Hammer's Slammers
| Hammer's Slammers | |
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| ◄Eamon adventure #260► | |
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| Author | Tom Zuchowski |
| Released | January 2004 |
| EDX number | 05-06 |
| EDX set | The Thomas Zuchowski Adventures |
| Native format | Apple DOS 3.3 |
| File | Eamon 260 - Hammer's Slammers.dsk |
Hammer's Slammers is an incomplete Eamon adventure written by Tom Zuchowski based on the Hammer's Slammers military sci-fi novels by David Drake.
Background
Hammer's Slammers was Zuchowski's final Eamon adventure and one he described as his most ambitious by far, with a 400-room map and featuring complex custom commands and equipment. He completed the first scene and puzzle, which involved surviving an ambush against the adventurer's convoy and defeating the attackers, but never finished the remainder of the adventure. In early 2004 he released the portion that he'd completed, which was made available through the EAG website.
Premise
You enlist with a band of spacefaring mercenaries known as "Hammer's Slammers" and travel with them to the planet Heaven where two religious groups are battling for control of an important holy city. The faction currently in control of the city has hired its own mercenaries — Mungo's Marauders — who've fortified it with defensive equipment, so your mission is to get behind the Marauders' lines and disable the equipment so the city can be retaken.
The Slammers land at the spaceport outside the city and your commanding officer Sergeant Rico gives you a quick introduction to the high-tech weapons and equipment you'll be using. The main force heads out as a distraction while you join a smaller group that aims to sneak into the city by a different way.
| Full introduction |
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And so it was that in the month of the Ram, in the year of the Rat, a strange ship of metal did descend from the sky and did land on the wide plain to the east of the city. Strangely dressed men did come from the ship, seeking fighting men of strong arm and stronger heart to join with their company which did fight other men's battles for pay. You are no stranger to the mercenary life, and this prospect of leaving the everyday, humdrum life of the world of Eamon to see the worlds among the stars appealed mightily to your sense of adventure! And so it came about that you became a member of the mercenary band known among the stars as "Hammer's Slammers", the roughest, toughest, on-the-bounce armored infantry outfit in all of known space! The changes from the world of Eamon were many and difficult to comprehend. Your amulet seemed to have gone dead. Your magic blade began to rust. Your spells were not heard. Your comrades thought your complaints mere foolish superstition, but were understanding, each coming from his own strange culture. Soon your ship arrived on a world named "Heaven". With some remorse, you oiled your personal weapons and put them away against the day when you would return home. You were met by a weathered sergeant who somehow managed to conceal his pleasure upon meeting his new recruit. Glancing over your papers, he remarked, "Eamon, huh? Never heard of it. Let's find out what you know. Do you know what a powergun is?" You stare blankly. "Fusion? Electricity? Plastic?" You look helpless. He grunts, "Just great. They hand me a savage, and me and the boys going into combat!" You perk up at the last word, an act which smooths the grimace on his face, but only a little. He says, "Look, sonny, I ain't got time to mess with you. We got orders to roll in a few minutes. Here's all you need to know about the Slammers' job here. The two main religious factions on this here planet have a little disagreement. They both think they should control the main holy city. It happens that we work for the guys who ain't got the city at the moment. See?" You nod. He continues, "But that don't concern you none. All you got to worry about is doing the job that gets handed to you and not get killed doing it!" He unslings a rifle from his back. "This here's a powergun. It's a 3-cee-emma, iridium-bored powerifle. This is your weapon." He thumbs a lever on its side and catches something as it flies out of the gun. He hands it to you. Holding it up, you see that it is a ceramic disk about the size of the silver pieces that you were used to at home. "That there little disk, when subjected to precise pressure gradients and magnetic fields, gives up a couple o' percent of its mass as light energy in a coherent beam." Scanning your face, he says, "I'm just wastin' my time. A picture is worth a thousand words. Watch this!" He glances around, sights the rifle on a tree standing about 100 meters west, and fires! You are blinded by an intense cyan-blue flash and startled as the bole of the tree explodes, and it falls to the ground! He swears as he pulls a splinter from the back of his hand, then continues, "Steam explosion from the heat. It'll do the same thing to a man, or melt rock and steel. Be careful with it!" He hands you the gun. "No windage. No elevation. Effective range as good as you are, say a klick, maybe ten klicks in the hands of a marksman. You want to watch your rate of fire. The firing chamber is cooled with liquid nitrogen, but if the barrel gets too hot, a spent disk might melt across the ejection port. If this happens, you He takes you over to a laager of large metal vehicles that are parked near the edge of the concrete spaceship apron. He says, "Them two big ones are tanks. Two hundred cee-emma powerbores and two 3-cee-emma tribarrels. Crew of three. I wouldn't be caught dead in one of 'em. The other two are combat cars. You, my laddy-buck, are going to be with me and Tiny in this one here." You follow the sergeant into the back of the car he pointed to. He smiles. "By