You begin Zork Grand Inquisitor as a luckless adventurer—your standard nameless-age-less-faceless-gender-neutral-culturally-ambiguous-adventure-person, to be exact. With not a zorkmid in your knapsack, and little idea of what lies ahead, you find yourself wandering about the historic town of Port Foozle. Port Foozle has seen better days; as you wander through the town...

Mir Yannick, the Grand Inquisitor of Zork, has parlayed his position as the head of the mega-conglomerate Frobozz Electric to rule the land like a fascist regime. Because Frobozz Electric owns all patented technology in the land, as long as the Inquisition can keep magic from the people, the inquisition can rule the populace as they please. And how they please, it turns out, is not so pleasant at all.

The story of Zork Grand Inquisitor quickly becomes the story of the quest (yours) to return magic to the deprived Empire. But you must act fast—the Grand Inquisitor has a plan, a super-plan (don't they always, those dastards!) that will tighten his grip on the minds of the Quendorans so painfully, that it might never be reversed. You have one day before he unleashes his own personal death star on the Empire—a powerful mind-control device, in the form of the Inquisition Cable Network, INQUIZIVISION. With Inquizivision, non-stop twenty-four-hours-aday Inquisition programming will brainwashthe already mind-numbed, dogma-fed population until their brains will become useless Mush.

But you soon discover why the Grand Inquisitor is attempting to tighten his stranglehold now. He's growing more nervous by the day because strange occurrences—rumors of supernatural sightings—are talked of with increasing clamor by the populace. The Grand Inquisitor fears a magic rebellion growing from the people. And his fears are founded in truth; magic, in a fundamentally magic land, cannot be banished forever, and all about you magical things really do seem to be struggling to return to their magical lives.

Luckily, you aren't alone in your quest. With a bit of good fortune, you stumble across what appears to be an old, battered brass lamp. (It's in a crate marked "Infocom," and appears to be a classic adventurer's lamp, bequeathed to you from your adventuring forebearers of text-adventures past.)
You soon find that magic isn't gone, but has been forced underground. A glimmer of hope remains in the form of the disenchanted Dungeon Master, Dalboz of Gurth, who has been banished by the Grand Inquisitor. He will become a powerful ally on your quest. Actually, he has no choice but to become your ally, as he's stuck inside your lamp, and accompanies you along your quest.

Though the Dungeon Master can no longer practice magic, he can help you advance in your own knowledge of the supernatural arts. With his help, you may even gain a spell book and fill it with contraband spells that have been hidden throughout the empire, in hopes of spiriting some magic away from the Inquisition. Together, you contact the enchantress Y'Gael, a familiar Zork character who has in times past led the Enchanters' Guild to hide all of Known Magic in the Empire into a powerful relic known as the Coconut of Quendor. If the Coconut could be recovered, along with the two other most powerful artifacts in Zork's magic treasury—a Cube of Foundation and the Skull of Yoruk—magic would again flow through Zork. And it is here your quest begins in earnest. You must reclaim the lost treasures of Zork.
You soon meet up with three other traveling companions who wish to (well, okay, have no choice but to) join your quest. All three are one-time magical creatures who have been stripped of their magic faculties and imprisoned in flat, metal disks called Totems. The Grand Inquisitor, who possesses a fearsome machine called the Totemizer, continues to victimize magical creatures with this technology. One day he hopes to have utterly "cleansed" the land of any remaining traces of magic.

The three Totems that come to help with your quest include the beautiful and telepath is Lucy Flathead, one of the only remaining descendants of the House of Flathead that once ruled the Empire; the thick-witted, all-brawn no-brain Brogmoid "Brog," who is something like a cross between a troll and Chewbacca; and the whiny, neurotic Griff, who suffers a Dragon inferiority complex and wants desperately to avoid physical pain. Together, you form an unlikely band of Adventurers who join forces to—with any luck—recover the lost treasures, destroy the Grand Inquisitor, and finally return magic to its rightful place in the Empire.

And who knows? Perhaps even return the rightful heir to the throne...
(For a more in depth accounting of the story leading up to the gameplay of Zork Grand Inquisitor, see the "Backstory" section of this book which is covered in Chapter Three.)