Dungeon Campaign

_Dungeon Campaign_ is one of the earliest role-playing games for home
computers and in a way again, like Beneath Apple Manor of the same year, an
obscure Rogue-like — two years before _Rogue_ actually coined the term.

_Dungeon Campaign_ is a basic fantasy dungeon crawl that doesn’t even care
about a background story — enter dungeon, slay monsters, amass treasures,
find exit. Not even a fabulous all-powerful item to be found here! Unusual is
that the player does not control a single character, but rather a fighting
force of 25 men — who, effectively, represent the player’s _hit points_.

The game starts out by generating the four random dungeon levels the player
will be exploring. This takes a few minutes, but as the maps are shown on-
screen while generated, the player can try to memorize them. After this
introductory cutscene the game begins. In a top-down view, the player guides
the party (a red block) through the level’s maze. All commands are entered by
key presses, using _LRUD_ for walking left, right, up, or down which needs
getting used to.

The player will soon encounter green blocks — groups of werewolves, vampires,
orcs, goblins, basilisks, giant spiders, gargoyles, trolls, griffons, and
whatnot. Walk onto them to pick a fight, walk the other way to try to evade —
some monsters are slow and can be evaded, while others will catch up with the
player.

Combat is done in a basic manner: Dice are rolled for the player and the
opponent; depending on the result, the player and the enemies’ losses are
computed; last man standing’s the winner. An interesting twist is that the
dice rolls are interactive: random numbers scroll up the text window, with the
player pressing a key to stop them when the player feels lucky.

After a successful fight, the player can search to find and grab any treasure
carried by the defeated enemy. Sometimes the player will find a magic carpet,
with which the player can fly, making the player randomly fly about the
current level — great for exploring, and indispensable for reaching parts of
the map that cannot be reached (yes, map-generation isn’t so sophisticated).

When a certain time spent on a level, the player will wake a special monster
(grey block) who’ll begin to chase the player. If he catches the player, the
player will lose one of the party. On earlier levels, this block represents a
_man-eating dragon_ who is quite easy to escape, deeper levels feature a giant
snake chasing the player in real-time, or a specter who, not being restricted
by walls, goes directly for the player and is sure to get the player after
some time.

Other hazards found in the maze include pits, necromancers or pteridactyls
(sic!) that transport the player to other parts of the level, or even to other
levels (the abundance of these makes this game somewhat similar to the _Snakes
and Ladders_ board game), or areas with poisoned gas that the player will have
to leave quickly (in real-time, again). The player will get a warning if he is
near one of these dangers, but note that the player is not told exactly where
it is. The player can try to jump over a square where the player suspect some
dangers — this feature can also be used to move quickly, for example to
escape enemy monsters.

The main goal, of course, is to find the stairs down to the fourth level, and
find the exit.