Pharmacy Run Postmortem
Introduction
“Americhaos 1994 is a complete hypertext role playing rule book. The game itself is not played on the computer. It is to be used as a hypertext set of rules for playing the game with friends.” read the description of AC94.ZIP, a file for download on a local BBS. The context necessary when it sat next to shareware demos for early Apogee and Epic DOS games. Even amongst now forgotten Adventure inspired text based games that could be mistaken for one another, it stood out., If not itself unique, it’s uniquely ahead of its time and as such has been hiding out in the back of my head since I first saw it years ago.
Nobody is out there making Americhaos supplements, or even really talking about it. It’s too obscure, the license is paradoxically restrictive, and the rules are hard enough to track down in the first place. Besides its method of distribution, it’s not that Americhaos is wildly unique, it’s basically Mad Max with dice. But it also had a clear vision reinforced by its mechanics, and the moderate collapse wasteland that wasn’t the irradiated hellscape of Fallout or alien zanyness of Rifts is a compelling one. I know I don’t have the kind of reach where everyone pays attention to what I do, and I didn’t expect this to change that. I just wanted to make something for a game that’s been in the back of my mind for years. If it introduces even a few people to it, that’s a bonus.
BBS Shareware
The limited recognition that Americhaos has out of all the early independently produced TTRPGs that never took off is due to its unique distribution method. The Shareware model was common for software at the time, allowing the program to be freely distributable either as a limited version (First Episode of Doom) or with a timer or built in nag or simply the caveat that if you found it useful, to purchase a license.
This model gave Americhaos a much wider reach as it was reuploaded and spread through multiple dial up BBSs where its other small print contemporaries would go to die on the shelves of various local gamestores. Paradoxically though the permissive shareware license is now a restriction as technically the program can only be used for 30 days without registering and there is no current way to purchase a copy.
Setting and Mechanics
The setting of Americhaos, while it may not be the most original, feels relatable in its banality. It’s not nuclear wastelands or interdimensional rifts, it’s the kind of everyday, failed state you could imagine existing twenty years from now. Strip out the mutants and you’re still left with resource scarcity, micro warlords with too much firepower and a small handful hoarding everything they can. When we have a water futures market, this setting doesn’t feel that far off.
This lack of fantastical elements shifts the kinds of stories the game can tell. Conflicts aren’t necessarily framed as being a group of heroes preserving the status quo against an overblown cartoonish villain, they are about factions fighting over limited resources, where there isn’t a right side or a compromise where everyone gets what they need. It’s a setting that leans on scarcity, distrust and pragmatism rather than exaggerated villains.
The mechanics aren’t revolutionary, but they reinforce the tone of the setting. It wasn’t an outlier at the time, but plenty of modern games lean towards making an action hero who survives endless firefights, walking off gunshot wounds afterwards. In addition to Hit Points (Health Points in the text) all characters have Blood Points which can make any injury fatal if you can’t stop the bleeding. Vehicle combat rules discussing mounting guns on a car may seem a departure at first, but the high lethality of car crashes emphasize logistics and improvisations more than a GTA style power fantasy. It’s less about doing wheelies and spraying bullets, and more about bleeding out in an abandoned parking lot after a fight you probably shouldn’t have picked.
Why Not a PDF
I knew from the start this wasn’t going to attract a big crowd, and that’s fine because it gave me the excuse to experiment with the form and do it in a way I thought was fun.The licensing restrictions basically make DOSBox (or an old computer) a necessity to read the rules, so even though it’s an extra layer of friction I decided to release my module in a similar format.
The original program was generated with a tool called HyperHelper made by Azarona software, which seems pretty obscure in it’s own right, and has a lot more functionality than mine, including in document hyperlinks and logic for adjusting the text to fit within the allocated area. My program is a lot simpler, just a loop through a series of strings. This resulted in a lot of tedious hand editing. I ended up writing a python script to break up my text into the appropriate sized chunks which helped but didn’t take care of everything.
This project wouldn’t have been possible without DOSBox. In addition to running a DOS environment it has a ton of great features for all use cases. Being able to use DOSBox arguments to mount the files and run other commands was a huge help. I saved the Turbo C compile command to a bat file and you could easily integrate this into a modern CI/CD pipeline for DOS program development.
Conclusion
In the end Americhaos was ahead of the curve but also stuck in a brief, but extremely fascinating, period when computers weren’t as ubiquitous and digital distribution was still a pretty radical new idea. Unsurprisingly, my module doesn’t seem to have kicked off a resurgence of interest in Americhaos but this was never really the point. This was a fun project and if you took the time to check it out hopefully you found it enjoyable or had some usable ideas. Maybe next time I’ll try a NES cartridge.