the way, my name's Sgt. Rico. You can call me Sarge. This here's Tiny." A huge gorilla of a man smiles at you. "I man the forward gun, Tiny takes starboard, and you get port." Sarge loses his grin. "Here's the bad news. We're goin' straight into combat so you won't get much time to know your stuff." He turns to the portside gun. "This here's your tribarrel. Three rotating 3cm barrels. High rate of fire, mainly because the two extra barrels get some extra cooling time. To use it, He hands you a heavy ceramic cuirass, and helps you buckle it on. "This plate will usually stop a powergun bolt. The locals only have ordinary projectile weapons that can't penetrate it at all." "The other side's hired some mercs, an outfit named 'Mongo's Marauders'. They favor flechette weapons. A flechette rifle looks a lot like one of our power rifles, but instead of having a silver-gray iridium barrel, it has a darker gray, synthetic diamond barrel with a pinhole bore. A flechette is a tiny needle, and the rate of fire is a couple thousand rounds per minute. They'll chew you to pieces if they hit you. The armor'll stop them for only a few seconds before they erode through." He hands you a helmet that you don, and says, "Notice the commo button on the side. You've got three channels. One talks to me, Tiny, and Ozzie our driver up in the driver's compartment. Channel two communicates within this 4-vehicle battle group. Channel three is battalion-wide, so stay off of it. We use it to communicate with Headquarters and with Artillery Central. Notice that the corner of your goggles has a channel readout that you can check with Suddenly your helmet comes to life: "(Tank sections, ground in place. Prepare for direction control. Three aircraft approaching square 034-116 from 267 degrees; distance 7.04 Kays, closing at 1100)" As one, all the tanks scattered across the spaceport apron settle down onto the ground. Every turret swings to the west and elevates to the same precise angle. Sarge says, "Close your eyes!" "(Outgoing.)" Your closed eyes are dazzled by the fury as 20-odd cannon simultaneously fire foot-wide cyan bolts of energy, and you are rocked by a loud thump of expanding superheated air. "(Resume advance.)" The tank beside you lowers its cannon; the barrel glows an angry red and dances in the waves of heat that pour from its surface. Sarge remarks, "I ain't never gonna get used to them doing that!" "(Spectroanalysis indicates three hostiles carrying chemical explosives.)" "(Group Tango-7, proceed. Saddle up and get it moving!)" The four vehicles spin up their fans and lift from the ground. One of the tanks takes the lead, your combat car falling in line behind it. The other combat car follows you, and the second tank brings up the rear. Sarge grimaces, and says, "Here we go! I guess there's no more time for lessons now. I'd better fill you in about our mission. It's a crucial one, and if we screw it up, then a lotta Slammers are gonna die. The Marauders have got the city pretty well interdicted. We need to break their line, but we need to use our satellite-directed artillery to soften 'em up before we go in. Here's the rub. Our arty can't break their line because they got a calliope bunkered somewheres in the general area we're headin' towards. A calliope's a radar-directed 8-barrel powergun that is used to knock incoming artillery shells out of the sky. "Most of the Slammers are going to create a big diversion to the north while our little group tries to sneak up the back way. Mongo will know that we were at the spaceport, see. We were s'posed to be there to pick up spares and replacements. That's you, for our group. And now, while the rest of the supply train returns to HQ, we're beating a fast fade off in a different direction." He hands you a booklet. "Here," he says, "read this and learn somethin' so you won't be quite so useless when we find some fighting." As the big machines cruise up the road, you reflect that this isn't the first time that you have impulsively signed up for more than you bargained for! |
Walkthrough
Though Zuchowski conceived Hammer's Slammers to be a full and complex adventure, the completed portion only covers the introductory phase of the story and consists of just 15 of the planned 400 rooms.
As your group travels west along the road you're ambushed by Marauders in the nearby jungle to the north. The lead tank is struck first and its nose hits the ground; your combat car crashes into it, and the second car crashes into you from behind. The rear tank is struck next and its ammunition explodes, blasting it to pieces and flipping the second combat car over so it lands on top of yours, killing Tiny. The wounded Sarge tells you your only chance for survival is to reach the turret of the lead tank without being seen and destroy the Marauder encampment with the main cannon. You make your way out of the ruined combat car and climb the south side of the grounded tank to reach the entrance to the turret.
Zuchowski notes: "If it crashes in 80-column mode, try it in 40-column lower-case mode."
Reviews
In correspondence with Huw Williams in December 2021, Zuchowski wrote, "I consider Hammer's Slammers to be a failure. I was over-ambitious. The goal was to simulate something like 400 rooms. I wasn't planning on multiple disks but I never got that far before I lost interest in developing it further."
Location
The introduction begins on Eamon in "the wide plain to the east of Evenhold" where the mercenary spaceship lands; the story then continues on the planet Heaven, on an east-west road through the jungle outside the unnamed city that the Slammers are assigned to take.
External links
- EAG Online: Master List
- The Interactive Fiction Database: Hammer's Slammers
- Interactive Fiction Reviews: Hammer's Slammers
- Wikipedia: Hammer's Slammers
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