Twine 2.12.0 released on 10 April 2026. Major highlights in this release include a new way to see tags in the story map, a better tag autocomplete, and native Japanese language support.

Full Notes

New Features Added

• When adding tags, multiple suggestions are now shown when more than one existing one matches what’s been typed.
• A new preference has been added where tags now appear as badges with names on passage cards instead of a thin stripe of color. When this preference is active, all badges are shown on passage cards regardless of whether a color has been assigned to them.
• App Twine has been updated to Electron 41.
• A Japanese localization has been added.

Bugs Fixed

• Long passage names now display with an ellipsis in the title bars of passage editors, instead of the title bar getting taller.
• The start passage on duplicated stories is now set correctly.
• A bug where passage name completions in the passage editor didn’t appear in certain situations has been fixed.
• An unnecessary delay when loading localizations has been fixed.
• The Ukrainian localization has been improved.

Story Format Updates

• Chapbook has been updated to version 2.3.1.

For full details, please refer to the Twinery Reference Guide

Hello to everybody in the IFTF Community (and beyond!)

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation’s board of directors is thrilled to announce the creation of a new way that you can help support our mission and get some fun perks in the process. This initiative has been in process for many months and we are delighted to finally launch it for the public.

You may now support IFTF on the Patreon platform, at the following URL:

https://www.patreon.com/IFTF

Backing IFTF on Patreon provides an additional, accessible route to helping us continue to serve the community of narrative game lovers and its ever-evolving needs. By becoming a member of our Patreon, you can unlock various perks, such as:

• A special role and access to an exclusive channel in the IFTF Discord ($5/month tier)
• A unique profile badge on the Intfiction forums ($5/month tier)
• A scaling discount on NarraScope admission ($10/month tier or higher, after 6 continuous months)
• Access to the Secretest Discord channel ($100/month tier, for you wild and wacky folks!)

We plan to continue to expand the perks over time as each of IFTF’s committees hooks into the system. We also are open to suggestions about additional things we can offer, so if you have ideas, please feel free to contact IFTF.

IFTF Patreon Q & A

Q: I already financially support IFTF another way. Is that changing or being eliminated?

A: No! This is simply another option for helping out.

Q: If I support IFTF via PayPal, it’s considered a tax-exempt donation. Is that still true with Patreon?

A: We advise checking with a tax advisor with expertise in your specific jurisdiction, but Patreon states that “if the creator is a legally recognized not-for-profit company and you receive nothing of value in return for your payment to them, then some jurisdictions allow the patron to take a tax deduction.”

For more information, this is a good place to start: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207099326-Is-my-payment-to-a-creator-tax-deductible

Q: I have an idea for a perk or feedback about the Patreon!

A: That isn’t a question, but you can still get in contact with us via the many routes outlined on our website: https://iftechfoundation.org/contact/

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation is registered in the United States as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

IFTF is thrilled to announce the next round of our microgrant program, providing modest grants to folks working on interactive fiction technology, education, preservation, or outreach. Do you have a project in the works that will benefit an interactive fiction community and could use a bit of funds to get it to the finish line? We would love to hear from you: applications for this year’s program are now open.

The goal of the grant program is to support projects that benefit the interactive fiction community at large (rather than funding the commission of new games, for instance). We especially love projects that provide tangible benefits to a community of IF players or makers in their work to preserve, maintain, and inspire the continued growth of this medium. Proposals are evaluated by an independent committee of advisors (distinct from the grant admin committee) for merit, feasibility, and potential impact.

Our budget for the grants program is small: we have $3,000 of funds in total to split between awardees, with a maximum award per application of $1,000. (Requesting a smaller amount is okay and helps us support more projects.) To preserve our volunteer bandwidth, we will not consider funding projects needing less than $150. We will ask you to submit a simple budget to back up the amount you are asking for, as well as a few details about your project and its scope, but we try to keep the application process as simple as possible.

Some fine print: Grant awardees will be asked to submit a report nine months after receiving funds, meaning our funding is best-suited for projects that will be accomplished in under one year. Please note that those directly involved in the grant process (i.e. Grant Admin Committee members, Grant Advisors, IFTF Board Members) cannot apply. Those who have been banned from IFTF activities are not welcome to apply. If you are connected to someone involved in the process, please disclose that in your application so we can make appropriate plans to avoid conflicts of interest.

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about the process, please check out our grant guidelines. Applications will be open until November 15, 2025, and we except to announce accepted projects by January 31, 2026.

Last year, we funded an array of exciting projects focused on accessibility, education, documentation and outreach. And in our most recent funding round, we helped support four exciting projects currently in progress or concluding: Serhii is working on Atrament, an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. Work is in progress with a launch is expected by the end of the year. Grace Benfell commissioned articles on modern interactive fiction for a special issue of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal, with the goal of introducing modern IF to a broader audience. The special issue is expected to be published shortly. Mark Davis is developing Moving Literature, a web-based platform for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to make interactive stories incorporating images and animations. A blog post introducing the platform recently went live. Katy Naylor hosted a series of IF writing workshops earlier this year in London and online, in association with the zine Voidspace, introducing artists from the wider literary and interactive performance worlds to interactive fiction.

We can’t wait to see what ideas you’ve got brewing this year. If you have any questions about the IFTF Microgrants or the application process, please reach out to [email protected]. And if you don’t intend to apply but are still thrilled that IFTF is funding cool projects, you can donate to the grants program directly (choose “IFTF Grants” in the donation page dropdown), or simply to the IFTF General Fund to help us keep this and many other great programs running!

At the end of 2025, David Cornelson stepped down from the IFTF board of directors. We would like to thank David for his time and service to the organization during his two years on the board. David will continue to support IFTF, along with former members of the board, on the advisory board.

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Grace Benfell, co-editor in chief of The Imaginary Engine Review, which was completed last summer!

TIER defines itself as an online journal of games criticism - but Grace and Phoenix, the editors, have a very specific goal and outlook for it, described in their manifesto. TIER values the margins, the strange, the hobbyist releases, the experimental, the games that don’t get a lot of critical attention. Prior issues each focused on a specific game, such as thecatamites’ “Anthology of the Killer” or randomnine’s “OVERWHELM”; but things got a little different for their latest issue…

See, their initial proposal envisioned three small issues on three IF games; however, the scope shifted into a larger issue that would offer the opportunity to showcase a wider range of perspectives on IF. And it is a large issue with no less than 6 pieces on various aspects of IF. (We get it! There is so much to talk about in IF!) Grace explains that the grant money was very welcome as it allowed them to commission more ambitious and experimental pieces overall. The issue took overall longer than expected, but with an interview, a retrospective, and four critical perspectives on a variety of IF games, there’s a lot for everyone!

You’ll find this issue on TIER’s website, featuring: - a reflection on “Repeat the Ending” (Best in Show at Spring Thing 2023) as a personal game and the vulnerability it entails - an honest retelling of what it was to be a Twine author participating at their first IFComp in 2017 - a shorter piece on game poems, and the exploration of experimental techniques that have long been part (or precursors?) of IF - a lengthy interview with Nathalie Lawhead, touching on the power of text-based games for effective, personal, touching, and plain weird experiences, in an industry that looks more towards sleek polished spectacles, and an angry world that stifles creativity - a great study of “Horse Master” that made me go, “fine, yes, of course I will play Horse Master for the 12th time” - an exploration of retro interfaces featured as literary devices in a few IF games, and what they point to.

We are very happy to have helped bring into the world these very unique and thoughtful pieces of writing! Good games criticism pieces have always been very important to the IF scene, from long rec.arts.int-fiction pieces to SPAG articles, and even to this day articles from The Rosebush, but it can go through periods of lull - it takes thoughfulness, introspection, and the time to sit with a piece. IFTF is proud to continue to support a vibrant, healthy creative scene in this way!

One of the projects in the 2025 class of IFTF grants awardees was led by Katy Naylor from the Voidspace. In Katy’s words, the Voidspace is a cross-disciplinary space to bring together practitioners and explore and promote the overlap between the worlds of IF, indie writing, games, and interactive performance to encourage cross pollination. From our experience, notably at Narrascope, those worlds do have quite a bit of overlap that is always interesting to foster! The proposal sought grant money to support the delivery of several interactive fiction workshops and Twine minijams for newcomers as part of the London Games Festival Fringe in April.

The Voidspace successfully managed to run three IF workshops in April, two in person and one online; although they weren’t formally picked as a side event by the London Games Festival, the workshops ran at the same time period. The Void managed to bring together quite a few people from the literary and the interactive performance worlds that form part of the network that Voidspace has created - most of whom had not run into IF before, but had very relevant skills and an interest from their existing practice. The in-person workshops occurred April 5 at Theatre Deli in London, UK, a theatre community hub that frequently partners with the Voidspace. The first workshop focused on Downpour, a very intuitive and accessible tool for hyperlinks-based games created by V Buckenham, who also ran this workshop; and the second one saw Stanley Baxton (who readers of these pages might know from his 2024 IFComp entry) introduce a group to the tool Videotome. As for the online workshop, on April 15 Mark Ward gave and introduction to Twine.

Katy reports that these workshops were very successful! Not only for the attendees - Katy herself reports that the workshops planted several seeds in her minde, helped her shape her approach to advocating for IF and inspired her to use Videotome for an upcoming piece. This also spurred her to create her own introductory IF workshop aimed specifically at theatre makers, which she ran in September at an experimental theatre festival, using physical materials to replicate Twine-like structures - one attendee even said that this broke her writer’s block!

We’re always excited to help introduce more creators to the world of IF, and it sounds like the cross-pollination aspect of this project made it very successful!

PS: when we asked Katy to describe the overlap between IF and interactive theatre, her response was so insightful that we are copying it here verbatim:

The overlap between IF and theater (particularly immersive and interactive theatre, which is the Voidspace’s core interest) is massive!

Immersive theatre often involves audience interacting with environments that are all around them (i.e. inside a big touch real set - see Punchdrunk for the biggest example), choosing which strands of an atomised story to follow (e.g. following different characters or objects), etc. Interactive theatre takes this a stage further and allows audiences to take a direct part in the action - a sort of live action game but with a tight narrative arc. A balance of choice with controlled impact very similar to IF!

IF is well suited for creating environmental narratives - my workshop focuses on the spatial mechanics of “Howling Dogs” - how the degradation of the core space over time tells a story if its own - and encouraged participants to design a story from an environment first perspective. For those interested in interactive theatre you can use dialogue options and variables to create a story that feels responsive in a similar way.

There is also the element of time - even in a linear piece of IF, you can manipulate the flow of time far more than conventional text - by choosing breaks between passages, expanding links, moderated text etc. You can use these simple tools to give a piece of IF a sense of theatricality - landing the timing of ‘beats’ for flow and emphasis. Add the use of variables to build in a sense of time passing and use of environment and you have what I call ‘4d storytelling’. Which if you think about it, is what theatre is… “[Understudied][https://borntopootle.itch.io/understudied]” is a great example - a piece of IF about theatre that uses variables to introduce time pressure, and text effects and structure to choreograph the timing of ‘beats’. Form and content in unity!”

Thank you so much Katy!

Earlier this month, IFTF was delighted to participate in the GDC Festival of Gaming in San Francisco. This was our chance to explain what interactive fiction is, does, and can do to the biggest game developer gathering in the world.

We began by rocking the crowds at the Monday night opening event at Oracle Stadium. Several nonprofits and indie collectives had tables up at the concession level. We took the opportunity to soft-launch our GDC-week project: a collaboratively-authored Twine game - the classic “exquisite corpse” reimagined for branching narrative. Everybody who walked by was invited to add a node to the Twine editing screen — without looking at what earlier attendees had added. (Or, at least, not looking much.)

Naturally, the story got pretty chaotic pretty quickly, even on that first night.

Tuesday was a breather, since the festival hall wasn’t open yet. We took in some of the GDC talks and generally sprawled on the lawn in Yerba Buena Gardens. The weather was lovely — particularly for those of us who had flown in from East Coast snowstorms.

On Wednesday, the IFTF booth opened up (along with the IGF pavilion, alt.ctrl.gdc, and the rest of the festival hall). We were located in “GDC Commons,” alongside several other nonprofits and independent organizations. Our space had three tables, so we were able to demo the first day’s worth of Twine contributions while also grabbing people to continue the growth of the Twine map.

It turns out that most passers-by were familiar with Twine — no surprise, since it’s one of the most popular open-source narrative design tools out there. Fewer people realized that a whole educational nonprofit exists to support Twine. IFTF also manages other IF community services like IFComp (the oldest continuously-run game-design competition), IFDB (the definitive database of IF), the IF Archive, the forum and more. Not to mention NarraScope, our cozy little conference dedicated to narrative games. (Coming up this June in Albany!)

IFTF’s third table was dedicated to an older brand of interactive fiction: the Visible Zorker. This is an open-source project which demonstrates Zork, the original 1979 text adventure. The game is rigged to display its own source code as you play, along with all the variables, timers, and other mechanisms that run behind the game’s magic curtain. We at IFTF love this kind of educational project: revealing and making game design accessible to everyone.

GDC’s festival hall runs three days. By Friday afternoon we were tired (but happy) (but definitely tired) and ready to wrap up. The Twine game was a huge success with over 120 contributed passages over the course of the week.

We’re looking forward to next year at GDC in San Francisco. What will we be showing off in 2027? Haven’t the foggiest! We’ve got eleven months to decide, and you have eleven months to anticipate it. We hope to see you there.

To play the IFTF Collaborative Twine Adventure, visit this page!

Another project funded in 2025 as part of our micro-grants program supported Serhii in the development of additional features for his engine Atrament. Here’s an update!

The core concept of Atrament is that, while the Ink scripting language is widely used, it could be further developed into a more full-featured and user-friendly web-based engine that could offer creators a workflow comparable to Twine or ChoiceScript. While the core of the engine already existed prior to applying to a IFTF micro-grant, additional work was needed to push the tool towards greater maturity, ease of use, and functionality. The micro-grant allowed Serhii to work on the following areas: - developing documentation for authors; - developing a “wizard” style command line tool to provide technical scaffolding to users in creating a project and publishing it; - adding features to allow authors to export their games to a desktop OS; - delivering improvements to the debugger and the compiler; - expanding visual capabilities and extending the markup language; - purchase of a domain name for a dedicated website for the project.

Serhii also notably performed some exploratory work around automated game testing and VS Code integration, two very interesting features that are nonetheless not ready for primetime at this point. Still, the project is still under active development, moving from version 2.0 to 2.4.1 in 2025, and Serhii has integrated the feedback from external developers making a first wave of Atrament games, such as Sun Runners, The Loop, and The Corridor. Plus, given by the enthusiastic reaction the engine has met from established authors over at IntFiction, it seems like we can look forward to more Atrament games in the future!

Head on over to Atrament.ink (and the Github page) to learn more about the project, and give it a try! We are thrilled to have supported Serhii in further improving his engine and making it even easier for authors to develop their stories!

In 2025, as part of our micro-grants program, IFTF funded a project from Mark Davis; thanks to the funding, Mark and the team have made very good progress and were able to launch the platform, now called “Moving Literature”!

The project’s ambition was to design a no-code web-based tool for authoring interactive fiction, specifically designed to empower creators through accessible technology and a low barrier of entry, while still offering some nice multimedia options. Mark’s vision was to foster a vibrant community by blending the narrative power of Ink scripts with modern visual elements, such as the integration of images but also of Lottie animations (hence the zoetrope/Muybridge-style logos on the website!), which are triggered within the story through the use of Ink tags. While Mark explains that the technical stack is one he uses in his professional work, this project brings those high-end tools to the hobbyist and experimental IF scene.

The project was able to launch in the fall of 2025 thanks to IFTF’s support, with the launch of two websites: - MovingLiterature.com: The project’s home base, featuring general communications, development blogs, and “getting started” documentation. - MovLit.com: The library and creation space where the “action” happens, allowing for user registration and story creation.

The micro-grant was used to engage a professional graphic designer (who has since joined the team!) and cover hosting costs for the next 3 years, to ensure the project has a stable home for years to come. This supported the team as they focused on carrying the project towards launch, such as building a documentation library, implementing user registration, and building out forums.

We are very happy to have helped bring this new authoring tool into the world! Building new low/no-code options that nonetheless provide engaging capabilities to control or enhance presentation has proven numerous time to be a very effective entry point for newcomers to discover and enjoy IF, and lower the barrier of entry to more stories being created. IFTF is proud to support such projects that push the envelope for web-based interactive storytelling!

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the third round of IFTF microgrants, following the continued success of our 2024 and 2025 programs!

A big thank you to everyone who submitted a grant application late last year; we are thrilled to see continuing interest in the program and more interesting projects for the IF community! Our independent committee of Grant Advisors have carefully reviewed all applications, and have selected four projects that represent the expanding technical and cultural horizons of the medium. Without further ado, here are the grant recipients, class of 2026!

Flatgame making tool - Kate Bagenzo This project aims to simplify the creation of “flatgames”, a genre that has a decade of history, most often associated with allowing players to view and explore an author’s own drawings (often hand-drawn and scanned), collages, music, etc. Most of these games are either coded from scratch or using Unity templates, which doesn’t quite succeed in making game making as easy as possible, as originally intended. Kate will receive $650 to develop a streamlined toolset that lowers the barrier for artists and non-programmers to bring their visual stories into the interactive space.

Пригода: A Ukrainian-language text adventure engine - Andrii “Пригода” (Adventure) is a dedicated parser-based engine focused on the specific needs of the Ukrainian-language IF community. Andrii will receive $600 to support his efforts in developing this localized parser-based text adventure framework that provides useful features for authors in Ukrainian, from synonyms and aliases as in other text adventure engines, to more Ukrainian-specific needs such as streamlining recognition of different cases, prepositions, and forms of commands. This seeks to ensure that authors have the linguistic tools and engine support necessary to create text adventures in Ukrainian, which currently don’t exist!

Twine & the IF Community article - Tabitha O’Connell Twine fundamentally reshaped the landscape of interactive fiction over the last decade; however, there was a period around 2014 where the community debated the increased use of the tool and its impact on the IF scene and IFComp. The strong viewpoints and particular context made this a key moment in the IF community, and while participants can recount part of the story and the IntFiction threads are still up, there is little literature taking a closer look at this episode and contextualizing this event. Tabitha will receive $750 to fund her work in collecting appropriate sources and materials, before writing her deep-dive critical and historical article on the topic, an important chapter for the IF community of broad interest for the history of the medium.

New Standalone Engine Built with Godot for Making Splitscreen Co-Op Interactive Fiction - Abhik Hasnain, Adeline K. Piercy Although there have been a few experiments over the decades, IF usually tends to be single-player, and multiplayer experiences are rare and lack specific tooling to explore this further. Abhik and Adeline, two students at Edmonton’s University of Alberta, propose to build a standalone engine using the Godot framework specifically for co-operative storytelling, focusing on giving creators a powerful tool allowing them to explore building splitscreen, multi-player interactive fiction; they will receive $1,000 to fund their work. This could unlock entirely new possibilities of exploration and experimentation around this relatively new genre of co-op (local or remote) narrative play.

We love this year’s class of projects, as they explore 4 very different directions that touch on innovation, new frontiers, fostering creation, and community history. Looking forward to getting updates on them next year! And congratulations to the recipients!

