@vga256's Betrayal at Krondor Podcast Notes Overview -------- - Betrayal at Krondor fits comfortably between a classic 90s point and click adventure, and traditional combat-driven computer RPG. - The story takes place in the high fantasy setting of Midkemia - a world of medieval kings and queens, magic, gods, elves, trolls and goblins. A familiar riff on Middle Earth, but with more of a focus on the everyday politics of warring cultures and cultural misunderstanding between races. - In relation to the Riftwar Saga, which is the series of books the game is based on, the story of the game takes place ten years after A Darkness at Sethanon. For those who have not read the Riftwar Saga, the story in a nutshell is a war that breaks out between two worlds: Midkemia and Kelewan. Magicians on Kelewan build a rift or gate that allows the Tsuranuanni empire to invade Midkemia, and they meet resistance from the Kingdom of the Isles. You don’t need to know any of this to play and enjoy BaK, but this nuanced political and cultural setting, and many of the characters featured in the books, become central figures in the game. - The game’s writer, wrote BaK as a followup to the series - in other words, you might think of it as the fourth book in a three book series. - The riftwar saga became enlarged into the riftwar cycle over time as the author added more stories to the world. But that’s beyond the scope of this show. - All you need to know is that the game begins with a war brewing between two cultures in Midkemia: the kingdom of the isles that lives in the south (mostly humans) and the kingdom of the north - comprised mostly of the Moredhel people - a dark elf race known for their cruelty and thirst for power. The Grand Story Arc - The game begins in medias res - that is, you’re dropped into the middle of a story in progress. It begins with a cutscene in which Seigneur Locklear and his elvish-looking prisoner Gorath are fleeing the northlands, on their way to the capitol city of Krondor. - The two are joined by the son of a minor noble, Owyn Beleforte, who stumbles upon Locklear and Gorath along the road. - Gorath and Locklear are suddenly attacked by moredhel assassins, who have been pursuing them since they fled the northlands. Owyn tends to their wounds and joins the party, bound for Krondor. Locklear decides to remove Gorath’s shackles, and allows him to join them as a full party member in battle. - And that’s how your first few steps into the world of Midkemia begin - you only know that you’re on an escort mission to bring moredhel prisoner Gorath to Krondor for an audience with the Prince, that Locklear and Gorath are being pursued by Gorath’s own kind, and that Owyn joins as a squireboy and intends to depart the second you arrive at Krondor. - The rest of the story unfolds as an answer to some of the underlying questions posed in this first cutscene: - Who is Locklear? Why is he on a mission to escort his prisoner to Krondor? - Who is Gorath really? Why is he willingly being escorted to the castle of his enemy race? - What is the nature of the war between the humans (or “Kingdom men”) and the moredhel people of the north? - What future does Owyn Beleforte, young squire boy and novice magic user, have with the kingdom? And what role does he play in the unfolding of this grand intrigue? - What does the Riftwar have to do with the current events, despite it ending 10 years earlier? After all, Betrayal at Krondor is written as a direct continuation of the original Riftwar books. - All of these questions are woven together in a grand story arc that takes these characters on foot over the entire region north of Krondor. Locklear, Gorath and Owyn are joined by a host of other playable characters, who come and go as the story unfolds. - Along the way, the characters not only become embroiled within his grand intrigue, but become victims of (and sometimes helpers of) local politics that add flavour to the world. - In the end, it becomes obvious that Locklear, Gorath and Owyn all have fates bound up with the riftwar. The story comes together in a final confrontation that concludes this chapter of the Riftwar by exposing its true orchestrator, and determining the fates of the Kingdom of humans, the elves, the Tsurannuani and the moredhel alike. Style and Implementation ------------------------ - One thing that immediately stands out is that the game plays out like a novel: the game is split into nine chapters of varying lengths. Some can be played in two or three hours, and some might take ten to fifteen hours to finish. - Critical story beats are played out as non-interactive cutscenes much like an illustrated storybook: there is a window featuring a digitized costumed actor, along with some dialogue below. - There are also a dozen or so moments of “chapter flavour text” - where the screen switches to a high res mode that shows an entire book page, as if it were from a novel. The flavour text serves to provide narrative context to the story in the third person - usually, for an extremely important moment. While you can skip this text, it usually deepens your understanding of the characters and the intrigue they’re wrapped up in. These appear at the beginning of any new chapter, or sometimes at the end of the current chapter. - The game is saying, in a literal way, that you’re a part-writer of this novel: there are moments that the author or dungeon master has determined will play out as they are written on the page, and then everything that happens in between those moments is up to you. - Now, let’s talk about the game interface which is very unique - The game uses a few different UIs to handle terrain movement, making camp/sleeping, inventory item use and transfer, casting magic spells, managing character skill progression, NPC dialogue, and visiting villages and towns. - I won’t go into detail about how much UI is designed, but here’s a rough overview of the design. There is a first person terrain travel mode, where you walk the Midkemian landscape. The UI is split in half: the top half is an adventure window that displays a 3D polygonal landscape consisting of ground, roads, paths, the sky, houses, and mountains. If you’re familiar with any 320x200 flight simulator of the time, like Aces of the Pacific, you can imagine what the simple Gouraud shaded landscape looks like. Trees and characters are represented by 2D scaled sprites, not unlike the kind you’d see in Wing Commander (they can be seen from different angles). - Below the adventure window is the character and command panel. Here you see portraits of your current party members, much like the Eye of the Beholder or Might and Magic interfaces. You’re limited to three party members at any time. - To the right of the character portraits are a few command buttons: cast a spell, make camp, switch to overhead view mode, bookmark (quicksave), and go to the main menu. These command buttons are context sensitive: if you click on the overhead view mode button, the command buttons change to: zoom out, zoom in, make camp, show world map, and return to the main interface. - Between the adventure window and the command panel is a small compass that shows your current bearing, and has four arrows representing the cardinal directions. Clicking one of these arrows moves the party in the indicated direction. - Now, if this UI design is sounding at all familiar, it’s probably because this is a flight simulator UI reskinned for RPG use! The Aces of the Pacific dashboard or instrument cluster has been replaced by character portraits, a compass, and a few menu buttons. - It’s a very chunky interface - it’s not informationally dense like you’d see in a high res modern RPG. The character portraits are huge, they don’t show any facial expressions like we see in Might & Magic, and the command buttons are as big as your thumb. There are no tooltips when you hover over a button, so you really have to know what’s what by skimming the manual. - The overhead view button switches the camera perspective to a bird’s-eye-view of your current location with a little arrow representing your party. It looks almost identical to a GPS navigation screen, and it is absolutely crucial when you’re making your way around Midkemia. - Left-clicking on any party member