origin of DM-characters

[Ameena]

Pretty sure there is no map of the outside world, nor any information about anyone's origins except what you can guess from their names and starting gear. I seem to recall Hissssa doesn't start with any gear at all (I really should be able to remember this, given he's one half of my party every time I play these days ), which means all we have to go on is that he is a/the "Lizar of Makan". Note also that it is "Lizar" and not "Lizard", so whether that's a title or a species, who knows?

[Clodius_one]

Understood, I put Makan South-Est, out side of my Dungeon Master World Map. 'll take him across Zaangaard to make his clan in the swamp Nordoor Marsh. Thank you Ameena for the precision 'Lizar'.

[slickrcbd]

The manual has a little bit of information on Syria, Alex, Halk, and Nabi, and talks a little bit about the outside world, but you wouldn't be able to draw a map from it.
You have to remember that the game shipped on a single 800K diskette and so did not have a lot of room for a lot of exposition in the form of (uncompressed) text.
It was actually fairly common practice in the 1980's to have all the background lore and documentation in printed format as it was actually cheaper in those days. That was doubly true for games that came on the 5.25" disks for the Apple II family, which could only read one side at a time and only held 140 Kilobytes.
I know I ran out of disk space in my freshman year of high school for my homework one semester on a 5.25" disk, and had to put all the stuff from the previous semester on the other side. Then the school got rid of the Apple II's after the end of my sophomore year and I had to carry a Mac 800K disk because my Apple IIGS couldn't read high density disks. Thank god Apple put out an HFS FST with System 6.

[jayrshaw]

I remember the introductory story involving Syra, Alex, Halk, and Nabi from the game manual - I thought it was pretty cool at the time I read it [who knows how long ago that was].


--Jay