NEUC Eamon Adventure Contest

The NEUC Eamon Adventure Contest, also called the "Un-Contest", was an adventure design competition devised by John Nelson and Bob Davis of the National Eamon User's Club and announced in the May 1985 issue of the NEUC newsletter.

Rules

Nelson established the following contest rules:

• Maximum of 70 rooms.
• Maximum of 35 monsters.
• Maximum of 50 artifacts (not including dead bodies).
• Version 6.0 base program only.
• Entries to be received by 1 September 1985.

Entries also had to adhere to the follow story outline:

Things are not right with the Eamon world. The most timid of animals attack humans on-sight. The fields are ravaged one-by-one at night.

No one knows the cause of this strange disturbance, and only one man (you supply the name) can restore order. But _________ has had his life-orb stolen and is bed-ridden, losing strength day-by-day.

Your mission: Recover the Life-orb of _________, find the cause for the natural disasters and chaos, and either help _________ correct the problems or find a way to do it yourself.

Within these constraints participants were free to fill in the contents and details as they please and give their adventures whatever names they preferred.

Results

Nelson formally announced the results of the "un-contest" in the October 1985 issue of the newsletter, noting that the following three adventures had been received:

• The Life Orb of Mevtrelek by Rick Volberding
• Wrenhold's Secret Vigil by Bob Davis
• Orb of My Life by John Nelson

He elaborated on the results in the following issue:

"We would like to express our thanks to all of the people who made the un-contest the truly great success it was. That's what we'd like to do, but the problem is, it wasn't all that great a success. Three very good adventures were added to the list of Eamon adventures, but we were expecting a lot more. I guess we had too narrow a time frame and too small a prize for a really great success. Of the three adventures we received, all three should have been disqualified. As a result, we have no real winner, but unofficially, we have three winners. (What do you expect from an 'UN-Contest'?)"

Nelson noted Life Orb of Mevtrelek was disqualified because it was sent out for distribution before the NEUC received a copy for judging, and the other two were disqualified since they were made by club staff members.

Late entries

In the June 1996 newsletter, Tom Zuchowski noted that Rhadshur Warrior was "another one of the 'Life-Orb' series of Eamons that resulted from an NEUC contest held long ago." It's likely the club received it after the contest ended. Zuchowski noted the same was probably true for Greg Gioia's adventure Expedition to the Darkwoods.