We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to select the projects for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, PB Berge, Rourke Bywater, Liza Daly, Chandler Groover, and Nathanaël Marion!

I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like — it’s still The Phantom Ship except in the sense of being a ship where searching reveals nothing — but I’ll give a report anyway.

Before starting on gameplay, I have a piece of history to cover. (Rather, I have three pieces of history, but I’m just doing one for now to spread it all out.) Technically speaking, the creator of Yuureisen was not Shinkigensha but Micro House.

I/O Magazine, April 1983.

From the ad above — selling the game on tape, prior to PC Magazine launching — the publisher of the upcoming magazine is listed as Shinkigensha and the creator is listed as The Micro Communication, with a different address than Shinkigensha’s listed on the bottom. This doesn’t mean they were actually fully separate; they may have been essentially an informal spinoff that got pulled into the fold once the incorporation became official (exactly the month of the ad).

Three books are also listed as being newly published, and they aren’t the sort of thing that would have been created on the spot; this seems like a setup that was some time in the making (at least overlapping the exact publishing date of the original Phantom Ship type-in that Rob came up with, November 20 of 1982).

I/O Magazine, March 1983.

An ad the month before (see picture) doesn’t mention the Shinkigensha deal at all, but it does mention selling VHS copies of PC Sunday, 15,000 yen each!

Back to the game: I have, at least, what I think is an accurate map.

As a reminder, there are some exits where after going in a particular direction, the game will give a prompt (either up/down or left/right) so some paths actually split (even though walking back the other direction may not have a prompt at all). Entering what I’m considering the three “floors” requires going west to a stairway, choosing up/down, and then having the game move you to the floor. That is, there is no real stairway room, but I put them on my map because otherwise I was getting befuddled.

Also, while I’ve been thorough, there’s a slight chance I still have a translation that’s off (especially as far as ship terms go) and any item that’s singular may actually be plural (“hammock” seems more likely “hammocks” in the lower decks, for instance).

Some of the doors can be opened right away and some of them are locked. I do not have a key.

On the map below of the upper-back area there are four doors, two each lead to officer quarters (identical with a desk and skeleton) and two are locked. Here I am entering the Officer Quarters 2, trying to search the desk (“tsukue”, possibly “table”), and finding nothing:

More on the specific search verb later.

The bottom section seems like it ought to have something:

At the far south, a hatch I can’t do anything aside from the locked door; there’s also hammocks, barrels, cannons, and another desk/table just to the north of that.

At the center of the lower deck, searching all the items including the desk, with nothing found each time.

More locked doors are to the north: an armory with cannons, and a storage room with a mound of trash. You might think I’d find something searching the mound, but no luck. Finally, to the far north, is a pile of skeletons, which do nothing spooky other than hang out. This is like if Return of the Obra Dinn didn’t have the time-viewing mechanism and just had the bodies.

One last observation, this time on the main deck: there’s a boat in the center. One could presumably try to enter it and escape, and I tried to do that, but the game asked where I was going. Poking around the source code, there seems to be a map somewhere, so my suspicion is I need the map in hand first before escaping.

The next most obvious thing for me to do (which I do in my English playthroughs but also most especially in languages I’m not fluent in) was to make a verb list. The verb list is decently long on this one.

Fortunately, there’s no obfuscation, you can just do a LIST command.

Thinking about English for a moment: text adventures seem to have a very natural set of commands, but some of them are very much a product of standardization rather than what someone developing from scratch might come up with (or what an amateur playing might try to type). INVENTORY is a prominent adventure-specific example, being an odd word that Poker Night at the Inventory is clearly making a reference to adventure games. The very early game Mystery Mansion used LIST instead of INVENTORY.

Similarly, Journey uses DESCRIBE instead of EXAMINE or LOOK. It’s just cultural osmosis that EXAMINE LAMP seems more natural than DESCRIBE LAMP to an adventure gamer, and if Journey was the very first adventure, maybe the games that followed would use DESCRIBE instead.

EXAMINE also managed to get an early split in English with SEARCH, but in an inconsistent way. I’ve seen games with EXAMINE and SEARCH behave the same way but also ones where examine is “give a visual description” and SEARCH is “use your hands and check more thoroughly for something secret. SEARCH also may or may not imply opening a thing as you search it.

Every language stepping into adventures for the first time gets its own chance to interpret verb usage; Geheimagent XP-05 used AUSRUESTUNG (or “equipment”) for inventory, and put RUN as a command that was differentiated from other movement commands (it happens in English, but it’s still non-standard).

Back to The Phantom Ship: the act of examining something has four verbs associated with it:

ミル (miru)
ミワタス (miwatasu)
サガス (sagasu)
シラベル (shiraberu)

I looked up all four on Jisho to get a sense of different shades of meaning…

(miru) to see; to look; to watch; to view; to observe
(miwatsu) to look out over; to survey (scene); to take an extensive view of
(sagasu) to search for; to look for; to hunt for; to seek
(shiraberu) to examine; to look up; to investigate; to check up; to sense; to study; to inquire; to search

…but this still doesn’t necessarily translate directly into the meaning of the actions! “Miru” and “miwatsu” both can serve the function of being given alone and giving a room description, but the other two words do not.

Applying miru and miwatsu to the start of the game.

When applied to a noun instead, miru and miwatsu seem to function like EXAMINE, and sagasu and shiraberu seem to function like SEARCH (assuming a parser with a split where SEARCH involves a more active looking process). The screenshot below involves checking a desk four times; miru and miwatsu call it “ordinary”, while sagasu and shiraberu state that nothing is found, implying a search by hand.

I’m still not fully confident I have all the details worked out, because I’ve applied search to a great deal of the ship and still haven’t found anything!

Here’s the next four words off the verb list:

アケル (akeru, open)
ヒラク (hiraku, open)
シメル (shimeru, close)
トジル (tojiru, close)

It turns out in practice the opens and closes are equivalent, but I still had to test this because it was non-obvious to me when eye-balling the definitions.

(akeru) to open (a door, etc.); to unwrap (e.g. parcel, package); to unlock​
(hiraku) to open; to undo; to unseal; to unpack

There are four “destroy” type verbs (kowasu, tsubusu, hakaisuru, tataki) and while I can presume they all mean the same thing, I can’t even assume HIT and ATTACK refer to the same thing in an English game (I’ve seen ATTACK only apply to live enemies but hit get used on inanimate objects).

Other than that, there are versions of move, listen, eat, drink, pray, speak, and throw. Pray is notable for potentially being a “for fun” style verb that’s in there to let the player mess around (like accounting for swearing). (Or maybe there’s an altar where we really do have to pray, like Epic Hero 2!) At the moment pray just responds “nothing happens.”

I could just keep plowing through the source code but I’m fairly certain I haven’t quite done sagasu on absolutely every item, nor have I really tried destroying things in earnest. My guess is once I get past my current roadblock the rest of the game should go smoothly, but I may still be missing some fundamental aspect about how the game works.

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IFTF’s 2024 Transparency report is online, summarizing the organization’s activity over the previous calendar year, including its financial income and outflow.

1940 was a curious year to be starting a publishing company, but especially one in Tokyo.

This was in the midst of WW2, and the same year Italy, Germany, and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact. Censorship was ongoing and total by 1941; The Japan Publishing Distribution Company (日本出版配給株式會社) was started to oversee all content, consolidating over 240 companies. There were essentially no notable literary works from 1941 until the end of the war; while The Makioka Sisters (considered Junichirō Tanizaki’s masterpiece) started serialization in 1943, it was stopped by the government and publication was only finished after the war.

A 2000 Knopf edition, From Elephant Bookstore.

August 1940 — a month before the Tripartite Pact — marked the founding of our company today, Shinkigensha. As you might expect, they came out from the very start with propaganda, like Showa Chronicles by Iwao Mitsuda (a year later the same author released a biography of Hitler with a different publisher) and A Guide to the New Order; the New Order refers to both the proposed “New Order in East Asia” (trying to cast Japan’s colonial project as a way of breaking from Western powers) and New Order as a movement, interested in imposing a state mass party and boosting nationalism.

In 1942, Shinkigensha published a book by a military celebrity: If You Go to War by Sakurai Tadayoshi.

Photo from the National Diet Library. Source.

Sakurai Tadayoshi was a veteran of the Russo-Japanese War; he suffered so many bullet and sword wounds that he was mistaken for a corpse and was discovered alive while being transported for cremation. He wrote a memoir in 1906 (Human Bullets); the concept of the title was “using one’s own body as a bullet”, essentially fierce close-quarters combat.

Suddenly a tremendous shout arose throughout our whole line; all the officers, with drawn swords and bloodshot eyes, rushed into the enemy’s forts, shouting and yelling and encouraging their men to follow. A hell-like struggle ensued, in which bayonet clashed against bayonet, fierce shooting was answered by fierce shooting, shouts and yells were mingled with the groans of the wounded and dying. The battle soon became ours, for, in spite of their desperate resistance, the enemy took to their heels, leaving behind them many mementos of their defeat. Banzai was shouted two or three times; joy and congratulation resounded on the heights of Kenzan, which was now virtually ours. The Flag of the Rising Sun was hoisted high at the top of the hill. This stronghold once in our hands, shall we ever give it back to the enemy?

— From the translation by Masujiro Honda

The new book starts with an author note asking “why did the war break out?”, blaming Chiang Kai-shek of China “looking down” on Japan and Britain and the US “pulling the strings from behind”.

Unless we defeat the United States and Britain, the war with China will never be finished; we must cut off their hands as they attempt to take hold of China.

A year later, the same publisher printed Returning to the Homeland by Goro Nakano. Nakano was a reporter with the newspaper Asahi Shimbun who was in New York at the outbreak of war and was detained; the book is “the Pacific War as seen from America”.

