Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus

This is the author's first parser game, but lacks many of the bugs and rough edges that first games tend to have. I don't recall running into any errors during gameplay.

In this game, you're a warrior/poet who is visiting a coastal desert city. You have to sell your camel and find out where your enemy has fled, a professor with something called the mantablasphere.

The game has combat, with different items you can equip. Unlike some recent combat RPG games I've played recently that were extremely difficult with almost no room for error and few opportunities to heal, the combat in this game was fairly mild but still interesting, with a few opponents and multiple opportunities to heal. You can fight with weapons or use poetry to hurt others (this functions as a weapon but with humorous descriptions of the fight).

The world felt really big at first, but once I explored I saw it was manageable. The map accompanying the game helped. A couple of times I got stuck because I did examine room descriptions and people carefully enough.

The game ends before anything super exciting happens. And the world seems a fairly generic representative of fantasy. It varies from goofy (like having food named after tv and movie creatures like the mogwai) to serious (a guard asks you to report crimes for money). Creatures like goblins and elves inhabit the world without any real exploration of what their presence means. An inn is just an inn; a castle just a castle; a merchant is just a merchant; a church is just a reason to have a cemetery; pirates and thieves work together but there's no hint of why or their purpose. Each part of the game locally makes sense and work, but if you step back globally it's hard to see a bigger picture.

Because of the smooth programming, I'm glad I played the game. For the next installment, it would be fun to see more of what makes this world unique.

game map

A promising start! The premise here is that you are a student warrior poet, about to embark on a career of adventuring; however, just before graduation, your advisor steals a precious artefact and flees, so naturally you’re tasked with tracking him down to earn your degree. This game, the first of what I hope will be many instalments, takes place in the port city you’ve followed him to. Explore the city, talk to its inhabitants, discover the professor’s next destination, and secure passage to pursue him further.

The highlight for me was the writing and the characters. The locations are interesting and varied, with engaging descriptions that capture the dynamic vibe of a bustling city and market, which makes exploration is enjoyable even when there isn’t much you can do yet in a particular place.

The game is generally really responsive to what you know and what you’ve seen. Conversations with NPCs use the TALK TO command and are of the type where, instead of picking a topic, the conversation simply happens based on your knowledge; if you’ve encountered relevant information you automatically share it. This is nice as it makes the interactions feel more natural and integrated into the narrative, and the author’s good at writing interesting dialogue. However, sometimes this system works a bit too smoothly, because my character is making connections before I do. For example, I talked to one character simply because they were there, and the character immediately goes oh I see you have something I need, can I trade it from you? – even though I hadn’t yet realised that was what I needed to do!

Many puzzles here are narrative and conversation-based and follow that pattern: you do something or find a clue, figure out who to approach with that information, and hopefully gain more clues in the ensuing conversation. The progression is generally smooth and satisfying once you’re on the right track; however, one minor complaint is that the system feels somewhat rigid. There’s essentially one main chain of conversations that drives the plot forward, which you start by finding a specific clue. Talking to people before getting that the info to prompt the relevant conversations usually doesn’t work, and I spent some time aimlessly wandering around until I looked at the walkthrough and realised I hadn’t examine something thoroughly enough. This is a downside of the otherwise good conversation system, you can’t just go to the inn or the docks and ask if anyone has seen someone matching the professor’s description, as one might expect.

To mix things up here’s also a combat system that I found pretty fun. It’s simple to control – choose to attack with either a weapon or poetry magic and hope for a good roll. There are opportunities to increase your ability scores and acquire better weapons and armour, but the combat encounters feel fairly manageable even with the starting equipment. As a result, getting better weapons feels less about immediate necessity and more like preparing for the next stage of the adventure.

Overall, a very well put together experience, I’m very much looking forward to future installments.

Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus (aka Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus, Part 1: The City of Dol Bannath) is an RPG fantasy game that follows the journey of a warrior poet (not poet warrior, mind you) who has embarked on a task…

…a task they received because no one else wanted to find someone more suitable do it. Both capable and perhaps a little out of their league, they face their journey head-on, or else they won’t officially graduate from the College of Myth and Legend.

The city of Dol Bannath is where their journey begins.

Gameplay
About this task. The overarching objective of Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus is to hunt down someone named Professor Zylock who stole an important poetry artifact. We don’t get anywhere near to achieving this since this is only Part I of a larger game.

Instead, the game’s objective is for the player to (Spoiler - click to show)seek passage to the Island of Attar, though this isn’t clear until you’ve spoken to the cleric about the tombstone descriptions. After that, the gameplay boils down to acquiring an amulet from a goblin by doing her a favor so you can afford a spot on a ship.

Ultimately, gameplay consists of buying and/or selling items to maximize your stats to prepare for fight sequences. With just under two dozen locations, there is plenty to explore.

