Adventure of the Week - Martec's Tomb (1981?)

This week, we finally get around to wrapping up Brian Nash's Pharaoh trilogy, playing the third game in the series, Martec's Tomb, following Pharaoh and White Palm.  As noted previously, evidence suggests that these games were all loosely based on a trilogy of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons modules by Tracy and Laura Hickman, with this game inspired by the third module, The Lost Tomb of Martek.

The available TRS-80 Model I BASIC source contains an encoded title screen, which unfortunately is corrupted in the copy I found online:

But the game remains playable.  This one suffers from the same design and technical issues as the earlier games, and can be finished very quickly by taking advantage of a certain bug.  But we'll play it straight for this discussion.  If you plan to play yourself, I advise you to do so now before proceeding, as there are certain...

**** SPOILERS AHEAD! ****

As in the case of White Palm, Martec's Tomb has no direct way to collect data about the player's performance in the previous games, so it starts out with a few questions concerning whether we obtained the Glass Hammer from White Palm and the (oddly portable) Normal Water from Pharaoh.  We can easily lie to make sure we're prepared -- Y is the correct answer to both questions -- and the game carries over the Star and Gem from White Palm automatically.

The setting this time around is pleasantly fanciful, if a little arbitrary.  Early on, we find ourselves at the edge of a sea of glass, and can SAIL CLOUDSKATE to reach an oasis.  In a nearby area, HIT PILLAR causes us to teleport to a room with a LARGE STONE DIAS; I think it's supposed to be a DAIS.

Young Mr. Nash's writing has improved a bit, with more evocative language, though spelling and grammatical errors abound and the vocabulary still sounds a bit strained at times.  For example, READ SLAB in the jungle hints at some confusion between height and age:

IT SAY'S 'IF YOU STRAY FROM THE PATH WATCH THE WRATH AS THE IRON BIRD SOARS FROM IT'S SENIORITY, YOU WILL BE ENTERING THE DOORS OF ETERNITY!'

SEARCH doesn't ever come up with much in this game, but there's a lot of DIGging to do -- we get some moist dirt in the jungle, and find a raft and oars in the desert, useful for crossing a large lake to the east of the dais.

Bugs abound in all three games; as in the others, we can cause any known object to materialize out of thin air by simply DROPping it where we stand.  In this one, we can't GET CLOUDSKATE on one side of the sea of glass -- the game tells us IT'S TO BIG SO LIFT!, which apparently means it's too big to lift, but we can readily do so on the other side.  And if we try to SAIL CLOUDSKATE at the lake, the game responds YOU SAIL AWAY ON THE CLOUDSKATE, followed immediately by I CAN'T SAIL THAT!   And there's an irritating parser inconsistency here -- we can't SAIL RAFT to cross the lake, but have to SAIL LAKE, and can only do so when we're on the shore, not in the water next to the raft.

I found a clearing with a stone doorway presenting slots the size of gems, and initially thought that I had to PUT GEM twice as well as PUT STAR, as the sequence PUT GEM / DROP GEM / PUT GEM / PUT STAR satisfied all three conditions for the puzzle.  But I eventually realized that there must be a third gem, because what was happening is that I was simply invoking the DROP bug and gaining a different one.  In fact, the process I tried first inadvertently acquired THE MARTEC JEWEL; apparently both the gem and the jewel are referred to as GEM.  We can RUB JEWEL to produce light, although its value as marginal, as the dark, damp forest rooms don't contain anything that needs to be illuminated once we've found our way through the area.


The poetic clue found earlier is apparently meant to be a warning -- if we stray from a particular path, that is, by not using the FOLLOW PATH command, then the game announces: 

THE BIRD SOARS DOWN AND KILLS ME! NEXT TIME FOLLOW THE PATH!

The bird, or perhaps birds, causes some confusion -- we can GET BIRD in one room, but have to stand on a circle to get it, automatically falling down into a circular room.  This action seems to create an exit going UP from the acid pool room to the circular room, from which point we can go UP again to... the acid room.  I suspect this action was actually supposed to enable a DOWN exit.

At this point, the BIRD still SOARS DOWN AND KILLS ME! in the other location, even if we're already carrying it -- the expected action is to FREE BIRD once we've reached the circular room.


