Game #192: Knight Quest (1983)

Knight Quest was John Nelson’s vision to create a “super-Eamon”.

Donald Brown gave us Eamon in 1978 which has developed a huge cult following; still active to this very day. At least 279 Eamon adventures have been published. Swordthrust was then introduced in 1981 by Donald Brown which was a commercialized version of Eamon and published by CE Software. There were seven separate adventures, each sold separately, to this commercial successor.

John Nelson had been an author of almost a dozen early Eamon adventures and was also responsible for forming the National Eamon User’s Club. He also started a regular Eamon newsletter. Nelson’s first Eamon adventure which he published was Eamon #15: Heroes Castle. I am only on the 9th Eamon adventure and thus I had not previously sampled any of Nelson’s work.

John Nelson then independently published Knight Quest in 1983 which contained considerable enhancements over the standard Eamon and was an attempt to approach a true Dungeons & Dragons gaming environment

However the Apple II did not have the resources for such an ambitious enhancement. Because of an extreme shortage of memory, Knight Quest ran VERY slow and was difficult to work with. Then the IBM/PC with its 640k of RAM appeared and John moved his efforts to that platform. Only four adventures were ever published before the system was soon aborted.

When creating a character in Eamon there were no classes to choose from however Knight Quest gives you the choice of eight different classes.

You then have the choice of the following races: dwarf, elf, giant, gnome, human, orc, or troll. Your player can choose to speak one of eight possible languages too: Trollish, Orcish, Dwarfish, Elvish, Gerbish, Falconese, Latin, or Welch.

Much like its predecessor you begin play in a frontier town with a number of character choices.

Knight Quest has 17 spells in total which is a huge improvement over the four offered in Eamon. The spells are: HEAL, CHARM, BLAST, FURY, SCARE, POWER, HARDHIT, LIGHT, TELEPORT, SLEEP, RESURRECT, INVISIBILITY, FORCEFIELD, DARKSEE, ATTALL, RAGE, & PURIFY. I never did get the opportunity to experiment with any of these spells. For the introductory adventure the only items I could afford when starting out were a sword and padded armor.

There were only three adventures ever created for the Knight Quest system. Amateur Alley which is equivalent to the Beginner’s Cave in Eamon was the first offering. This is the adventure that I started with. Curse of the Hellsblade was the next full adventure and this scenario ended up getting converted to the regular Eamon system as adventure scenario #206. Quest for the Firedragon was the next full length adventure and this was also written by John Nelson.

The setup for Amateur Alley is that an old man has told you about a treasure to be found in the alley behind a tavern. I found this first initial adventure to be very underwhelming. I question the choice of an urban city adventure as a first initial introduction to a system. I was also turned off by the humor and the “flippant” encounters which took place in the game. For example in the back of the bar is a room entitled the chip room. It is where all the snacks for the bar are stored. Inside this room you encounter the Frito Bandito and do battle with him. Kind of silly right?

The game doesn’t seem to give you much in the way of role-playing choices for a system wanting to show off its enhancements over predecessors. I felt forced into combat much of the time when I would have rather preferred an alternative solution. The combat with the old hag who runs the halfway house stands out as an example.

There was quite a bit of combat in the game with several different opponents: muggers, the Frito Bandito, an old hag, an alley cat, a junkyard dog, a brown rat, a gray rat and a couple of others that don’t readily come to mind.

I played the game on an apple emulator and I can see why the Apple platform was ultimately abandoned. The game ran extremely slow and waiting for the combat and locations to load were painful. The game’s spell enhancements and artifacts I never got a chance to sample in the introductory adventure and my experience was such that I won’t be moving on. I’d rather wait and play the converted Curse of the Hellsblade in the regular Eamon system.

The introductory adventure was rather easy and the alley had several buildings to explore. I ended up finding a thieves lair and obtained a gold statuette and some jewelry.

I am a fan of the text adventure / role-playing game hybrid but this particular offering did not resonate well with me. Perhaps it didn’t help that it closely followed on the heels of Might & Magic: Lava Pits of Aznar which I was enamored with. Nevertheless, I can see why the Knight Quest series was short lived.

Up next on the docket is Karkoth’s Keep which looks pretty immense.

Until next time…