Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures

Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures is not only the game! Now in front of you is actually not even a game, but a designer program for creating your own (!) Role-playing games in the Forgotten Realms universe based on the SSI GoldBox series RPG engine. The program contains one predefined script - Heirs to Scull Crag - as well as the broadest possibilities for creating not just your own adventures, but also entire worlds. All the role-playing games created are based on the AD&D 1-2 rule systems, therefore, to work properly with this editor game, you need a pretty good knowledge of these systems (the rules of combat, the main characteristics of the characters, the legend of the parameters of weapons, armor, spells, etc.). The maximum number of cards with a top view (along which the heroes move between different dungeons and cities) is four, the maximum number of dungeons themselves is thirty-six, and the maximum number of locations in a dungeon is 24x24.

First, a few words about the built-in script, which, in fact, is a demonstration of the capabilities of the program. In the story, you have to play for a group of adventurers who delivered a caravan with some valuable cargo to the city of Scull Crag (named after the rocks surrounding the fortress outside the city), which will face the search for the missing heir to the throne, a conspiracy of the aristocracy, a huge number of monsters and a mysterious Road Overseer. The plot of the game cannot be called very elaborate, but its purpose is not at all a claim to some kind of literary laurels, but only to demonstrate what kind of game it can turn out, available for creation in the Unlimited Adventures editor.

Work on creating your own game takes place in the start menu on three “pages”. On the first you need to indicate the name of the game, the place of appearance of the heroes (a specific map or dungeon) and a specific point (1-8) of their appearance, which is set in the Edit Modules mode. Here it is also necessary to determine the initial conditions for the party: the amount of experience (up to 40,000,000), the quality of non-magic (from its complete absence to the best) and magic equipment and the amount of money at the time the game starts; that is, you set up and give all the weapons, armor, scrolls with spells, etc. to the heroes yourself. On the second page, you need to enter the names for the eight keys that will be used in the game (the initial names correspond to the materials - copper, iron, etc.), on the third - enter the names of all other items (no more than twelve) that the party will have in the inventory the moment the game begins.

For editing parts of the game, the already mentioned Edit Modules mode is intended. First you need to select the desired module (card or dungeon), after which you can start placing blocks on it on locations (it will be possible to go by location or not), distribute zones (each module has up to eight zones, each of which requires specific parameters to be set - those or other events that will take place there, the landscape of the battle, and so on); when editing dungeons, instead of blocks, you will have walls and doors, in different locations of one map (city, for example), you can make different floors and ceilings (indoors - boards, on the street - sky and grass).

The interface when creating the dungeon is as follows. In the upper left corner there is a window "view from the eyes", to the right is a small map of the dungeon, on which the walls and doors are displayed in different colors; nearby are indicators for the current position in the maze (that is, the state of the walls on the left, right and in front of you). Below are the compass, information about the size of the labyrinth and the current horizontal and vertical coordinates. At the very bottom is the current wall selected for installation, in front of the image of which there is an indicator of its status (locked, open, false, and so on). There is also a small menu, the Select button is responsible for choosing the walls. After clicking on it on the left side of the screen you can see sixteen types of walls (empty space and three groups of five types of walls, and the groups themselves are selected from another menu); within one dungeon, you can choose only three types of walls. On the right, the status of the wall is selected (open, secret open, deaf, locked, false door, secret locked, requiring a spell or key, and so on).

After choosing the wall, you need to choose the place in the dungeon where you want to put it, while remembering that in the first-person view, the partitions between the locations are two-layer, that is, after installing the wall, you will need to put another one on the other side (in neighboring location). Above is the options menu that allows you to view the resulting labyrinth and change it, and this applies not only to the walls, but also to the very points of the appearance of the party, points of key events, and more.

Global Info mode allows you to move on to the actual creation of the script. You can start by painting the walls, choosing the types of floor and ceiling locations, and ending with determining the types of zones (say, zones of random encounters with monsters or relaxation areas; you can also set zones in which specific spells will or will not work) and those events, both plot important and random, moreover, many events can be interconnected (for example, if you picked up an object, then monsters attack you, if you didn’t take it, then you don’t attack, and you’ll also see all types of monsters with their parameters come up on your own). All descriptions of events (of which there are a lot of types in the game) you will need to enter yourself: each card is limited to 8500 characters to describe 100 events. Separately, I would like to note that when creating a city in a game on a map, it is not necessary to make it “full-fledged”: it can be just an ordinary point with the ability to relax, get information and buy things, without connection with the storyline (which will save game resources for more important things).

The gameplay itself of a typical game is not very dynamic. You move through the dungeons using the keys in the first-person mode, on the global map with a view from above and with the mouse (the party is displayed as a circle on the map); view in combat mode from above, but here you will already be shown the figures of your heroes and monsters. The advantages of the interface include pink highlighting the name of the hero who has reached the amount of experience necessary to move to the next level, but, unfortunately, there are also disadvantages. For example, viewing equipment was not very convenient and requires a large number of clicks, and the maximum carrying capacity of the characters (in other words, the number of objects that they can carry with them) is not separately registered anywhere, although this value is quite finite and very important (directly from it depends on the speed of their movement on the global map).

As already mentioned, playing this game without AD&D knowledge is practically impossible: how else can you find out that, say, 10 (xx) is the value of the character’s characteristic, at which 10 (00) is its maximum value, or that strength is only the probability of hitting an opponent in melee (whereas agility is in ranged)? And, perhaps, without a detailed guide - either, because within the framework of a brief description it is impossible to tell about all the subtleties of this really colossal in number of subtleties game program. Something about its features, however, is still worth it. So, only people (from the available races, regardless of class) can achieve the maximum level of experience, magicians (in class) can not wear heavy armor, if the value of hit-points ("life") of a character reaches zero, then he loses consciousness, but while alive, from -1 to -10 - coma, -10 and below - death. But for a full game, we repeat, it takes a lot of time to study the details.

But the difficulty of mastering more than pays off for the truly fantastic capabilities of its editor, for the absolutely fantastic abundance of available events and moments that you can include in your adventure, as well as the ability to download and connect other people's scripts from the Internet to it. The game has quite a few sounds, and all of them are of the same type, from the music there is only one melody - in the opening screen saver. But the game’s graphics are really gorgeous: you will find a wide variety of well-drawn portraits of heroes, almost three-dimensional corridors of dungeons and very beautiful creature sprites in combat mode. And if you remember that all this in a sense is created with your own hands, then it becomes simply incredibly pleasant.

In conclusion, it can be noted that Unlimited Adventures has become, if not unique, then, without a doubt, the best example of a “game-editor” of all that has ever been created, and in absolutely all respects. So if you always dreamed of creating your own role-playing game, at the same time “old-school” and beautiful, then now you are actually limited only by the scope of your imagination.