The Mirkwood Tales RPG: the link between the original D&D rules and text-based computer games

Cover of Mirkwood Tales, 1977, by Eric S. Roberts

In May 1977, the all-text computer game Adventure, also known as Advent or Colossal Cave, "became the first computer game blockbuster", per the book 50 Years of Text Games by Aaron A. Reed (2023). Its popularity led to a whole genre of text-based adventure games that enjoyed popularity in the 80s, the best known being the Infocom games such as Zork, a close cousin of Adventure. While the start of Adventure approximates a real-world cave system, the game includes many fantasy elements, and it has long been known that the initial developer, Willie Crowther, was inspired by playing a D&D-type fantasy RPG.

Some of the earliest information came from Barry Gold, husband of Alarums & Excursions editor Lee Gold, in his article "Computers and Fantasy Gaming" from issue 30 of A&E, January 1978 (which I happen to have a physical copy of):

"As far as I know, Willie Crowther of Stanford University wrote the first fantasy simulation game. Don Woods added several features and expanded the dungeon to produce the current ADVENTURE game. Tim Anderson and Dave Lebling of MIT built on the Adventure game by using a more powerful computer language and including some ideas from D&D (Dave Lebling plays it). With help from two other users they came up with ZORK, sometimes called DUNGEON."

Later in the article, Gold adds follow-up information from Adventure co-designer Woods:

"ADVENT: Willie Crowther was at BBN (Bolt-Beranek and Newman - Massachusetts) when he wrote the original Adventure program. He was inspired by a Middle-Earth offshoot called Mirkwood Tales. Neither Willie nor Don appear to have drawn any ideas from the D&D rules in building Advent. Don Woods doesn't play any RPG games."

"The original program by Willie Crowther was much less complex than Don Wood's current version, and the dungeon was only about half its current size."

"Don Woods also provided a short genealogy of these games: war games, D&D, Mirkwood Tales, Adventures (original), Adventure (Don dropped the 's' from the name of his version), Zork."

From Gold's account, one might gather that this Mirkwood Tales was some kind of game situated between D&D and Adventure, but from this it's not really clear from this which it is closer to.

A 1996 Washington Post article by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon clarifies that Mirkwood Tales was a version of D&D set in Middle-Earth, in which Crowther played a thief sharing his first name:

"Dave Walden, who had been a programming ace working under Crowther at BBN, got his introduction to the game one night in 1975, when Eric Roberts, a student from a class he was teaching at Harvard, took him to a D&D session. Walden immediately rounded up a group of friends for continued sessions. Roberts created the Mirkwood Tales, an elaborate version of Dungeons and Dragons set in J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth. The game stretched on for the better part of a year and was played mostly on Walden's living room floor. One of the regulars was Will Crowther. Where the dozen other players chose names like Zandar, Klarf or Groan for their characters, Crowther was simply Willie, a stealthy thief."

In 2012, the epilogue of the first edition of Playing at the World by Jon Peterson has a section "The First Virtual Worlds", which contains the first detailed description of the Mirkwood Tales rules, based on an unpublished 1977 manuscript written by Eric S. Roberts, the DM of the game (page 617). Peterson quotes from the Introduction and Acknowledgements section to demonstrate the "debt of Mirkwood Tales to Dungeons & Dragons", and then notes some of the significant differences in classes and combat from D&D, but concludes:

"Mirkwood Tales is a game of stratified progression, where characters accumulate experience points while adventuring and go up in level as they reach certain experience totals. It moreover relies on underworld exploration, combat and treasure to drive an engaging narrative. In all those respects, it very closely follows the precedent of Dungeons & Dragons" (page 617). 

Later in the section, Peterson reveals that Dave Lebling, one of the developers of Zork, also played in Roberts' Mirkwood Tales campaign (page 622).

(Note: The 2012 edition of Playing at the World is out of print, and is being republished in a two-volume edition; the first volume is already out but does not contain the above material).

