Nice thinking!
There are actually four ways out of the cellar, although a given player may not yet have encountered some or all of the necessary items for three of them.
I suspect you’ll find the two methods you haven’t used yet to be obvious once you acquire the needed items.
“Get zombified and start over” is how we’d played every other Infocom game at that point. It didn’t seem like there was anything to get exercised about there.
The problem was that the randomized RPG elements of the game didn’t jibe with that (otherwise expected) Infocom experience.
I didn’t think starting over was as simple as it was in other games because of RNG. I wouldn’t have fun, but I could start over & get a KULCAD scroll (Enchanter) in 10-15 minutes. I don’t think BZ plays out the same. It was more of a hassle, IIRC. If you know you need to start over, anyway.
If it would have been a straight puzzle/exploration game, I would have liked it a lot. Alternately, I would have loved the game if all puzzles supported multiple build types (like Sierra’s Quest for Glory games). That would have been great. I just don’t think that was on the table at the time.
I am playing Reliques of Tolti-Aph concurrently with this one (incidentally I also like it!) and I stumbled across the following text:
There is a vast, booming series of reports, the inconsequential sound of these jackstraws of stone smashing down against each other…
It is a description of columns of stone falling down after being pushed. Quite a coincidence considering how the two games are gameplay-related! (Or is it?)
So tines, ere, and report carry almost the whole meaning of the riddle.
I first played this game as a teenager circa 1988, and I remember solving this.
When I started playing, I ended up exploring the the pub first, but I soon gave up there. Next I headed northeast and came upon the riddle. My first answer was correct, and took only a few minutes.
Tines are the separate points of a fork. It’s not archaic at all, but how often is that something you talk about? I don’t even know if there is such a word in any other language.
Ere means “before”, and is nowadays used only in poetry, for the sake of meter.
Report when used for a sound usually refers to the bang of a gun. This also has an old-fashioned or jargon feel to it, which I think was primed by the tone of the riddle.
I found the other riddle in this game much more difficult.
Are you sure about the compassion? I haven’t played the game in years, but I looked at the source code and as far as I can tell…
…you need at least 46 compassion to survive the endgame. You should start out with at least 1, and you gain 15 each for saving the baby hungus, releasing the unicorn, and hiding the minx tracks. You will lose 1 compassion if the minx sees you eating the chocolate truffle, though, but if you don’t do that, you should end up with enough compassion at the end.
It’s Zinke (singular) in German and I guess there are a lot of Germans who don’t know that term. I wouldn’t have understood ere and tine, and I definitely wouldn’t have guessed the second meaning of report!
But if it is solvable with the paper manual, it was an intentional kind of copy protection?
Beyond Zork has an extraordinary level of manual-based copy protection for an Infocom game. Many actions you wouldn’t think to try are clued by information in the manual. But the riddle doesn’t go in that category.
There’s nothing about the riddle in the printed manual. The manual copy-protection stuff is mostly monster weaknesses – you have to look up a monster to figure out how to defeat it.
I just skimmed my copy (a PDF that came with Classic Text Adventure Masterpieces of Infocom) and counted 15 bits that I consider actual puzzle hints, only 6 of which are how to defeat monsters.
Amusingly, it includes this (OCR?) error: “Minxes are highly prized for their ability to find and root out chocolate truces from the ground…”
I was looking at http://infodoc.plover.net/manuals/beyondzo.pdf , and yes, it’s an OCR error.
Feel free to explain how you would categorize the rest. :)
(Herb lore, I suppose.)
Yeah, there are four of those. Several others are about monsters, but not about defeating them. I guess three of them are all you need to know about chocolate truffles. The others resist categorization.
I can back this up. When I played ZZ after my Apple was gone and I’d discovered the magic of WinFrotz(?) and Z5 files, I actually thought “I bet they wouldn’t kill us just for not having high enough compassion. That would be really mean! The implementors are so smart, I bet I thought of that. So I’ll be sneaky and drop that stat to 1.”
This gamble really paid off–it made early fights easier. There’s another trick, too, that a lot of attributes are boosted by floor(99-x)/10. (89, maybe.) So if you start a boostable attribute with 19 or 20, the next boost puts both at the same. So you can chisel a bit there to maximize total stat points! Although those might not be what is best to maximize.
The flip side is, putting that attribute at 11 along with the others (“why not make a balanced character?”) is a serious waste, since there are only 3 places where you can boost it by 15. I wouldn’t be surprised if most players started, got frustrated with early fights, and said “What the heck, let’s boost fighting stats” and then poured all their points into strength and dexterity.
I think there’s also a possibility you can attack the baby hungus to lose compassion.
Do you mean this one?
Never ahead, ever behind
yet flying swiftly past;
for a child, I last forever,
but for adults, I’m gone too fast.
If so, it’s quite interesting how our experiences of these two riddles are almost diametrically opposed! I knew the answer to this immediately, only struggling a bit in order to find the right synonym. In fact I remembered your comment and thought it was so easy that it must be some kind of “gotcha!” (it wasn’t). It’s really cool to hear so many different experiences while playing these games for the first time.
P.S. The answer is youth.