The Crimson Crown: Critters of the night

The first step in the chain of Crimson Crown's unsolved problems is to light the candle, found in the attic of the abandoned house, and then burn the zombie in it. Your reward is a mouse and a burlap sack, containing an ebony ring and a flute. Don't ask me to explain the logic behind any of this. The sack also expands our inventory limit, which incidentally has already been hit by having a scepter, a candle, and a sword.

I also try typing "LOOK IN CRATE" and am told "There are no mushrooms here." Um, that was a weirdly specific denial.

Next, there's the owl, who doesn't speak HOOT, but speaks English perfectly, once you give him the mouse. 

Nope, that didn't work.

 

He tells us to whistle if we need aid. Before I can figure out how this helps, I figure out how Erik can. By letting him drink the witch's potion, I can toss his transmogrified form into the lake, where he finds a silver coin.

Next, the flute found in the sack enchants the cobra, giving me a few new areas to explore.

 

I offer the demon my coin, and get a.... sphere of annihilation? The sphere has the images of a man and a horse on it, giving me a clue to its purpose, but no clue on what to do next.

But eventually I find the grate in the cemetery can be pried open with Erik's sword. 

An incense burner is found down here, but the way out is obscure. So obscure that the parser actually interjects pretty quickly and offers to give you a clue, but only once. Initially I declined, but when lighting the burner and waving it around didn't do anything except make this smelly pit even smellier, I had to reload and accept.

A word will do. It is the only way out.

I'd been teleported with a word before - Windmill - and it works here too.

The incense is useful in the wizard's castle; it drives away the spirits in the high chamber, letting me enter the wizard's tower. 

After speaking to the wizard, I find that although I still can't take his magic laughter scroll, Sabrina can. This is exactly what we need to deal with the witch and take her tablet.

The wizard helps us cross the chasm to the fortress, as promised, but this gets our adversary's attention.

 

To be continued, on side 2!

My Trizbort map of Transylvania:

Game 454: The Crimson Crown

Read the manual here:
https://www.mocagh.org/loadpage.php?getgame=crimsoncrown

 

There's an obscure, possibly unfinished early version of The Crimson Crown floating around the Internet. It's so obscure that I can't even find a version that has the title screen intact (edit - it was there all along), where it is simply called Transylvania II. This one has an engine very similar to the first game's 1982 release, but was very soon afterward remade with Polarware's new Comprehend engine, and later in 1985, the original game was also remade in Comprehend and expanded.

Despite what many resources online (including Digital Antiquarian) state, neither Comprehend remake appears to use the Apple II's 128KB double-resolution 16-color mode. This seems to be conflating them with Transylvania's earlier 1984 re-release, which did.

Comprehend. There are five colors here, including black.

Normally, I would cover the earlier version first, if not exclusively, but as it seems to have never been released or indeed intended for release, and I don't know how complete this one is, I'll play the complete commercial edition of The Crimson Crown as consumers would have experienced it for the first and only time back in the day. After all, you're probably going to get more enjoyment from a finished novel by reading it fresh than you would by reading the author's foul papers first.

Still just four colors.

 

Polarware stepped up their package game, now including a manual, a map, a sealed envelope, and a booklet entitled "Journal as chronicled by His Majesty's Loyal Chamberlain Mikkail" in old blackletter. 

The plot is all in the journal in this version. The princess Sabrina is returned, safe and sound, and the people rejoice, but there are evil tempers in the air, and the king seems afflicted by an almost spiritual fatigue. Fatigue advances to madness, and then death - a vampire's curse. Now the Crimson Crown is missing, stolen by the vampire (sorry, Vampyr), who is using its magic powers to terrorize the land. We, the adventurer from the first game, are summoned and sent on a quest to destroy the monster and recover the crown, and are accompanied by the princess and crown prince, which is allowed for some reason.

The sealed envelope contains three riddles, which seem pretty abstract. I'm thinking the answers to the first and third might be fear and dream, guided partly by the prominent eye motif on the parchment. The second, I don't know... pollen? That's probably wrong. I may have to brute-force it and possibly the rest of them too when the time comes to solve.

Let's start.

 

I get Trizborting, as always, but the attempt doesn't last long.

We're dumped into a crypt, where Erik opines that Sabrina should magic us out, but she isn't powerful enough for that yet.

There's an inscription on the wall here - a riddle that I can't figure out.

"I do not breathe, yet I need air, true."

 

I continue trizborting this new area, which quickly opens up to a new, open area of crossroads and several caves. One cave holds a crystal ball, through which we see the vampire (and he sees us!).

Another is the lair of a gryphon, who challenges us to answer his three riddles; my first guesses are correct, and I eventually brute-force the last - there's no limit on guesses - it's cloud, which I have to call foul on, especially for misleading us with the literal image of a teary eye when the other two examples of this motif weren't metaphorical. Our prize is a scepter.

This eventually circles back to the tree stump, where we now know to walk around the trap door. We'll just have to ignore the fact that the exit from this underground crypt is a twenty-foot flight of stairs leading down that somehow returns us to the same topographical height from where we started.

Good to know

Sabrina can HELP if you get bitten

How thoughtful!

This guy just shows up out of nowhere and offers clues/spoilers to puzzles I haven't seen yet.

Many of the landmarks from the original Transylvania are present and accounted for here - there's the stump, the castle, the abandoned house, and cemetery, but the geography connecting them is different.

While exploring the castle, now renovated and apparently home of a short-tempered wizard, we're whisked away back to the crypt.

Oh, duh!

The password opens the iron doors, where we find a sword embedded in a stone, and naturally, Prince Erik alone can take it.

 

Unsolved problems:

• An owl sits in a tree near the start of the game. The sage advises us to speak to him, but the owl doesn't respond.
• There's a button in the crypt and I'm not sure what it does.
• Do the mushrooms do anything? Touching them is no good, but not fatal either, thanks to Sabrina's magic.
• There's a witch in the woods who has an important-looking tablet. Sabrina can scare off her cat, but Erik is useless and just wants to drink the brew, which (temporarily) turns him into a frog.
• Erik also can't kill the cobra, not because he refuses, but because he sucks.
• There's a zombie lurking inside a wooden crate in the abandoned house, and we're told that normal weapons have no effect on it.
• Knocking on the stump results in an explosion, rather than anything apparently useful.
• A scroll in the cellar is known by Sabrina to be a spell of laughter, but it is magically protected.

My Trizbort map so far: