Welcome to the Fifth Praser Maze, a product of Sadistic Software (on the Beat-Your-Nose Tour.) The Maze was designed, written, ported to the Web, and then ported again to Z-code by Andrew Plotkin (erkyrath@eblong.com).
The Rules:
Wander around. Puzzles will be posed. Eventually you win.
Philosophy:
Some games make their puzzles too dense, by packing too many puzzles into the same sets of clues. Some make theirs too sparse, by putting in too many red herrings. I have tried to achieve a balance, by doing both.
Playing the Game:
Type one of the highlighted words to go in a direction, examine an object, or talk to a creature. You do not need to use Adventure-style commands like "take sword" or "read parchment". A single word will work.
Type a creature's name to begin speaking to it. (Merely naming its species is rarely sufficient!) Creatures often ask questions, or pose riddles. When you are speaking to a creature, you will see a double ">>" prompt. You can then type a word or phrase to try to answer the riddle. If you are correct, you will be rewarded.
(You can still move in directions, and examine objects, at the ">>" prompt.)
Special commands:
- void will always return you to the starting location.
- look or l: look at the location again.
- about and credits: show this message, and the game's credits.
- save and restore: save your position to a file, and restore it.
- quit or q: end the game.
Free hint:
Don't make assumptions about what you're being asked.
Acknowledgements:
- My thanks to Wean Hall; floors 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, and especially the stairwell behind the elevators, for their help in letting me pace around for hours at a time.
- Thanks to the cork bulletin board strip outside the Wean clusters, for letting me pound my head against it repeatedly when I found that goddamn extra semicolon.
- Also thanks to Mxyzptlk Dimensional Constructors for the use of the Astral Plane and environs, for the game's locale.
More seriously, PRASER 5 owes its entire inspiration to Cliff Johnson and The Fool's Errand. (I later went on to write a Fool pastiche called System's Twilight. I stole a puzzle out of PRASER 5 to put in it, too.)
The structure of the planes (and the Plane of Structure) were snitched from Roger Zelazny's The Changing Land -- a novel which still contains the best description of spell-hacking ever written in fantasy.
History:
I designed PRASER 5 in 1989, in the form of a set of directories and files on a CMU fileserver. Listing the directories showed the room descriptions; reading the files displayed objects and showed clues. Some directories contained a binary you could run to answer a riddle. A correct answer got you access to the next directory. (Or rather, a correct answer dropped a message in my email, and then I would add you to the appropriate ACL.)
This was a hassle to maintain, so in 1994, I redesigned the game for the excessively new and hip medium of the World Wide Web. I wrote a custom web server -- this was after CGI, but either I couldn't get permission to run CGI scripts or I didn't want to bother -- anyway, I wrote a custom server that displayed rooms as Web pages and accepted answers as forms. (The introductory text made this clear, since forms were still an ill-supported extension to HTML.)
I left CMU in 1995, and the Praser server went down. I resurrected it in 1997, but that job didn't last too long either. The game has languished in the dark since then.
Now, behold. An all-new implementation for Z-code. (And recompiling the web code was an experience. Was I really still using K&R C prototypes in 1994? No, I must have imported some code from the 1989 version without ever updating it.)