portrait shows that character’s inventory. The left side of the window shows three slots for the character’s current weapon, a crossbow (if they’re allowed to wield one), and armour. Magic users can only wield a staff and wear armour. The right side shows the character’s pack contents, much like you see in any Diablo-like game. Mercifully, everything auto-sorts into slots so you don’t have inventory management nightmares to deal with. - Now this is fascinating: right-clicking on any item provides a detailed description of what that item is. For armour and weapons, a “more info” button appears that lets you peek at the exact statistical changes conferred upon the item. For instance, Standard Kingdom armour has an armour modification of 15%, No Resistances, No Blessings, and No racial modification. - Double-clicking on certain inventory items, like Notes or healing herbs, lets you use them. These are context-dependent - you cannot, for instance, study and memorize a magical scroll during combat because that doesn’t make any sense - the enemy doesn’t have all day to wait around for you to finish up your memorization! - Per classic adventure design, you can sometimes combine two inventory items. For instance, if you’ve got an armourer’s hammer, you can drag and drop it on your armour, to try your best at knocking a few dents out of the armour. The same goes for a whetstone and your swords. Both of these actions depend upon your skillfulness with Armorcraft. - Now’s a good time to check each character’s skills. Right clicking on any character portrait shows you a breakdown of their statistics (Health, Stamina, Speed and Strength), their current condition (normal, poisoned, drunk, sick, plagued, near-death), and their current percentage of skill in 12 different skills. - The skills are broken down into the kinds you’d expect in most RPGs: a combination of defensive and offensive combat skills, a magic skill, stealth, lockpicking, haggling, and barding. Yes, you can become a skilled bard and sing your butt off at the inns and taverns across the land. - Now, here’s the fascinating UI detail - and this is one I did not know for the first ten years I played the game: there is a sword underneath each skill. I thought for the longest time that this was purely ornamental. But if you click on the sword, a little red gem lights up on the haft. When the gem is red, the character focuses their time on that skill more than the others, and gains a bonus to skill progression! If you’re familiar with Fallout, this is very much like Tagging a skill. That being said, unlike Fallout, if you tag a skill, all the other skills are acquired more slowly. Now, you can also tag none of the skills and have them progress at the same rate too. - According to the manual, skill progression is not linear, but is curvilinear. That means it’s easy to progress from 30% to 31% in your Spellcasting ability, but it’s very difficult and time-consuming to progress from 98% to 99%. - The entire UI was clearly designed to be mouse driven. Yes, you can use a keyboard and there are hotkeys assigned to each function, but a lot of the game involves dragging and dropping inventory items, and clicking on a specific hotspot in the adventure window. You really don’t want to be doing that with the arrow keys on the keyboard. - When you visit large villages and towns, the 3D view is replaced by a traditional, hand-painted background of the settlement, typical of early 1990s adventure games. Hovering over a hotspot shows the places you can visit, like an Inn, the castle, an armour shop. Left-clicking one of these places takes you directly to it. Right-clicking over one of these hotspots shows a description of the place. Occasionally, if you pixel hunt a bit, you’ll see a magnifying glass: usually these are hidden caches of items that you can snag, and sometimes these open up hidden locations you can travel to. - Back to the adventure view 3D travel view: often, you will see enemies on the landscape moving around. Left-clicking on an enemy allows the party to try and get the jump on them before you attack. This tiny UI addition turns out to be one of the most critical game mechanics to survive many encounters, because getting First Strike can often determine the outcome of difficult combat scenarios. - Clicking on a dead enemy or animal on the ground lets you loot the corpse, often with the character making a grim comment on the nature of the job. - So let’s talk about combat. Engaging in combat switches the adventure window to a pseudo-isometric camera angle and grid of spaces. Imagine it like viewing a chess board from a slightly elevated angle. Your opponents start at the opposite end of the chess board, and your start closest to you. - Combat is turned based. Each playable character, and each enemy, gets a single turn to make their move. During the turn, the player can: Move, Move and Attack, Use an inventory item, Rest, Assess an opponent, or Defend. If the entire party is alive and well, you can also Flee. (Trying to flee while someone is down always fails). There’s also an “Auto-combat” button which lets the entire party attack using their own predetermined algorithms, but the outcome is usually less than spectacular. - Here’s where many of the player’s statistics and skills come into play: the Speed statistic determines the number of squares you can move in one turn. Stamina is used up when you cast a spell or take damage. When you’ve used up all your stamina, your Health starts to decline. Pretty cool system - so your overall condition is a combination of your Health + Stamina. When both hit zero, the character collapses out of the fight. Strength determines how hard you’ll hit in your melee attacks. - When you attack in melee combat, you have the option to either Thrust or Swing. Thrusts are usually more accurate (depending upon the type of weapon used) but do less damage. Swings are usually much less accurate, but do more damage. - Magic users like Owyn rely upon their spellcasting abilities during battle. Magic users need to be at least one square away from an enemy in order to cast a spell, so keeping your mage away from enemies is a critical part of combat. Generally, the best strategy is to get your swordsmen into the fight and let them take damage while your spellcaster rides things out many square away from the fray. - The spellcasting system is unique to this game. It is a “circle” based spell system in more ways than one. First, there are circles or groups of spells that belong together. When you cast a spell, you are presented with four different circles or groups of spells, each represented by a different geometric symbol. Owyn begins the game knowing a spell from each of these circles. Now, no circle is more powerful than the others - the groups are more on the basis of whether they are defensive, offensive, related to elemental powers, and so on. To be honest, I was never able to understand if there is anything systematic to the spell circles… I just hunt around the different spell circles to find the spell I want to cast. Now, the second meaning of spell circle is that when you cast a spell, you’re presented with a circle that has gradations around the perimeter like a watch face. Starting at 12 o’clock and moving clockwise, this controls the casting power used with the spell. Choosing a spell power of say, 1 o’clock, casts a very weak form of the spell. That being said, weak casts do not use much health and stamina. Casting a spell at 10 or 11 o’clock consumes much more health and stamina. You learn very quickly to be conservative with spellcasting as this can leave your mage without the ability to defend himself after a couple of casts. Nice Surprises -------------- - A host of other playable characters, who join the party for a chapter or two, and then depart on their own business for the kingdom. These moments always feel more organic to me than, say, a game like Baldur’s Gate where party members join or depart based on the player’s charisma statistic or story elements. When Locklear leaves the party on kingdom business direct from Prince Arutha, you really do feel like Locklear is speeding off to Sethanon and hopefully you’ll see him again some day. When Patrus joins your party at Northwarden