Back label text from ERDE 2E Module: ‘The Surreal Cities of Schwarzvald’ circa 1986
Are you man enough to take on the role of the Lone Prince? Waking up alone in a tavern with no idea who he is, the Lone Prince must traverse the rotten pizza bagel of an underworld known as the Schwarzvald. Carved into four quadrants, the Schwarzvald is a dark and bizarre place, where monsters of all kind come to live and thrive in a bizarre semblance of society. Crystals deck the giant cavern ceiling; hungry fungal monsters stalk the plains between settlements; and monsters are your closest companions.
To the North, the Lone Prince must convince the Great Goddess of the Cathedral Underground that he is worthy of the title Son of Schwarzvald. To do so, he must retrieve the blessings of the Four Apostles, four mysterious religious ambassadors that work for each of the major countries that lie below the crust of Avauntguarde. To the West—the Mad Kobold King, who lives in a treacherous maze filled with cunning traps to tease the mind. To the East—the Torpor, a vast metropolis filled with sentient undead, and their newly crowned Regent, Augustus Mustus. To the South, the Dwarven Kingdom of Fire, where the Dwarflord sits atop his Crystalline Tower and waits for all prospective heroes to challenge him to a deadly duel. Claiming the blessings from these three leaders and passing the test of the Dark Apostle will allow him to awaken the Great Goddess, who may visit the Lone Prince with his greatest challenge of all.
Are you cunning enough to claim the title of ‘Son of Schwarzvald?’ Find out in our next game module, ‘The Surreal Cities of Schwarzvald: Advanced Extremely Realistic Dungeon Exploration, 2nd Edition
“Pssst. Justin!”
Tony Henderson’s voice floated over the quiet classroom to me. We were in a weekend class; the last one ever of my undergrad career, if I was lucky. The Professor had stepped out for lunch, as had most of the rest of the class, but as per usual I decided my time was better spent boning up on my work so I could relax and play games as soon as I got back to my dorm room.
I was focused on my chem analysis almost too deeply to register his hissing, but a questing finger reached over and jabbed me between the ribs.
“Did you hear about it?” Tony asked me quietly.
“About what?” I hissed back.
“The ERDE: Inside Triad Championship Beta. There’s gonna be three winner slots, and those three winners get to be the first three ever to play it in glorious Visuo-Bino-Cortex Vision.”
“I’ve heard,” I said, as if I hadn’t slavishly read every update that happened as soon as it released. “I signed up for my chance last week.”
I did not mention I had laboriously programmed a bot to create a series of fifty-thousand spoof emails and applied through each of them to increase my odds. The ERDE franchise was like my crack, and the predecessor to Inside, ERDE Online, was like my dealer. I had devoured nearly everything with the acronym on it since I was a teeny little kid. It wasn’t that I was a geek, necessarily—even if it was the in thing to be nowadays. When my Dad passed away, the only thing left of his that wasn’t taken away by scrabbling handsy aunts and distant relations was a dusty photo album and his old notebooks from the eighties. They were his character sheets and the art he’d helped pen for the earliest tabletop version of ERDE.
He was one of the first players to ever play ERDE in person, and even helped build it, at least in the case of some scenarios. His best friend was ERDE’s creator, the misanthropic Florian Fanisci of popular urban legend—someone who hated humanity so much he wanted to make a game that would torture them relentlessly. Extremely Realistic Dungeon Exploration was born as a result of his sheer spite towards the world, and an underground tabletop phenomenon was born.
That Dad had been so close to Fanisci was news to me. Nobody had mentioned it, even if I had heard lots of stuff in the news and at church about the evils of ERDE. That he was so closely related blew my prepubescent mind at the time. I tried to play as much of the game as I could—pored over his old pencil sketches, the ins and outs of the character sheets he’d rolled. He played a Shadowslayer, a stealth assassin of the Falenvolk race that skulked in the darkest reaches of Schwarzwald, the massive underground tunnel system that ran the length of the world.
