FAQ

About the game

What is Eamon?

Eamon, also known as The Wonderful World of Eamon, is a text adventure game series originally written in Applesoft BASIC for the Apple II series of computers back in late 1979 and circulated throughout the '80s and '90s on 5.25-inch floppy diskettes. Though similar in some ways to the seminal Colossal Cave Adventure that came before it, and to later text adventure games like Zork or other popular Infocom titles, Eamon stands apart in a number of ways.

First, it adds a level of character development unseen in other games of the time. While in most text adventures the player-controlled protagonist is just a cipher — pre-made, flat, and unchanging — Eamon gives players the freedom to create their own unique characters, just as they might in a real tabletop game of D&D, with attributes, skills, and equipment of their choosing.

Second, Eamon is non-commercial and places no restrictions on people freely sharing and distributing the game.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for Eamon's success, the game is extensible and gives players the freedom to create whatever adventures they can imagine. Players made good use of that freedom, writing at least 280 publicly available adventures for the system, with new ones still appearing.

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About the Guide

What is The Adventurer's Guide to Eamon?

It's a world-building project that adapts the lands, cultures, and creatures of the Eamon text adventure games into a setting suitable for use with modern, fantasy role-playing games, and makes that setting available for free online.

Why was it made?

A few reasons, but mainly just for fun.

The Guide is very much a passion project for me and combines several things I really enjoy: world-building, map-making, role-playing games, website design, and of course Eamon. I built the Guide mainly just as a fun creative exercise, but also as a way to recognize the 50th anniversary of D&D, without which we never would have had Eamon in the first place.

I also made the Guide as a means of stirring up some fresh interest Eamon. Not many people play computer-based text adventures these days, and even fewer remember Donald Brown's creation, but role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons have never been more popular. By tying the two together, my hope is that it'll spark a bit of curiosity about Eamon in people who otherwise might never have known about it.

Is the Guide associated with any other projects or websites?

I do consider the Guide to be something of a sister project to the Eamon Wiki, since I created and manage them both, but they're separate sites that serve separate purposes. The Guide is not directly associated with any other projects.

Is the Guide officially associated with Dungeons & Dragons?

No, not at all.

The Guide is not official in any way, and is not authorized or governed by anyone other than myself. It's just my personal vision of what the world of the text adventures looks like, built for love of the craft, and shared for love of the game and the community.

Can the Guide be used with systems other than Dungeons & Dragons?

Yes! Though the Guide was made with D&D in mind, its content is easily applicable to practically any roleplaying system. Most of what the Guide presents is simply "world-building" text which fleshes out the history, geography, and culture of the setting, and deliberately avoids system-specific rules or mechanics as much as possible.

How consistent is the Guide with the Eamon text adventures?

It's as consistent as possible.

And just how possible is that, you ask? Well...

If you think of Eamon as a crazy quilt, you get an idea of what this project was like. There are 280+ adventures in the Eamon game series, many wildly different from each other, written by over 130 different authors who mostly just followed their own unique creative visions and who didn't worry about fitting in with what anyone else was doing. That diversity is one of the things that's made Eamon such a wonderfully rich and colorful and long-lived series... but that diversity also made me trepidatious about whether all the bits and pieces could possibly be sewn together into a coherent whole.

While working on the Eamon Wiki, I pored through the entire corpus and documented every fact I could find that related to the history, geography, and culture of the world of Eamon, and to my surprise I found that they actually could be combined without too much difficulty or compromise. Despite having 130 separate contributors across 40-odd years, there weren't nearly as many contradictions as I expected.

Much of this is due to the fact that only a small fraction of Eamon authors undertook any significant world-building, or revealed anything about the game's broader setting beyond the isolated confines of a particular castle or dungeon. (Had everyone been as ambitious as Sam Ruby or Pat Hurst, the collisions would probably have been irreconcilable!) Certainly some occasional contradictions do arise — A says there's a mountain to the north while B says there's a lake — and those I reconcile as best I can, usually rewarding the author who seems to have put more thought and effort into their adventure by giving their descriptions more weight.

When all the pieces are stitched together you get a lovely quilt, but one that still needs lots of material added between the pieces to make it complete and usable. Adding that connective fabric is one important purpose of the Guide.

Does the Guide reference anything other than the Eamon game series?

Yes, I do include occasional references to little-known text adventure games outside of Eamon. Some of these, like John Nelson's Knight Quest (1983) or Riggs and Sullivan's Imagery! (1987) are very closely related to Eamon and can be considered part of the game's extended family. Others have no direct connection, but still I couldn't resist giving them a little nod or a small foothold in the world of Eamon. Even in these cases, though, I was careful to honor the original authors' worldbuilding and only bring them in when it wouldn't contradict their backstories (or anything in Eamon). Games like Ragnar Fyri's Ula Tor or Ray Sato's Escape from the Dungeon of the Gods say nothing about the wider worlds they occupy, so I felt comfortable giving them a home here.

Was the Guide made using AI?

No. The Guide's text was written and edited by me, Huw Williams, a genuine CAPTCHA-certified human. I'm also working on setting up some commissions for equally human artists to produce images for the Guide, and hope to have them online sometime later this year.

The only AI-generated element currently in the Guide is the image of the Eamon dragon that appears on the home page, but even that I'd like to replace with a human-made alternative as soon as I'm able.

More broadly, I have taken advantage of various algorithmic tools online for ideas and inspiration, including Azgaar's excellent fantasy map generator and Watabou's fantasy city generator.

What about the map?

