SwordThrust is a commercialized and enhanced version of the Eamon RPG. Your hero begins in the land of Diurla at the Main Hall, where he (or she) must register, roll up stats, equip, and buy spells before going on one of many adventures.
Like in its predecessor, your main stats are Hardiness (the number of hits you can take before you die and your carrying capacity), Agility (affects your chance to hit monsters), and Charisma (affects prices at the Main Hall and the friendliness of monsters). SwordThrust also adds another ability called Left Hand, which affects your chance of hitting with weapons in your left hand. All the standard weapon categories (Axe, Bow, Club, Spear, Sword) are inherited from Eamon and work in similar ways. Your weapon score is a percentage chance for you to hit with that type of weapon, and it has a small chance of going up each time you hit.
SwordThrust adds many new spells to the standard Eamon spellbook of Blast, Power, Heal, and Speed. Some examples of the new spells are: Charm (makes monsters friendlier towards you), Fear (makes monsters run away), Thickskin (increases your armor), This greatly expands your options in the game as well as giving you something to spend your extra gold on since the most powerful spells can cost 30000 or more gold pieces.
Adventuring is very similar to Eamon. The dungeons are all text-based, similar to an adventure game. You move and fight through the dungeons with commands like NORTH, INVENTORY, ATTACK RAT, and so on. Some improvements over the Eamon interface are that the room description and character status are displayed in a window at the top of the screen so you don’t have to constantly be LOOKing to figure out where you are. Another gameplay change is that your character can get fatigued. When your fatigue gets too high, you pass out which may end up killing you if monsters find you. Stopping and RESTing is necessary, but it is easy to get very fatigued in a difficult battle and pass out when you have to run away to rest.
Equipping items is also much different than in Eamon. You can now equip weapons in your left hand if you don’t use a shield, potentially doubling your number of attacks. Armor is also now equippable, so it is possible to find better armor during your adventures instead of being stuck with what you bought at the Main Hall.
SwordThrust had several adventures written for it, including The King’s Testing Ground, a beginner’s adventure that came with the game. Other adventures included:
- The Vampyre Caves
- The Kidnappers Cove
- The Case of the Sultan’s Pearl
- The Green Plague
- The Eternal Curse, and
- The Hall of Alchemie
