The Adventurers' Guild

These maps are 100% computer generated based on my reverse-engineering work.

Cellars Level 1
Cellars Level 2
Cellars Level 3
Cellars Level 4
Catacombs Level 1
Catacombs Level 2
Catacombs Level 3
Harkyn's Castle Level 1
Harkyn's Castle Level 2
Harkyn's Castle Level 3
Kylearan's Tower Level 1
Mangar's Tower Level 1
Mangar's Tower Level 2
Mangar's Tower Level 3
Mangar's Tower Level 4
Mangar's Tower Level 5

The maps are all pulled directly from memory dumps from the WinVice emulator, running Bard's Tale. All maps appear as they do upon initially entering a dungeon level--the sharp-eyed will notice, for example, the one-way door in Kylearan's tower that prevents proceeding out of the second darkness zone into the meeting with the Crystal golem.

I made no attempt to decipher the special programs that are run from disk for certain squares--they are simply '?' on the maps, and so some mystery remains for those who want to use these maps instead of creating their own. I plan to publish a spoiler-free set of maps for those who don't want to get lost, but also want to be surprised by everything.

Some interesting facts I learned during the reverse engineering process:

On each dungeon level there are a maximum of eight each of spinners, teleporters, monsters, messages, special programs, smoke in your eyes, spell point regeneration, and stasis fields. There can be up to 16 antimagic and burning coals. Bard's Tale 1: Tales of the Unknown has no spell point draining tiles. Fixed monster encounters are only defined for one group of monsters, as you probably noticed while playing. Anything more than that has to be in a special program pulled from disk, as it is for the legions of Baron Harkyn.

In all the dungeons, there are only two spell point regeneration zones, and only two stasis fields. The former seems to me like it was a waste of bytes and programming effort.

Though the map encoding scheme used can technically produce one-way walls (and other strange or pointless combinations like a door that's secret on one side and not secret on the other), Cranford did not define any for Bard's Tale 1. This seems odd to me only because he seems so fond of using them in The Destiny Knight.

The "something specials" at 17 north, 4 east on level three of Harkyn's Castle, and at 19 north, 0 east on level three of The Cellars, literally do nothing. They are flagged to appear as something special to your magic detection spells, but nothing is defined to happen there--those coordinates do not appear in the list of special feature coordinates. These are either deliberate red herrings, oversights, or evidence of buggy dungeon design tools at Interplay. They could both be a case of running out of room for a particular feature type. Harkyn's Castle Level 3 already contains 8 spinners, while The Cellars Level 3 already contains eight monster encounters. It might be that the dungeon building tool at Interplay didn't properly handle a designer who defined too many of a single type of special feature.

These maps may be the first to definitively note all the secret doors in the game. It seems a shame that magic renders secret doors virtually irrelevant. It might have been cool if detecting secret doors were one of the functions of the otherwise useless rogue. RPG designers take note: don't allow simple magic spells to duplicate or better the basic functions of other character types.

Years ago, I read a post somewhere from Michael Cranford himself stating that he did in fact use a dungeon building tool where he could insert for example "Darkess!" at the press of a key.

I'm going to go ahead and assume the useless specials are red herrings, since frankly I doubt MC was inept given his overall finished product of the day.

In any case, good work. I presume this is going to supercede my efforts?

No, this is preparatory work.

Python is a good language for prototypes, and I wanted a program to read the dungeons so I could "prove" the reverse engineering as I went along. A computer program is much easier to write, for me, than a specification.

The next step is to hope that the special programs aren't too ridiculously hard to reverse-engineer--or we could proceed without knowing how they work.

Once those are done, we'll have all the dungeon data that we need to proceed with the 8-bit project, a product that'll be much more interesting.

Horpner wrote:No, this is preparatory work.

Python is a good language for prototypes, and I wanted a program to read the dungeons so I could "prove" the reverse engineering as I went along. A computer program is much easier to write, for me, than a specification.

The next step is to hope that the special programs aren't too ridiculously hard to reverse-engineer--or we could proceed without knowing how they work.

Once those are done, we'll have all the dungeon data that we need to proceed with the 8-bit project, a product that'll be much more interesting.

What can I do to supplement what you're doing?

You guys are feeding me daily tidbits...Keep it up. It is fun learning the inside scoop. Thanx

I decoded these some years ago as well. Back in the day before I got old and when my brain still worked, I actually decoded the Huffman encoding schemes used to compress the IBM PC version of the levels. Then I reverse engineered the walls, doors, and specials much as Horpner did. Then I wrote a program to convert that to a .bmp file. I only included things useful to me at the time. Here's a sample.

Level 11

I wish there had been a real Bard's Tale message board like this available at the time.

Maven wrote:I decoded these some years ago as well. Back in the day before I got old and when my brain still worked, I actually decoded the Huffman encoding schemes used to compress the IBM PC version of the levels. Then I reverse engineered the walls, doors, and specials much as Horpner did. Then I wrote a program to convert that to a .bmp file. I only included things useful to me at the time. Here's a sample.

Level 11

I wish there had been a real Bard's Tale message board like this available at the time.

That's pretty cool stuff.