to help disrupt the moredhel, you really do feel like Patrus has an axe to grind with them and isn’t just joining because you “really need a mage to get through this part”. I’ll cover this later, but co-creator John Cutter was especially anxious about this design decision: he was concerned that players would hate the idea of building up a character, only to have them disappear half-way through the game. It was enough that he considered removing his name from the credits before the game was released. - Hundreds of characters to speak with. While dialogue trees are not nearly as complex as the kind you might have in Planescape torment, they are nonetheless enjoyable. I never find myself clicking through dialogue, praying for it to be over sooner or later. I really do feel like the character has some important detail to relate, that might lead to a breakthrough in the quest, or to some fun side-quest or dungeon crawl. And they’re not just quest-vending machines, they feel like real people with their own motivations and worries. - There are tons of secret and hidden places strewn all over the map. So much of the fun involves exploring for the sake of exploration. Last week concluded my 10th or 11th playthrough of the game (only third time to completion), and I was still discovering new quests, new hidden parts of the map, and new moredhel chest riddles! - This is one of the very few RPGs that rewards backtracking. What do I mean by backtracking? Well, in the vast majority of cases you’ve got the run of the entire world map - you can go anywhere and see anyone you want. That’s a total nightmare for any game designer, because our usual approach to the craft involves gating the player and preventing them from experiencing content out of order. Neal Hallford and his team, and we’ll talk about this later in the development history, just created more content for players who enjoyed playing the game world in a different order! For instance, in Chapter 1 you can go straight south to Krondor and follow the breadcrumb trail of combat encounters and plot twists that happen along the way. Or you can take a huge detour that passes through Dimwood forest that lets you do a few simple quests. Later in the game, when you return to Dimwood, there are new quests and new NPCs to encounter that weren’t available before. - It’s wonderful when story elements interact with the combat system and economy. At some point in the game, a trade dispute in a small river town leads to the local militia causing a huge demand in armour and weaponry. You can take advantage of this by ferrying armour and weapons from nearby towns and making a huge profit by sneaking them into town and selling them at the shop. After you assist in settling the trade dispute and the blockade is over, armour and weapon prices return back to normal, and it’s no longer possible to smuggle in arms at a profit. It’s little moments like those that make Krondor feel like a real place with real political and economic factions. - The barding skill is surprisingly fun. No, it has no effect on combat like you’d expect to see in the average RPG. Instead, it’s about playing for drunks at the bar who either reward you with a few gold sovereigns, or boot your ass out for stinking up the joint. What amazes me is that the composer orchestrated several different versions of This Kingdom Mine, each at different levels of skill. When you start, you’re terrible, and you hear a rendition that’s full of mistakes. By the end of the game, if you’ve trained up your barding skill, you can hear the full and perfectly picked version of the song. - The skill-based system is brilliantly conceived. This allows for min-maxing players, as well as players who prefer rounding out a character’s skillset. Tagging a handful of ksills generally leads to min-maxing, but since you’ve got fine control over skill progression, you can produce characters that have unique combinations of skills. The last time I played, I actually trained Owyn up to have a lot of defensive and melee skills, so he was cracking heads with his staff just as well as anyone else. - Each party member, individually, can’t really die. They can become incapacitated and lay unconscious at the battle, but they never permanently disappear. You can nurse an unconscious character back to health through a combination of rest, using a healing potion, or herbal pack. That being said, you can lose the game through a TPK or Total Party Kill. When the entire party is dead, or incapacitated by being magically paralyzed, it’s game over. - The Moredhel wordlock chests are fun. Imagine a combination lock that, instead of using numbers for a password, use letters on a rolling cylinder. Above the rolling cylinders is a hint in the form of a riddle, that lets you guess at the combination password. - The combat system is both fascinating and frustrating. One surprise that makes this combat system inherently different from, say, standard Dungeons & Dragons based rules systems is that health damage impairs your ability to defend and attack. A character at full health will attack and defend at full strength - but once you’ve exhausted your stamina and your health starts taking damage, you become less accurate in attacking, less powerful in your strokes, and more prone to missing. This is a huge departure from D&D style combat in which a character with only 1 hit point left, bloodied and bashed in battle, can somehow strike their opponents at full power. - The magic system has uses outside of combat. This is something I wish D&D influenced designers had understood much earlier in the history of computer RPGs. Y’see, in the vast majority of computer RPGs, magic is just treated as a ranged attack (or defensive) skill. The only time you might use it outside of combat is to heal a wounded character. In this game, they created plenty of situations where you need to cast a magical spell in order to explore a new area, discover hidden items, advance the plot, or just open a locked chest. It makes your magic user the most important party member, because without him, you’re not going to get far. - Gravedigging is an important part of the game! Getting a shovel turns out to not only be important, but an enjoyable task. You don’t have to gravedig - in fact, I think this is purely optional in terms of the main storyline in my memory - but it sure is fun reading gravestones and determining which graves might be loaded with treasure. - Everything takes time to accomplish. Reading and memorizing a magical scroll takes the better part of a day. Digging up a grave takes hours - you might start digging in the afternoon, only to find out it’s night time when the digging is complete. - The game is very carefully paced in terms of the story progression and the difficulty. There are no impossible difficulty spikes, only a handful of challenging moments. Listener Ben noted that he called it quits some time in chapter 2 or 3, dealing with the Black Slayers that rise from the dead after a few turns in combat. They’re incredibly annoying enemies, and almost unbeatable without a specific magic spell. That being said, there are workarounds! For instance, if you manage to wipe out your enemies very quickly, you can actually end combat before the first dead black slayer resurrects itself. That’s a really slick strategy if you didn’t stumble upon the “Final Rest” spell to keep them dead, or if your mage is incapacitated. - This seems small, but the sounds of birds in the forest is a nice touch. While this doesn’t have the strong atmospheric elements of Ultima VII or VIII, the bird calls in the background add a bit to the feel of being in a living world. - The music! Jan Paul Moorehead’s compositions are not only fitting for a high fantasy world, but somehow accentuate the intrigue and drama of the riftwar. And it’s got a unique sound - you’d never confuse the music of Betrayal at Krondor with Baldur’s Gate or the Ultima series. There’s something more pensive about the soundtrack, that gives you the feeling that you’re dealing with royalty embroiled in a plot that has consequences for the inhabitants of two different planets. Meanwhile, at a more mortal level, the music really captures the spirit of a the fun-loving bard and gang, traipsing from town to town in search of good food and drink. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where spending time in a pub was one of the most enjoyable things. There’s something playful in Krondor’s soundtrack that I don’t find in most RPGs with sullen, life-or-death, or war-oriented themes. It’s catchy enough that I find myself humming many of the tunes when I’m driving or doing chores around the apartment. It’s worth noting that the CD-ROM version (not the one that comes in the Krondor: The Betrayal book) comes with redbook audio tracks. From what I’ve heard, it sounds very much like a Roland SC-55 recording - however, the instrument levels are different from the midi version played on a real 55. Honestly, I think the redbook audio version sounds better. Besides, you get the best track ever hidden on the CD: Northwarden Pigs. - No grinding! This is a rarity for computer RPGs, especially those that came from the JRPG genre that was itself influenced by Wizardry. You really, really don’t have to grind at all. The game was balanced properly so that just dealing with the pre-set encounters along the breadcrumb trail that leads to your next story beat, is enough to advance your characters to take on the enemies in the next chapter. - Automapping in dungeons. Oh man, I could go on for days about how critical automapping is. But I won’t, because I know there’s that one player *cough* that enjoys manually mapping with a quill pen under candle light in his suit of kingdom armour. That being said, Automaps were not too common when Betrayal at Krondor came out, so this was a genuinely great choice for the game. - The writer isn’t just good - it’s spectacular. Neil Hallford went out of his way to give the dialogue and written chapter pages the kind of stylistic flair that makes it feel like you’re in a Raymond E. Feist novel. Not-so-nice Surprises --------------------- - Bugs. There are a few that have survived, most of them are merely annoying, but there are a couple of showstoppers. I hit a showstopper mid-way through the game that quite literally kicked me to DOS. I don’t remember this happening in real MS-DOS, so it might just be a DOSBOX bug, but I can’t tell. Basically: in Chapter 8, if you get to a point where the game is crashing to the DOS prompt, google for “betrayal at krondor freeze in chapter 8 gog”, and you’ll find a workaround so you can complete the quest. Basically, the solution is to stay in overhead view (not first person view) for a minute or two, get what you need from two chests, then leave the area. Once this is done, you’ll never encounter the bug again. - One of the most powerful spells in the game, Mind Melt, can’t be gotten due to a bug in the game in the CD-ROM version of the game. This one requires some hex editing to fix. Thanks to RPG Codex user LightandTime. To fix this, google for “bak mind melt spell quest bugfix gog” and you’ll find the thread with the hex address to change. Takes 10 seconds, and you can finally fulfill the sidequest that lets you get the spell. - There’s a hilarious but game-breaking bug if you manage to power-level Gorath by getting tons of gold and using tons of books to train his skills and strength up: a weapon like that Guarda Revanche can do negative damage (e.g. give health) to enemies by having such high damage (>255) that it rolls over the damage integer variable into negative numbers! I haven’t done this myself, but I’ve seen other people complain about it. If you’re into powerlevelling, you’ve been warned. That being said, I’ve played the game a dozen times, and there really isn’t a good reason to power level your characters. The game was balanced to be completable just by finishing the main quests, without having to do a ton of grinding to get there. - If you’ve bought the GOG version, you’re going to hear skips and blips in some of the redbook audio tracks. Yes, GOG used a CD image from a scratched CD. - Speaking of music, redbook audio doesn’t loop during combat. So if your combat lasts longer than five or so minutes, be prepared for a very silent finish :) So if you want your combat music to loop, switch to MIDI music. - Don’t leave stuff in a bag on the ground. It *will* disappear after you exit the area and return. If you really need to store something, store it in a chest. And that being said, if you store it in a chest, you still might lose it if that chest is an important “quest” chest. So my advice is: if you really need something, like something you suspect is a quest item, keep it in your backpack! This isn’t a LucasArts adventure - you really can break the game if you lose a main quest item. Thankfully, they’re usually pretty obvious things to hang on to. - You’re going to have to save often. Like, really, really, often. Expect to have your characters incapacitated constantly, always searching for some healing herbs or vials of healing juice. - The dungeons are pretty……. Uninspired. There are very few puzzles in them, and they’re mostly there to stretch out gameplay instead of adding flavour to it. Development History ------------------- The Lord of the Rings ---------------------- - The game really has its roots in at least three different mediums: the high fantasy novels that emerged in the 1970s after a resurgence of interest in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the pencil’n’paper role playing games that emerged from the same interest in Lord of the Rings and tabletop wargaming, and the computer games that emerged in the 1980s as a response to all of the above. - I’m going to talk about each medium in turn, and how they came together in Betrayal at Krondor. - Although The Lord of the Rings seems ubiquitous today – I mean, who hasn’t seen at least one of the many films, or has at least heard the name Bilbo or Frodo or Gollum? But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, The Lord of the Rings was met with quite a bit of skepticism from the publisher, who thought it too long, too expensive to typeset, and likely too unpopular to sell well. In fact, it took four years of negotiation between Tolkien and book publishers before the manuscript finally went to press in late 1954. - The book sales were a slow burn. While the Sunday Times raved about the book, famously saying that, “the English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and those who are going to read them”, other reviewers were less charitable, seeing the series as psychologically shallow, literarily snobbish, or outright too damned pedantic. - Moreover, it wasn’t until the 1960s that The Lord of the Rings got a paperback edition. Until that, you had to shell out for an expensive hardcover edition, which was likely a major contributor to its slow burn through the American consciousness. That is, until 1965 when Ballantine Books published an official paperback edition – that sold a half a million copies in the United States alone. It was this affordable edition that became enshrined on campuses as the university student’s book of choice, making it the best selling mass market paperback of 1966. Most, at the time, saw the book as a welcome diversion (and some, a distract) from the extreme political unrest of the late 1960s as a result of the Vietnam war. - The Vietnam war, which smouldered for the next decade, finally came to an end in 1975, which was the same year Raymond E. Feist found himself the member of a graduate student role-playing group at the University of California San Diego. - And here’s where the second part of the story comes in: Dungeons and Dragons had begun to spread through college campus dorms in the United States at the time. Dungeons and Dragons -------------------- - The history of D&D doesn’t just require its own podcast episode – it requires its own podcast, which it has. So I can only sketch out a caricature of what I think is relevant to the creation of Betrayal at Krondor. - D&D began its life as a followup to tabletop wargames – the kind where you would have a dozen military miniatures on a physical tabletop, complete with painted terrain and modeled buildings. The focus in these games was generally on military conquest at various levels of scope (or “Level of War”) – one game might involve entire nations at war on a global battlefield, while another might take place between two rival clans, while another might be a skirmish over a single castle. This is what is traditionally understood as the difference between “strategic” and “tactical” levels of war. In both, your role in the game was to act as a commander of forces – you’re the military general that commands the troops, selects their formations, and sends them off screaming into the fray. - D&D departed from this gameplay model in several important ways: 1) It took medieval high fantasy, directly referenced as “Tolkien” type worlds, as its core thematic element. 