Let's Play: Trinity by Brian Moriarty

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

Well, my final papers are in, now I just have a huge stack of assignments (or rather six huge stacks of assignments) to grade. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, let’s see what’s UP!

Arboretum

A spectacular pergola of arborvitaes arches over your head like a great green Ferris wheel. Its tangled surfaces are peculiarly twisted, making it difficult to tell where the inside ends and the outside begins.

Steep, leafy tunnels curve up into the pergola to the north and south. Other paths lead east and west, into the surrounding hedge.

An abstract sparkling sculpture stands between the tunnels. The words Felix Klein 1849-1925 are inscribed on the base.

We’re back at the Klein bottle pergola. Actually, wait, does it describe the shape?

>x pergola
The pergola resembles a doughnut, fifty feet across and woven entirely of arborvitaes. This “doughnut” is standing on end, and you’re gawking up at it from underneath. Steep, leafy tunnels curve up into the pergola to the north and south. The whole affair is oddly skewed; some parts look as if they’re turned inside out.

It does! So I think it is that other immersion of the Klein bottle I mentioned up above!

Just tipped on its side and woven out of trees.

>u
[Which way do you want to go up, north or south?]

Ah, the joys of Death on the Stormrider.

>n
You ascend the north side of the pergola.

North Arbor

The “floor” of the pergola curves up and around in an inexplicable way that makes your eyes cross. It seems as if you’d be standing on your head if you went much higher. Little daylight makes its way through the thick walls of arborvitae.

Can we do a loop-de-loop?

>u
The floor twists alarmingly as you continue your ascent.

Top of Arbor

The tangled vines and tendrils seem to writhe malignantly in the flickering light of the splinter. The air is pungent with the odor of arborvitaes.

Dark, leafy tunnels curve down to the north and south.

An arborvitae is cleaved by a silver axe.

Your sense of direction is very confused.

Wheeee!

Ooh, also an axe. That’s going to be good for chopping down trees.

>get axe
You yank the axe out of the arborvitae.

[Your score just went up by 1 point. The total is now 17 out of 100.]

>x it
The silver blade is still sharp.

Gotta keep moving, if you stop at the top of a loop-de-loop you might fall.

>s
South Arbor

The “floor” of the pergola curves up and around in an inexplicable way that makes your eyes cross. It seems as if you’d be standing on your head if you went much higher. Little daylight makes its way through the thick walls of arborvitae.

>d
The floor twists alarmingly as you descend.

Arboretum

A spectacular pergola of arborvitaes arches over your head like a great green Ferris wheel. Its tangled surfaces are peculiarly twisted, making it difficult to tell where the inside ends and the outside begins.

Steep, leafy tunnels curve up into the pergola to the north and south. Other paths lead east and west, into the surrounding hedge.

An abstract sparkling sculpture stands between the tunnels. The words 5291-9481 nielK xileF are inscribed on the base.

That was fun!

Wait, what’s that on the sculpture?

The sparkling sculpture looks like a crystalline bottle, eight feet high, with a polished surface that twists in impossible curves. It’s hard to tell where the outside of the sculpture ends and the inside begins.

The words 5291-9481 nielK xileF are inscribed on the base.

Hm.

Well, probably nothing to worry about.

>e
Arborvitaes

Barely eighteen inches separate the thick walls of arborvitae that tower on either side. They form an uncomfortably narrow corridor that bends sharply to the west and northwest.

>nw
Trellises

A fortresslike wall of arborvitaes stretches east and west through the forest. The only breach is an identical pair of arched trellises.

A mountain stream trickles between the trees. Paths wander from its banks in many directions.

>nw
The Bend

An exhausted stream trickles into a river that bends to the south and west. The opposite shore is veiled behind a thick mist.

Paths meander off in many directions from the river’s edge.

A dark shadow moves slowly southwestward across the ground.

Wait, northwest to the Bend?

The river bending west?

>e
Bottom of Stairs

The triangular structure before you must be thousands of feet high. It divides the sky like a razor, casting a stern, precise shadow over the surrounding landscape.

A narrow stairway climbs north, up the hypotenuse of the triangle. Footpaths converge on the stair from every direction.

Oh no. Abort abort abort!

By going once through the Klein bottle, we’ve inverted the world—what used to be the inside is now the outside, and east and west have been swapped!

In physics and certain types of mathematics, this is called a spinor: when rotating 360 degrees results in flipping everything backward, and you have to rotate another 360 degrees to get it back. Here’s a nice visualization with a Möbius strip:

When you’ve made one full rotation (from the blue arrow on the right to the red arrow), you’re flipped around; make another full rotation to un-flip things. Another famous demonstration is the “wine glass dance”. But it turns out they show up surprisingly often when you’re doing certain types of math, especially math involving rotations: you frequently end up with things that need to spin around twice to get back to their starting point.

Which means if we go north, up, south, down one more time, we should get un-flipped again!

An abstract sparkling sculpture stands between the tunnels. The words Felix Klein 1849-1925 are inscribed on the base.

Success!

The other place to explore upwards is the huge gnomon in the middle. So let’s see what we have there.

Bottom of Stairs

The triangular structure before you must be thousands of feet high. It divides the sky like a razor, casting a stern, precise shadow over the surrounding landscape.

A narrow stairway climbs north, up the hypotenuse of the triangle. Footpaths converge on the stair from every direction.

This isn’t going to be an easy trek. Thousands of feet straight up, times the square root of 2 (the angle of a gnomon depends on your latitude, but OSHA requirements say stairs can’t ascend at more than a 45 degree angle), means approximately 3000 feet of stairs at minimum. That’s over half a mile!

But, let’s give it a go.

With a fearful gulp, you ascend the narrow stairway.

Halfway Up

The breeze feels noticeably cooler here, about halfway to the vertex. The landscape below is gray in the shadow of the triangle.

Phew. Are we there yet?

No?

The air grows colder as you continue your ascent.

Vertex

The temperature on this tiny platform is well below freezing. But it isn’t just the cold that makes your teeth chatter when you look down that narrow stairway, thousands of feet high.

Far below, the shadow of the structure stretches across the landscape. From this great altitude it looks like a dark finger, accusing a point on the east horizon.

At the center of the platform stands a handsome antique sundial. You see a threaded hole on the dial’s face. The circumference is enclosed in a wide brass ring.

Wow! What a view!

Also, a sundial with a threaded hole—what a coincidence! (This is where you’d discover the game was unwinnable if you hadn’t found the Wabe back in Kensington Gardens.)

>x sundial
The perimeter of the sundial is inscribed with seven curious symbols and a compass rose, with the legend “TEMPUS EDAX RERUM” emblazoned across the bottom. A threaded hole is set into the center of the dial.

Oh dear, this is French. I can tell you that the Latin again says “time, devourer of all things” (or literally “time, gluttonous for things”), but my best guess at the French is something like…“this is a clock that doesn’t chime”? I guess that would make sense for a sundial.

And finally…

>put gnomon in hole
You twist and push the gnomon into the hole on the sundial, but it doesn’t seem to fit very well. A quick glance shows the reason why. The thread on the bolt doesn’t match the thread in the dial’s hole.

We’ve come all this way, and it doesn’t even fit?!

It looks like these threads turn in opposite directions. Is this gnomon really useless after all?

Next time: making use of the pergola, and chopping down a tree!

03b.txt (10.0 KB)

[HanonO (Hanon Ondricek)]

@Draconis

I’m assuming the mushroom clouds from nuclear explosions, but I’m actually not sure that’s right, because there are so many more of them in the west (which is the earlier side of a sundial).

[sighs in fatalistic temporal foreknowledge]

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

As we head back down from the tip of the gnomon, the descriptions actually change! It’s a small touch, and not one I would expect most authors to think of.

>d
Fighting back fear, you descend the stairway.

Halfway Down

The breeze feels noticeably warmer here, about halfway to the ground. The landscape below is gray in the shadow of the triangle.

>d
The air grows warmer as you continue your descent.

Because of course, we’re not Halfway Up this time, we’re Halfway Down.

The problem we’re currently facing is a gnomon with the wrong thread. We need it to be flipped around.

But, conveniently, we just found a way to flip things around! To the spinor!

North, up, south, down, and the world has been flipped again.

An abstract sparkling sculpture stands between the tunnels. The words 5291-9481 nielK xileF are inscribed on the base.

(Or rather, we’ve been flipped around. But from our perspective the world’s wrong.)

Back to the Vertex, and…

>x dial
The perimeter of the sundial is inscribed with seven curious symbols and a compass rose, with the legend “MURER XADE SUPMET” emblazoned across the bottom. A threaded hole is set into the center of the dial.

Latin for “sgniht lla fo reruoved, emit”.

Basically every single bit of text in the Wabe has been flipped around. It’s a fun gimmick.

>put gnomon in hole
You screw the gnomon into the hole on the sundial.

A long metal lever silently rises out of the floor. As it clicks to a stop, the ring around the sundial emits a brilliant twinkle of light.

[Your score just went up by 5 points. The total is now 22 out of 100.]

A voice in your ear remarks, “The Gnomon Conquest.”

The brass ring on the sundial rotates with a sudden click.

Now that’s a bad pun.

>x ring
The brass ring fits perfectly around the dial’s perimeter. It’s inscribed with an arrow, which is pointing to the seventh symbol on the dial.

That arrow wasn’t there before! It only appeared once we added the gnomon.

>x symbols
The seven symbols are arranged in a circle. The series begins with a Greek omega and runs counterclockwise around the dial, ending with a Greek alpha. All of the symbols are inscribed backwards.

[You’ll find the symbols reproduced on the sundial in your Trinity package.]

Sadly the feelies don’t include a mirror-reversed sundial. A grievous oversight, really.

>x lever
The lever is about five feet long, and stands vertically out of the platform.

>pull lever
The lever is moved up as far as it can go.

>push lever
As you lower the lever you hear a loud, mechanical groan below your feet. The floor lurches and stops vibrating; you feel a momentary dizziness, and a brief gust of wind. Then all is still.

I think this…unlocked something?

>turn ring
You grasp the edges of the brass ring and begin to turn it.

An ominous vibration makes the platform tremble. Then a motion catches your eye.

The sun is moving! It’s arcing across the sky like a time-lapse movie, smooth and terribly silent.

You let go of the ring with a cry. The sun instantly stops, and the strange vibration with it.

After your pulse slows, you grasp the ring again and turn it, ever so carefully, until it clicks into place at the dial’s fifth symbol.

Aaagh!

>turn ring to first symbol
The sun sweeps across the sky as you rotate the brass ring. It clicks into place at the dial’s first symbol.

So this is how we can enter the different scenes. When the gnomon’s shadow falls on a toadstool, its door opens. Instead of waiting around for that to happen (the sun does move on its own, very slowly), we can just put the sun into exactly the position we want.

Let’s go flip the chirality of the world back. Navigating like this is giving me a headache. North, up, south, down, and…

An abstract sparkling sculpture stands between the tunnels. The words Felix Klein 1849-1925 are inscribed on the base.

Much better.

Meanwhile, we have an axe. And we have a tree in dire need of axing.

Chasm’s Brink

The chasm at your feet is striped with colorful layers of rock. Narrow paths twist northeast and northwest, uneasily close to the edge. Other trails lead off into the forest.

To the north, a rocky mesa towers like a golf tee from the depths of the chasm. Only thirty feet separate you from its flattened summit.

An oak tree stands at the chasm’s brink.

>x tree
The oak tree spreads like a green canopy overhead.

>chop tree with axe
You chop at both sides of the oak’s trunk until it teeters uncertainly, deciding which way it will fall.

>say timger
[The word “timger” isn’t in the vocabulary that you can use.]

>say timber
[You don’t need to use the word “timber” to complete this story.]

I’m leaving my typo in to show the different error messages here. It seems the word “timber” is flagged as “mentioned in the text, but not implemented”, which is a nice little touch. But I’m not sure if the two separate error messages here are worth the hassle of adding all those words to the vocabulary!

Anyway, the text is pretty clear that we need to…

>push tree north
You push the teetering oak northward with all your strength. It arcs across the chasm with a leafy whoosh and crashes onto the mesa, barely missing the toadstool.

[Your score just went up by 3 points. The total is now 25 out of 100.]

A soap bubble appears high overhead. It hovers for a moment before it bursts with a flabby pop.

Success!

>n
You step gingerly across the fallen oak, and leap onto the mesa.

Mesa

The mesa’s summit is a flat platform of stone, surrounded on every side by a deep chasm. A fallen oak bridges the gulf to the south.

A giant toadstool has somehow taken root in the solid rock. The white door in its stem is closed.

Those two puzzles seemed pretty obvious to me: we have something that needs to be reversed, and a reversifier; we have a tree that needs to be chopped, and an axe to chop it with. But nothing else seems quite as obvious to me. So I’d like to open the floor to the rest of y’all.

Where should we go next? Shall we explore the cottage, or the cemetery? Or does anyone have an idea of what to do about the bees or the Venus flytrap?