Until this month, this was the most detail about The Mirkwood Tales RPG that was generally available. Now, however, Eric Roberts has made public a reformatted pdf of Mirkwood Tales, as announced recently on Renga in Blue by blogger Jason Dyer:

Renga in Blue: Crowther's Adventure and Mirkwood Tales

Head over there to find the link to the pdf, hosted on the Internet Archive, and much more in a deep dive back into Crowther's original version Adventure - before Woods added on to it - as viewed anew through the lens of the full Mirkwood Tales rules. Dyer has an ongoing project called All the Adventures, wirh the goal of playing and blogging "about every adventure game ever made in (nearly) chronological order" (!), and has previously played through the many variations of Adventure, and thus has great insight into the details of the game. 

Unlike Gold's early assertion, which appears to be based on communication with Woods rather than Crowther himself, after playing through Crowther's original version again, Dyer concludes that Adventure does draw upon several elements from The Mirkwood Tales:

"It isn’t like Crowther was trying to “adapt Dungeons and Dragons” entirely — this is not an RPG, and nearly every room has an analogue in the real cave — but there’s still clearly some flavor of Crowther’s world found in the campaign he participated in, with the treatment of magic, direct reference to the computer as the “eyes” of the player, and heavy emphasis on dwarves (if a bit more aggressive in this game)"

Of these, the element with the strongest ties to the original D&D rules is "the treatment of magic", which here refers to the identification of properties of magic items in the game. Dyer asked me about how magic items were identified in OD&D, and I pointed to the Example of Play in Vol 3, where a player tries on "old boots" to identify them as magical Elven boots:

Dyer notes that this concept, which is merely exemplary in OD&D, is expressly stated in The Mirkwood Tales rules:

"In addition to spells, magic appears in the Mirkwood Tales in the form of magical artifacts and equipment. More often than not, the magical effect of some object will not be clear from simple examination of the object, and it may require experimentation or searching for further clues to its nature" (The Mirkwood Tales, page 21, section "3.5.3 Magical Artifacts")

Adventure, in turn, requires the player to experiment to figure how out how to use magic such as items or words. The first magic item encountered in Adventure is the "the iconic three foot black rod with a rusty rod", which has two different properties in the game, and "the experience of fiddling with the rod — and finding two effects, both positive and negative — are similar to OD&D campaigns", per Dyer.

The Mirkwood Tales rules mostly rewrite the first volume of OD&D, Men & Magic, with some material from Vol 3, including a much longer Example of Play. The subject matter of Vol 2 is almost entirely missing; there are no lists of monsters or treasure. If I find time in the future I will take a closer look at how the Mirkwood Tales RPG rules differ from OD&D.

Tower of Xenopus: Mazes & Minotaurs RPG adaptation by Tony

In the comments to "Zenopus Built a Tower", Part 46 of the Holmes Manuscript series on this blog, reader Tony wrote in about his adaptation of Holmes' Tower of Zenopus dungeon for the Mazes & Minotaurs RPG, a reimagining of OD&D as if it was inspired only by Greek mythology, and which can be found for free on DriveThruRPG. With Tony's permission, I'm sharing his comments here:

"I am running a game of "Mazes & Minotaurs", which is Mythic Greek inspired OSR game (instead of based on Tolkien and the Middle Ages). The setting is "Kriti" (Crete) during a quasi-mythical version of the Late Bronze Age. As an homage (plus, I am lazy) I repurposed and repackaged "The Tower of Zenopus" to be more Greek-sounding as "The Tower of Xenopus", and tied it into the myth of the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. The stone tower was a fortification built by a Mycenaean warlord, Xenopus ("Strange Foot") which is still standing. It is built on top of the earlier ruins of a Minoan temple on a mountaintop (a "peak sanctuary") in central Crete. Like many Minoan peak sanctuaries it was also a sacred burial cave, which dovetails nicely with parts of the original "Tower of Zenopus". The tunnels of the "dungeon" would have been carved out of the soft limestone rock common to Crete and filled with bones. (Minoans practiced primary and secondary burial, where remains would first be stripped of flesh, then re-interred en masse in ossuaries like jars, small caskets, etc. with several sets of remains in one container). Floors are limestone, all walls have extensive Minoan murals (dolphins, bulls, female goddess figures of Rhea/Cybele, etc.). Most doors have been removed to fit the archaic burial cave theme. Also, metal for hinges was scarce in the Late Bronze Age.