I created the map by piecing together all the assorted geographical tidbits and clues I could find in the Eamon adventures. I started with lists and paper sketches, then outlined everything in Affinity Designer Pro on my iPad, and finally exported it to an SVG for use in the website. Throughout the process I did a huge amount of editing, discarding, and reworking to find the arrangement of features that I thought best combined the original authors' creations with my own vision of the world.

I decided to build the map as an SVG for a variety of reasons: minimal file size, crispness at all zoom levels, easy interaction with individual elements, and (since it's very much a work in progress) easy editing and tinkering. At its natural dimensions of 5000 × 3000 pixels, one pixel on the map equals one mile on Eamon.

When will the Guide be finished?

Hopefully never. My plan is to get the first round of content completed sometime in 2024 (since that's D&D's fiftieth anniversary) but I imagine I'll keep adding to it and refining it for as long as I'm around. I find the mapping and geography particularly fun, and there's still a vast expanse of uncharted area on Eamon that I'd love to explore. Plus, you never know when the Guide will need to be updated to reflect newly-released Eamon adventures — and yes, even in the 21st century new ones do still appear!

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About the author

Who wrote the guide?

That would be me, Huw Williams! By trade I'm a web designer, graphic designer, writer, and illustrator, but in my spare time I love playing games and building imaginary worlds. I also run the Eamon Wiki, which was a necessary precursor for this project.

What's your experience with Dungeons & Dragons or other RPGs?

I've been a roleplaying game enthusiast off-and-on since high school, where I started by running sessions of FASA's Star Trek RPG for a small group of friends, and playing a character in TSR's Top Secret. I also dabbled a little in FASA's MechWarrior, which I got into via BattleTech, one of my all-time favorite tabletop games.

More recently I played an elderly and cantankerous gnome druid named Garm in a multi-year session of Pathfinder, a wonderful experience that rekindled my enthusiasm for RPGs. I'm now reading all I can about D&D in the hopes of getting a new gaming group going. Building the Guide has been a good excuse for me to pore through D&D lore and familiarize myself with the game's rules and mechanics.

Any acknowledgements?

Many acknowledgements!

Thanks to Eamon creator Donald Brown and to all the imaginative Eamonauts who wrote the adventures of the Eamon corpus: Jeff Actor, Steve Adelson, Jeff Allen, Anne Anderson, Bonnie Anderson, James Anderson, Margaret Anderson, Matt Ashcraft, Sean Averill, Paul Balyoz, Tony Barban, Ed Bauman, Marty Bauman, Tim Berge, Sam Bhayani, Frank Black, Kenn Blincoe, Logan Blizzard, Paul Braun, Doug Burrows, Robert Claney, Matthew Clark, Wade Clarke, David Cook, Steve Costanzo, Johnathan Cottingham, Joel Cranston, David Crawford, Dan Cross, Joey Czarnik, Michael Dalton, Bob Davis, Jared Davis, Robert Davis, William Davis, Keith Dechant, Michael Detlefsen, Don Doumakes, Clyde Easterday, Marc Elkin, Mike Ellis, Thomas Ferguson, Matt Findley, Andrew Geha, Geoffrey Genz, Greg Gioia, Pat Gise, Matthew Grayson, Mike Greifenkamp, Glenn Gribble, Boris Guenter, George Gunn, Mike Hamaoka, Paul Hamaoka, Michael Haney, Henry Haskell, Bruce Haylock, Rick Hersam, Randall Hersom, Charles Hewgley, Jay Hinkelman, Evan Hodson, Ken Hoffman, Aaron Hunt, Pat Hurst, Karl Ivers, Jim Jacobson, Derek Jeter, Robert Karsten, Don Kellogg, Dan Knezek, Brian Kondalski, Rick Krebs, Ed Kuypers, Justin Langseth, Ron Ledbetter, Dan Lilienkamp, Jon Lilienkamp, Bob Linden, John MacArthur, J. M. Menassanch, Jeanette Merrill, Matthew Mullin, Adam Myrow, John Nelson, Ken Nestle, Ray Olszewski, Rodger Osgood, David Owens, Ryan Page, Robert Parker, Kenneth Pedersen, Roger Pender, Michael Penner, Ed Phillips, Joe Pirone, Robert Pirone, James Plamondon, Robert Plamondon, Allan Porter, Hoyle Purvis, Roy Riggs, Robert Romanchuk, Clayton Roth, Sam Ruby, Sam, Phil Schulz, Nathan Segerlind, Corey Sena, Bob Slemon, David Smith, Fred Smith, Sandy Smith, Keith Somers, Andrea Sparks, David Sparks, Paul Stadfeld, Scott Starkey, Ted Swartz, Jim Tankard, Thomas Tetirick, Jay Thompson, Richard Tonsing, Kurt Townsend, William Trent, Paul Van Bloem, Red Varnum, Joe Vercellone, Rick Volberding, Jon Walker, Jeff Weener, and Tom Zuchowski.

Special thanks in particular to Nelson, Zuchowski, and Black who did yeoman's work over many years wrangling the game's sprawling catalog and helping to ensure Eamon's continued survival and growth.

Thanks to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson for creating the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game which inspired Eamon, and to D&D's innumerable talented contributors and players (including the late Bill Fesselmeyer who first imagined crossing D&D with an Apple).

Thanks to Azgaar, whose excellent Fantasy Map Generator inspired my own SVG-based map-building, and thanks to Alexey Yakovlev for his helpful tutorial on how to get the map to work with D3.js.

Thanks to Serif, makers of the Affinity Designer iPad app I used to draw all the maps.

Thanks to Ana Sanfelippo for Almendra SC, a beautiful typeface.

Can I contact you?

Sure! Feel free to drop me a line at huwmanbeing (at) gmail.com.