2) Most importantly, you role-played your own character, as opposed to being the nameless commander of a military. 3) Gameplay was all mediated through a Dungeon Master whose job it is to not only referee combat, but also to set up and facilitate storytelling for the player characters. The DM also manages all NPCs, like enemy creatures. 4) Miniatures, and a tabletop map, were optional parts of the experience. The focus was on cooperative storytelling, not on measuring exact distances to calculate arrow trajectories. - All of these features, I think, contributed to D&D becoming a quiet success in high schools and college campuses in the mid-to-late 1970s. D&D was very accessible for a new player, compared to the barriers to entry involved in earlier wargaming systems. You didn’t need a massive dedicated table, hand coloured map, dozens of miniature figurines.. you just needed a pencil, some paper, and a set of specialized dice. - And what cemented this popularity among students was a formal rule system in print. Xerox photocopiers and mimeographs made it unbelievably easy to make copies of the original documents. Keep in mind that only a thousand copies of D&D0 went to print in 1974, and only 3000 copies in 1975. Given that tens of thousands of students on campuses were playing D&D by the mid-1970s, it’s obvious that more than a few folks were making copies for friends. - There’s a tension I want to point out in the original printing of D&D, that I think is endemic to the game’s history ever since: there is a tension between the old wargaming origins and the fluid free-form storytelling origins of the game. Chainmail, a tabletop wargaming rule system by Gary Gygax and Jeff Perren, was included as the foundation for D&D0’s combat systems. In Chainmail you still did things like measuring distances between figurines to calculate movement and attack numbers. It was an optional combat system that was later published for D&D0… which became known as the Greyhawk adventures rule system – that we know today as the D&D Basic Edition rule system. This system wasn’t based on doing measurements, but on dicing and character classes, attributes, and difficulty checks. These were all Gary Gygax’s contributions to Dungeons and Dragons. On the other end of this tension, there was co-creator Dave Arneson, who himself had grown up wargaming, but he turned towards the social elements of the game: the role of the Dungeon Master as neutral storyteller, a shared consensual imagination for the setting, and role-play of individual characters. Arneson and his group didn’t think Chainmail, with all its rules systems, was much fun. So in D&D we end up with a sometimes confusing, but always exciting, tension between simulation and storytelling – and it is the DM and the players who learn to navigate this tension as a group. - I bring that up because this is precisely how D&D gets re-imagined in 1975 by a group of nerdy graduate students at UC San Diego. Midkemia -------- - They called themselves the Thursday Nighters at first. It was originally created by graduate students Steve Abrams, Conan LaMot, and Jon Everson at UCSD, before friends from the neighbouring Wargaming Society joined their ranks. The core group swelled to thirteen, including Raymond E. Feist, who was a recent graduate of the UCSD Communications BA program. - Conan LaMut had just returned from a trip to Los Angeles with a copy of this “neat new game” consisting of three books in a box set. Because nobody found the original documents or rules systems very engaging, Conan set about copying a few of the combat tables from the books, and re-compiling that into a miniature player’s guide of his own he called “The Tome of Midkemia”. After a few games with the new player’s guide, Abrams, LaMot and Everson concluded that D&D wasn’t good for much more than “bash and crash and build giant characters”. Anyone that’s played D&D knows that most computer role-playing games based on D&D are exactly of this variety. - So, unsatisfied with the world and rules systems D&D0 had to offer, Abrams, LaMot and Everson split off from the main D&D gaming group to start writing their own rules – one heavily influenced by their participating in the SCA, or Society for Creative Anachronism… a group devoted to dramatically role-playing medieval societies. - Now, I haven’t done an episode on the Ultima series yet, but anyone that’s read a little about Richard Garriott’s history, will know that Ultima had almost identical roots: it was a product of both D&D and Garriott’s experiences in the SCA. - Although never credited as such, Midkemia follows a parallel history to the Ultima series, with the exception that the computer role-playing games came much later in history, and were not nearly as ubiquitous. - One of the loose rules of the group was that every new core member had to introduce something unique to the world of Midkemia – a contribution that was uniquely theirs. - Feist writes, “We did it for fun, as a pastime. This was around the time that Dungeons & Dragons was all the rage. But D & D was underdeveloped for our tastes; we decided to draw on our knowledge of medieval history and our love of fantasy to build a fully realized gameworld: Midkemia. We made up characters, countries, political alliances and disputes, a system of magic, a pantheon of gods -- a wonderful, magical place that didn't exist anywhere except in our heads.” (1998, http://elvandar.crydee.com/history.htm) - It was that dissatisfaction with D&D’s earliest rules systems, and the Tolkienesque world it borrowed from, that pushed the Thursday Nighters (now grown into the Friday Nighters, to accommodate the change in size and schedules of the group) to develop their own world and rule system for that world. - Those additions were generally adventures for towns and cities, each adding a specific new locale to the world of Midkemia. Over the next few years, these adventures would become known as the “Midkemian Campaign”. By 1979, there were enough unique materials in the campaign to put it into press… and this became Abrams and Everson’s chance to establish a new role-playing game company: House of Midkemia Press. - In the intervening years, between 1975 and 1979, Feist was working on storytelling – both as a Midkemian campaign player, and as a writer. Abrams had encouraged him to tell the story of Greater Path Magic (distinguished from Lesser Path Magic – a central theme in the series) – and how it came into being in Midkemia. Feist took up the challenge in 1977, and began writing the manuscript that would eventually become Magician. This gets us to 1979, where Feist is between jobs, struggling to pay rent, and trying to finish Magician. His friends help him out – he gets hired by House of Midkemia Press to handle communications, and then, on the verge of quitting the novel, his friends chipped together hundreds of dollars to cover his expenses and finish the book. - The gambit paid off. Not only did Feist finish the book, but in 1980 he scored a publication deal with Doubleday to have his Midkemian novel published. It was finally in print by 1982. - Magician is set 500 years prior to the events of the Midkemian Campaign that Feist was a part of, so doesn’t directly intersect with the role-playing campaign. Magician details the exploits of the boy Pug, caught up in a war between the Tsurani and the Midkemians. The book details Pug’s rise to becoming a Great One – that is, a magician of the Greater Path, and establishing a new magician’s college in Midkemia called Stardock. The book is full of political intrigue, cultural differences and confusion that lead to war, and treachery. The story is finally resolved when Pug closes the rift