Tim's Playground

For Christmas, my parents sent me a brilliant video. It's a collection of family videos from 1988-1990. which mainly features myself and my two brothers. One of the videos was of Christmas 1988, and it had me opening a present containing a Migent Pocket Modem which ran at 1200 baud. As I recall, it was the best gift I had received for I was into BBSes. Before the pocket modem, I was running at 300 bps, and I could type faster than the characters could transfer. A 1200 baud modem was 4x faster. It was an incredible feeling logging into a BBS at 1200 baud. That feeling lasted for months everytime I logged in.

Seeing the modem reminded me of a BBS documentary that that I had purchased and watched last year, and so I decided to watch it again. It is a fantastic documentary directed by Jason Scott. If you have ever logged into more than one BBS, you will love this documentary. It includes interviews about the beginning and the end, the sysops, and the users, Fidonet and the Internet. You can read more about the contents here. I highly recommend purchasing a copy.

For me, it brings up memories of logging in to local BBSes to chat, play door games, download files, and even play role playing games through message posts. My favorite board was Star Quest. It's a board I can't find any reference to any longer, but I do have some textfiles I found that I had captured during some play sessions.

The board had two major games. The first was called Star Quest which was a Trade Wars clone ran out of Arlington or Fort Worth, TX (817 area code if IIRC). In some ways it had more features, and some ways less, but it was a blast to play, and the person who ran the BBS (Dennis - don't know his last name) was constantly adding to the code.

The second game was called the Tower of Babel. It was a primarily a trivia game which included wizards. Your character was a wizard, and to go up a level, you had to answer a trivia question in a certain amount of time. A friend of mine and I would be running around looking in encyclopedia's or asking family members for questions we didn't know the answers to (we were 14 or 15 at the time). When you went up a level you got more spell points or mana. It look X amount of mana to cast the ˜trivia" spell to go up a level. Similar to trade wars in that you received X number of turns per day. In the Tower of Babel, you received X amount of mana (spelled manna in the game I think) per day up to your maximum you could have. There was also the concept of fighting other wizards with spells to lower their level or reduce their mana pool. You also had to make regular posts or the game wouldn't let you go up levels. One of the coolest features were the spirits. There were seven spirits (Darkness, Lucifer, Angel, Father Time, Caduceus, Life, and Seismoros) of the Tower of Babel. Wizards could send some of their mana to them, and it enough wizards did this, it would awake the spirit. There was even one that automatically got mana to itself daily, and wizards had to use their mana to reduce the amount of mana it had or else it would destroy the Tower. I actually wrote a poem about the Tower of Babel for high school. It explains what the spirits could do.

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The Tower of Babel
Wizards ascending to get to the Pinnacle
While sending some messages, of which are cynical.
Low wizards are slow and they can't do much
And usually are fireballed by a high wizard's touch.Spirits awakened, wizards defeated;
All of this happening ; some wizards deleted.
Powerful spells cast here and there.
Is all of this happening or is it a scare?

Darkness descending upon the Tower.
Nothing is seen including other's power.
One week it lasts with private blasts.
It sometimes prevents others from spell casts.

Lucifer the killer, killing randomly.
He hits whomever he wants spasmodically.
Lucifer stays until Angel's awakened.
It better happen before the Tower is shaken.

Father Time is a time machine that puts into past.
He helps many times when wizards are blast.
Four days he brings back in time to heal.
At least it saved me from my fate being sealed.

Caduceus the all healer helping you out.
This spirit helps a lot when you can't shout.
All troubles gone, some manna restored.
Now with manna back, you won't be bored.

Life is the manna giver, manna just filled.
This spirit's helpful when you're almost killed.
Life gives you much manna; just what you need.
Enough for Caduceus when you start to bleed.

Seismoros the destroyer shaking the Tower.
He will destroy EVERTHING including your power.
Once awakened there is nothing to stop it.
Everything starts over, everyone's got hit.

Now that you've seen what can happen to you.
Would you like to sign up and go through this too?
Adventure's awaiting at every level.
Maybe you'll reach the top before the next devil.

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Those were good times.