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Dad drew maps upon maps of the place—soon, it was as familiar to me as my bedroom or my neighborhood. My fingers pored over the words he’d scribbled in the sidelines, and I eagerly devoured everything I could about this new world.
There didn’t seem to be enough of it that existed for me. When Fanisci passed away, the ERDE IP was bought by OMEGA Entertainment, who began publishing ERDE and various modules for it over time. Eventually, OMEGA partnered with Nintendo of America, one of the preeminent forerunners in the console wars of the 90’s. A series of hack and slash games and early first person RPGS were released for their late-eighties/early nineties proprietary system the Famicom, also known as the NES in the states, and ERDE’s popularity skyrocketed it into a series of Choose Your Own Adventure books, numerous fantasy septilogy sequences, and even one ill-fated blockbuster movie, which bankrupted the studio that released it.
ERDE, despite its numerous flaws, was as popular as Star Trek, Star Wars, or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Nerd culture had located it and targeted in on it, and the rise of internet culture in the late nineties and onwards allowed more and more ERDE players to join forces and build their own adventuring campaigns online, starting with primitive MUDS and moving on to chatrooms and bulletin boards. Eventually, OMEGA caught up with the rising popularity of video games and expanded, starting its own first-party Digital Entertainment Group of America, known affectionately as OMEGA-DEGA. Here they began building a series of games for PC and major consoles, eventually branching into their first foray at the MMO: the by-now painfully dated ERDE: Chronicles of the Clouded Continent. While an interesting experience, it lacked a lot of the challenge that typical ERDE players craved. ERDE was the kind of game that inspired games like Dark Souls, if that told you anything. Its players craved the manic difficulty of the scenario modules and the realistic fighting system.
Its next evolutionary step was the fabled holy grail: ERDE Online, my at-the-time addiction. ERDE Online was a sandbox-styled crafting survival simulator sword and sorcery MMO. Decisions you made in ERDE seemed real, and they seemed permanent, mostly because they were. With a persistent Player-Versus-Player economy, a dynamic storyline, and what felt like a living and breathing world, ERDE Online finally channeled the stat-crunching, soul-eating difficulty that Fanasci’s original tabletop game was intending on and repackaged it into a form of media that elevated the experience.
The overwhelming support for the franchise made OMEGA insanely profitable, and their next eye on the prize after securing the number one slot as far as MMO subscriptions went was something far crazier: virtual reality.
An ambitious partnership between OMEGA-DEGA and Oculus Rift gave birth to the rise of a new entertainment idea. ERDE: Inside was born. At first only whispers, and unbelievable whispers at that, soon more and more press coverage indicated that ERDE: Inside was shaping up to be the most immersive VR survival game MMO set in a persistent world that ever existed. ERDE: Inside separated itself from its fellows by using the Oculus’ newly developed VBC (visual, binaural, and cortical) VR technology, an electromagnetic helmet that temporarily seized control over consciousness in a safe, repeatable, and ultimately, cheaper way. (The expected costs of custom cut glass versus electromagnetic digitization ensured that a single set of auxillary EM wave-fields could, in essence, last almost forever, as opposed to every other new model of the original goggle-based Oculus needing an upgrade every six months.) All the speculators in the market went insane, and all it took was a few demonstrations to make OMEGA-DEGA the next digital entertainment company to watch.
Nearly a decade of planning and programming happened. I was maybe fourteen when it was announced; ERDE Online was my puberty, through and through, and now ERDE: Inside was the phantom I chased in my dreams. Now that ERDE: Inside’s time had come, I wasn’t going to let anything as petty as rule breaking stand in my way.
“I’m sure everyone and their brother’s already entered,” Tony said. “I never win anything, though, so I don’t know if I’m gonna try out or not.”
“I have a good feeling about all this,” I said, smiling broadly.
“I don’t know anybody that would deserve it more,” Tony said. “Hey, if you win, let me go with you, yeah?”
“Yeah, sure, Tony,” I said.
“You want to run some raids after school?” he asked.
I nodded.
“I got nothing better scheduled,” I said.