This is the cover for Doriath - a 1985 C-64 game that I played an unspeakable number of hours of in the summer of 1987. It's not a good game, it may even be a broken games ... we'll get to that... but Doriath has something to teach about TTRPG adventure design.

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Doriath is a side-scroller where you play a wizard, a real Gandalf type and navigate an underground maze inhabited by a variety of monsters that try to kill you, either by touching you or shooting various projectiles at you. Pretty standard, but very complex for 1985.

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This is the map to Doriath. It's a 16x16 grid of rooms - 256 in all and from the start you can go anywhere in series of "Deeps" - anywhere you can sneak or fight your way into. This is Doriath's first set of lessons.

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The first and biggest challenge of the game is to find your way though this labyrinth. No other goal presents itself at first: are you supposed to escape? Find something special?
I got the game of a pirate BBS so I lacked the rudimentary story which amounts to "Find Crown".
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Your wizard avatar floats down into the abyss and begins wandering about - monsters prevent access to areas, as do portcullises - but largely you're free to wander and discover. You soon discover treasure chests some of which contain new spells.

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A new spell allows you to destroy a type of monster - from the spinning bone "Plebata" that you begin with which destroys knights and archers to the triskelion "Draconis" that destroys dragons. Finding new spells to destroy monsters that block progress is the play loop.
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At least it seems like the play loop ... but Doriath is tricky. It's not a combat game. Once you have a spell it's fairly easy to annihilate monsters with it - though casting has a knack to it as the wizard stands still and defenseless as you move the spell.
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While sometimes there's tricks of placing (you can't send spells through water or cast while jumping/falling) to cast spells - and the designers use them all - at most this makes combat an occasional puzzle. The heart of the game is still navigating the maze.
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When you start understanding the basics of Doriath work -- how jumping and spell casting works, how to dodge attacks by retreat etc -- you start to notice the maze, find treasure chest you can see but can't reach. Tantalizing clues that push you into exploring more.
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Other mysteries start to pile up, mushrooms and strange potions that seem to have no purpose, a "Wisdom" percentage up top that is increased when you open chests and destroy monsters.
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What does it all mean? As a player Doriath pulled me in because of these strange incomplete and mysterious, often useless seeming, complexities. Open gates and finding spells makes sense - but how do the mushrooms work - what is the Cloronar potion for?
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Everything in Doriath works to pile up this sense of confusing mystery. Everything hints at greater depth. For example this dragon is in the room immediately to the left of where you begin. You can't beat it until much later - you need to run away.

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Yes Doriath teaches the player quickly that they need to run away and avoid many monsters in the game. That's even one of the gameplay conceits - destroying monsters permanently gets rid of an obstacle, but it has no reward - you often need to run past them instead.
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Yes you can come back later and wipe out some annoying Kraken or vampire, but you can get past many of the monsters (besides dragons whose bulk prevents evasion) to steal any chest beyond or access new areas.
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That first lesson - encouraging and centering exploration - is what made Doriath so much fun. Me and my friend would talk for hours about how to get into various rooms and try to unpuzzle the various secrets of the game.
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Doriath is a game about moving through space and finding or making the safest paths to places you've either caught glimpses of or suspect to be there (you know the size of the grid quick enough). It's an exploration and puzzle game.

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The second lesson in Doriath is about monsters. Doriath has a lot of them for a 1985 game on the C-64, and it uses them pretty well.
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When I was a kid these monsters were interesting because they differed from the set of fantasy monsters I expected from D&D. There's no goblins, no orcs. Instead - especially at first - it's soldiers and ... kings?
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There's no detail about these creatures - why or what they are. There's the names of spells that allow you to disintegrate them and the sprites. They are enigmas for the player to protect menace and story on, with minimal hints of character.
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Some are obvious an expected: the dragon, the snake (which is one of the hardest to kill due to size), or the kraken. Others are less obvious - and some inspiring (at least to a 10 year old).
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The "Roimort" - the king was the one that most drew me into Doriath's "world building" as a kid. A golden king who blasts you with a rapid undulating string of stars. One of the more irksome attacks actually.
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What/who are these Roimorts? They're the first amulet you find, but why are there angry kings in this world dungeon? As a kid my vague knowledge of a few Latin phrases made me decide they were "Dead Kings" - the sad, cursed victims of the dungeon along with their knights.
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Suddenly with a collection of crude sprites Doriath has both built a story and established the danger of its setting - these deeps eat kings and their armies! It's cool, and it makes the player's avatar seem powerful while mechanically these are the least troublesome foes.

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Roimort could easily have been replaced with a green orc sprite that threw axes, the knights with skeletons or goblins - the normal vernacular fantasy hierarchy of danger. Instead you have fully armored knights (dead maybe) and a lich king.

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This makes the wizard avatar feel more powerful, and offers a sense of fairness when a Roimort or Plebata ends your game the first 20 times - you've lost to the cursed legions of an ancient king.

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That's Doriath's second lesson - monsters are themselves puzzles and tell a story both about the location. They set situate the character within the setting and tell the player about the story's scale. Unique, evocative monsters that contradict expectations create wonder.

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Doriath's last lesson was the hardest and most baffling for me as a child and one I still struggle with. There's no obvious win condition...
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Remember I mentioned that the box tells a little story about finding a magic crown? I didn't have the box. Also there's no crown in the game...
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Instead there's this "Ice Dragon" deep down at the bottom of the deeps. He guards a unique chest and you can't cast spells in his room - his breath is lethal (but you can dodge it).

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At first the Ice Dragon seems another random puzzle - maybe you need a special potion (oh yeah those potions? You pour them on mushrooms to cast spells in special rooms) maybe something else? There's various puzzles in Doriath.
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In the end though there's a mysterious scroll you find fragments of, and when it's finally put together it reads:
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Yeah it's a "riddle" - you need to collect a 100% "Wisdom" score (recovering all the chests in the game, unpuzzling all the puzzles) and then walk into the Ice Dragon. You can never get it's treasure chest.
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When you do this your wizard is sealed in the ice cave, the dragon gone. Trapped for eternity. That's the victory condition - a cosmic screwjob. Also you need to use exploits to get the last couple chests - it's very hard.
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Yet I still played the game after knowing - and didn't feel especially bad about the ending - it's cryptic and entirely in keeping with the momentous scale of Doriath. Now, there's signs that this wasn't the way the game was supposed to end - maybe it's a bug.
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Still, a product of a 12 week design schedule with a team of 3, or an intentional reflection of the sadness and epic scale of the game's Tolkien namesake - that's Doriath's third lesson - winning doesn't have to be flashy or an unalloyed victory.
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Defeat or setbacks that fit within the setting can be immensely satisfying.
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I should add @UncaringCosmos to this thread because it's seems like their jam. Also a blog worth looking at on the fusion of early CRPG and TTRPG ideas. Doriath being a weird action platformer that plays like a CRPG -- vaguely Darksoulseque even.
https://uncaringcosmos.com/ 
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