between Kelewan and Midkemia, and a host of important tsurani ex-pats are now trapped on Midkemia as vassals of the kingdom. - Magician was so popular that it not only sold incredibly well for a fantasy novel, but it inspired a whole series of books afterward (all by Feist) called The Riftwar Saga. It is this series of books that caught the attention of the game developers John Cutter and Neal Hallford nearly a decade later. - So here’s where we finally get to the third medium that the origins of Betrayal at Krondor: computer-RPGs. This is where Neal Hallford, John Cutter and Jeff Tunnell of Dynamix came together to produce the game, that was based on the Riftwar series, which was itself based on a role-playing game. The story had gone full-circle. Computer RPGs and Dynamix ------------------------- In this section, I am going to rely almost completely upon Neal Hallford’s amazing Krondor Confidential series of blog posts where he tells how Betrayal at Krondor, from inception to the same demise of the series, was made. Not only are his stories informative, but they’re touching insights into the pains of game development in a highly corporatized machine like Dynamix during the collapse of Sierra. I’m indebted to The Digital Antiquarian for linking to that series of blog posts, as I would have never known about Neal Hallford’s site without it. I’d also like to thank Matt of Matt Chats for his interviews with Hallford and Cutter, which filled in some gaps in the narrative. Betrayal at Krondor – the game, not the book that came later – began its life in the offices of New World Computing in 1991. Writer and designer Neal Hallford had become fast friends with designer and producer John Cutter. If you don’t know the name Neal Hallford, his legacy stems from traditional computer role playing games like Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan, Planet’s Edge, and the venerable Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra. All of these were published by New World Computing during its amazing run in the 80s and 90s under the leadership of Jon Van Canegham (pronounced “cannagum”). Hallford’s contribution to most of these were writing: The CRPG Addict notes that Tunnels and Trolls is notable for aspiring toward “Ultima levels of detail”, and uncredited story writing for Might and Magic III. Planet’s Edge, a space adventure-RPG that could be easily mistaken for a 1980s Westwood Studios game, saw Hallford doing the bulk of the writing, design work, and even the manual. John Cutter on the other hand had a different pedigree – the bulk of his work up to that point had been done for Cinemaware. Yes, the creators of Defender of the Crown, The King of Chicago, and – his last major project there – Wings! (While Cutter is credited with design and producer roles on most of his projects, Neal Hallford notes that of the two of them, Cutter is far more the technical nuts and bolts type of developer, schooled in formal rules systems for gameplay.) After his last published title at Cinemaware, Cutter would move to New World Computing where he found Hallford on the home stretch of Planet’s Edge. Cutter was hired as a Director of Product Development, and soon into his stay at NWC he realized that he was much more excited about the creative aspects of game development than project management. Six months into his stint at NWC, and after developing a strong affinity with Neal Hallford whose project he was managing, Cutter met Jeff Tunnell at a trade show. Tunnell enticed Cutter to Dynamix by making the one offer that Cutter could not refuse: a purely creative role at Dynamix. “Your job is to make the game fun.” No project management, just design. Cutter’s words to Tunnell at that moment were, “So, how much do I have to pay you to take this job?” Although Jeff Tunnell is most known for his Incredible Machine series and not fantasy role-playing games, it was actually Tunnell himself who had first proposed Krondor. Tunnell’s idea was that the team would create a “playable novel” based on Feist’s book Silverthorn (book 3 of the riftwar saga), after becoming enamored with the series. Cutter quickly read the book, and agreed that it would make a great subject for an adventure game. He called Feist’s agent, enquiring on Feist’s interest in perhaps participating in the project as writer, but soon found out that Feist’s popularity made him unaffordable to a company even funded by Sierra. But Feist was open to the idea of licensing, and that got the ball rolling. Without Feist as lead writer, Cutter needed someone to do the narrative heavy lifting for such a story-dense design. He could think of no one else but Neal Hallford, the man who he said was the finest writer he knew of in game development. It took only a matter of weeks to poach Neal Hallford from NWC, who on Halloween day of 1991, left the comfortable haunts of Los Angeles for the rugged wilderness of Eugene, Oregon and a new life at Dynamix. For what would become the highlight of his game design and writing career. The move from LA, California to Eugene, Oregon was like a move from Dallas to Austin, Texas: leave your fast cars and concrete jungle at the door, because it’s all hippies, renaissance faires and Grateful dead fans from here onward. While both Cutter and Hallford leaped at the idea of doing a game based on Feist’s books, Hallford admits having some reservations about doing a direct translation of the novel into an adventure game. He (in my opinion) very astutely recognized that doing a direct license of the book would only serve to alienate Feist fans, who (having already read Silverthorn) would know where to go, who to meet, and how to solve the main plot puzzle involving the princess and anti-venom. Worse, if the team changed the plot significantly enough, fans of the series would inevitably call the game out for deviating too much from the base material. If you’ve played any licensed adventure game, like Interplay’s Star Trek 25th Anniversary, Spectrum Holobyte’s A Final Unity, either of the Interplay Lord of the Rings games, or Westwood’s Blade Runner, you’ll know just how tricky those licenses are to navigate for writers. Hallford made what was then a dicey, but brilliant, suggestion: that the team come up with their own Midkemian adventure, one separate but canonically compatible with Feist’s riftwar series. Had he known it at the time, this was the same deal handed down to Feist himself, whose novelistic contributions to the Midkemian Campaign almost 15 years earlier cemented him as one of the core members of the role-playing group. In some ways, Hallford became his own missing member, perhaps honorary member, of that core group. But I’m getting ahead of myself. With Cutter, Tunnell and eventually Feist, convinced that this approach would work, the next dragon to slay involved picking the right kind of story for the game. When and where would it be set in the riftwar saga? After all, the was an elaborate host of characters, strewn across two worlds, over decades, that they might choose from. They could even go the Blade Runner route and produce a parallel storyline not involving the main character, but still compatible with the world of post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. After some serious research into all of Feist’s books, Hallford pinpointed the exact era in the saga it would happen at: Hallford writes, “Between A Darkness At Sethanon and Prince of the Blood, Ray had left a twenty year gap in the narrative. It was almost as if he’d circled the space between them with a big red marker, and I was anxious to take advantage of the obviously open narrative territory to roam. John and I drove a stake into the ground, exactly between those two novels.” So that’s where the project got off the ground. Dynamix paid a significant licensing fee to Feist for the use of the Riftwar saga – Hallford believes that it was the largest in the industry at the time – and had Sierra’s blessing and financial muscle to make a long, complex, and expensive game. It wasn’t long before that Origin made it’s “first million dollar game” with the release of Ultima VII: The Black Gate, but that was certainly not the norm. The AD&D gold box games were made with significantly smaller teams and resources, despite