Fallen Gods - Days of Yore

Your fire's gleam seems to dim in this great room, swallowed by shadows that swim and loom like whales in the dark sea. Blacker than light's lack, the hall must hold some lost, last scrap of the unmade world. Bats flap through this false night on leather wings, their shrill songs ringing softly off the far stone walls. It is an uncanny cleft, one which waits with unwelcome dread.

I'm old enough that when I was very young, we had no computer at all. And the computer we did get, when I was around six or seven, was an Apple IIc that plugged into a black and white television. This gift came from my grandfather, a NASA engineer who rightly anticipated that facility with computers would be essential for my generation, and using this machine he taught me basic (literally, BASIC) programming. Essential or not, it wasn't much for gaming, and even when my brother and I pooled our allowances, we never managed to get our hands on much more than a two-sided floppy with David's Midnight Magic and Choplifter. The formative games of my childhood were thus not computer games but board games, video games, "narration games" (rule-free RPGs in which whining and punching replaced rolling dice and tracking stats), and gamebooks.

There are two games from that era that loom large not just in my memory but in the design of Fallen Gods: Arnold Hendrick's single-player RPG board game entitled Barbarian Prince (Dwarfstar, 1981) and Joe Dever's Lone Wolf gamebooks (1984 and onward). Arnold Hendrick is a name any RPG fan should know because he was the genius, the seemingly mad and insatiable genius, behind MicroProse's Darklands. His earlier work shows the same genius. And Joe Dever has rightly ascended into, if not the pantheon of renowned game designers, at least the ranks of "designers with longform Wikipedia entries." His recent untimely death at 60 robbed the world of a generous spirit and a tireless pen.

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