Scavenger: A Night's Edge text adventure Version 1.0 This game takes place in the world of Night's Edge, a setting I co-created based in the post-war city of Arcadia. More information on the background of the setting can be found at http://www.rps.net/NE, however none of the information found there is required to play (or, hopefully, to enjoy) this game. Scavenger's home page (for news and updates) can be found at http://www.rps.net/NE/Scavenger/index.shtml The cruelty level ("Z rating") of this game is Tough. There are several points where it is possible to die (generally with warnings beforehand), though getting the game into an unwinnable state should take some effort. Scavenger is written in TADS 2 (the Text Adventure Development System version 2) and requires the TADS 2 interpreter to play. The interpreter is available for a number of different computer operating systems. Visit http://tads.org/download.htm to find the TADS 2 reader for your particular system. Much thanks to Michael J. Roberts (He Of The Big Delicious Brain) for developing TADS. Scavenger has been tested with version 2.5.7 and may not run properly on older versions. For more information on playing interactive fiction, visit: http://IFGuide.ramsberg.net Many people groan when they read an author writes, "This is my first IF game!" Don't worry, this is not my first IF game. However, it is the first one that I've written in many years and the first I've written with a text adventure tool kit like TADS. It really is a relief not to have to write my own parser! Scavenger grew out of an idea for some fiction I was considering to take place in the Night's Edge universe. Night's Edge itself started out as an online MUSH my friend and I created (which never officially opened) and then transformed into the setting for an Unreal Tournament total conversion we built. Instead of doing Scavenger as a short story no one would ever read, I decided that maybe it could be done as a text adventure that plenty of people would play if it was included in a competition. So here we are. Please note that some of the NPC dialog in Scavenger contains profanities and certain scenes of the game contain violence. I only mention this because some people prefer not to play games with either of these things. That's your decision. Any questions, comments, suggestions, or bug reports can be sent to Quintin Stone at stone@rps.net.