Stories of Beryland I: Ormus

The Ormus Saga is a little Ultima clone, written by a developer named Mike Doran for the Commodore 64, and offered on diskmag by the German publisher CP Verlag. Unlike Antares, in which I am currently also mired, Ormus offers its text in English. I haven't been able to find anything about the author, whose name doesn't sound German. In any event, this game is the first in a trilogy, which continues with The Ormus Saga II: Guild of Death (1993) and The Ormus Saga III: The Final Chapter (1994).

The game is set in 1227 in the land of Beryland. The Ormus Cult has taken over the realm, and the PC has decided to do something about it. Character creation is just a name, at which point the PC starts on "the southwest shores of Beryland," next to a city called Remfield. One of the game's major innovation: in addition to running around the land as a typical RPG character, you can hire troops and equip them. Troops are alternatives to regular combat--you can send them to fight wandering orcs and snakes and such--but they're mandatory for combats in which you try to seize or defend a city. Occasionally, as you explore, you come across a city that's "++OCCUPIED++" by the Ormus Cult, and to get in and take advantage of its services, you need to take the city. Army-based combat is pretty blunt--you exchange blows that kill a couple of soldiers at a time--and it mostly boils down to which side has more numbers.