Also: The game needs to make (Spoiler - click to show)Chantal more obvious in the room descriptions, especially at the Oasis. There is a lot of text for that location, and you only see her by examining an ornament for sale. To make things worse, my hamster brain naturally read “talk to goblin” on the walkthrough as “talk to the elf shopkeeper,” in the game, initially leaving me unable to make further progress. Fortunately, I figured it out.

RPG elements
There is a neat RPG system in the game, featuring armor for defense, weapons for physical attacks, and relics that enhance the strength of your Rhymes.

Some may be skeptical at the idea of fighting fire with poetry, but I think the concept of a warrior poet is clever and a nice change of pace. Rather than the player choosing between character classes of a scholarly poet or a skillful warrior, why not combine both?

However, I hope the author refines the game’s implementation of poetry because I often had a hard time taking it seriously. For instance:

When your words come, thunder cracks, the sky opens up, and a fount of terrible beauty expels from your lips like magma from the earth -- like wildfire -- like death! You cry out:

"This little piggy went to the market..."

Yes… Mortals will tremble at the mere mention of This Little Piggy!

Annihilating someone through the power of poetry has the potential of being an awesome moment, but that won’t happen when the protagonist is throwing out Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Also, it’s hard not to win. Within three moves I beat my opponents.

Tone
I have a hard time identifying whether the game is trying to be a silly game or an epic fantasy game filled with danger and strategic thinking.

When it comes to using poetry in combat, I envisioned it being taken seriously in the game’s world. Just how the characters in Counterfeit Monkey, a wordplay game, accept word manipulation as an established fact, I thought the characters in Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus would universally acknowledge that spoken words, like poetry, could have a tangible effect on the physical world.

And the characters (or at least some) in Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus do acknowledge the power of poetry, but when it’s Mary Had a Little Lamb… How serious is it?

I will say, while Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus is not a wordplay game, the description on the tombstone in the cemetery reminded me of the implementation of language in the world of Counterfeit Monkey.

Ozul, born almost 600 years ago in 1023, is a famed hero, whose Rhymes were instrumental in the War of Antiphocles that resulted in the independence of Mourdrascus.

Compare with the description for Counterfeit Monkey:

Anglophone Atlantis has been an independent nation since an April day in 1822, when a well-aimed shot from their depluralizing cannon reduced the British colonizing fleet to one ship.

In both cases, language can be wielded in powerful ways. Of course, Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus is still in development.

Story
I quite liked the story, even if it’s mostly inaccessible for the player. The protagonist’s determination and enthusiasm for their studies made their pursuit of the task compelling.

You, a warrior poet, came from a place called Mourdrascus where you pursued your studies in the Department of Poetry and War at the College of Myth and Legend (what a wordy sentence). However, interest in the department has declined. Administration is considering discontinuing it altogether. And this frustration is felt all too often in real life.

When Professor Zylock, head of the department, nabs the Mantablasphere, a valuable poetry artifact, and flees, your chance of graduating is jeopardized. The Academic Tribunal doesn’t care enough to formally chase him down. Instead, they send you, a go-getter student, on a quest to apprehend their rogue colleague.

Looking past the cheesy poems, a highlight of the game was the writing because it gives the impression that the author wants to offer the player a scenic gameplay experience in a fanciful city on top of their main objective of tracking down the treacherous teacher (alliteration!). Like when we get a room at the inn.

Your stay includes a breakfast of mogwai eggs baked in a tortoise shell with tengo root, grilled asobi fish, a side of tremor fruit, and hot black coffee, all delivered on a tray to your room in the morning by a smiling attendant. You consume the meal heartily. After finishing, you take up your pack, leave the room and lock the door behind you.

Five pieces of gold well spent. More exploring awaits!

Oddly enough, the game can also be sparse in implementation. On one hand, the game’s locations are dynamic in detail. On the other, it uses default parser responses for basic actions. Examining yourself only gets, “As good-looking as ever.”

Despite the unevenness, there is something pleasantly atmospheric about the gameplay. I genuinely wanted to visit every establishment and see what was for sale even if I could only afford one or two items.

Characters
I was shocked to discover that our protagonist is rather arrogant… and kind of a jerk. I was imagining a humbled, disciplined, warrior + poet, but instead? We get:

And as if that were not enough, you say, "The cove was crawling with dangerous pirates, but they were no match for my destructive Poetry and the lethal sharpness of my blade."

Okay, hotshot.

To be fair, the protagonist is not usually a jerk. But when they are, it makes you think who is this guy? It seems like I seriously misread them which can be off-putting.

Final thoughts
Warrior Poet of Mourdrascus is a creative fantasy RPG that promises a grand story of hunting down a runaway professor and poetry artifact. However, for it to truly shine, the implementation needs to be refined so the player has more direction of what to do. Ensuring that detail is evenly distributed throughout the gameplay would also help.

As standalone work, it’s a dead end since we never come close apprehending Professor Zylock. Fortunately, the game is merely Part I of a larger narrative, a narrative I look forward to playing in the future.

Seriously, though:

"Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet..."

Please do something about this.