03c.txt (12.0 KB)

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

@Draconis

Let’s go flip the chirality of the world back. Navigating like this is giving me a headache.

You don’t have to navigate the reversed world at all, really. It would be sufficient to run around the pergola once, drop the gnomon, run around again, and pick it back up.

[Natrium729 (Nathanaël Marion)]

@Draconis

“this is a clock that doesn’t chime”

“Il y a” should be translated by “there is”, and maybe “sonne” would be better as “ring”. But you got the gist of it.

@Draconis

Now that’s a bad pun.

I don’t think I get it. (Or maybe I’m just tired.) Can someone explain?

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

@Natrium729

I don’t think I get it. (Or maybe I’m just tired.) Can someone explain?

The voice that says, “the Gnomon Conquest”. I think it’s a joke on “the no-man conquest”, but I don’t get what that means. One that is more understandable comes later in space.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

I took it as a pun on “Roman Conquest” (as in the Roman conquest of Britain or Gaul or whatever). For me at least “Roman” and “gnomon” rhyme.

@Natrium729

“Il y a” should be translated by “there is”, and maybe “sonne” would be better as “ring”. But you got the gist of it.

Ah, so “there is a clock that doesn’t ring”, or maybe “doesn’t sound”? I’m glad I was able to get somewhat close! And thank you for the translation!

I’ve been sort-of-studying French, but by that I mean “studying the history of French and how it changed from Latin”, so I can notice things like “sonne is probably Latin sonat” but not things like “what the heck is y”.

[mathbrush (Brian Rushton)]

@SomeOne2

“the Gnomon Conquest”

I’m going with this!

(alt-text: The Norman Conquest, year of 1066)

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

While I wait for feedback, I’m going to procrastinate on some grading and check out the…

Cottage

An iron cauldron, brown with the crust of years, squats in the middle of this tiny chamber. Coils of steam writhe from its depths, filling the air with a greasy stench that makes your nose wrinkle. Luckily, the front and back doors are both wide open.

A crudely drawn map hangs upon the wall.

The biggest book you’ve ever seen lies open on a pedestal in the corner.

There’s a birdcage here. Inside the birdcage you see a magpie.

I glanced at the map the first time I came through here:

The map shows a network of boxes connected by lines and arrows, with many erasures and scrawled additions. Something about the pattern is maddeningly familiar; but you can’t put your finger on where you’ve seen it before.

But now something’s changed.

>x map
The map shows a network of boxes connected by lines and arrows, with many erasures and scrawled additions. Something about the pattern is maddeningly familiar; but you still can’t put your finger on where you’ve seen it before.

As you ponder over the map, you discover a number of hasty squiggles that you didn’t notice the first time you looked.

Someone’s been updating the map!

It might be me!

The magpie screeches, “Awk! X map. Awk!”

Thanks magpie!

>x cauldron
White coils of steam writhe mysteriously from the cauldron’s depths.

The magpie mutters, “X cauldron. Awk!”

A clever friend. It understands X, even if the game doesn’t!

>x book
The open book is so wide, it’s impossible to touch both edges with your arms outstretched. Its thousands of vellum leaves form a two-foot heap on either side of the spine; the rich binding probably required the cooperation of twenty calves.

That’s quite a book.

>read book
It’s hard to divine the purpose of the calligraphy. Every page begins with a descriptive heading (“Of the Red Stone’s theft by a Runner of Roads,” for instance) followed by a list of imperatives (prayers? formulae?), each preceded by an arrow-shaped glyph.

The writing ends abruptly on the page you found open, under the heading “Wabewalker happens upon a Book of Hours, and begins to study it.” The last few incantations read:

>X CAULDRON
>X BOOK
>READ BOOK

*squint*

Hm.

The magpie croaks, “Awk! Milk and honey.”

Milk and honey?

The magpie squawks, “Awk! Milk and honey, fresh whole lizard.”

Fresh whole lizard?

The magpie screeches, “Awk! Fresh whole lizard. Awk!”

If we wait around, the magpie relates a recipe to us one squawk at a time:

Milk and honey, fresh whole lizard, killed in the light of a crescent moon. Mix ‘em with a pinch o’ garlic, then stand back! 'Cause it go BOOM.

Well, we have a pinch of garlic, and I’m assuming there’s some honey in that beehive. I don’t know where we’re going to find milk, a lizard, or a crescent moon.

