players must face depend on the style of the adventure and range from the conventional fantasy staples of dragons, goblins, orcs and wizards, to wild animals, zombies, mummies, ghosts, machines, other humans (both friendly and hostile) and many more. Monsters share most of the same attributes as player characters. A key exception is that monsters have "friendliness" rather than charisma, a rating that along with the encountering player's charisma determines how the monster will behave toward the player. Friendly monsters may accompany the player through the adventure and fight on the player's behalf, while unfriendly ones may ignore or attack the player. Monsters also possess a "courage" attribute that determines how likely they are to flee from combat or pursue the player. Adventures More than 270 individual Eamon adventures have been written by various authors to work with the Eamon system. These adventures range from very simple, 20-room outings to complex works spanning multiple diskettes. With few exceptions, each adventure stands alone and does not depend on the user completing any others. Although a majority of the adventures are fantasy-themed, some adventures occupy contemporary or science fictional settings. Most adventures include some degree of customization, adding new commands or other special game features above and beyond those included in the base Eamon program. History Creator Don Brown first released Eamon for non-commercial distribution on the Apple II in 1980, encouraging others to share and expand the game. All of Eamon'''s fundamentals, including the original Main Hall, the first adventure design utilities and two manuals, were created by Brown, as were eight complete adventures. Brown subsequently left Eamon to develop a commercial version of the game entitled SwordThrust, but users continued creating and sharing adventures for the system. Conversion to PC In 1985, Jon Walker from Marshfield, Wisconsin converted Eamon to the PC and released several converted and new adventures. Eventually the disks were released through various shareware organizations and garnered a minor following. While the adventures attracted some modest interest, the direct conversion of the adventure creation program prompted much criticism among PC users for being too difficult to use and poorly written (the latter in later years by people who were probably never constrained by early versions of the BASIC language). By the time a serious attempt was made to upgrade the Eamon system to Foxbase, other adventures containing graphics and real time action were becoming popular and the