Zosia The Pious?

"Zosia the Pious" was the very first character name I ever used in the world of role playing games. She was a cleric under the old Advanced Dungeons and Dragons system.

In fond recall of that first character, I took this as a user name when I first started riding the modem waves back in 1983--a time when females were so rare that any woman had to disguise her identity to use electronics communication in peace. Later, I used it as a pseudonym to write a variety of text adventure shareware programs for the old Commodore 64 computer. I also used it when I dabbled in "Fendom," the world of Science Fiction Conventions.

On the Text Adventures

During the late eighties and early nineties, I managed to write 8 fairly complicated, well-received shareware text adventures intended to run on the Commodore 64/128. With the demise of Commodore Business Machines in 1994, I imagined that the days of usefulness for these programs was pretty much over.

Imagine my surprise when I did an AltaVista search on my name and came up with hits for the old guys!

The titles of the interactive fiction works, in order of creation, are:

Odinshrine
Overlord
The Darkwood Stories:

Mageca

I have found a number of the above converted to a PC emulator format, and recommend the following hosts, should you wish to download and play these works of interactive fiction.

The Squirrel's Nest

Darkwood
The first Darkwood adventure, set up to run on a PC running a C64 emulator.
Darkwood II: The Gryphon's Pearl
The second Darkwood story, set up to run in a PC C64emulator.
Darkwood III: The Tramontane Alliance
Also set up to run on a PC with a C64 emulator.
I loved writing these games, and was working on Darkwood VI when CBM went defunct, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found that Jon Purkey had converted the above three to emulation readable and put them on the web. These were the first I found, in 1999 or so, and are all the first versions of the games--thus, they contain a wealth of spelling errors and so forth.

8 Bit Adventure World

All the games hosted here may be found from this link. This gentleman hosts Darkwood I-IV, some in the oldest version, some in the newest version, some with "cracker" screens. This site also hosts what I consider the premo emulator, VICE. You'll need an emulator to play the emulator versions of these games, of course.

C64 Unlimited

My games are linked from this spot. C64 Unlimited hosts the best versions of the game; all the last releases, with the "cracker" announcements removed. They host Darkwood 1-4 and Overlord. As soon as I send out the maps, they'll have those up, too. I should warn anyone that wants to try it that Overlord is difficult to play.

Interested in finding what other sites might be connected to these games? Go to Google. So far, the most productive seach string is "tramontane alliance".

On Science Fiction Conventions

I was introduced to Science Fiction Conventions by my long-time signifigant other ("boyfriend" sounds so stupid when I'm talking about the mature man I've been living with these past six years), Michael.

They are fun, but they do tend to get backburnered a lot--there are many things we like to do together, and so Sci-Fi cons tend to be pretty low on our priorities nowadays.

However, watch this section for some of the fun we've had at some of the Con's we've attended.

Use your back key or

Sept Pendray top Elyse Boucher top

Elise (Elyse) C. Boucher

merouda@hotmail.com
copyright 1999


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