Review

• Recommended


• Text-based MMO like Legend of the Red Dragon (a classic game from the BBS era)


• NPCs, optional PVP, seasonal events, and seasons

Tale of the White Wyvern is the first game created by the developers of Cheerful Ghost; Jon Dodson and Travis Newman. It’s pretty much a text based MMO reminiscent of BBS games like Usurper, and most especially Legend of the Red Dragon. The game is rather simple; create a character, do some forest fights, buy a weapon, armor (and now a hat), and increase your character’s class skills. There are three classes to choose from; warrior, rogue, and mage. Each class has their own unique skills. For instance, the mage can use a couple of different offensive magic skills, heal, or teleport (flee). The rogue can now disappear, which makes them invulnerable for a few turns. You can increase skill points or stat points by spending gems.

In-game days last for 12 hours, starting at midnight again at noon (12:00PST/3:00EST). At the dawn of every day, your skill points refill along with your health and number of forest fights. Dead players also get resurrected during this time.

The forest is pretty much where characters will spend probably most of their time. It includes a nice variety of random encounters. Usually, characters will run into a monster or enemy, which they can attack or flee. This is the primary, but not the only, way to earn experience points and gold, which are awarded upon a successful kill. Gold can also be spent to heal in Helga’s Potions and Healing Shoppe. You can also have a few various chance encounters. You may randomly find gems along the way. You can use two to raise your attack, defense, or hit points by one point or save six of them for a skill point in Tarbreth’s Adventurer Training. You are given a limited amount of forest and PVP fights per in-game day. There are a couple of ways to temporarily increase your forest fights. You can accomplish this by interacting with the facilities in the new outhouse. You can also interact with an NPC named Crugg.

There are number of NPCs a player can interact with, many of these grant certain bonuses. Crugg can be found in the hidden tavern and will grant the player some temporary extra forest fights. This tavern is one of the previously mentioned chance encounters you may find in the forest. Scarlet, in the inn, will grant the player some experience points. Jon Boyd the bard will grant the player some gold. You will need some charm to get the maximum bonus from these NPCs. Charm can be granted or lost in the forest by a chance encounter with an old man or woman. You can only get an NPC bonus once per in-game day. However, you can ask John Boyd to sing, which will grant you some temporary forest fights. You can do this and still get the bonus from interacting with an NPC.

Pretty much, the goal is to gain enough experience to advance to the stage where you can no longer train with your master and are then told that you may be able to take on the wyvern. Once you’re able to do this, you’ll find the entrance to his lair in the forest, it won’t appear as a random encounter, nor does it take away from your daily forest fights. Instead, you’ll find a new option in the forest to enter the wyvern’s den. The wyvern is one tough beast and gets tougher the more you’ve defeated. It attacks hard and has a lot of hit points, so you’ll want to be fully prepared before you attempt to take it on, if you don’t want to die. A good strategy for fighting the wyvern is to save all of your daily class skill points for that battle and use them then. You will also need a good weapon and armor. Defeating the wyvern will reset you to the beginning and allow you to chose a new class. This does not reset your charm, but resets all other stats and wipes your amount of gold in the bank to zero.

There is a PVP aspect to the game, although I don’t use it. If a person does not rent a room in the inn, they will be in the fields when they exit the game; out in the open and vulnerable. If a person does have a room in the inn, you can still attack them, but you will have to pay some gold in order to call them down. Players who die (not just in PVP) lose some experience points and all the gold they have on hand. So, it’s best to deposit all of your gold into the bank before leaving the game. Luckily, you can acquire interest each day, which will give you a nice little bonus. You can also acquire more interest by wearing certain hats.

Tale of the White Wyvern is a good game to play and it doesn’t take very long to complete your in-game daily activities. It is meant to be played for about 15 minutes per in-game day. There are a variety of things to do and ways to interact with NPCs and other players. One of the best things about it is that it is completely free. There are no loot boxes or anything you can buy with real money to enhance your character. The development process seems to be on going as Jon and Travis are working to add more things to the game. It’s a pretty bug-free game that can be played on anything with a web browser. You can play it on your PC, phone, tablet, and more. It’s a pretty interesting game and is definitely reminiscent of those games many of us enjoyed on a BBS back in the 90’s. I recommend at least giving it a try. As for me, I play it every day, twice per day, usually near the dawn of each in-game day.

Pay attention to the in-game help menu as it will guide you to forum posts here on Cheerful Ghost where you can report bugs, provide feedback, or make suggestions. There is a bit of help written in to the game, but not everything is laid out clear as day. The developers left some things left for the player to discover.

There are also occasional seasonal events. Many relate to real world holidays. These events add in extra things for players to do and usually provide the players with opportunities for extra gold, experience, forest fights, etc. There is also now a “seasonal” game in which a separate instance of the game is running at the same time as the main one. This kind of game is slightly different from the main one and is a bit of more of a competition to see who can rank at the top by the time the instance ends.