Wearing The Claw


If it's not an adage, it ought to be: a lord asks no favor from a peasant. Yet there he was, in your own family's modest home, waving what used to be his hand in the air and looking at you with eyes full of supplication.


Wearing the Claw is a traditional fantasy quest in which you and your village have been cursed with a slow transformation into various animals. The only way to stop the curse is to retrieve the Pendant of Elinor from the mysterious island of the Goergs. It won 8th Place in the 1996 IF competition.

Wearing The Claw is a piece of interactive fiction (IF). If that term means nothing to you, you might want to see an explanation of how to use this kind of software. Excellent introductions to IF have been written by Adam Cadre and Mike Roberts.

The other thing you need to know about Wearing The Claw is that it is a "story file" which requires the use of an "interpreter program". These two components are roughly analogous to a videotape and a VCR, respectively. There are lots of interpreters capable of reading the game -- I recommend Frotz, which is available for most platforms, with the notable exception of the MacIntosh. If you're using a Mac, I suggest Andrew Plotkin's excellent MaxZip.

Once you've downloaded your interpreter, you can click here to download the Wearing The Claw story file. Remember to download this file in binary format, which in most browsers means right-click and choose "Save Link As" (or the closest equivalent) from the pop-up menu.

If you have a Java-enabled web browser, you can also play Wearing The Claw online.


This page has been viewed times since June 18, 2000. Considering this game came out four years before that, I'll be happy if anyone besides me visits this page.

Wearing The Claw page / Paul O'Brian / obrian at colorado.edu / Revised September 2000
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