Only a miracle might delay the outbreak of war. With Secretary of State Hull’s outrageous response to Japan on November 26, the U.S. government had already trampled upon Japan’s restraint and peaceful efforts.

(This is the “Hull Note” that demanded that Japan withdraw from China and French Indochina.)

Post-war involved a rapid reverse, including the eight volumes of Dr. Sakuzo Yoshino’s Collected Works on Democracy (published in 1946) as well as literature by Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Osamu Dazai the same year.

This reversal could be a.) starting as a true believer in fascism, but changing course for survival during the US occupation or b.) the founder being reluctant with the propaganda to begin with, and they’d really rather be doing something else. Despite the founding date being a puzzle, there’s good reason to think the latter, because the founder appears to be the erotic literature scholar Kenbun Matsukawa.

From the back pages of If You Go To War. The text along the top edge mentions The Japan Publishing Distribution Company.

松川健文 (Kenbun Matsukawa) is given as the publisher.

In a 1997 book, the scholar Toshio Takahashi calls Matsukawa “no mere purveyor of erotica, but instead a man of refined sensibilities”; in the early 1950s he published a series of booklets titled Curiosa through the “Tokyo Limited Edition Club” with essays (“Eroticism in Detective Fiction”, “Edo period sideshows”) and translations (with high-literary choices like Casanova, Henry Miller, and the ancient Greek play Lysistrata).

He also published A Study of Erotic Literature in 1948 (using the publisher name Logos), and it includes the important essay “On Obscenity”; despite the name of the author being different (Fumio Natsukawa) it likely was just Matsukawa using a pen name. This essay uses Havelock Ellis’s book The Psychology of Sex (in English) as a reference; instead of some absolute natural law, he calls the obscene an “emotional response under certain circumstances” and that it is simply a “violation of social etiquette” that is subjectively dependent on each individual person.

This was when it was possible to go to jail for publishing erotic material, and indeed he was sentenced to two months in 1950 for “selling obscene literature”; another scholar writing in 1969 called him a “nihilist” (in the same sense as Dazai Osamu) who made “significant” contributions in advancing the study of erotic literature.

These works were all in “alternative” presses; while all this was going on, Shinkigensha was busy with churning out “proper” work, including straight textbooks like “Stable Value Accounting: A Study of Inflation Accounting in Various Countries” (1949) and “Public Debt Economics” (1955). They also in the 60s published a “Collection of Literary Works by Junior High School Students” (for multiple years, for an annual prize) and in 1970 published “A Middle Schooler’s Guide to Daily Life”.

They switched gears starting in the 1980s, still with an underlying mission of conveying historical and technical information, but now aimed squarely at hobbyists. (Right before this, in 1979, they published the Comprehensive Research Study on Zainichi Koreans. It’s fair to guess this would not interest people playing with tabletop miniatures.) As far as why, it likely is because while they were founded a long time before, they only became incorporated on March 4, 1982. (Very loosely, it went from “family business” to “corporation”, allowing things like government contracts and limited liability.)

Their biggest niche after that became the Truth in Fantasy books.

From Shinkigensha’s Facebook page.

They’re a bridge between textbook and fantasy: they’re meant to be guides pulling elements from history and mythology to help with TTRPG games. Truth in Fantasy 4, Residents of a Fantasy World, tries to show what kind of characters one might meet in a campaign. Truth in Fantasy 10 is a guide to the deities of Taoism.

The company has guides outside the series of a similar flavor. The artist Mitsuhiro Arita (mostly known for Pokémon cards) did some work with Shinkigensha; his art in the stand-alone Arms & Armor Encyclopedia impressed Kenichi Iwao of Square Enix enough that he was offered a job. He made Final Fantasy XI content for ten years.

Other than that Shinkigensha became after known for

▲ military manuals for hobbyists

▲ art books

▲ guides to games

▲ and technology.

From a Wizardry art book by Jun Suemi.

For the story today, the technology is our focus; in late 1981 they started a tabloid newspaper about personal computing, and in 1982 they helped create the program Pasokon Sunday (lasting until 1989); I’ve embedded below an episode from late in the run (1988):

The tabloid newspaper was eventually turned into a monthly newspaper, PC Magazine. (Not to be confused with the American magazine of the exact same title.) Here’s a page from their September 1983 issue:

Included during the newspaper phase was one marked January 1982 (published one or two months before).

The very last line has our game: Yuureisen, or The Phantom Ship, by Yasuhiro Kume. It was for PC-8001, the same machine Omotesando was on. This gets listed in archives as Yuureisen, but I’m giving it in translation for English audiences. I could have used Ghost Ship as the translation of the title, but there’s the faint possibility that some inspiration came from the 1950s animated short, or the 1960s manga and anime, and in both cases they include Phantom in their official English translation.

I unfortunately don’t have a copy of the original printing, and as far as I can tell nobody else does either. Tabloid newspaper format does not lend itself to preservation unless done actively. The Game Preservation Society in Japan has copies of all the magazines and none of the newspapers.

The game was reprinted in one of the magazines (June, by the time they went monthly), but the reprint is for a machine we haven’t had on this blog yet, the PC-8201. The one-digit difference hides that this is a much different system. The PC-8201 is a portable computer, NEC’s answer to the Tandy 100.

A NEC PC-8201A, from Reddit.

The game was actually published by Shinkigensha on tape before the June issue came out (price 3500 yen, shipping 240 yen), and the BASIC source code had bugs! In addition to the PC-8201 version, the June article has fixes for the tape release, and tells the readers to retype the BASIC lines with the fixed versions.

When I made this joke a few days ago, I didn’t realize it applied to this game.

In case you are curious, here are the two changes:

Correct: 2220 IF NN<>5 THEN PRINT “* アシヲ イタメマスヨ！”:PLAY “o7c4”:GOTO 1130
Incorrect: 2220 IF NN<>5 THEN PRINT “* アシヲ イタメマスヨ！”:BEEP:GOTO 1130

Correct: 2740 IFPC(P2,J)>10000 THEN D1$=D$(8-INT(PC(P2,J)/10000))+”ニ ススメル”
Incorrect: 2740 IFPC(P2,J)>10000 THEN D1$=D$(8-PC(P2,J)/10000)+”ニ ススメル”

(The missing INT rounds to a whole number; this sounds like a bug that could crash the game.)

One last thing to highlight before diving into gameplay; this is from a 1992 issue of LOGiN magazine:

The image shows a branching chart of Japanese game history, subdivided into various genres. The middle blue timeline shows adventure games, starting with Omotesando Adventure, branching up to Mystery House and various other games on top. Branching down from Omotesando is one game, the only other text-only game listed: 幽霊船 (The Phantom Ship).

This is the first text-only adventure game in Japanese, and it was considered notable enough to be listed in a magazine 10 years later as one of the foundational games of the adventure genre as a whole.

Cover of packaged version.

There was an accident on your ship, and as you drift in the Pacific Ocean, an old sailing ship appears before you. You “manage to climb up to the figurehead at the bow of the ship”, and this is where the game begins.

The function keys are enabled (the game also lets you change their assignment). By default they’re look, north, east, south, west, open, left, right, up, and down in order.

The instructions (see above) include a general map (the black point on the right is the figurehead) but also helpfully specify how to parser works: noun, followed by a space, followed by a verb.

Moving on, I did LOOK to find that the game mentioned the exit was to the south, to a stair that goes up or down. Going south, the game prompts you (rather than having a stairs “room”) which of the two ways you wish to go. Up leads to a forecastle, which has exits to the north and south to stairs, and a barrel (タル) by the foremast. (Or maybe barrels. Japanese needs more context; for example you could put the equivalent of “many barrels”. Just “barrel” on its own could mean one or many. This is non-trivial in an adventurer sense, for a single container you might expect to open, but a whole pile of them is more likely to be scenery.)

At the opening stair, picking “down” instead leads to the north upper deck, including this text.

＊ キタ ニ ウエニ ススメル カイタ゛ン カ゛アリマス。
＊ タイホウ,ガイコツ ガ アリマス。
キタ,ミナミ ニ ススメマス。

* There is a staircase to the north that leads upward.
* There are cannons (or is a cannon) and skeletons (or a skeleton) here.
You can go to the north or the south.

Later the game uses “pile of skeletons” so I think it’s skeleton singular, but cannon is ambiguous; generally speaking I’d expect there to be multiple cannons in a section of ship. Parsing the line タイホウ,ガイコツ ガ アリマス literally you get

cannon(s), skeleton(s) exist here

There’s even more trouble in just this room (and the forecastle room) in that it was entered via an up/down stair, but to get back to the stair (and the figurehead) you just go back north.

It feels like there’s a room you pass through while going south (even though it exists via simply an up-or-down prompt), but the room doesn’t exist and doesn’t get mentioned when going back the other way. This turned out to be non-trivial for mapping, especially because there are also directions that lead to left-or-right forks. Expanding the map a little:

Going south along either the up-stairs or down-stair paths eventually re-merges at the center upper deck, and then going north has the game prompt you for if you mean left or right. I was baffled for a full hour with multiple connections like this I originally had going the wrong way.

This is all compounded by the fact that I’m not good with ship terminology. For example, at one point I came across a “mizzenmast” (or rather “mizzen masuto”), which I could read off the katakana (having run across masts already I knew what “masuto” was) but I did not know I was looking at an actual English word so I wasted time translating a “mizzenmast” into “mizzenmast”.

It’s this one. I’m a landlubber, ok? Image source.

All this is to say I’m going to leave off here and continue with having everything mapped out next time (and maybe the game finished, if it’s straightforward enough). I can say this is not a game about obvious threats; there’s skeletons but none of them have risen up attacking with swords. There’s obvious locked doors at the back, er, stern of the ship, so I assume any rising action comes from there. This may end up like Death Dreadnaught where exploration and atmosphere are largely the point.

