Fazuul

[Questman]

Elwynor Technologies is proud to release Fazuul for WG 3.2. It's on bbs.elwynor.com file libraries and soon the website.

THE BACK STORY...

Thinking of taking a vacation?

Well, you were, and then something happened. As a seasoned intergalactic
traveler, you are accustomed to the occasional hyperspace grid interlock, or
matter-transmitter hiccup.

But this is something else entirely! You were just beaming down to FAZUUL,
playground pleasure planet of the galactic elite, when all of a sudden the
vortex cannonballed, the goonplasm deflated, and the freplishers skrank out.
You are left standing on the tarmac in front of a large, deserted alien city.

The welcoming committee is absent. The vacationland spa hosts and hostesses
have all mysteriously disappeared. You have reached FAZUUL, all right, but
your vacation is over, and your nightmare has just begun.

You have arrived on FAZUUL, a lush pleasure planet discovered years ago by a
number of shipwrecked space captains. At the time of its discovery, FAZUUL
was a harsh, forbidding world of intense dry heat and endless rolling sand
dunes. Now, however, through the miracles of kwish-age engineering, FAZUUL
has been transformed into a beautiful leisure paradise, fully equipped with
all of the essentials of the up-to-date resort planet.

Due to a quantum fluctuation of the void, however, the entire tourist mass
transit system on FAZUUL has been incapacitated. Vacationers can beam in but
they can't beam back out!

Or can they? As a marooned vacationer on this paradise planet, you and your
fellow marooned vacationers may be able to figure out the alien technology
lying around, pool your resources and knowledge, and find a way to escape.
Or, if you like, you can spend your time playing the various Galactic games
that have been installed as part of the resort's facilities, such as Foon-Ball
and Umflungoo. Or, you are free to just explore around, talk with other
players, fight with them, or whatever you like!

WHAT IS FAZUUL?

This is a multi-user online adventure game. It is something along the lines of
Zork, Deadline, and so on, but with a key difference: many people can play at
once, and they are all in the SAME simulated universe. The program that
generates this universe is like an automated dungeon master in "Dungeons and
Dragons"... one that plays no favorites, makes no mistakes, and has the
capacity to track a large number of individuals or groups completely
independently of one another.

FAZUUL takes place on the planet FAZUUL! FAZUUL was originally a harsh,
forbidding world of intense dry heat and endless rolling sand dunes. It had
been inhabited, millions of years earlier, by a strange alien civilization of
which little is known. The aliens all died out long ago of mysterious
biological causes, leaving their technology behind.

Then humans came along, and, through the miracles of kwish-age engineering,
FAZUUL was transformed into a beautiful leisure paradise, fully equipped with
all the essentials of the up-to-date resort planet.

The object of the game is to work with your fellow vacationers to figure out
the alien technology and find a way to escape the planet!

GAMEPLAY

You move around by telling FAZUUL the direction in which you want to move:
north, south, east, or west (or just N, S, E, or W for short). Sometimes,
depending on the situation, other moves will also make sense. FAZUUL keeps
track of the last five places you have visited, and gives you the full
description of the place only if it is not one of these last five. You may
tell FAZUUL to always give you short place-descriptions by typing "brief"
(this may be undone by typing "nonbrief").

TALKING

You can talk to other players in your immediate vicinity by typing the word
"say", followed by whatever it is you want to say to them. If you want your
voice to carry further, use "shout" or "yell". Everyone within hearing
distance will hear you.

If you want to communicate privately with another player in your immediate
area, you can type "whisper to so-and-so", followed by your confidential
message -- other players nearby will only know that you have whispered
something, not what it is you whispered.

TRADING

You can trade crackers, goods, services, and information with other players
any time you like, in any way you like. Typing "give such-and-such to so-and-
so" will cause the item to be transferred to the player you specify, assuming
that (a) you possessed it in the first place, and (b) the specified player is
in your immediate area. The item can be either a device you are holding, or a
count of crackers (for example, "GIVE 5 CRACKERS TO BEELZEBUB"). The terms
and conditions of any sale are entirely yours to work out with your co-
conspirator.

RESTARTING

If you are lost in the jungle or something and merely wish to restart the game
afresh, just type "restart".

STRATEGY

The original inhabitants of FAZUUL all perished thousands of years ago of
biological causes, leaving behind odd bits and pieces of incredibly advanced
technology. The technology takes the form of the various objects with strange
names that you find lying around here and there. Since they are based on
advanced alien technology, their various purposes may not be apparent to you
at first, but by experimenting around with them you may find that some of them
have amazing properties.

You can also assemble the objects together in various ways to make more
complex and interesting devices (e.g. "ATTACH THE GWINGUS TO THE MONGOO").
These combined devices can then be further combined, and so on. A major
portion of the information you will be trading with other players relates to
which devices combine with which others, what they do when combined, how you
activate them, the side effects they might have, and so on.

CONFIGURATION

Fazuul has one message files. Within it, you can input your game
activation code, define the key required to play the game, and set the ANSI
attribute for game text. There are many text blocks to customize to your
heart's content however!

INSTALLATION AND ACTIVATION

Simply unzip the archive to your Worldgroup server directory, add
it to your menu, configure the MSG file to your liking, and start
Worldgroup! It's that easy!

To activate the module, edit the MSG file and enter your Activation
Code, if you have one. If you don't, it will run for 14 days
without one. To get a code, contact Elwynor Technologies at:
http://www.elwynor.com

MODULE HISTORY

Fazuul, in many ways, was the software that started it all. It was originally
written in 1984 by Tim Stryker to power a system called ENTERNET. Not much is
known about ENTERNET; whether it was a multi-user dial-up system that only
played Fazuul or if it was a multi-user dial-up system that included Fazzul
isn't remembered; advertisements suggest it was one game at a time. It was a
service of American Software Technology of Bay Harbor Islands, FL, and this
company held the trademark and copyright. ENTERNET allowed up to 45
simultaneous users. It is possible they were early GSBL / Galacticomm hardware
customers, but this isn't clear.

In any event, a lot of the trappings of what became The Major BBS were seeded
here - state/substate, real-time kick routines, credits ("crackers"), etc.
Stryker refactored Fazuul into a module for The Major BBS all the way back in
1986 which means it probably ran on the very first versions of the BBS, prior
to version 3.05, which didn't finish until late 1986/early 1987. But the game
wasn't released for The Major BBS until much later due to copyright issues.
Stryker didn't control it. This led to the development of Quest for Magic with
Scott Brinker, and much of this game was shared with Don Arnel of Logicom to
create ZORGON (essentially a clone). The partnership with Brinker of course
led to the formation of Moonshae Telecomm and 7 great text adventure games.
All of these games inspired, on some level, and even shared code with, major
games that followed including Galactic Empire and MUD games.

Fazuul itself had some variants. The game for The Major BBS was an amalgam of
these variants like Freezuul, Phazuul, Fazuul 9001. While it was a mainstay of
the Galacticomm catalog once Stryker was able to recover the rights, it, like
most of the add-on games, fell by the wayside toward the end of the
Galacticomm era.

Fazuul was acquired by Elwynor Technologies in 2005 along with the rest of the
Galacticomm intellectual property. It was fully ported to Worldgroup 3.2 in
April 2021.

[Duckula]

I remember Fazuul fondly from back in the day and it is great to get this into wg3.2 and ultimately V10, great work!

[Questman]

Absolutely. In many ways, Fazuul is the genesis of ALL of this. It was the precursor to The Major BBS... so cool.