their access to the high profile D&D license. All this meant that Betrayal at Krondor was a gamble for Dynamix, who had thusfar scored some big hits with Aces of the Pacific, The Incredible Machine, and Red Baron… not to mention their adventure lineup including Willy Beamish and Rise of the Dragon. Dynamix was a hot company, producing games different from anyone else at the time. The initial two weeks of work were completed in John Cutter’s office, where John and Neal holed up for 12 or more hours a day, hashing out a plot framework for the story. The mcguffin of the story was selected – that is, the plot device that drives the story forward to its final confrontation – and a “page turner” or thriller style novelistic plot was singled out. That is to say, the game would be laid out in chapters, and each chapter would end on some kind of cliffhanger that tried to pull you forward into the next chapter. Beyond the story, some foundational game design decisions were made at these early meetings. The game would not involve clearing out dungeons for that magic “completion” checkmark – something that’s become enshrined in modern RPG design. Instead, the world would be dynamically persistent, that is, anything you’d do would leave a lasting effect on the world, and the world would change as a result of it. Moreover, they took the radical additional step of triggering in-game events that would take place regardless of the player being there, or not. In other words, they were making what I think is the only other open world narrative RPGs in history, second only to Ultima VII. But that open world philosophy came with some significant design challenges for John and Neal. Was it worthwhile to create content that players would inevitably miss out on if they wandered off the beaten path? How were they supposed to access that content if they missed it in Chapter 1? If the world was truly open, was the player supposed to have access to every single town, village, dungeon and castle at any one time? If the world was dynamic, how would these places change chapter-by-chapter? Were they supposed to re-create 9 different phases of Midkemia, one for each chapter of the game, that would progress as you went along? Finally, how was QA testing and bug management going to work? As we’ve seen with large open world games like GTA5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Cyberpunk 2077, when players can play through quests in any order they want, replicating bugs becomes a nightmare for developers. Gating players serves not only to make plot progression easier for developers, but bug and player UX testing easier too. As I mentioned in the nice surprises section of the podcast, the developers came up with some unique solutions to these problems. The world would not be completely open at any one time – you cannot (for instance) access the Northlands when you’re trying to escort Gorath to Krondor in the first chapter. This choice not only set some critical barriers to simplify development and reduce content creation, but it also sets a steady pace for the first chapter: don’t dilly-dally around too much, because Gorath really needs to get to Krondor and meet Arutha. Second, content really did change if you re-visited important places in some chapters. Not everywhere, and not completely, but in enough places to make the changes feel delightful. Usually this consists of just a few lines of dialogue, or perhaps a new dialogue option for certain characters, but it’s the kind of flavour text that makes the game feel alive. It’s not content for the sake of additional content – like, a new quest has been unlocked! - as has become the norm in modern RPGs like Mass Effect. It’s stuff made to convince you that you’re exploring a living, changing, world. More specific design choices came months later into the project. For now, one of the critical steps was to pass their thick tome of story notes over to Raymond Feist himself. These notes comprised the core story for the game, the key plot points it needed to hit, the main characters involved, and the historical Midkemian context in which it was all set. At the time, Feist was actively writing in the Midkemian universe, and Hallford and Cutter were concerned that since their game was in a 20-year period for which Feist had left a gap, that any changes they made to the Midkemian timeline might ripple forward and cause conflicts with Feist’s future plans for the Riftwar series. They would not have to worry – while Feist wrote copious notes and struck out any writing he thought was particularly bad (according to Cutter, it was all his writing) – the core story was given his approval and blessing. I can only imagine the sigh of relief that came from Neal and John when they received the stack of notes back, with the green light. More specific design choices were still being worked out. If the game was supposed to be an RPG, what kind of rules system would be used for combat? While both Hallford and Cutter had tons of pencil’n’paper D&D experience under their belts, they weren’t completely enthusiastic about the old core rules regarding levels and classes. If the game was going to be driven by narrative, and not by rules systems, then the player was not going to start by rolling up whatever characters they wanted at the beginning. The game starts with Locklear (a fighter), Gorath (a moredhel warrior), and Owyn (a magician), and you don’t get a choice in what classes they are. That being said, you do have very fine control over their skill development. Want Owyn to focus on his melee combat with the staff? Sure, tag that skill, and crack some skulls instead of casting spells. Want Gorath to become an expert crossbow marksman? Tag it, and keep him at least one square away from enemies during combat. Hallford points to the Call of Cthulhu role playing system from Chaosium as the source inspiration for these rule mechanics. The “sanity” system of Cthulhu was modified for use as a magic system, where if you ran out of stamina, you could sacrifice your health to cast a spell. Another critical decision in that time involves the combat system, which John attributes to his hours playing Archon: The Light and the Dark. Most people remember Archon for its twitch reflex two player action sequences where you try to out blast or throttle your opponent, but John was thinking of the more strategic turn-based layer played before the action started. Thus, a year into the project, Krondor had a turn-based chess-like board with figures for each playable character and enemy. They even added some line-of-sight obstacles like boulders, and even traps, that prevented the player from just hitting ‘Auto combat’ and walking away. It was 1992. The project was still a year away from launch, and the floor almost fell out from under it: Jeff Tunnell, desiring to return to his coding and design roots, departed Dynamix and founded Jeff Tunnell Productions – the company that would become synonymous with The Incredible Machine. The Krondor team suddenly faced a series of internal management changes, the kind that led to a “leadership of the day” phenomenon that anyone who has worked in a troubled office knows what it feels like. Dynamix now had over 100 employees, and had outgrown the Atrium building it had been housed in. Management decided to scale up, and uproot its workers, moving them to the University of Oregon’s newly built Riverfront Research Park. John’s role in day-to-day design and story decisions was replaced by constant negotiations with the leadership of the day, trying to maintain a line-of-sight with upper management (meaning: Sierra). This meant that Neal’s influence increased within the team, and with the move to the new building, suddenly had an office of his own. Things sounded good, even with the increased stresses of management changes. It’s now late 1992, and the team was suddenly faced with the sheer enormity of the world they were trying to populate with characters, criss-crossing plot lines, and dialogue. The world of Midkemia is huge, especially given that most of the story moments in the game are bespoke, and not the result of an underlying simulation. The fear John Cutter correctly had a year later, the “content churn” they would have to deal with, had