Special thanks to f_t_b (for scanning assistance) and the Game Preservation Society (especially Joseph who helped locate the June article).

I'm going to tell this one out of order, because it's not April Fool's Day any more.

Tara McGrew, the author of the modern ZILF compiler, has released Linchpin, a brand-new implementation of Infocom's "mu machine". That's the virtual machine which powered Cornerstone.

...You all know about Cornerstone, right? Infocom's first and last business product? Ate up all their game profits at exactly the point when the company couldn't afford it? Go read the Digital Antiquarian article; Jimmy tells it better than me.

Anyhow. Since the 1990s, Infocom fans have put uncountable nerd-years into supporting the Z-machine. Almost nobody has looked at Cornerstone. It just wasn't a fun idea. John Elliott did some reverse-engineering work (see his comments in the DA post) but didn't get very far.

As of last week, that has changed. It's a new age for aficionados of failed 1985 database products! Linchpin includes a working interpreter for Cornerstone's VM. It also includes an assembler, so you can create new programs for that VM.

As a final touch, Tara updated ZILF with a new back-end. It can now compile ZIL code directly to the Cornerstone VM. I mentioned April Fool's Day? On April 1st, Tara announced that she had found not only the unreleased Atari ST port of Cornerstone, but a version of Zork that runs on the mu machine.

This was, to be clear, a joke. Atari Cornerstone remains a lost project, and Infocom never considered cross-compiling its games. However, the Zork disk and the Cornerstone disk exist; Tara created them. You can get them running on an Atari emulator, or an actual Atari ST if you feel ambitious.

(Note: Linchpin is available, but I don't see the updated version of ZILF yet.)

That's the news flash. Now I shall take questions.

Yes, you in the back. Yes? Well, if you bought Cornerstone...

Oop, sorry -- let me repeat the question.

Why do I keep saying "mu machine"?

If you bought Cornerstone back in 1985, you could see that the DOS executable was called MME.EXE, and one of its data files was CORNER.MME. The MME command is mentioned in the Cornerstone manual as well. So the name "MME" was clearly a thing. But we didn't know what it meant.

However, after Tara's post, I dug into my backlog of Infocom data to see if I could find anything about Cornerstone. I didn't find much; what's been preserved is from Infocom's game division, not the business division.

However, I did find this quote, apparently intended for a Status Line article that never came to be:

Currently, we have three types of interpreters: ZIP (for Zork Interpretive Program) which runs the games, MME (for Mu Machine Emulator) which runs Cornerstone, and DIP (for Display Interpretive Program) which runs Fooblitzky.

Gotcha! I guess we can refer to μ-code now.

(Modulo arguments about capitalization. We write "Z-code", so shouldn't we write "Μ-code" with a capital Mu? It's only a wee bit confusing...)

(The name "DIP" turned up a few years ago when I was collecting Infocom's interpreter code. See here for their original DIP interpreter implementation. There are no modern open-source DIP interpreters, as far as I know. Maybe next April.)

What is the mu machine good for?

I don't know! I've barely looked at the interpreter code. Go read John Elliott's overview or this partial instruction set description.

At a glance, it's a subject-neutral low-level VM. Most of the opcodes manipulate bytes and memory arrays. A few are dedicated to string comparison. It supports reading and writing files. It prints text directly to the screen (presumed to be a terminal-style grid); there's some stuff about dividing the screen into panes which can be scrolled independently. (You can see this in how Cornerstone runs.)

The VM was not specifically built to be a database. If Cornerstone had been a landmark hit, Infocom would have been well-poised to build "Infocalc", "Infowrite", and the other business ideas they had tossed around.

One important note: the keyboard-read opcode (KBINPUT in John Elliott's list) is a poll rather than a blocking read. This means that the interpreter busy-spins as it waits for input. I guess that made sense in the DOS era, but it's poor sportsmanship these days. A modern implementation should probably have a 5ms delay or something to keep the heat down.

Where can you download Cornerstone itself?

Until last week, I'd never gone looking for Cornerstone. (See "not fun" above.) But now of course I had to.

The Internet Archive has a disk image of Cornerstone 5.1 in this collection. Actually it's five disk images, tagged as "Program Disk", "Sample Database", "Client Tracking", "Beginner's Guide 1", and "Beginner's Guide 2".

For added fun, the "Program Disk" is served in three formats I never heard of: .86f, .mfm, and .tc. Sorry -- I'm sure they're old hat to you, but I'm new to the world of PC emulation. But I managed to get the files off. I've now posted these (as regular easy-to-use .zip files) to my Infocom Collection page.

Then I went hunting around the Internet, and hey look -- some abandonware site had a disk image for Cornerstone 5.20. So I added that one too. (Only four disks this time. It looks like the two "Beginner's Guides" have been combined, but I haven't tried them out.)

Both versions can be fired up in Linchpin; see my forum post for detailed instructions. Note that I ran into some bugs when trying to ADD-RECORD. No doubt the interpreter will get some updates as people break it in.

If you know of disk images of any other versions, by the way, drop me a line. I guess I'm collecting them now.

We are pleased to announce the creation of our new Institutional Relations committee! You can learn more by reading our charter here.

The intent behind this committee is to help support IFTF in establishing and nurturing relationships with institutions that align with our vision. Over the years, we have realized there are so many of them! Other non-profits (related to digital arts, video games, open source, etc.), educational institutions, libraries, museums and other preservation-oriented folks, video game studios, but also government bodies and granting bodies, and everything in between!

While IFTF has established a number of great institutional relationships over the years, there wasn’t necessarily formal internal resources or structures that could help in supporting these relationships; with so many committees with different goals and activities, there was a risk of a lack of coordination or visibility, and missing identifying interesting opportunities or potential synergies. This committee’s goal is to help with this, and also support the org more generally in things like communicating IFTF’s impact to various interested stakeholders more effectively, or having a more structured and more long-term-focused approach towards fundraising. We believe this is an important step in IFTF’s maturation, and we are very excited about it!

Our committee has a few members to get started with, however we’re definitely interested in onboarding more folks! If you like building bridges, or know a few people in fields related to what we do, like to find missing puzzle pieces, enjoy the thrill of finding new partners, have some fundraising experience — or if just like interactive fiction and would love to help us and maybe gain some skills, please get in touch via email and we’d be thrilled to chat!

Note: This blog post started as an outline generated by Claude, but the details are mine and the character system was worked out through long conversations with Claude in how NPCs might converse differently. I started with the requirement that the system support unreliable narrators. Eventually I realized that character personality mapping was a prerequisite to dialogue, so the character package was extracted from the original ADR into two; one for character and the other for conversations, which is still being designed.

Teaching NPCs to Think: Building the Character Model

Most interactive fiction engines treat NPCs as dialogue trees. You write a lookup table and if the player asks about the murder, say this; if they ask about the weather, say that. The NPC has no inner life. It doesn't know things, feel things, or change over time. It's a vending machine with better prose.

I wanted something different for Sharpee.

Characters, Not Dialogue Trees

The new Sharpee character package is the foundation to conversation, which is a projection of character state. What an NPC says depends on what they know, what they care about, how they feel about you, and what kind of person they are. If you model the character well enough, the right dialogue selection falls out naturally.

While I was researching conversation systems I realized dialogue is the easy part (for a writer). The hard part is the mechanics of an NPC personality that determines what they will say, to whom, and why. This is the "IF" side of conversations.

Every NPC in Sharpee can now carry rich internal state: personality traits with intensity, directed dispositions toward specific entities, transient mood, situational threat assessment, a cognitive profile, a knowledge base with sourced facts, beliefs that may contradict those facts, and prioritized goals. The new character package is entirely optional. Two-dimensional NPCs like the Troll and Thief in Dungeon don't need it. When an author wants their NPCs to have a real personality, the new package is there to import.

Words, Not Numbers

One thing I chose was to rely on character traits and not numerical measurements. No author wants to manage complex D&D character dice roll values in a table then implement large if-then-else blocks for future conversations.

In Sharpee, you'll write personality('very honest', 'cowardly') and the system knows what that means. You can write loyalTo('lady-grey') and the disposition is set. You can write mood('nervous') and the two-dimensional valence-arousal coordinate is resolved behind the scenes. When you need to query state, you ask in words too: evaluate('trusts player') or evaluate('not threatened').

NOTE: Yes, I assume Inform 7 could implement the same system.

This extends to cognitive profiles. Instead of tweaking five separate numeric dimensions, you write cognitiveProfile('ptsd') and get an example personality: filtered perception, rigid belief formation, drifting coherence, episodic lucidity, uncertain self-model. Then you override the dimensions that don't fit your character.

The Five Dimensions of Mind

The cognitive profile system is a stab at building psychological profiles of NPCs.

NOTE: I'm very open to modifying this structure. Feel free to log a complaint/issue on the GitHub page.

There are five dimensions:

Perception determines what the NPC notices. Accurate perception means events are recorded as they happen. Filtered perception means some events are missed entirely — a character with PTSD might not register quiet actions behind them, but sudden movements hit with amplified impact. Augmented perception means the NPC perceives things that didn't happen. Hallucinations are author-defined: you specify what the character sees, under what conditions, and the system injects those perceived events into the NPC's knowledge base with the same conviction as real ones. The NPC can't tell the difference. The system can.

Belief formation governs how the NPC updates their worldview. A flexible character changes their mind when presented with evidence. A rigid character needs overwhelming proof. A resistant character doesn't just reject counter-evidence — they reinterpret it to fit their existing beliefs. Present a delusional NPC with proof they're wrong, and they'll explain why the proof actually supports what they already believe.

Coherence affects how the NPC maintains focus. A focused character stays on topic. A drifting character occasionally wanders to adjacent subjects. A fragmented character jumps between unrelated topics, mixes timeframes, and can't maintain a thread.