>get cage
Your load is too heavy.

Oh, shoot. This is an early game, so it has an inventory limit. That’s going to be really annoying.

>i
You’re holding an axe, a splinter (providing light), a credit card, a piece of paper, a small coin, a bag of crumbs and an umbrella. You’re wearing a wristwatch. Your pocket is empty.

>put card in pocket
You put the credit card in your pocket.

The magpie croaks, “Awk! It go BOOM. Awk!”

>put coin in pocket
You put the small coin in your pocket.

>put bag in pocket
You’d have to empty the bag of crumbs to do that.

>get cage
Your load is too heavy.

The magpie squawks, “Awk! Milk and honey. Awk!”

ARGH.

I’m going to go dump all this stuff at the bottom of the stairs.

>drop axe, paper, bag, and umbrella
The axe: Dropped.
The piece of paper: Dropped.
The bag of crumbs: Dropped.
The umbrella: Dropped.

So Infocom’s parser could handle the Oxford comma! It’s just Inform’s that can’t!

Taking the cage scores us a point, but there’s not much we can do with it. We can open it:

>open cage
You open the birdcage.

The magpie flutters out of the cage and circles around the inside of the cottage. After considerable effort, you manage to stuff it back in the cage and slam the door shut.

But if we open it inside with the doors closed, we immediately cage the magpie again. If one of the cottage doors is open or we’re outside, it flies away and is never seen again. So I’m keeping it caged for now, where it’ll keep commenting on the commands we enter.

What now?

The Book of Hours: 03d.txt (8.5 KB)
The map on the wall:

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

What about the barrow? You can do it already, but still save beforehand…

@mathbrush @Draconis Those make more sense!

[eriktorbjorn (Torbjörn Andersson)]

@Draconis

So this is how we can enter the different scenes. When the gnomon’s shadow falls on a toadstool, its door opens. Instead of waiting around for that to happen (the sun does move on its own, very slowly), we can just put the sun into exactly the position we want.

Additionally, once you’ve lowered the lever, the sun stops moving on its own. And that’s good, because it means the shadow won’t move away from the door.

Though it also means that unless you make the sun move again, you won’t see the sun set on its own, which - while completely pointless - is one of my favorite metal images from any Infocom game ever.

@Draconis

I’m leaving my typo in to show the different error messages here. It seems the word “timber” is flagged as “mentioned in the text, but not implemented”, which is a nice little touch. But I’m not sure if the two separate error messages here are worth the hassle of adding all those words to the vocabulary!

Actually, it’s just random variations of the same error message:

<GLOBAL UNKNOWN-MSGS:TABLE
	<LTABLE 2
  <PTABLE "The word \""
	 "\" isn't in the vocabulary that you can use.">
  <PTABLE "You don't need to use the word \""
	 "\" to complete this story.">
  <PTABLE "This story doesn't recognize the word \""
	 ".\"">>>

<ROUTINE UNKNOWN-WORD (PTR "AUX" BUF MSG)
	<PUT ,OOPS-TABLE ,O-PTR .PTR>
	<SET MSG <PICK-NEXT ,UNKNOWN-MSGS>>
	<TELL "[" <GET .MSG 0>>
	<WORD-PRINT <GETB <REST ,P-LEXV <SET BUF <* .PTR 2>>> 2>
		    <GETB <REST ,P-LEXV .BUF> 3>>
	<SETG QUOTE-FLAG <>>
	<SETG P-OFLAG <>>
	<SETG INLEN 0>
	<TELL <GET .MSG 1> "]" CR>
	<RTRUE>>

That is, it cycles through three versions of the message:

>HOCUS POCUS
[The word “hocus” isn’t in the vocabulary that you can use.]

>HOCUS POCUS
[You don’t need to use the word “hocus” to complete this story.]

>HOCUS POCUS
[This story doesn’t recognize the word “hocus.”]

>HOCUS POCUS
[The word “hocus” isn’t in the vocabulary that you can use.]

I was going to use “ZORK” for my test case, but the game actually recognizes that:

>ZORK
[Sigh.]

@Draconis

But now something’s changed.

That it says “but you still can’t put your finger on” (emphasis added) just means that you’ve looked at the map before. The hasty squiggles you didn’t notice before is because you’ve been to places you hadn’t been to the last time you looked at the map.

It looks like you’ve also read the book more than once?

