(or the story of twenty-five bodies for the meatgrinder)
It is the year 666 -- the year of The Beast.
In the country of Caer Omn, near the town of Mersad, stands the ruined castle of Ramething. Beneath the castle lie the terrible dungeons of Ramething, an incredible maze of rooms and corridors, occupied by horrid monsters and piles of ancient treasure.
You are a brave young fighter preparing to enter this dungeon, to kill monsters and amass treasure. For every monster you kill and every bit of gold, etc., that you bring out of the dungeon, you earn experience. The greater your experience, the better fighter you are and the harder you are to kill. Your object is to reach 20,000 experience points and then retire from dungeonry with an established reputation.
As a well-educated young person, you know how to use a sword and have a certain acquaintance with magical and clerical spells. These capabilities will improve with your experience level.
I won't retread too much ground here as many other, better writers have documented this game, but pedit5 is held as the earliest example of a CRPG that can not only be proven to exist (m199h fails on this front) but also can still be played to this day via the brilliant emulation team at Cyber1.
Shortly after the original release of the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons, enthusiasts with access to computers leapt to create digital representations of their new hobby. Rusty Rutherford, working within the Population and Energy Group at the University of Illinois as a PLATO programmer built pedit5 within the spare mainframe space allocated to the department. He recalls that a similar game—dnd—was under active production but wasn't locatable so jumped into making his own program, taking roughly six weeks to finish.
The version that is accessible using Cyber1 feels a little like a museum piece as it opens with a credits message describing its provenance before offering the option of jumping straight in or offering some help. These help files (which I think were originally stored within pedit4) are approachably comprehensive and include information on the basic mechanics, the spells, and the denizens of the dungeon.
Getting Started
It doesn't take very long at all to settle into the brutal gameplay. The behind-the-scenes combat is harsh enough that most randomly-rolled characters will not survive a fight with even the weakest of the enemies and it is impossible to escape fights when within spaces defined as rooms. A fresh avatar has a single spell slot (yes, we've got Vancian-inspired, Dungeons & Dragons spellcasting here) which gives access to Sleep, Charm, Light (which does nothing), and Magic Missile. Both Sleep and Charm will allow for an instant kill if rolled successfully but are limited in the creature types they work on. Magic Missile simply does a little damage as a prelude to a fight, which should help the player's odds of survival.
In practice, this means that the simplest way to play is to enter a couple of rooms, hoping to find a valuable treasure, and then flee as soon as the single spell slot is consumed. Upon leaving the dungeon, gold is converted into an equal amount of experience and accruing enough of that to gain a level unlocks valuable spell slots and a larger "hits" pool.
In reality, you die. A lot.
Twenty-five Dead Theos
I called it quits after the death of Theo the 25th. I estimate that I have only mapped a tenth of the dungeon, so I may return at a later date to throw more bodies into the dungeon.
Overall, I think pedit5 is just a little too random to mine much enjoyment from. Unlike later games with permadeath, there is neither the opportunity to learn from mistakes nor a sense of difficulty progression as one treads deeper into the game. Instead, the very first room you enter may contain a level six dragon, the strongest enemy in the game, which is likely to kill you regardless of your power level.
Is it Worth Playing?
Only as an absolute curiosity piece. It's just too random to truly have fun.
👎
Loot for the Hoard:
Nothing! Because no character survived.
Another thank you to the team over at Cyber1 for keeping this and many other history pieces alive.
