Dungeon Campaign

Dungeon Campaign is a top-down dungeon crawler written for the Apple II by Robert Clardy in 1987. This is another original CRPG only influenced by the Dragon Maze code example that came with the Apple II and the Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game.

To modern eyes the most interesting feature of Dungeon Campaign is it’s hit point system. Instead of controlling a single character you control a party of different adventures and together they form your hitpoints.

Dungeon campaign is a game of high adventure wherein the player directs an expeditionary force as it ventures into an underground labyrinth.

Dungeon Campaign looks a little like Rogue but, like Beneath Apple Manor, predates it.

Gameplay Video

Setting

The rule book lays out a fairly standard Dungeon delving setup.

Dungeon Campaign is an adventure in which a group of intrepid warriors undertake to explore the dreaded Totmacher (Death Maker in German) Castle dungeons in search of treasure. The ancient and evil subterranean labyrinth is said to be full of gold, jewels, and priceless magical devices. The dungeons also contain a deadly variety of hazards, pit traps, malignant sorcerors, and vicious monsters, all with a single minded determination to destroy any intruders. The explorers must penetrate this dangerous multi-level maze and survive its dangers while getting as much of its treasures as possible.

Goal

The goal is to escape the dungeon and to do this you must get to the fourth level and find the exit.

Thematically this is a change from retrieving an item but it’s also interesting in what it suggests about the structure of the dungeon. If the exit is 4 floors down, are you coming out the bottom of a mountain?

Health System

Dungeon campaign’s unique feature is that you are controlling a party of 15 characters.

The exploratory party that you command is made up of thirteen people, one elf, and one dwarf. The dwarf, with his familiarity with caves and mines is your map maker. If he dies in battle, your map will no longer be added to. The elf has the ability to sense certain of the dungeon’s hazards and give you warnings. If he dies, these warnings cease. The rest of your party’s members are warriors.

Interestingly your party isn’t homogenous there are two special party members, the elf and dwarf, who’s deaths remove abilities from the user. Without the dwarf the map stops updating and without the elf you get no forewarning about traps and enemies.

The rest of the party is cannon fodder and to lose one of the “warrior” party members is equivalent to losing a hitpoint but it also reduces the parties strength stat, used in combat.

Exploration

The game consists of a dungeon, four levels deep. Each level is randomly generated. The game draws the level as it generates it, before hiding the details and only revealing the tiles as the player walks by them. This is straight from Dragon Maze, the example Apple II program also draws a randomly generated maze before hiding it.

There are no rooms in the randomly generated dungeons, they are mazes of corridors. This is also very similar to the Dragon Maze example program and possibly uses the same generation code.

The R, L, U, D keys move the character right, left, up and down respectively. These controls are the same as in Dragon Maze but Dungeon Campaign adds an additional jump control to pass through hazards with J.

You can search by using the S key to find treasure and gold. Treasure doesn’t have an in-game use but rather acts as a high-score.

There are staircases but you may also be transported to other levels by events such as encountering a necromancer or group of “pteridactyls” (sic) that transport you to another location.

Combat

As you wander the corridors of the the dungeon you occasionally come across monsters that appear as colored blocks. If you walk into the block you start a fight, otherwise you can walk away to avoid them.

The bottom quarter of the screen is left blank and text is written here describing what’s happening or asking the player to make a decision. This is precursor to the activity log in later RPGs. These 4 lines of text at the bottom of the screen are common to many Apple II games because of the design of graphics API (for a generous interpretation of API!).

If you begin combat the game starts to scroll numbers in the “activity log” text area. The numbers scroll from the top to the bottom of the screen. You can press the Space key at anytime to stop the numbers and choose the most recently generated one. Giving the player some agency over choosing the number has some similarity with a player rolling a die in a table-top game.

Interestingly you also get to roll for the enemy. The rolls determine if you hit and if you do how much for. Blows are traded until you or the enemy dies.

Special Monsters

In addition to the monsters you encounter wandering around, some levels have special monsters.

Most monsters stay in the same position but some move. In the early levels you may find a dragon the pursues you and can be killed if you happen to have a magic weapon. On lower levels there is a serpent that pursues you can cannot be kiiled. If these creatures catch you, they will take one of your party.

The forth has the spectre, a ghost that appears after you’ve been exploring for a short time. In appearance it’s a grey blob spread over a few tiles. It heads towards the party passing straight through walls. When it touches the party, it takes a character, which is done with a nice little animation and the spectre dissapears off-screen. The Spectre cannot be defeated.

Equipment

There’s no real equipment system but you can find a map, magic carpet, invisibilty potion and magic weapon.

The map reveals more of current level. The carpet is activated by pressing F to start flying then F again to stop. While on the carpet the party is randomly flown about the level. The potion lets you become invisible by drinking it using the I key.

This equipment doesn’t really match the idea of a band of 15 adventures - they all fit on the carpet? But it adds some variety to the ways the player can interact with the game.

Progression

Fighting monsters increases your strength which increases your attack. That and finding equipment is pretty much all there is to the progression.

Legacy

Clardy went on to build on Dungeon Campaign by creating a second game called Wilderness Campaign and later games including “Odyssey: The Compleat Apventure” and “Apventure to Atlantis”.

The unkillable “boss” monsters with special behaviors were an innovation. As was the party-based hitpoint system and removing abilities on the death of certain party members. It’s also quite short which makes it easy to complete and, for games of the time, that’s an unusual concession to the experience of the end user.