the former home of our king crab. (Oh, I get the pun now!) Searching the crab’s nest, I discover a “golden doubloon” and pocket it. 
  
  
• The “Reeking Room” contains a rod. The game first claims there is nothing extraordinary about the rod, but waving it around allows me to feel that it has magic potential. I can probably zap someone with it, but I don’t see how yet.
  
  
• In a “Musty Corridor”, I find a gray patch of moss on the wall but nothing obvious that I can do with it.

After only three rooms, my lantern is already fading. 

• In “Shadowy Stacks”, I find a skeleton wearing an amulet. Removing the amulet causes the skeleton to wake up and attack me, but I defeat it quickly with my trusty club. (In D&D, you need to use blunt weapons on skeletons. I have no idea if the same holds true here.) The amulet is inscribed with red and blue runes and I vaguely remember a puzzle associated with it.
  
  
• At the “Bottom of the Stacks”, I find barrels that I could climb, but this character isn’t coordinated enough. 

And now my lantern fades completely and I die. I restore and this is when I realize that the rooms are all in a different order. Instead of being a straight path, now they are arranged in a web. It certainly makes the game replayable, but it’s mostly just confusing. I play the section over again but faster. 

At this point, I need to start solving puzzles. I pay more attention to the moss this time and realize that it is the “Moss of Marelion” and that I have one of my “Lore and Legends” cards about it! The instructions say to squeeze the moss to gain dexterity. I give it a try and slap myself on the back for solving the first bit of copy protection.

A few turns later, my finger starts to itch.

> examine finger

Damn, that itch! You hold your bothersome hand up to the lighted lantern… and gasp with shock.

   Your fingers, once fat and stubby, are now long and slender as a pianist’s. You flex the new digits one at a time; they respond with unfamiliar agility. Fact is, your whole body feels tighter and more coordinated than ever.

   [ Your dexterity just went up. ]

I now have nineteen dexterity, an eight-point bump! With that, I can climb the stacks of barrels to fetch the single bottle of wine left in the cellar, but my light goes out. I’ll need to solve that next.

Squeezably soft.

Unless I am doing something very wrong, it’s impossible to beat the dungeon with a single charge of the rusty lantern; there just are not enough turns to do everything, even if I carefully keep the lantern off during the initial fights and any time that I an under the light of the trapdoor up to the kitchen. Fortunately, this is where the rejuvenation scroll comes into play: read it and all of my items are just like new! Our rusty lantern is no longer rusty and now has plenty of charge. My biggest fear is that I need to rejuvenate some other item as well and I am missing the solution to some puzzle, but I hope the game won't be that mean so soon after starting.

With my lit lantern, I can climb the stacks, get the bottle of wine, and head back upstairs… except the cellar door gets slammed in my face. Is that another callback to Zork I? If so, I love it. 

I cannot break the door down with the club or anything else that I can see immediately. In the original Zork game, there were alternate exits from the underground that we would have to find, but here the basement is only a few rooms and there are no other obvious ways up.

I take stock of my items and ideas:

• I can wave my rod at things, but it says it only works on living things and I do not have a good angle to wave it at myself. Whatever it does, it doesn’t do anything to the door. 
  
  
• We cannot squeeze the moss a second time, nor does there seem to be anything new in any of the rooms that I explored.
  
  
• The amulet seems to be covered by red and blue lines but there is no clear indication what to do.

The trick that I remember a few minutes later is that the wine bottle is a translucent red color. (It also has a label featuring the white house from Zork I.) I fear that this is more a half-remembered memory from twenty years ago than any clever puzzle solving, but I think we are supposed to be thinking of the way that some hint books work: when you view the red and blue through a red filter, we can clearly see the blue text. Curiously, this is not how Infocom “Invisiclues” worked as they used an invisible ink that could be revealed with a special marker. Moriarty was also not thinking about the red/blue hint books used by Sierra as they only started those in 1989. I’m not sure where he would have gotten that inspiration, but the puzzle is creative at least.

Seastalker’s included hint systems used the red/blue method for hiding the text.

In Infocom’s canon, only Seastalker’s hint system used this style of red/blue for hints and this seems like too deep a cut even for him. In any event, when I look at the amulet through the wine bottle, I can read its trigger word (“Bok”, in this case). When I invoke the word while wearing the amulet, I am temporarily granted super strength and can easily smash open the trapdoor. Upstairs, the cook is shocked to see me and the splinters that remain of the basement door, but he begrudgingly takes the bottle off my hands and gifts me one very large onion. I hope it is worth it. 

With a new adventure in front of me (and almost 6500 words behind me), this feels like the right place to end our introduction.

Time played: 1 hr 25 min
Score: Level 1 Female Peasant
Inventory: Shillelagh (wielded), rod, gold doubloon, tiny crown, dagger, lantern, pack, Amulet of Bok, 1 zorkmid. 

A rusty old lantern.

We’ve made it to the end of the introduction and this means that it is time to register your score guesses. Thanks to a good showing from Plundered Hearts, Infocom games are currently averaging 40 points. Brian Moriarty’s games are also averaging 40 points, but that’s only if you include the type-ins Adventure in the Fifth Dimension (13 points) and Crash Dive! (20). Excluding them, he’s averaging a positively saintly 55 points! I look forward to seeing where you think Beyond Zork will fall. 

Consulting Detective Vol. 3 Update

Next up for me will be Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective Vol 3, the final in that series. I am waiting to get a copy of the newspaper and manual that is included with the game, if it isn’t the same as the other two, and then write up an introduction. 

As a capstone on this series, I hope to organize a special playthrough of the Consulting Detective tabletop game to experience the “missing” 10th case that ICOM never adapted. My plan is to do this on video and edit something together that we can share on Youtube, but the exact logistics are still to be determined. I could use some advice on filming a multi-camera setup and if any commenters or writers have any great ideas for how to pull this off, please let me know.

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There's a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introductory post, it's an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won't be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It's also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.