Lucidity models whether the cognitive profile is stable or shifts over time. Episodic lucidity means the character has discrete windows of clarity — they might be coherent and accurate for a few turns after the player calms them down, then gradually return to their baseline state. The author defines triggers (what causes a lucid window), transitions (immediate or next turn), and decay rates (how quickly baseline returns).

Self-model tracks the NPC's sense of identity. An intact self-model means the character knows who they are. An uncertain one means they question their own memories. A fractured one means they may not recognize themselves or maintain continuity between interactions.

These five dimensions might create:

• A character with schizophrenia has augmented perception, resistant beliefs, fragmented coherence, episodic lucidity, and an uncertain self-model.
• A character with dementia has filtered perception, rigid beliefs, fragmented coherence, fluctuating lucidity, and a fractured self-model.
• A character who has schizophrenia and has learned coping strategies might have drifting coherence instead of fragmented.

Unreliable Witnesses!

Here's what falls out naturally from the model: unreliable narration. You don't implement unreliable witnesses as a special feature. They emerge from the character state.

A loyal character omits their patron's crimes; not because you coded an "omit" behavior, but because their high disposition toward the patron and their loyalty personality trait combine to select a response that protects the patron. A cowardly character under threat agrees with whatever the questioner says. A character with augmented perception reports hallucinated events with full conviction. A character whose beliefs resist evidence reinterprets proof you present to them.

The taxonomy of unreliability maps directly to character configurations:

• the liar (goals motivate deception)
• the loyalist (disposition drives omission)
• the coward (threat plus personality)
• the delusional (resistant beliefs plus augmented perception)
• the traumatized (drifting coherence plus episodic lucidity)
• the confused (filtered perception plus fragmented coherence)
• the self-deceived (beliefs contradicting their own knowledge)

None of these required special-case code. They're all just character state evaluated through the same predicate system.

The Observation Pipeline

Characters don't exist in a vacuum. They witness events and react. The observation system connects the world to the character model through the cognitive profile filter. I had implemented the perception system very early in Sharpee's design, so adapting it to the new character model was straight-forward.

When something happens in a room where an NPC is present, the event passes through perception first. If the NPC has filtered perception, quiet events might be missed entirely while violent events are amplified and the threat increase is doubled, the mood shift hits harder. If the NPC has augmented perception, the event passes through normally, but the system may also inject hallucinated facts on the same turn.

After filtering, the event updates character state through a set of default transitions. Violence increases threat and shifts mood negative. Gifts improve disposition toward the giver. These defaults are configurable, not hardcoded. Stories can swap in their own transition rules without touching the handler.

Lucidity triggers are checked against incoming events. If a PTSD character configured with a violence trigger witnesses an attack, their lucidity state shifts to "flashback" immediately. The cognitive profile changes. Maybe perception becomes more filtered, coherence degrades further. Then, over subsequent turns, lucidity decays back to baseline.

The whole pipeline runs automatically. The author configures the character once, and the system handles event processing, state transitions, and lucidity management across turns.

The Builder

All of this could be overwhelming, but the authoring surface is a fluent builder that reads almost like prose:

new CharacterBuilder('margaret')
  .personality('very honest', 'very loyal', 'cowardly')
  .knows('murder', { witnessed: true })
  .loyalTo('lady-grey')
  .likes('player')
  .mood('nervous')

  .on('player threatens')
    .becomes('panicked')
    .feelsAbout('player', 'wary of')

  .on('lady-grey arrested')
    .becomes('grieving')
    .shift('threat', 'cornered')

  .compile()

That's a complete character definition. The builder compiles to trait data, trigger rules, and predicate registrations. Call applyCharacter(entity, compiled) and the NPC is alive.

For characters with cognitive conditions, the builder extends naturally:

new CharacterBuilder('eleanor')
  .personality('very curious', 'honest', 'slightly paranoid')
  .cognitiveProfile('schizophrenic')
  .mood('anxious')
  .knows('murder', { witnessed: true })

  .lucidity({
    baseline: 'fragmented',
    triggers: {
      'player is calm': { target: 'lucid', transition: 'next turn' },
      'loud noise': { target: 'dissociative', transition: 'immediate' },
    },
    decay: 'gradual',
    decayRate: 'slow',
  })

  .perceives('shadow-figure-in-library', {
    when: 'hallucinating',
    as: 'witnessed',
    content: 'shadow-figure',
  })

  .compile()

Eleanor is a schizophrenic witness who has lucid windows when the player is calm, shatters into dissociation on loud noises, and sees shadow figures in the library when hallucinating. She reports those figures with the same certainty as real events. The player has to figure out which of her accounts to trust — and Eleanor herself can't help them with that distinction.

What's Next

The character model is the foundation. It doesn't own conversation — it feeds it. ADR-142 defines how the conversation system specifically consumes character state to select authored responses, manage topic resolution, track contradictions, and handle confrontation mechanics. That's the next layer.

I'm planning a Clue (the board game) style mystery as the proof-of-concept: six suspects with distinct character models, randomized guilt, and enough constraint density to stress-test the whole system at realistic NPC count. If the character model works for Clue — where every NPC has secrets, opinions about each other, and something to hide — it works generally.

The character model shipped today as @sharpee/character version 0.9.106 with 128 tests across three packages. Every mutation is verified against actual state, not just events. The authoring surface is words, the internals are numbers, and the two never leak into each other.

NPCs in Sharpee aren't vending machines anymore. They're people — flawed, biased, scared, loyal, delusional, and sometimes hallucinating shadow figures in the library. What they tell you depends on who they are. And who they are is something the author describes in a language that reads like character notes, not like code.

We are pleased to announce the recipients of the second round of IFTF microgrants, after a successful pilot in 2024.

The grants program exists to disburse small-value grants to peer-reviewed projects that benefit a community of interactive fiction makers, players, researchers, or educators. An independent committee of Grant Advisors review each submission and provide recommendations for funding to the Grants Committee, who this year have selected four projects to fund.

We saw great diversity again this year in the projects submitted, including a higher number of submissions compared to our pilot year. Thanks to everyone who submitted proposals! Here are the list of grant recipients for 2025.

Critical Essays On Interactive Fiction - Grace Benfell Grace is a co-editor of The Imaginary Engine Review, an online games criticism journal. Grace will receive $500 to commission three articles for the journal on significant interactive fictions written in the 2010s, exploring how these works continue the medium’s tradition of experimentation and introducing modern IF to a broader gaming audience.

No-code IF platform for web using Ink - Mark Davis Mark Davis is developing a web-based tool for interactive fiction builders that allows creators without coding experience to create interactive stories incorporating images and animations, using Ink scripts under the hood. Mark will receive $600 for hosting and branding assets for the in-development platform, crucial steps towards opening it up to outside testers on its road to launch.

Interactive Fiction Workshop for London Games Week - Katy Naylor Katy will receive $716 to host a series of IF writing workshops and Twine mini-jams at the 2025 London Games Festival Fringe, and present resultant works online in a special edition of voidspace zine. The workshops are aimed at people interested in games or interactive writing but who have not coded or designed a piece of IF before, hoping to bring new voices into the community.

Atrament, an Ink-based IF engine - Serhii Serhii is working on an IF engine that combines Ink scripting with Javascript as an alternative to Inky, creating a more full-featured release platform for Ink stories comparable to the mature web deployments for languages like Twine and ChoiceScript. The core of the engine is already complete: Serhii will receive $1000 to fund dev time writing documentation, testing and debugging the engine, and adding improvements focused on easier development and deployment workflows for authors.

We’re thrilled to see so much passion for expanding the audience of IF writers and readers in this year’s awardees. We want to thank all applicants, as well as our Grant Advisors, who volunteered their time to review the projects and formulate a recommendation for IFTF: thank you very much to Grim Baccaris, Kate Compton, Emilia Lazer-Walker, Juhana Leinonen, Colin Post, and Kaitlin Tremblay.

Congrats again to this year’s grant recipients! Check back in the fall for information about next year’s grant cycle. An announcement of the 2024 grant recipients is also available.

And lastly: if you like the grants program and want to see it continue, please consider donating to IFTF! Our Paypal page allows you to specify the program you’d like to see your money fund - you can select the grants program in the dropdown menu if you are so inclined. Thank you to everyone who has been donating to IFTF and allowing us to continue furthering our mission!

On February 22, 2025, IFTF elected two new officers to the roles of Treasurer and Technical Officer. The former position is being filled by Colette Zinna, while the latter, a new role, is being filled by Doug Valenta. Previously, these tasks were handled jointly by Andrew Plotkin, whose term on the board finished in March 2024 and whose time as Treasurer has now also ended. The board thanks Andrew for his many years of service to the organization’s administration; he will be continuing as the chair of the IFArchive committee and helping with the NarraScope conference.

Colette Zinna is a longtime fan of narrative games and an occasional game developer. She’s attended or volunteered at NarraScope every year since it began.

Doug Valenta is a programmer and creator focusing on games, narrative, language, and the web, and a two-time NarraScope speaker. Doug works as a software engineering manager, leading a platform engineering team at a data management startup. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner and two dogs.

As we celebrate our two new officers, we look forward to the organization’s continued growth as we continue to expand our purview, operational activities, and service to the world of interactive fiction and narrative games. You can read more about IFTF’s leadership, and join us on the Intfiction.org Forums to toast the new officers.

We wrap up this series of grant reports with this fourth and final blog post, on Felicity Banks’ project and how support from IFTF made her able to travel to Indonesia and spread the word about IF!

Felicity is a long-time IF author who lives in Australia but has ties to Indonesia, having travelled there over half a dozen times and learned the main language, Bahasa Indonesia. She applied for a microgrant to travel there for the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival, the largest writing festival in South-East Asia), hoping to offer an IF workshop as part of the official program track. However, after the festival declined the proposal, Felicity instead shifted the project’s focus to connecting with authors in Ubud around the time of the festival and giving a series of workshops. (Oh, and go to cat cafés and monkey forests.)