To adapt the map I flipped it over left-to-right but left it mostly unchanged. Above the initial entry stairs was a Mycenaean square stone tower fortification typical of the period (a ground floor and a roof accessed by a stairs). As the underground complex is on a mountain the underground river is the same. But the tunnel to the ocean is now instead a mystical passage to the Underworld. The pirates inside it are all changed to be "Telkines", mythical Greek "fish-children" (aka "Sons of Dagon" or off-brand Deep Ones). The goblins are changed to "Kobaloi". ("Kobalos" is linguistically related to "Kobold", which is itself linguistically related to "Goblin".) The ghouls become "Vrykolakes", a sorta-similar undead cannibal of Greek folklore. Giant rats and the Giant Spider are the same. Room S still has stairs up, these lead to another burial cave. The sorcerer inside is changed to be a Telkine water Elementalist with a Telkine guard.

Room S now also has stairs down, these lead to the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. At the middle of the maze are the remains of the Minotaur, slain by Theseus (and with the sword he used still in its ribs). At the entrance to the Labyrinth a "clue" (ball of thread) is tied off. This is what Theseus used to navigate the Labyrinth. It becomes clear the Labyrinth is not a real maze; although the path twisted and turned there are no branching paths or dead ends. (This is the classical Cretan labyrinth diagram.) It becomes clear the thread does not somehow mark off branches to aid in navigation, it simply measures distance to the middle of the Labyrinth. This is because it was intended all along the Greek (Hellene) sacrifices would be forced to travel a single path inwards to the centre where the Minotaur would be waiting to kill them. There would be no side passages, no dead ends. They would simply travel the path and it turned back and forth, becoming disheartened and confused, then die. Theseus, as he knew how far he would go, was forewarned by the thread running out. Thus when nearing the centre of the Labyrinth he was ready for a fight, unlike all the other sacrificial victims.

Thus, the classic "Tower of Zenopus" becomes the "Tower of Xenopus"!"

"Silver coin from Knossos displaying the 7-course "Classical" design to represent the Labyrinth, c. 400 BC." Source: Wikipedia page on the Labyrinth

 

Followup comment:

"It would be my pleasure! There are a couple of monsters that do not need adapting: the giant spider and crab, and the skeletons. The players are very into the quest; they have passed up every chance of looting even though there are glints of gold and valuables mixed within the bones in the ossuary vessels, a couple chests of silver in the boats on the shore of the vast underground ocean (the Gods warned them to not proceed further in that direction as it leads to the underworld, and it was not yet their time). As another "Greek" touch the rotating statue is of Poseidon, and the talking mask looks like the "death mask" of Agamemnon. In the central circular room are stairs leading up (into come caves on the mountainside) and a trap door leading down into the labyrinth.

The labyrinth is a classic "Cretan" one: circular with no branching paths with dead ends. One single path to the end. Clearly not the confusing maze they are expecting! The purpose of the labyrinth was to execute prisoners. So they wander the single path to the end where the Minotaur waited to end their lives. By that time they would be disoriented and demoralised, easy prey in the darkness. How Theseus prevailed was using a "clue", a ball of yarn. I could never figure out how that would help to navigate a maze unless it was really, really big! But if the path has no branches then a strand of twine can do one thing well: measure distance. Therefore Theseus would know exactly how far he'd gone and how close to the end. Instead of the Minotaur ambushing him as he stumbled along, confused, he would know to be armed and ready for a fight. A fight the Minotaur would not expect, the advantage would be his. In this case the PCs would follow the twine to the centre, there to face the Minotaur."

My commentary: This is a very creative adaptation of Holmes' Sample Dungeon and would be a great deal of fun to play through!