Mandragore

Mandragore is a role-playing game that was originally released in France. The kingdom was at peace under King Jorian. When he was killed in a freak accident that peace was shattered as Lord Yarod-Nor took control and began a reign of tyranny and evil. The player leads a party of four characters (with the option to either define your own characters or take a predefined group) through the land to eventually challenge, confront and defeat Yarod-Nor in his own castle. Before that can be done the group must explore nine chateaux each of which contains a problem and clues that are useful later in the game, battle assorted and unusual monsters, enter villages to trade, and develop your characters skills.

The four predefined characters are:

• Syrela: a human female minstrel,
• Podus: a male dwarf thief,
• Gelth: a male elf wizard, and
• Torlin: a male mi-orc ranger

Each character has values for the following attributes, constitution, strength, knowledge, wisdom, dexterity, and appearance. When creating your own characters there is a maximum of 80 points can be assigned to these attributes with none having more than 20 points or less than 5.

Character control is unusual and consists of abbreviated commands. The whole party moves as a single unit so to move North, South, East or West the player just has to type N, s, E, or W. When the party comes on an enemy the commands take the form

• character: each character in the party is referred to by a number in the range 1 - 4
• command: only the first two characters need to be typed
• target: objects and enemies are referred to by letter

So when a monster is encountered typing 3 will select Gelth, typing AT will command Gelth to ATtack, and typing A will instruct Gelth to attack the first target. When the party acquires weapons it is possible to extend the command to specify the weapon to be used.