Old School Computer DnD Pedit 5

Just finished reading Playing at the World by Was a little miffed that he missed crediting the pedit5 PLATO program which my buddy Rusty Rutheford at University of Illinois wrote, and only mentions the PLATO DnD program (which sounds very much like pedit5) being observed by an anonymous source at Cornell instead. However that is price one pays for not writing stuff down. When I voiced my complaint on the blog of holding, I was surprised when the author of the book responded in person. He suggested an alternate book "Dungeons and Desktops" which might have more details, unfortunately in it pedit5 is dismissed as ephemeral and not well documented. However, after the publication of that book "Rusty" sent an email to author which is reproduced here

I actually played pedit5 a lot in fall of 1975 before being subverted to the face to face version of DnD. It played a lot like the much more modern Dungeon Hack with a single player wandering the dungeon facing a series of random monsters with random treasures.  PLATO has has a long  but ambiguous history with gaming. Being one of the first interactive terminal computers and having networking capability across the many University campuses, it foreshadowed many multiplayer online games we are familiar with today. It also had the  ability to allow one to generate ones own fonts, which Rusty used in pedit5 by creating line art enclosing parts of a square to generate a top down view, as well as the sprites for the monsters. Those who are looking for more graphical representation have only to look at the thin wall 20x20, 30x30, and 20x20 with a 10x10' extension rooms in my old school dungeon which was influenced by the style of pedit5. However, the academics at the University who had created PLATO as an Educational tool highly frowned on its use for games (I had to use it for freshman physics homework, dull as dishwater).   Being 17 and on PLATO at the time I am well aware of the furtive nature of playing games on “Play-Toy”. About the time they gave me the boot for hijacking my fathers account I decided to quit wasting time on computer games and become an engineer instead.

Was in the same Boy Scout troop with Rusty’s sons and played DnD, Runequest, and Empire of the petal throne with him many times. Unfortunately the University of Illinois Conflict Simulation Society was not big on writing news letters (Some of members are still running Winter War an annual convention dating back from that time, although the club has been disbanded, most likely due the lack of a student to act as president, a role I fulfilled while attending graduate school at the University of Illinois in the mid 1980's), so the only documents I have from those times are a few issues of the Wurm Walder, the news letter of the local SCA chapter. I do remember playing many interesting variants of DnD (It seemed every DM I played with had his own rules). I suspect most of those are lost in the depths of time. And no I don't know "Rusty" actual first name, everyone just called him "Rusty" or in my case dependant on the situation Mr. Rutheford.

P.S. Here a link showing actual game play of pedit5 which is still playable on the cyber1 PLATO emulator here Someone with access could try cryo2 and see if my buddies magic fountain game (I loaned him the file space) is still there too!

Selandia, it's back!

Loyal readers will remember a post a year or so back about a french website which I had to take the link down because the spyware checker listed it as a "know bad website". Well the french have rebuild their website and this time it checks out clean. Here's a couple samples.

Although the bulk of the site seems to be by Partrick Janniaud (iparcoss) thre are some leads for work from the missing Pascal Furland (Faeriss). A few adventures with his name in the credits, although the Simlaracco overblog link remains as dead as a doornail.

Summer of Kickstarters update

O.K. so its November, so I thought I'd post a little update on the kickstarters I signed up for this Summer.
I signed up for three: Dungeon-a-Day, Rappan Attuk, and Midgard Besitiary 4e. I am mostly complete on the first two. For Midgard I am still waiting for the print edition (Although Wolfgang has upgraded it to color and promises it will be worth the wait), I have the .pdf so I am happy.

Dungeon-a-Day took from August until October to get me a password for a a web site that already exists (not exactly stellar performance), but the site has over four complete dungeons as well as all the Super Genius stuff Hyram is selling on drivethruRPG (including one on my wishlist) so I won't complain too loud.

Rappan Attuk after a bumpy start (needed to fill out two survey forms, I was worried I missed the deadline for the credits but I am in there) went relatively smoothly. Giving out .pdfs in advance of the print helps to keep my waiting anxiety under control. I have everything,  but the subscription levels, and am pleased with most of it (although now that I am used to color battle maps,the black and white ones seem a bit flat). The secret level was cooler in concept than execution, I like the idea of a level the party can't talk about because every evil cultist in the world will try to torture the information out of them, but the level itself is kind of small and the monsters didn't catch my fancy. I do have to find a hole in my bookcases large enough to stuff the massive tome that is the main dungeon into, so maybe I'd have been better off with the print edition. There are certainly enough extra levels to warrant having purchased Rappan Attuk for the third time, and all the extra levels and sub-levels definitely push it up from the lightweight megadugeon to one of the all time heavy weights. The Cyclopedean depths holds its own with the other published underdarks of the world (although the Greyhawk fan mash-up from TSR modules is still the all-time champion[see also Dragonsfoot forum on the mash-up]). Not so fond of the plain brown wrapper covers for either module though.