Game #27: Eamon: Beginner’s Cave

Eamon is a CRPG disguised as a text adventure. There has always been a fascination with and several discussions about the possibility of electronically porting a character and his or her belongings from scenario to scenario. Role-playing enthusiasts love the concept of episodic games in which their characters progress over time. A series of modules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons that told a complete story and had an overarching plot were extremely popular. The U series featuring The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh or the A series beginning with Slave Pits of the Undercity come to mind.

This would later lead to something called Adventure Paths which would consist of six adventures that told a large and complex story. Characters would begin at 1st level and earn experience throughout the campaign and find themselves at 16th level or higher by the campaign’s end. These first appeared in Dungeon magazine and later Paizo built it’s publishing empire on Adventure Paths.

The argument could be made that Wizardry, which would not come along until 1981, was the first commercial role-playing game that began to surpass the early Plato CRPGs. Wizardry would invent the commercial concept of saving and porting your characters from Wizardry I to Wizardry II. This was a wildly popular concept among computer role-playing game enthusiasts.

This is why I find what Donald Brown was able to do with Eamon so very impressive. In 1979, Donald Brown pioneered the concept which would become popular in AD&D and future CRPGs. He created a platform or an engine to house modules or story arcs that characters could play through; so basically a complete role-playing game campaign system. He did this before campaign module arcs for AD&D and Adventure Paths or character ports in games were even a thing. Each module or scenario in Eamon can be considered as a self-contained adventure or story that takes about 30 minutes to complete but the scenarios vary in length. Each story has a unique plot, encounters, and items. You can keep money, weapons and armor that you find but most of the magic or unique items will not transfer from adventure to adventure. There are not experience points to be gained per say but there is somewhat of a leveling system or character improvement over time as you can increase your chance to hit and your ability to fight with improved armor encumbrance.

You start play in the Adventurer’s Hall where you have to create and store your character.

You’ll have to provide a name for your character as well as the sex and then you’re provided with your prime attributes. If it is an existing character the game will load it here. You can read the game instructions from this screen and they are quite detailed.

You have five different classes of weapons to choose from. A club or mace is the easiest to use while a bow is the most complex.

So using the Weapon Complexity formula my ability to hit with the mace in my possession would be 20 + 20 + (15*2) = 70% of the time I hit my opponent with my mace.

There are four different armor types and they affect the amount of damage you can take and your chances to hit as well. The more encumbered you are with armor the harder it will be to hit your opponent. However you gain expertise as you wear your armor and over time your chances to hit in that particular armor will increase. The carry over of money, weapons, and armor between adventurers is impactful and influences character progression.

You can also learn spells in Eamon. There are four different major spells that can be taught to you for a price. You will not be able to afford the tutelage of spells at the outset but after I completed Beginner’s Cave I chose to use my plunder to learn the Blast Spell.

Donald Brown took things a step further and released all of this as public domain or shareware. He went so far as to release his code as well and then later provided an editor as a means to construct or write your adventures. This historically represents the first ever construction kit or means by which a community could create their own scenarios. It would be years later before any other kind of adventure construction set for any game is commercially released. In doing this Mr. Brown created a passionate community of gamers who would go on to author AND share their own scenarios with others. The community is active to this day and can be found here at Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Online. The site is a treasure trove of information and goodies and eventually you’ll make your way to the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild Library Master List. You’ll find 255 different Eamon adventures there as well as 12 Eamon Deluxe adventures. There is also an Eamon Blog that is active to this day as well as an Eamon Facebook Group, an Eamon Remastered Page, and an Eamon Wiki. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more passionate, creative community that has kept a game alive for 42 years like you’ve seen here with Eamon. Donald Brown wrote the Main Hall, the Dungeon Designer Diskette, two manuals, and 8 different adventurers before dropping out of sight never to be heard from again. He published the Eamon code and discussed the game mechanics in this article of Recreational Computing. He WOULD appear later to commercialize the game; calling it SwordThrust which we will get to play at a later date. Jimmy Maher wrote a fantastic piece looking at Eamon more from a historical and technical perspective rather than the game perspective and I highly recommend you read it over at The Digital Anitquarian.

The Beginner’s Cave is the very first adventure scenario that you can play in Eamon. Only new characters are allowed to enter the cave to find what lies within. A knight-marshall will even stop you before the entrance to the cave to make sure that you are a novice. I even tried to come back to the Beginner’s Cave a second time and was denied entrance. I found this to be a very clever way of preventing characters from grinding to raise their abilities as well as hoard gold.

Many an adventurer have gone into Beginner’s Cave and missed the main plot hook and opponent. There is a secret door in the North/South Tunnel that leads to a hidden temple. There you come upon an evil priest about to sacrifice the Duke’s daughter on a blood stained altar. If you defeat the priest you can obtain his mace and you’ll also receive a gold piece bonus for rescuing her.

Combat in Eamon is very unique. You type in your attack intentions and the computer will generate the attack round for you and your opponent and then describe the results. The computer may tell you that the Tan Rat missed or The Tan Rat is critically hit! as examples. Combat may take one to two rounds or several rounds. You can also Fumble your weapon. If you do Fumble your weapon (the computer must have rolled a 1 to attack) then you have to spend a round picking it up again and thus are vulnerable to attack.

The rest of the complex involves a series of encounters with rats, barbarians, a mimic, and a pirate. One of the cave tunnels empties into a cove and you do battle with a pirate there. The pirate possesses a very special sword. When you utter the word Trollsfire a green flame envelops the sword. When you kill the pirate you can take the sword into your possession. Trollsfire is one of the items that your character can transfer into the next adventure because it is a weapon. You also find a healing potion within the cave complex that will not port with you to the next scenario so you’ll either need to use it in this scenario or it will be sold. The encounter with the pirate and obtaining the very cool sword seems very much like an end game and the encounter occurs in the room furthest away from the entrance to the cave so I can see how many would think that their adventure is finished. The only way to find the secret door to the temple is to EXAMINE the North/South Tunnel. I was routinely doing this at each point on the map so I was lucky to discover it.

You can see I was paid 2,226 gold pieces for the items brought back from the cave complex and that I also received a gold piece award for rescuing Cynthia from the sacrificial altar of the evil priest.

I decided to use much of my funds to have the Blast Spell taught to me. I initially bought a mace and chose to start the game with that so you can see that my ability with the club increased to 32% You can see Trollsfire listed now as one of my weapons as well. I only have a 55% chance to hit with my new magical sword vs. the 87% chance I have to hit with a mace but the sword adds panache to the character.

There is an updated version of Eamon for Windows which is called Eamon Deluxe. It was created by Frank Black and there are currently 12 adventure scenarios available for this updated version. There are other updated versions which exist and John Nelson has done a tremendous amount of work to keep Eamon alive and well. Once again I recommend that you read Jimmy Maher’s article on the subject.

I have fond memories of Eamon as a teenager and my experience was no less pleasant as an adult. I would go so far as to say that Eamon is a gem and one of my favorite game experiences from the 1979 collection. It is about as close to the experience of sitting across the table from a dungeon master that you can get. It is important to again emphasize that Eamon is shareware and was not sold commercially. While it would be easy to say that Eamon surpasses many of the commercial text adventures that I played from 1979; it would also be unfair because Eamon is really a CRPG disguised as a text adventure; and a good one at that.