For a while now, I've wanted to just kind of gush about an old Mac game I played when I was a teenager, and the last day of Marchintosh for the year is as good a time as any.

Overview

Realmz is a game that ran on the classic Mac OS and, in later versions, Windows. It was shareware at the time - one of the few shareware games I ended up cobbling together the money for - but has long been made fully available for free, with my go-to source being the Macintosh Garden. If you have SheepShaver around, it works nicely there.

The game itself is quickly identified as a party-based fantasy RPG. I didn't really realize it at the time, but it's a full-on CRPG in the nerdiest sense. I mean, look at this freaking character sheet:

While it's not strictly D&D rules, it basically is. Older versions (which are also available on the Macintosh Garden) even used THAC0 before switching to an "Armor Rating" system.

CRPG

Looking back, I'm glad I had an experience with such a true-blood CRPG at the time. I didn't play D&D growing up, didn't play the Gold Box games, and was too busy playing pretty much exclusively Blizzard games to play the Infinity Engine games or Neverwinter Nights when they came out. It wasn't really until Dragon Age: Origins and then (especially) Pillars of Eternity that I realized the glory of the genre. But looking at Realmz, it's obvious that it's right in the same lineage.

Combat is strictly turn-based, takes place on a grid, and is suitably technical:

It even does some of the weird stuff: for example, martial characters won't just get multiple attacks per round, but will also get "partial" steps like my rogue Hebs there, who gets three attacks every two rounds, as a stepping stone to 2 / 1.

Realmz also has its own mechanics-heavy take on the thing CRPGs try to do where they want to emulate an open-ended experience a DM might oversee beyond just combat. For example, early on, you meet a kid who wants you to help his dog, which is stuck in a well. When you get there, you're presented with the "encounter" screen, where you can try all sorts of things:

There are a lot of ways to deal with these encounters. In this case, I might have Galba there do an Acrobatic Act, which has about even odds. My sorcerer Fenton there might use a Spider Climb (might not be the name) spell to make scaling the well effortless. Or, if I stocked up, I might just use a rope. You can easily fail this - if you do, the kid runs off crying and you have to wait for the guards to show up to help you, with no experience gain. Realmz has a bunch of these scenarios and they're pretty neat. Admittedly, they fall short in the ways that all non-DM-run games eventually do, where your actual options aren't truly limitless. The "Speak" option is available in other situations, but it's only ever really practical if you have, say, a magic word to open a door or something. It's not a true tabletop experience, but it's trying, bless its heart.

Mac-ness

One thing I really enjoy about games in the heyday of Mac shareware games (by the way, read The Secret History of Mac Gaming if you haven't - it's great) is how thoroughly Mac-like they are. For both practical and cultural reasons, a lot of Mac games didn't necessarily take over the whole screen with their own interface like DOS and Windows games usually do. While there are some Windows games that use the Windows UI, like another small classic Castle of the Winds, it's very common in Mac games. For example, there's Scarab of Ra:

As it happens, Scarab of Ra is another game where I didn't appreciate its lineage at the time: it's a true roguelike, albeit with a first-person perspective.

Realmz doesn't go quite as hard in using native widgets for everything, but you can see the menu bar in earlier screenshots - you use the normal Mac menu to access game commands, the bestiary, your ally list, your collected notes, and so forth. It's just neat. Also, like a lot of Mac software at the time, Realmz's program directory is just a delight to look at:

My use of the "Drawing Board" Appearance Manager theme helps it too, but just check out those icons. That sort of thing wasn't strictly necessary, but it was the Mac way, and it was wonderful.

Versions

And this isn't exactly a Mac-like attribute, but I like that Realmz wasn't afraid of using version numbers. It went from version 1.x all the way up through 8.x, with minor and patch versions along the way. It was updated all the time, and it was always exciting to see a new major version to find what the big changes are.

Mostly, the changes were things like adding classes: the old versions have the same sort of handful you'd find in basic D&D, while the later ones have so many that you can pick between "Archer" and "Marksman" or "Bard" and "Minstrel". Some of the changes were less like finding a D&D source book and more like the game gradually morphing into its own sequel, though.

For example, the original versions didn't have music of any kind, as was the style at the time. Somewhere along the line (version 5, I think), it gained music, and... boy, it's a doozy. Here's, for example, the camping music:

What I assume happened is that the developer wanted to add some music and then found some free or cheap module files and slapped them in there where they kind of work. The tone is absolutely bizarre, and it's kind of great for it.

It was just neat seeing the game progress, with the changes in systems and new features, even the "eh, not the best idea" stuff like parts of dungeons that switch to a first-person mode.

Scenarios

I have to admit that, though I played a ton of Realmz, I never even got that far into it. A big part of that was that the scenarios beyond the starting City of Bywater also cost money above the core game, and it's a tall order for a cash-strapped teenager to cough up money at all, let alone add-on costs. So my characters probably always plateaued around level 10, as there's just not that much to do in the base scenario. That's good news for future me, though: there's a ton of stuff waiting for me whenever I want to get back into it.

If you have a taste for older games or CRPGs in general, I definitely suggest you give it a try. The Windows version may be easier to run than the Mac one, though it loses some of the appeal. Depending on your temperament, Realmz may be easier to get into from scratch than games like, say, the original Baldur's Gate, with the latter's janky RTwP combat and constant fourth-wall-breaking dweebiness. Definitely keep it in mind for a cozy-day game, I say.