[eriktorbjorn (Torbjörn Andersson)]

One thing that surprised me the first time I was looking through the Trinity source code is that there are special cases in it for the Atari ST. One such case is when you leave the Kensington Gardens. On most computers:

“This way, please.”

You turn, but see no one.

“This way,” the voice urges. “Be quick.”

The space around you articulates. “No!” your mind shudders. “That’s not a direction!”

“It’s a perfectly legitimate direction,” retorts the voice with cold amusement. “Now come along.”

On an Atari ST:

This way, please.

You turn, but see no one.

This way, the voice urges. Be quick.

The space around you articulates. “No!” your mind shudders. “That’s not a direction!”

It’s a perfectly legitimate direction, retorts the voice with cold amusement. Now come along.

That is, instead of quotation marks for the mysterious voice, it prints the text in italics. Your own responses are still in quotation marks. At first I couldn’t understand why, but then I remembered a screenshot I saw once from the Atari ST version of Bureaucracy. I think it may be that the Atari ST interpreter was the only one that could actually print text in italics, while all (?) the others (even the Macintosh one) used underlined text instead.

I get the impression that of all the Infocom imps, Brian Moriarty was the one most obsessed with getting his games to not just play right [1], but also look right.

[1] Ironically, Trinity is one of the few Infocom games where I stumbled on a bug while playing it back in the day. Oh well.

[Angstsmurf (Petter Sjölund)]

@eriktorbjorn

I think it may be that the Atari ST interpreter was the only one that could actually print text in italics

I played this on an Atari ST (it was my first Infocom game) and I remember being very impressed with the italics. I had never seen that on a computer display before.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

@eriktorbjorn

It looks like you’ve also read the book more than once?

Oops, yep, I just didn’t notice the changed message for that one! (I looked at the book, remembered how it worked, did a sequence of actions that would make sure everything listed in the book was a command copied here for the Let’s Play, and looked at it again.) Let me check what the change is, and edit appropriately.

[blackmyron]

Some notes:
“All prams lead to Kensington Gardens” is a paraphrase from the first Barrie story with Peter Pan.
The ravens flying through the door are the ones from the Tower of London. Legend has it if they leave the tower, London is doomed.
You probably noted you came out of the “Omega” door to the fantasy land. You can probably guess what lies behind the “Alpha” door.
Note that you entered the realm in a baby carriage.

[Angstsmurf (Petter Sjölund)]

@blackmyron

“All prams lead to Kensington Gardens” is a paraphrase from the first Barrie story with Peter Pan.

In the book (The Little White Bird) it is “All perambulators lead to the Kensington Gardens.”

I wonder why the exact quote wasn’t used in the game. Was Moriarty quoting from memory?

[zarf (Andrew Plotkin)]

Trinity’s version makes a better echo of “All roads lead to Rome”, which is the quote I thought of when I first played it.

[Angstsmurf (Petter Sjölund)]

I’d guess that’s what Barrie is paraphrasing as well. Perhaps Moriarty just wanted a snappier version, but it’s an odd thing to do in a game which takes such an interest in quotes. You’d think that if it is deliberately misquoting, it would acknowledge this in some way.

[Draconis (Daniel Stelzer)]

I’ve returned home from vacation, and you know what that means: it’s time for more Trinity!

@blackmyron

The ravens flying through the door are the ones from the Tower of London. Legend has it if they leave the tower, London is doomed.

I didn’t know that at all—that’s a cool bit of lore!

@blackmyron

Note that you entered the realm in a baby carriage.

Not quite, unfortunately. The pram was wrecked when we took it across the grass, so we went the rest of the way on foot.

@eriktorbjorn

At first I couldn’t understand why, but then I remembered a screenshot I saw once from the Atari ST version of Bureaucracy. I think it may be that the Atari ST interpreter was the only one that could actually print text in italics, while all (?) the others (even the Macintosh one) used underlined text instead.

Huh! I should really make Bocfel claim to be an Atari to get the better typography…but unlike quotation marks, italics don’t get saved to the transcript, so I have to remember to go back and add them in manually. So probably better for the LP that it uses quotes.

@SomeOne2

What about the barrow? You can do it already, but still save beforehand…

Then that’ll be our next destination! I thought I needed to find some sort of protection before going in, but if not…

Let’s begin!

[SomeOne2 (Max Fog)]

@Draconis

I should really make Bocfel claim to be an Atari to get the better typography…

Frotz is great like that… It’s easy to do so.