Five complete games written in Zaytun. All of them are finished, all of them are free
software, and all of them are played entirely by reading and typing.
The Sundered Dawnstone
Genre: hand-authored adventure ·
Length: 38 rooms across six regions ·
Ending: one, with optional secrets
Eleven years ago a man called Malachar the Hollow walked up out of the sea caves, took
the Dawnstone out of the altar on the south shore, and broke it into three pieces over
his knee. Then he hid the pieces, climbed his tower, and sat down. He did not curse
anyone or raise an army. He simply removed the thing that made the mornings, and waited
for a whole country to get tired.
It has very nearly worked. You are not a knight, you have no sword and no plan, and you
hold the specific and dangerous conviction — shared by exactly one person in Emberfall —
that eleven years is long enough.
What is in it
Six regions: a village, woods, a coast, a barrow, a peak, and a tower.
Three dungeons and four bosses, each guarding one of the broken shards.
Six optional secrets that reward exploring rather than rushing.
Equipment, combat, and characters who react to what you are carrying.
A single canonical ending, earned by reforging what was broken.
Genre: roguelike ·
Length: ten floors, generated fresh each run ·
Ending: permadeath, and a score
Nobody sentences anyone to the Undergaol any more. There is no need. The doors have not
opened in four hundred years, and whatever is down there has had four hundred years to
sort itself into an order. You are going down anyway, for the Heart of the Gaol, which is
on floor ten.
This one is the counterweight to the others: no fixed map, no authored plot, and no way
back up. It exists to prove the language can generate a world at runtime rather than only
describe one written in advance — floors, chambers, monsters and loot are all rolled as
you go.
What is in it
Ten procedurally generated floors — every run is laid out differently.
Permadeath. Dying ends the run; restarting builds a new dungeon.
A bestiary whose monsters get harder as you descend, placed at runtime.
Loot, equipment and a limited healing flask — the pack is a resource.
Health that regenerates slowly, so retreating into cleared ground is a real tactic.
A score at the end, which is the whole point of going deeper.
Genre: story game ·
Length: 43 rooms, 24 scenes, 20 speaking characters ·
Endings: six
A retelling of the tale from Tolkien's Silmarillion. It starts before the love
story does: twelve outlaws on a moor in Dorthonion, an errand west that is the only
reason you survive the night, and an orc-company at Rivil's Well carrying your father's
ring on a cord. Then a mortal man crosses an enchanted border he should not have been
able to cross, falls in love with the daughter of a king, and is sent to fetch a jewel
out of the iron crown of the first and greatest of all evils — a price named by a father who thought he had found a way to say no that
cost him nothing, and who has in fact just doomed his kingdom.
The unusual thing mechanically is that singing is the weapon. Three times in the
story, a fight is not winnable and the only move on the board is to sing: against Sauron
on his island, in the pit afterwards, and in front of Morgoth's throne. It is one
author-defined verb whose meaning depends entirely on who is standing next to you.
What is in it
Eight parts, one source file each, from a moor in Dorthonion to the Halls of the Dead.
One act you fight your way through, and seven where a weapon is no use at all.
Three difficulties, chosen with difficulty and changeable at
any time. They alter how much of you there is and how thin the mercies are — never which
rooms, lines or endings you can reach.
Eighteen characters with real conversations — ask Huan about the prophecy.
Rooms written twice, for the road out and the road back.
A final fight you cannot win alone, and are not meant to.
Six endings. The tale cannot change — Finrod dies, the hand is taken — so what
varies is the verdict: how much of the road you understood, whether you reached for a
second jewel, and whether you got on the horse at the end.
Songs with names, learned from the people who know them, and a hint system
(remember) instead of the game telling you what to type.
topics tells you what a character will discuss — except for
the two subjects that exist to reward asking a good question unprompted.
Genre: story game ·
Length: 30 rooms across six worlds, 17 scenes, 10 speaking characters ·
Endings: two
The Norse end of the world, played as Víðarr, the silent son of Odin — one of the few who
is still standing when it is over. The gods know exactly what is coming and have known
for an age; nobody in this story is surprised, and they intend to be there anyway.
You walk out of Asgard into a Midgard three winters deep, down a nine-night road to the
shore of the dead, and onto a field a hundred leagues wide where every duel is a draw.
Then your father is swallowed by a wolf, and it is your turn.
The central mechanic comes straight out of the myth. Snorri writes that Víðarr's shoe is
made from every strip of leather anyone has ever trimmed off a shoe and thrown away — and
that this is why you should throw yours away, to help the gods. So the game scatters ten
such strips across the nine worlds, and you need seven of them worked into the shoe
by the time you are standing in front of Fenrir. Sword blows do effectively nothing to
him; the shoe is the answer, and a shoe that folds is a real ending.
What is in it
Six worlds, one source file each, from Asgard to the world that comes after.
A collection mechanic taken from the source material rather than invented.
A final enemy that cannot be beaten with a weapon, and says so.
Conversations with Odin, Loki, Hel, Heimdall and Frigg, among others.
Two endings: the one the myth has, and the one where you did not gather enough.
Elias Vale, seventy-one, parish historian, is found on the floor of his own archive with
one wound to the left temple and a brass candlestick beside his hand. A fall, says the
doctor. A threatening letter, says the drawer. Too tidy, says the only policeman in
Ashcombe, who sent for you.
Every major witness tells a different version of that night, and four of them are lying.
Two are lying about something that has nothing to do with the killing, and the game gives
you the means to prove it — because a mystery that punishes you for suspecting a liar is
not a mystery, it is a trick.
Underneath the murder is a mine that flooded in 1887, nineteen dead men, and a verdict
that blamed one of them because he could not answer back.
What is in it
An evidence system where clues break specific statements: present the day book
to the doctor and watch his account come apart.
A notebook and a timeline that contain only what you have established — the
game will not ask you a question you have not earned.
A nine-question final deduction, scored twice: was the answer right, and can you
support it?
Seven endings, including two that are wrong in instructive ways.
No combat. Observation, memory and argument are the whole of the game.
Every game above has a Play link. It opens the game in the browser player and starts
it. There is nothing to download, nothing to compile and no account, and nothing is
uploaded: the page fetches the compiled game and runs it on your own machine, and keeps
working with the network off once it has loaded.
Use Export save to copy a save out, and Import save to bring one back. A save
string carries the state of the random number generator as well as the world, so a seeded
game resumes exactly where it left off — and the same string works in the terminal player.
In a terminal
You need the compiler and the terminal player. The
downloads page has both, ready built, for Linux, Windows and
FreeBSD on 64-bit and 32-bit x86 and ARM. Then clone a game and compile it:
Compiling a game and playing it in a terminal.
git clone https://codeberg.org/zaytun-project/ragnarok
cd ragnarok
make # compiles the game
make play # plays it in the terminal
If you would rather build the toolchain from source, both repositories build with
make and need a C compiler and nothing else — see
getting started.
The commands
A few work in every game: movement — directions such as north,
in and down — plus look, examine,
wait, status, save, restore and
help.
Everything else depends on the game, and help lists exactly what this one
supports. It is not a fixed menu: the compiler works out what a game contains, so a
game with no combat does not offer attack, and a game with nothing to open
does not offer open. In practice you will meet take,
drop, inventory, use, read,
search, open, talk,
ask someone about something, attack and equip —
in the games that have something to use them on.
Games add verbs of their own on top, and help lists those too:
sing in Beren and Lúthien; cobble, listen and
mourn in Ragnarök; notebook, timeline,
present and accuse in The Last Witness. You never have to guess
what a particular game has added.