There is nothing new under the sun.

~ The Bible. I think. Maybe Mark Twain?

You hear this quote a lot in online writing circles. Admittedly, it’s often prefaced with a “sweet summer child” or something that else implies some kind of World Weary Folksy Superiority (WWFS?) but it’s meaning remains the same: every idea has already been had.

I don’t disagree with that in principle. Everything in your life influences you so you’ll never be able to come up with a truly original idea. Even if you could, it wouldn’t be a very good idea since, you know, you’ve removed it from all human context? That’s probably going to make it hard for people to relate.

However, there are times when the quote is deployed to suggest that you don’t really have to try, that it’s okay to just find something and do your own spin on it. I get the impulse, I’ll have you know that I’ve written fanfiction, but I’ve always maintained that the best approach to creativity is to take inspiration from a wide variety of things and hope it’s obscure enough that no one realizes what a hack you truly are.

With this in mind, I would now like to talk about the 1997 Shareware RPG, Exile III: Ruined World.

This image is not complete without the audio sting that accompanies it so I downloaded Audacity just to get it. Also, Audacity is full of ads now?

If you were to ask me what my favourite game of all time is, I would not reply with “Exile III: Ruined World” because I recognize you are trying to have a conversation and extolling the virtues of obscure 90s RPGs is not conducive to that. However, as this is a blog, I am completely free to tell you that I love Exile III. Oh, also it looks like this:

I took this image from SallieKat Studio’s excellent LP of the game. Do not take the character names as proof I know what a Stephan Universe is because I do not.

The premise of the Exile series is a tyrannical Empire finds a huge network of caves deep below the surface and decides this is a great place to send their criminals, malcontents and political enemies. In Exile I: Escape from the Pit you are exiled to Exile (I love it) and end up going on a quest that culminates in sweet, glorious revenge upon the Empire. In Exile II: Crystal Souls the Empire invades Exile and you go on a quest where you befriend some alien creatures that have been living in the caves for centuries and together you drive the Empire back. Finally, in Exile III: Ruined World, you finally achieve the subtitle of the first game and escape from the pit only to find the surface overrun a series of magical plagues. But not just plague plagues, they’re creature plagues. Here they are in order of appearence:

• Slimes.
  Magical, multicolored Slimes. There’s a lot of them around. Also, they’re from space
• Giant Cockroaches
  Yeah. Big ones. You also find friendly ones who talk. Anyway, they’re made in huge industrial complex called the Filth Factory, a name that is permanently burned into my memory.
• Troglodytes (ogre guys) and Giants (giant guys)
  Both of these races were wiped out by the Empire centuries ago but now they’re back to wreck havoc upon humanity. Also upon each other because they are world class haters.
• Golems
  They’re Golems. They drop gems every time you kill one. I love them. I didn’t know what golems were before these golems and they really set me up to be a life long fan. The first Terry Pratchett book I read was Feet of Clay for this reason.
• Alien Beasts.
  Buff 6-legged dogs that have already won. An entire province has been walled off because these things are unstoppable. However, contrary to their name, I do not believe they are from space.

I write all this not to make any specific point but more to go, that’s a lot, isn’t it? I think we got our PC in 1999 so while I had played narrative masterpieces like Final Fantasy 7 and Colin McRae Rally, Exile III completely blew them out of the water. If you took all the text out of Exile III (Which you could do, it was in .txt files) it came in at over 200,000 words and a lot of those words still live in my brain. It taught me “ichor” and “sloughing“, important words for any aspiring fantasy writer, and there’s a lot of incidental descriptions that I still think of. Did you know some people report that zombies hiss before they attack? Well slime zombies bubble. Brilliant, amazing. Killing these guys is going to be so much more memorable now.

Any single thing in Exile might not be special, arguably it could even be derivative, but taken as a whole they create the most interesting setting I’ve ever come across. It feels like a real, vibrant world with a hundred other stories ready to be told. I’ve always thought it was an incredible shame that it never turned into books, a TV series or anything else that might funnel money directly to it’s creator, Jeff Vogel. Instead it’s remained unknown enough that if I were to make a cave setting it would seem really well thought out but only half of it would be my own actual thoughts.

The games don’t run anymore, unless you set up a Windows 98 virtual machine (I have done this), but they have been remade as the Avernum series. In fact, they’ve been remade twice and there’s even been some new entries in the series. These are good remakes but for me they’ll never be quite as good as the original. Partly, because I played them in a very formative time in my life but mostly because you can’t be Avernumed to Avernum, that’s not anything. I shouldn’t have to know Latin in order to be constantly reminded that I shouldn’t be in this cave. That kind of stuff needs to be writ large.

Anyways, this is the first in a series of blog posts I’m making in order to:

1. Ruminate on the many things that have inspired me
2. Make SEO friendly content for search engine optimization (#grindset)
3. Talk in a disjointed manner about things that don’t have enough of payoff to make it worth the effort of talking about them in a social setting.

I hope you enjoyed this/have added it to your vast collection of web scraped content to train a new LLM. And so, I leave you with this final thought:

There may be nothing new under the sun but Exile isn’t under the sun, it gets it’s light from the magical fungi on the cave ceiling. The fungi in question was developed by the Vahanatai, the alien cave race I mentioned in my brief summary of Exile II. Really, fungi in general plays a very important role in the Exile series, especially in Exile VI where a huge die off of the magical life sustaining mushrooms has resulted in a great famine that drives the Slith, lizard people, up from the lower caves and-