This proved to be very successful, with Felicity teaching 7 small workshops (focusing on the use of tools such as Twine) involving 18 Indonesian-speaking authors! The workshops went very well, as told by Felicity:

“It is wonderful to see people’s faces light up as they see their words transformed into a game at the touch of a few buttons. They are extremely impressed that volunteers on the other side of the world care so much about inviting Indonesian people into the community.”

Following these workshops, Felicity sought to keep the momentum going - as part of her application, she proposed to stay in touch with participants for two years after the workshops, to follow their progress. A WhatsApp group was created with over a dozen of Indonesian authors joining, and everyone keeps in touch and remains engaged with IF. Felicity also ran, in late 2024/early 2025, a small friendly comp for her students, with small cash prizes for the three best interactive stories.

We love this project - despite the fact that Indonesian is spoken by 200-250 million people, we are not aware of a Indonesian-speaking IF scene, and we would love for one to spring to life! Felicity’s familiarities and ties with Indonesia have allowed her to become an ambassador for IF there, and plant the seed among the community of authors; we are very happy the microgrants program was able to help make it happen!

“This was an incredible journey and I met lots of wonderful writers. Thank you so much.” -Felicity Banks

(My first title for this post was "The Mystery of the Missing Adverbs". That was just too trite. Instead I spun the ol' Stratemeyer Syndicate title wheel and picked different words. Now it's trite and clunky; sorry.)

Adverbs are one of the great Bad Ideas of interactive fiction. Imagine this sort of interaction:

We can parse verbs, adjectives, and nouns, so why not adverbs? They provide an additional axis of choice for the player's command. They can be situationally appropriate. (Note how I'm cueing the player to consider alternatives: "At a glance", "at your touch".) Is this a good idea?

Well, no. It's bad. The standard reply is that this is too much choice. It can't be connected to meaningful game responses. That is: 98% of the time, EXAMINE CAREFULLY is going to do exactly the same thing as EXAMINE, so the player will rapidly learn to not bother.

Also, players are used to searching a two-axis space. "Try every verb on every noun" is boring; you don't want the player to go there; but sometimes they get stuck and it happens. Trying every verb/noun/adverb combination isn't practical at all.

(I once tried to equate the two-axis noun-verb searchable space of text IF with the two-dimensional searchable screen space of Myst. I was certainly overstating that connection -- this was before RealMyst -- but it's fun to try.)

This argument is not new in IF circles. In fact it's so well-known that I can't remember the last time someone seriously proposed adding adverbs. They're only hauled out as an example of a Bad Idea!

Except... occasionally, in one of those discussions, someone remembers that Deadline does use adverbs. And they kind of work, right? I mean, the game was playable. We used the right word at the right time and solved the mystery. And yet the idea was never followed up -- outside of Infocom's later mystery games.

What's going on here?

(SPOILER WARNING: Spoilers for the mysteries of Deadline! Some of them, at least.)

First, we note that the manual doesn't clue you in about adverbs at all. Neither the folio-edition instructions nor the grey-box manual (they're slightly different). The sample game in the grey-box manual doesn't use any adverbs either. That's not great! It seems like the game wants you to try a command that you have no way of knowing about.

UPDATE (Apr 3): Aaron Reed points out in comments that the folio manual does mention CAREFULLY. It's buried in the "Time Element" section:

Some actions, such as examinations done CAREFULLY, may take a bit longer [than one minute].

Obviously easy to miss, because I missed it! (So did my PDF search function, because the word CAREFULLY is hyphenated in that sentence, sigh.) And they dropped that line when they wrote the grey-box manual.

But that's just ("just") the manual. Let's look at the parser code that handles adverbs. Here's the entire bit:

 (<OR <EQUAL? .WORD ,W?CAREFULLY ,W?QUIETLY>
  <EQUAL? .WORD ,W?SLOWLY ,W?QUICKLY
            ,W?BRIEFLY>>
  <SETG P-ADVERB .WORD>)

(Side note: Due to the way Infocom pasted parser code from one project to the next, these lines occur in almost every following game. However, they're usually commented out. Only Deadline, Witness, Seastalker, and Moonmist run this code. A few other games detect adverbs and say "Adverbs aren't needed in this game.")

What does these lines do? They simply check for one of the five listed words (CAREFULLY, QUIETLY, SLOWLY, QUICKLY, BRIEFLY), store it in the P-ADVERB global variable, and move on with the parsing. Unlike the verb-noun structure, which is rigid, an adverb can occur anywhere in any command.

However, very few commands care about the P-ADVERB variable. Like I said earlier: almost every action runs the same whether you do it QUICKLY or SLOWLY. Here is everything you can accomplish with an adverb in Deadline:

• If you CLIMB STAIRS QUIETLY or SLOWLY, you learn that they creak no matter what.
• You can EXAMINE/READ NEWSPAPER CAREFULLY/SLOWLY to find the business-section article about the Omnidyne merger.
• You can EXAMINE/READ NOTEPAD CAREFULLY to discover the imprints left from the previous page.
• You can EXAMINE/SEARCH BOOKSHELF CAREFULLY to notice the books that George moved when he... well, I won't spoil that.

What, Master O'Lochlainn, do we observe here? First, it's a pretty haphazard list. (Why not accept CLIMB STAIRS CAREFULLY too?)

More important: all of these commands are optional.

• The game tells you that the stairs are creaky; so do the casefile interviews. Knowing that they're inescapably creaky is just a confirmation.
• READ NEWSPAPER mentions that there are two sections and you've only glanced at one. You can then READ SECOND SECTION.
• The imprints on the notepad are a detective-story cliche; you might go straight for the pencil. FEEL NOTEPAD gives you a blatant hint too.
• If you saw George move the books, the adverb is not necessary. A regular EXAMINE will direct your attention to the books you noticed earlier. EXAMINE BOOKSHELF CAREFULLY is an alternate solution if you missed George sneaking around.

Is this on purpose? That is, did the designer deliberately avoid putting any adverbs on the critical path? I don't know for sure, but I suspect the answer is yes.

One pointer is that there is an unusual command form which is critical to finishing the game: SEARCH NEAR/AROUND HOLES. And this one is explicitly called out in the manual.

(I feel like they should have accepted SEARCH HOLES CAREFULLY as an alternate solution... but they don't. Oh well.)

But there's one more game effect that I didn't mention, and I think it's the key:

• Any EXAMINE or READ command takes 3-6 minutes longer if done CAREFULLY.

This isn't just a matter of bumping the clock. All of Deadline's NPCs move around the house on a schedule, which means they can surprise you in the middle of an action:

If you want to stop Mrs. Robner, or answer the phone yourself, you have to interrupt your EXAMINE. It's a trade-off! And trade-offs are the root of all game agency.

Even if no characters happen by, you're aware of the clock ticking. You're on a schedule too. (The first thing you learn in the game is that the will-reading is at noon.) (For that matter, the game's tagline is "Twelve hours to solve the murder.") Spending several minutes on each EXAMINE is genuinely too much time to waste. You have to pick and choose.

Yes, yes, the game allows arbitrary save and restore. You could search-scum your way around the mansion. But, like the "try every verb on every noun" strategy, it's clearly a tedious last resort.

By placing EXAMINE CAREFULLY into an "economy" of game resources, Deadline breaks the (not-yet-invented) Curse of the Adverb. EXAMINE CAREFULLY is never the same as EXAMINE; it's always a little worse, and sometimes (rarely) a lot better.

Other adverbs don't fit this pattern. But then, none of them do anything interesting, with the very minor exception of CLIMB STAIRS QUIETLY. Anyhow, you're a detective. EXAMINE and SEARCH are really the core actions of the game. Giving them extra flexibility suits the genre.

See also EXAMINE ROOM, the other command which takes several minutes. The game explicitly warns you that it "wouldn't reveal much" -- and indeed it never does. You're supposed to EXAMINE specific objects! But you can see why the game allows EXAMINE ROOM; it's clearly part of both the mystery genre and the time-economy of Deadline.

So perhaps adverbs could be extended to other IF after all. It would require (1) a genre in which some actions require more variety than a raw verb; and (2) a meaningful resource cost for the player to balance. Want to give it a go?

(It would make sense for WALK NORTH SLOWLY/QUIETLY to take extra time as well. Or FOLLOW GEORGE QUIETLY? But NPCs move at a steady one room per turn, for simplicity's sake. Slowing down the player would break the FOLLOW entirely -- not what you want. Maybe some other trade-off...)

This one was from a while ago, and while I’m not replaying (I beat the game, just not with a full score) I did check a walkthrough that was posted last year (after I had finished) because I was still bothered by the mazes.

From Bonus Life Computers, $1999.99.

It was a game on the Sol-20 that was clearly heavily inspired by both D&D in general and Tomb of Horrors in particular. It has the finale with the demi-lich that’s only a skull. As it now has come up in two adventure games (Skull Cave and Epic Hero #2), I think it’s worth it to go into a brief aside on the history of Tomb of Horrors itself, then I’ll return to the new(-ish) discovery about the mazes. This combines information from Playing at the World by Peterson, Gygax’s foreword to Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History.

Alan Lucian was part of the same wargaming circles as Gary Gygax, joining the International Federation of Wargaming in 1969 and serving as one of their Senators in 1970. He also wrote an article in the same year about the board game Jetan, invented by Edgar Rice Burroughs for his John Carter series. (Excerpt below from The Chessmen of Mars.)

Gygax ran a play-by-mail game space-combat game (originally by Tullio Proni, revised by Gygax) called The War of the Empires. It ran for two years starting in 1969; Lucian tried to restart the game after it lapsed. Lucian was clearly known to Gygax as he gets mentioned in a letter by Gygax as potentially having interest in the newly-designed Dungeons & Dragons.

From Jon Peterson’s blog.

Lucien was indeed interested, and ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in California. In 1975 he sent to Gygax a new dungeon (handwritten on four pages, not including the map on graph paper): Tomb of Ra-Hotep. It was themed around an Egyptian tomb with many traps.

Passage turns into crawl space, and 6 [the end] contains 5-20 cobras! Can’t turn or run — crawl backwards away. Treasure is Ring of 3 wishes / Delusion (very hard to guess this one!) and Scroll of 7 cleric spells.

The final enemy, Ra-Hotep the lich, has a “jackal stick” with a Sphere of Annihilation at the end.

The sphere later got moved to a devil face at the end of the starting hallway. Source. The sphere causes instant annihilation to anything that touches it.

Gygax got back to Lucien (February 1975) that he had “reorganize[d] your excellent tomb area” and ran it through a trial. Quoting Gygax:

From his basis I developed the material that was to become the Tomb of Horrors, and I admit to chuckling evilly as I did so … Specifically I had in mind foiling Rob Kuntz’s PC, Robilar, and Ernie Gygax’s PC, Tenser. To make a pair of long tales truncated, Rob, by expending a lot of ore servants, managed to get through to the final encounter, and as the skull of the demilich rose to assail the one daring violation of his sanctum, Robilar swept all immediately visible treasure into his bag of holding and escaped. Ernie likewise managed to attain the ultimate, destroyed Acererak, and likewise left laden with loot.

All this eventually resulted in a “competition game” at the first Origins convention in the summer, where players were given two hours to get as far as they could through the Tomb of Horrors. The rules reflect the set in 1975, including mention of the later-scrapped character classes Divine and Mystic. The final enemy was now an unnamed lich that was merely a skull (that would become Acererak in the published version of 1978). Illustrations were included to be used during gameplay, made by a local 14-year-old, Tracy Lesch.

Lesch’s illustration of the lich at the end.

The illustrations were a genuinely novel element, but for my purposes I’d like to emphasize: so was the gameplay style. This was a game not about combat so much as puzzles. (I’ve run Tomb of Horrors before as a Dungeon Master, and one of the players was clearly getting irritated at the lack of combat rolls.) So much of the dungeon feels oriented around methods of survival while working out traps and magical items that it comes off more as an “adventure game” (in the computer-genre sense) than a “RPG” (again in the computer sense). The final battle against Acererak involves such an overpowered set of abilities that to win a player needs to do something clever rather than just attack.

If touched (or struck) the lich targets the strongest character and sucks their soul.

This was true in the competition as well; one team took a cursed crown/scepter pair meant to trap players, and put the set on the demi-lich, vaporizing it. (The problem with having your villain lair full of deathtraps is they can be used against you!)

When D&D became popular, while some adventures tried to embrace it as much as possible (see: Cornucopia) others struggled because combat in adventure games just isn’t that interesting except for small segments. (Zork I has memorable combat, but it uses the combat system for the troll and the thief and nothing else. Not a standard dungeon crawler!) Adventure games lean so hard into the player being more of a “trickster” than a “warrior” that it became routine in this era for weapons to be red herrings. The one famous D&D campaign whose gameplay matched this sense was Tomb of Horrors, so it doesn’t surprise me to see two explicit references (there may have been more general inspiration elsewhere).

Let’s get back to that Sol-20 game.

Map from impomatic.

The map is divided into a north area and a south area; the north area has a maze of passages “all different” and the south area has a maze of passages “all alike” (where a thief resides, and likely is meant to be the Zork thief). The problem is both mazes are, as I stated in my previous post, literally unmappable.

You cannot drop items (they get teleported away), and there are no sound clues or other messages. You might ask: how did the walkthrough (by benkid77) manage? By hacking the binary code of the game.

Each maze is a single room. There’s a series of five bytes giving the answer to maze 1 and six giving an answer to maze 2. There’s no representation of movement; the game simply checks the last five (or six) directions taken, and if they match the answer, the player is moved to the exit.

The part of impomatic’s map with the link to Maze 2, with the thief. There is no map of the maze because a.) there aren’t even any “rooms” in the normal sense and b.) benkid99 hadn’t done his hacking yet when this map was made.

Letting benkid77 take over:

There are three routes out of the first maze and two out of the second maze.
Four out of the five have been shown in the walkthrough above. For completeness, the fifth is from maze 1:- U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage. But this was surplus to requirements.

The 32 maze route and destination bytes are found at game file offset (and therefore memory location) 0BA0:

Maze 1, the “all different” maze:-
0BA0:
02 02 02 02 02 16
S, S, S, S, S -> Witt’s End

0BA6:
01 03 06 02 0A 13
N, E, D, S, SW -> Big Junction

0BAC:
05 04 06 02 02 0A
U, W, D, S, S -> Low east-west passage

Maze 2, the “all alike” maze:-
0BB2:
02 03 02 03 02 03 2A
S, E, S, E, S, E -> Passage (to the east of Flame Room)

0BB9:
07 05 04 01 06 04 26
NE, U, W, N, D, W -> Thief’s Lair

He goes on to ask “how the player would find these routes without disassembling the game.”

The odds are astronomically unlikely to stumble upon the correct sequences and usual mapping methods do not work here. I wonder if there may have been some additional documentation or hints accompanying the game, or some other clues I might have missed?

The “some other clues” is the kicker here: does anyone want to give it a try? You’ll likely need to play the game or at least watch the video of the complete walkthrough (meaning this is not something I expect people to solve in five minutes in the comments, but you never know). Even if there really is no answer (maybe the author had a plan but never finished; keep in mind this is an “unpublished” game) I still thought this was worth highlighting for how outrageous the setup is.

Coming up: a story that begins in the depths of WW2.

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I’ve defeated the game; my previous posts are needed to understand this one.

For reasons I’ll get into, I believe some inspiration came from here. Source.

First of all: it was a short hop to defeating the vampire master (and both John Myers and Rob guessed the answer more or less). I was thinking in particular about how there’s no pause (RNG or otherwise) like there was for the regular vampire: you open the coffin, you’re dead. This suggested a “preparation puzzle” as opposed to some particular action that’s needed, and based on all the items of the game, the only one that seemed like it might beat an enemy “passively” was the Mirror of Neo-Madness. Hence:

It didn’t occur to me immediately — I would have thought of vampires as already insane — but at least I could see the logic. Searching in the coffin reveals “Galdimus”; even without looking I knew I had a sword, so I knew what to do next.

Well, somewhat. Even with the shield and the sword you can lose! It’s just RNG, but given my antics with the wandering vampire that could kill you between 0 and 99 turns I figured that might be the case.

In a game without a save game facility (like Seiko’s Adventure) having an RNG-dependent death at the very end of a game is automatically a bad move; here at least you can save. (I wasn’t thrilled about it, but it wasn’t catastrophic to either the gameplay or my mood.)

Once you actually kill the guard (see below)…

…you get some red dust, which then converts into a red orb (“a diameter of about two inches”) when you look at it.

Last time we had put a glass ball (“about two inches in diameter”) into a hole to get an item. This is just re-using the same hole. (Item re-use is always satisfying, even when it’s simple, and the size is a good indicator that the magic is being used in parallel.)

Now we can unlock Final Judgement and win, right?

The game says “Surprise!” and a “Grinning Skeleton” appears in the room description. After KILL SKELETON:

You move in to attack
with your sword ….
The skeleton chops down with his saber ….
…. you shatter its sword with a deflection from GALIDIMUS!
It shoots a fire ball at you ….
and kills you!

This is the part that I think might be derived from Tomb of Horrors. Amongst the traps of the game is a room with three chests: gold, silver, and wood. The wood one has a skeleton.

It’s not exactly the same; it uses scimitars rather than a saber, but it is resistant to bladed attack (like this game implied), and holy water is useful in both incarnations (as you’ll see in a moment). For this game’s version, you need a set of objects to fend off a series of attacks: saber, fireball, curse, and finally death gaze. It’s a little like the Babel Fish puzzle of Hitchhiker’s but with everything done in one shot. This has the downside it is easy to beat by accident, but the inventory limit means you probably dropped one of the important items before arriving here.

Holding the sword, shield, vial of holy water, and mirror: victory! In the chest is the Jewel of Derojhen, which now can be taken to King Brion.

This might be the most I’ve enjoyed myself on an experimentalism-based game where magic is at play. My main frustration with magic has been a fundamental lack of logic; you wave some items at an arbitrary point to cause an arbitrary action. Even though you couldn’t find out the sequence of the Final Judgement skeleton without dying to it (unless you get lucky) the response to a particular attack wasn’t unreasonable; I got cursed, thought about the items I had laying about, and immediately latched onto the holy vial as useful. (This is using the “fan fiction shortcut” to be fair, knowing that holy water and the undead don’t mix.) Similarly, the death gaze made me think of re-using the mirror for “bouncing” even though it already got used once for the madness quality. The effects of various colors was completely unclued, but not unclued in a way that required checking across the map (like The Hermit’s Secret requiring magic words at unexpected points). The experimentation was self-contained.

If I was playing this on a computer that had slow save/reload I might be a bit more annoyed about all the above.

This compares quite favorably to the Howarth games (I think Arrow of Death Part 2 was a little better due to clever geography design, and it’s on par with The Time Machine). Scott Adams still inches above with clever use of daemons which doesn’t happen here; there are no persistent effects (like rooms that change over time) to deal with or coordinate. However, given this is still only game number 2 from Leduc we may still see something like that in the future.

Coming up: some unfinished business, followed by Japan and then Ireland. This will be the first time Ireland has featured on this blog.