Realmz

Tim Phillips's 1994 shareware fantasy RPG for the Macintosh wrapped a turn-based, party-based AD&D-flavored ruleset around a scenario system that let third-party authors ship full campaigns. Fantasoft published thirteen official scenarios between 1994 and 2002 and released the standalone Divinity editor for fans to build their own.

Setting and story

The base game ships with the introductory scenario The City of Bywater and assumes a generic high-fantasy world of humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, half-elves, half-orcs, and dark elves, with classes spanning fighter, wizard, priest, ranger, monk, and several specialist subclasses. Each scenario is its own contained world — Phillips's own Castle in the Clouds, Trouble in the Wilds, and City of Bywater; Jim Foley's Prelude to Pestilence series; and contributions from Sean Sayrs, Pierre Vachon, and Nicholas Tyacke.

Gameplay

Parties of up to six characters explore top-down 2D outdoor and indoor maps, fight tile-based turn-based combat, and manage spell points, fatigue, food, and inventory across long expeditions. The signature mechanic is scalable spellcasting: most spells let the caster pay extra spell points to multiply damage, area, targets, or duration by two to seven times. A right-side party panel keeps every member's HP, AR, and spell points visible at all times.

Engine and technical changes

The engine is pure 68k Mac, later carbonized for PowerPC, and ran comfortably under System 7 through Mac OS 9 in either 256 colors or thousands. Scenarios are file-based and drop into the Realmz folder; the Divinity editor (also Mac-only) exposes terrain, monsters, encounters, items, and dialog without requiring any scripting knowledge. Save games are per-scenario, so a single party can carry across many adventures provided level scaling is respected.

Development and release

Tim Phillips released Realmz as shareware in 1994 with a $20 registration fee and additional scenarios at $13 each. Fantasoft ported the game to Windows in 1999, which broadened the audience but split the active community between platforms. Development continued steadily through the late 1990s with regular engine patches and a slow drip of new official scenarios; the final official scenario shipped in 2002.

Reception and legacy

Mac gaming press in the mid-1990s — Inside Mac Games, MacUser, MacAddict — reviewed it warmly and gave it multiple shareware-of-the-year nods. In November 2008 Fantasoft released the full version as freeware and published registration codes openly, ensuring the game and its scenario library remained accessible. It's remembered as the canonical Mac shareware RPG of the era, alongside Taskmaker and Exile.