Castle Moldvay Alpha 1.1

”Could the rumours be true?” you wonder as you stumble upon a strange terminal connected to a massive antique mainframe in the dusty corners of a long-forgotten lab. "Good luck," you whisper, as you fire the ancient machine up. There is a strange buzzing sound, the smell of dust burning… suddenly the twin screens on the terminal come to life with a soft glow … “This is it!,” you say, “This is my ticket out of this crap department and to fame and fortune!” 

- the Unnamed Student

Castle Moldvay  is  a game within a game. It is a grand-cryptographic-puzzle. It is a lock and a key. The fever-dream of a genius gone mad. Well, sorta...  you'll see ... 

Castle Moldvay (Alpha 1.1) interactive-fiction (IF) game in the Infocom/Ultima/Interplay tradition where you control a party of  adventurers who must survive the perils of an authentic old-school-style  FRPG world. Think of it as Zork meets Bards Tale meets Ultima. Castle Moldvay is  turn-based, text-driven Roguelike adventure with minimalist  late-70's inspired graphics. This limited Alpha version of the game is meant to be a test of the game  game's engine and feel.  Therefore, the only goal of this current Alpha version is to  have at least one party member survive for twenty days. 

Can you do it? Let me know! This project has grown too big for one lone coder to test on their own!

I have big plans for Castle Moldvay. This version is really just the baby - a fully-working baby that includes:

• A large procedurally generated frontier, including small villages, cities and caves to explore
• Seven "classic"  player character archetypes: elves, dwarves, halflings, etc.!
• A magic system with 21 player (and enemy) spells currently implemented
• Twenty-four monster types and many NPC types (who might join your party if asked politely or compelled by charm spells)
• An array of items, both magical and mundane, that can be found and used in play
• Interactable items and NPCs who can be conversed with ...

The forthcoming versions will boast many more monster types, items, rumours, as well as an overarching story-quest around the mysterious Castle Moldvay !

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Instructions:

Note: Please press the full-screen button!

You will start your adventure in a village. Type "wander village" to get a list of all the traders/proprietors there. You can find out what a trader has for sale by typing something like "ask bob what items he has," or the like. Like many IF games before it, Castle Moldvay may seem "difficult to crack" and daunting at first . But fear not, the game does provide some hints if you simply type "help" or "help" followed by a topic. 

To get you started, here are some other hints and shortcuts:

• Castle Moldvay's parser ignores capitalization, so you can type in small case just fine. 
• If you have a number pad you can use 8,6,2 and 4  as a shortcut to typing "north," "east," "south , etc..
• Nouns and verbs must be single words, so some items have been hyphenated (e.g. short-sword) while others concatenated (i.e. chainmail) . The parser might remind you of these odd spellings from time to time. 

If you want to support further development of Castle Moldvay towards its first official release, please consider donating $2! If you donate you will be informed of updates and new features/bug fixes added!

 In the meantime, I look forward to your feedback!