Exile: Escape from the Pit

The Exile series of roleplaying games were created by Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software. They are released as shareware titles for Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows systems. Exile III was also ported to Linux by a third party, although it does not seem to work as well as the Windows version run in WINE. The series consists of four games:

Exile: Escape from the Pit
Exile II: Crystal Souls
Exile III: Ruined World
Blades of Exile

The first three of these games form a trilogy covering the exploits of the inhabitants of Exile, a vast series of underground caves populated by those banished by the Empire, rulers of the surface world, culminating in their eventually gaining the ability to return to the surface.

Blades of Exile consists of three short "scenarios" set after the main trilogy as well as an editor that allows players to create their own scenarios, which need not be set in the Exile game world at all. Several hundred custom-made scenarios have been designed since the release of the game in 1997, attracting so many prolific scenario designers that a whole community has evolved around it. The most prominent meeting places on the web of the Blades of Exile community are the official company-hosted internet forum and the site The Lyceum, founded in 1998 by the designer calling himself Alcritas. These forums offer support for beginning designers and players, reviews of new scenarios and general discussions about the use of the scenario editor. Since many designers have also set up their own Blades of Exile-related websites, a webring has been established to allow easy navigation between the numerous fan pages. Fan sites also include a number of archives from which custom graphics can be downloaded to be used by other scenario designers.

Common to all Spiderweb Software games, the Exile series have very limited graphics and sound, which is balanced by a large and detailed game world as well as a generally deep storyline and well-developed plots.

More recently the Exile games have been remade as the Avernum series, which replaced the two-dimensional tile-based graphics system with an isometric one and made numerous changes to the RPG system and some changes to the content.