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Adventure Construction Set allows non-programmers to construct massive adventures incorporating fiendish puzzles, malevolent monsters, eerie sounds and magical treasure and if you run short of ideas it will even finish the game for you.

The ACS disk pack comes complete with a 46 page manual which explains, with examples, how to find your way round the construction menus. However, if you'd prefer to play an adventure straight away, you can as there are two ready build games on the disk.

The first, titled "Land of Adventuria" is a collection of seven mini adventures spread throughout a wilderness which not only demonstrates the types of adventures ACS can produce but includes numerous help squares to guide you through them. These mini-games include an attempt to save the galaxy, the invasion of a Nazi Castle, exploration of a dark dungeon and even one based on Alice in Wonderland.

The second adventure, "Rivers of Light", is a more serious challenge and will take you some time to solve but once you have you could always use the game's constructor to change it.

Up to four adventurers can explore at once and each has his or her own traits and abilities. These form the character of the adventurer and include speed, strength, wisdom, dexterity, size, power and life force. Life force represents your current state of health and your character will die if this reaches zero. Power indicates the amount that a character can do in a "turn" and is affected by injuries. In addition, each adventurer has skill levels in melee, parrying, dodging missiles, armour and magical defence. These start fairly low and are increased with practice. For example, successfully killing something with a bow and arrow will increase your missile skill.

During a "turn", a character can move around the rooms and corridors of the adventure or perform an action. For example pickup, drop or use an object, swap a weapon or cast a spell. Once you have completed your turn, the adventure's creatures will have theirs, and so on until the adventure ends - one way or another.

As mentioned earlier, ACS allows you to alter an existing adventure or allows you to build a new 240 room adventure from scratch and populate it with up to 500 creatures and some 7,500 props. The disk contains a prebuilt library of creatures and things but you can of course design your own.

Each creature also has traits and skills which you can define as well as giving it spells, objects or a special weapon, such as poisonous fangs. Finally, you can also define the creature's strategy or personality which will decide whether it will attack the party on sight or slink away.

The list of props or things can also be added to or edited and includes weapons, armour, magical items, chests and tables, doors and spells.

There are fifteen different spells which can be stacked together, say on the chest, to produce some interesting effects. The act of opening the chest could trigger a spell to play one of thirty tunes or sound effects, another could display a message, a third could summon a defined creature and a fourth could simulate a poison by sapping the character's strength (or any other trait or ability).

As you can see, spells add the fun and atmosphere to an ACS adventure and can be triggered singularly or in stacks by doorways or traps or by single carried objects to create almost any imaginable effect.

Finally a pixel editor included on the disk allows you to edit or draw the graphics for any object or thing in your adventure.

ACS contains a range of facilities and options that should match the imagination of any adventure author that will allow him to produce his masterpiece in a fraction of the time.

As far as C64 disk adventurers are concerned: "The Quill is dead, long live ACS"...!