The designer occasionally gives himself away with a hint that clearly comes from outside the game context.  If we RUB STAR outside of the expected confrontation, the game responds, A LIGHNING [sic] BOLT COMES OUT!  NOT HERE WAIT!

Once we're past the doorway with the three gem slots, there seems to be no way to go back.  We need to PLANT TREE after freeing the bird, and to do so we need to be carrying the plant, shovel, SOME NORMAL WATER left over from the first game in the trilogy, and dirt. It becomes a TALL TREE, and due to the way the map is implemented, even if we pick the tree up and carry it elsewhere, it leaves a new exit in this location, going UP to a hexagonal room.

We finally get to make use of the password CLOUDSKATE mentioned in White Palm in this game, opening the way from the hexagonal room to a set of four dioramas (why four and not six remains a mystery.)  By GETting each one of the dioramas in turn, e.g. GET 1DIORAMA, we are warped to areas with new puzzles, as follows:

1 -- Large room - GET 1MINARET yields IT SECURED MAGICLY! until we have destroyed the Timelord in another room.

2 -- A THREE WALLED COLLAPSING BUILDING, with statues that are reported as having holes the size of gems in them.  We can't PUT any of the gems here, though, and GO STATUE puts us on a small island floating above a great abyss, from which we cannot easily return.  So does moving S, it seems, so this appears to be a bug, with GO STATUE interpreted as S, probably related to the way that GO ISLAND evaluates as though we had typed INVENTORY.

3 -- A spinning room with a CRYSTAL GIRL and HIDEOUS MONSTER. We can RUB GEM or THROW SPEAR to kill it, rescuing the girl in rather undramatic fashion; the girl is apparently unremarkable, and we even have to accost her to GET GIRL and obtain our reward:

4 -- Doesn't seem to do anything of interest; perhaps time or ideas ran out.

We have to retrieve four numbered minarets and place them in a room -- if we try to PUT [N]MINARET and we don't actually have that one, the game responds OKAY IT'S DONE... but it isn't, actually.

Once we have all 4 minarets in place, we teleport to THE ENTRANCE TO MARTEC'S TOMB and can explore the area a bit.  But the only useful thing we can do is go E to the BURIAL ROOM, where we discover to our confusion that 3 STATUES FORM AN ALTER AROUND HIS ALTER.  It turns out that these are actually the aforementioned statues with holes the size of gems in them, and that the description was inappropriately displayed as a LOOK STATUE response in the other room with statues that are in the description but not actually there.  All we have to do at this point is put the three gems in the statues and the game is over:

Our the best!

Martec's Tomb is more involved than the others in Brian Nash's Pharaoh trilogy, certainly, but it's still relatively easy to solve.  As I have not found any such documentation elsewhere, I'm including a full walkthrough below the fold.  With this bit of housekeeping out of the way, I'm happy to inform you that next week, the Great Scott Project resumes...


WALKTHROUGH:



W
SAIL CLOUDSKATE
GET SHOVEL
SAIL CLOUDSKATE
E
DIG
GET RAFT
GET OARS
W
SAIL CLOUDSKATE
HIT PILLAR
SEARCH DIAS
GET JEWEL
S
DIG
GET DIRT
N
E
RUB JEWEL
E
D
GET LANTERN
U
SAIL LAKE
PUT JEWEL
PUT GEM
PUT STAR
E
E
E
FOLLOW PATH
GET BIRD
FREE BIRD
S
PLANT TREE
U
SAY CLOUDSKATE
S
W
GET 1DIORAMA
E
S
W
U
E
RUB GEM
GET CURTAINS (? - get long spear)
W
D
E
N
W
GET 1MINARET
GET 1DIORAMA
S
GET 2DIORAMA
S
S
E
RIDE ROCK
GET 2MINARET
RIDE ROCK
E
E
N
GET 3DIORAMA
RUB STAR
SEARCH MONSTER
GET 4MINARET
GET GIRL
S
E
N
W
N
PUT 1MINARET
PUT 2MINARET
PUT 3MINARET
PUT 4MINARET
E
PUT GEM
PUT STAR
PUT JEWEL