Curse of Eldor, The
Stuart Allen 1996
- Language:
- English
- Authors:
- Stuart Allen
- Systems:
- JACL
- Platforms:
- JACL
- Genres:
- Fantasy, misc., IF Comp 1996
- Entered by:
- iamaran, Mr Creosote, Strident
- Added:
- 27-11-2010
- Edited:
- 11-09-2026
Synopsis
"Who can save us now?!" the chief councillor cries as he peers at the frightened, fire lit faces that fill the village's hall. For twenty days now the black rain has fallen, slowly killing the forest and threatening the lively hood of all those who inhabit it. Stepping carefully around a large stone pillar near the back of the hall you slowly make your way to the front of the crowd.
"Unless someone can defeat Eldor and recover the artefacts necessary to lift the curse we will have no choice but to leave our home land forever," the councillor continues pulling his hood back from his grim face. "Who will be that someone?"
Pausing for a while, the councillor pulls a leather pouch from his pocket and holds them up for all to see, "Who ever can return Eldor's head to me along with the artefacts we need to lift the curse shall receive these coins as their reward. It is not much, but the best we can do. May your journey be safe and our village soon be free to live in peace once more."
Notes
21st place (out of 26) in the Second Annual Interactive Fiction Competition.
Resources (Upload file)
- Solution
- by Mr Creosote
- Further Info:
[+] Users who have solved this game
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[+] Users currently playing this game
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From Carl Muckenhoupt:
"Standard fantasy scenario: fetch artifacts to lift curse on kingdom. Tolerable prose, good sense of expanse. Unplayably buggy under both DOS and Linux: save/restore doesn't work under Windows, and in both versions some crucial items and characters, including the historian who's supposed to tell you about your quest at the beginning, are unmentioned in the room descriptions and undetectable without consulting the walkthrough. This is probably a bug in the JACL interpreter rather than the game scripts, but the game scripts are not compatible with more recent versions of JACL."
Has anyone managed to get this running? I tried using a 32-bit version of Dosbox-X which I had previously used to run ICL Quest, but the instructions given by the author in the game's accompanying .txt file crash the program. The jacxl.exe file brings up a request for the story file; however, entering the name of the game file (eldor.jacl) or just typing "jacl eldor.jacl" from the command prompt do not work.
From what I can gather from the instructions it is only under Linux that "eldor.jac" must be renamed to "eldor.jacl" and "jacl.con" to "jacl.conf". Given the filename limitations of DOS I guess you have to leave the two aforementioned filenames unchanged and type "jacl eldor.jac".
Oddly Alastair, it has now opened. It appears to have taken over a minute for the opening screen to fire up. After I had typed eldor.jac (the program requests it after you have run the executable) nothing happend beyond a carriage return. If you leave it long enough, however then it suddenly springs (or, more accurately crawls) into life. If I hadn't unknowingly left the session open I would never have left it that long to wait for a response. I've uploaded the opening screen to CASA. Why is it that whenever I post something saying it doesn't work. it suddenly starts working.
It will in fact run in the latest DOSBox version as well. After you enter "eldor" when prompted to ENTER THE SAVE GAME FILE: you have to press a keyboard character or the opening screen never appears. This will work after about a minute or so. Having read some reviews of the game it is buggy apparently, but I see that Mr. Creosote has posted a walkthrough so it must be completable somehow.