finally reared its head fully. Before anyone really realized it, including Hallford himself, team had begun the six months of crunch before release. Hallford’s health crashed suddenly, leading to a trip to the hospital and the E.R. doctor’s mandated direction to take a week of stress leave from work. Hallford complied with the doctor’s orders just barely – his best friend and co-worker Chris Medinger had to confiscate the power cord from Neal’s Macintosh so he couldn’t give into the temptation to work from home. The months passed, and the game was fleshed into what it would eventually become. John mentions in an interview that Krondor was one of the few projects he worked on that had a surprisingly large QA window – there was an extra three months at the end of the project that were used to iron out bugs and add the little niceties (like story rewards for backtracking to distant places in other chapters) that make the game surprisingly polished. I can only imagine the anxiety for Neal and John as Ray Feist played the game for the first time. It was at a trade show. Ray writes, “When I finally got a look at the finished game, it was at the Drake Hotel in Chicago before my first press interview on the game at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1993. It was a revelation. It was my world, but it wasn’t. These were my characters, but they weren’t. They came alive and ran around and fought and died and started over and fought again. When it came time to give the interview, I didn’t want to stop playing.” Players loved it too. Johnny Wilson, a respected regular reviewer at Computer Gaming World, praised the magic system and the writing. Electronic Games gave it 97%. It eventually made the coveted February 1993 cover of CGW, and by the end of 93 giving Krondor not just the RPG of the Year award, but the Game of the Year award too. That’s not to say things were altogether cheery at Dynamix. This was Dynamix’s first RPG, and they were expecting the sales curve they saw with adventure games: peak sale for three months, then a sharp and steady decline into obscurity. Krondor didn’t sell well at all in the first few months, and was being treated as a dud by management. And yet, here were all these rave reviews in game magazines. What was going on? RPGs at the time, and even now, were and are, slow burners in the marketplace. RPGers are a small, but extremely dedicated subgroup in the massive pool of players, and they mostly rely upon word of mouth before they decide to play a game. After all, think about the time commitments involved in most RPGs: you might be dedicating 40, 50 even 100 hours in the average 1990s game just to see the ending. An adventure game, far more accessible and far shorter, was a bite-sized affair – 10, maybe 20 hours of gameplay stretched over a few weeks or months. In the 90s, the massive fanbase for them (compared to RPGs) made them an easy choice. Adventure games were the FPSes of their time. We might not see it that way now, but before Doom, adventure games were easy to sell. Not RPGs. So it took months for Krondor to get traction in the marketplace amongst role-players. What saved it was Sierra and Dynamix’s decision to re-publish the game on CD-ROM in 1994 – a year after its original floppy disk release. While the game is structurally the same, some bugs were patched, and more importantly Jan Paul Moorehead’s stunning SC-55 soundtrack was added as redbook audio tracks. Being 1994, and in the midst of the Multimedia craze – and with few CD-ROM titles to choose from – Krondor suddenly started selling. Selling huge numbers. Hallford thinks that it even outsold Sierra’s flagship games at the time, and definitely outsold all of Dynamix’s library up to that point. The story goes on from here – Cutter departs Dynamix for brighter pastures at Cavedog Entertainment, Hallford sticks it out at Dynamix for as long as he can, holding out for a proper Krondor sequel… only to have the entire project fall apart due to mismanagement at Sierra and Dynamix… But that’s stuff for someone else to tell. If you want to hear more of these stories, I recommend listen to the Matt Chat interviews with Neal and John, as well as reading Neal’s incredibly detailed (and touching) Krondor Confidential series at nealhallford.com. I’ll link to that in the shownotes. One last thing… I have to re-tell an unbelievable story that Neal tells so much better in his blog: I daresay moment of kismet in the production of Betrayal at Krondor. Throughout development, in a series of encounters with random people, and even Raymond Feist himself, people ask Neal whether he’s related to one Dean Hallford. The Dean Hallford, a member of the SCA, and Friday Nighter with the UCSD Midkemian Campaign group. Neal honestly has no idea who this guy is, but the name keeps coming up. The year after Betrayal at Krondor ships, Neal decides he wants to find out exactly who this Dean Hallford is, and starts dialing up Hallfords in the San Diego phonebook. Sure enough, he finds one Dean Hallford who works at San Diego State University’s IT department. He meets the man, whose SCA photos are proudly pasted on the wall. That’s when it hits Neal: this same man, who turns out to be his cousin, is The King of Queg. The island of Queg – a seafaring region of Midkemia has a capitol named Dean. The capitol was named after his own cousin, decades earlier, by the Friday Nighters. Ray Feist's Krondor: The Betrayal (Novel) ----------------------------------------- Given all we’ve heard in the history of Betrayal at Krondor, there’s one more little twist worth talking about. In 1998, five years after the game, Raymond Feist published a new novel in the riftwar cycle called: Krondor: The Betrayal. This is indeed a novelization of the game, and it’s a good one. It’s like Feist played through the game a few times, selected his favourite or preferred playthrough, and wrote that. So it skips past certain sidequests or story beats he felt were unimportant, and goes into depth with others he felt were underdeveloped in the game. It’s a fantastic read – a quick read, a page turner for sure. And the hardcover edition comes with a CD-ROM that contains both BaK and a demo for RtK. More on that later. Tech Stuff ---------- - There is one showstopper bug left in the engine that I suspect only affects Dosbox. It happens in Chapter 8 on the desert planet. You’ll need a spell called “Drain Strength” to get past a couple of enemies in the dungeon. That spell scroll exists in only one area of the map. Unfortunately, in Dosbox the game crashes to the dos prompt if you try entering that area. The solution is to never go into first person mode when you walk into the area – just walk using the overhead eagle eye view until you’re practically standing on top of the hole with the spell scroll. I’ve detailed how to get the scroll, step by step, over at the GOG forums and I’ll provide a link to that in the show notes as well. https://www.gog.com/forum/krondor_series/freeze_in_chapter_8 - Another bug involves the Mind Melt spell – an extremely powerful spell that you’re supposed to be able to get in a town called Dencamp on the Teeth. Due to a bug in the CD version of the game (that is, patched to v1.02) you cannot complete the quest. I’ve added a link to the fix, which involves using a hex editor: https://www.gog.com/forum/krondor_series/bak_mind_melt_spell_quest_bugfix - This is a great game for Roland SC-55 owners. Where to Get it --------------- - The game would see a re-release on a CD-ROM included at the back of Raymond Feist’s book “Krondor: The Betrayal”, unfortunately stripped of its redbook audio soundtrack to make room for a Return to Krondor demo and interviews with Feist. Avoid this version. You really do want the redbook audio tracks. - Grab it from GOG! Aside from a few annoying skips and clicks in the redbook audio, obviously sourced from someone’s scratched CD, you can usually find this for sale for less than five bucks. - If you insist on playing this on real hardware, go for the CD-ROM version that was released in a retail box. Do not buy the book version. - Don’t forgot to check out the BaK Help Web. This was an old exhaustive web site from Iceland that saw on a server for decades til it went offline a few years ago.