The Stack

I’m almost ready to wrap up Secret of the Silver Blades for the time being. I don’t expect to finish the game this weekend, though. Judging by the number of teleport gates I’ve liberated, I’m still a bit less than half done with the game. That might not be a very good way to judge progress, though, because the teleporter density varies a lot. The game seems to provide a new teleporter whenever it would be inconvenient to redo your progress from the last one, and how often that’s the case depends on the game design. There was only one teleporter for all ten levels of the mines, even though they took me the better part of a week to clear. This is because the mines were basically arranged around a single hub, the mine’s central shaft: a teleporter near that hub could serve all the levels. In a more linear section, like where I am now, providing the same level of teleporter access means putting a separate teleporter at the beginning of every major section.

The sections immediately after the mines go back to the established 16×16 block design, and the constraint seems to have inspired some of the creativity that the mines were lacking. We’ve got riddles and illusions — on more than one occasion, I’ve gone to rescue someone only to fall into an ambush. I’ve accepted into my party a man in a Black Circle uniform. He claims that he donned it as a disguise while he searched for his captured companions. His story seems to check out so far, but trusting anyone or anything around here makes me a little nervous.

For a while now, the main theme in the enemies has been monsters with petrification attacks: cockatrices, basilisks, medusae. This is something that really started back in the mines, but they were just spicing on the normal encounters before, and now they’re the bulk of the monsters, and appear in quantities I used to associate with kobolds. I’ve contemplated equipping everyone permanently with a mirror, but this doesn’t even seem all that necessary: my saving throws are good enough by now to survive most petrification attempts, and I can generally take out the bulk of the monsters beforehand with a couple of well-placed fireballs (still my bread-and-butter spell, despite having higher-level stuff: its range and area of effect are unmatched, and it’s low-level enough that I can memorize a whole bunch of them). And to top it all off, both of my mages can cast Stone to Flesh. Supposedly the shock of being unpetrified can sometimes kill the patient, but I haven’t yet seen this happen. I think the game is starting to phase out the petrifiers in favor of driders and other spellcasters, but they’re still vulnerable to the same general tactics — that is, kill or disable them before they can do anything.

Anyway, I’ll give it one more day before I go on to 1991.

I’ve finally made it through the mines to what I assume to be the start of the game’s real dungeon. Secret of the Silver Blades is definitely a lot more dungeon-heavy than the previous two games, and I hope I’ve been clear by now that this isn’t a compliment. This is easily the most slow-moving game in the series so far.

In third edition D&D, there is a trainable knowledge skill called “Dungeoneering”, which is used both for knowledge of dungeon-dwelling creatures and for things like identifying important features of mines and caves: unstable areas, unnatural rock formations that may be concealing something, etc. Second edition didn’t have knowledge skills of this sort, or at least the Gold Box games don’t. Dungeoneering knowledge is instead the inherent province of Dwarves. And it happens that, even though I didn’t know how dungeon-heavy this game was, I have a dwarf in my party — a fighter/thief. (Despite the advice of others, I simply wanted a thief in my party, but making a pure thief seemed a waste, and combining it with a fighter seemed like a good idea. And in fact this is a combination recommended in the manual. In fact, the manual contains a couple of complete recommended party rosters, one of which is, strangely enough, identical to what I came up with independently: fighter, paladin, fighter/thief, cleric, and two magic-users, all human except the one dwarf.)

There have been a few occasions where my dwarf has had a visible impact on what happens. Obviously the designers don’t want to make this stuff too critical — some players won’t have a dwarf on their team, especially now that we’re at the point where the level caps for nonhumans really begin to hurt. But he spotted a trap door at one point, and there’s a repeated feature where you’re offered an opportunity to dig for gems, with the gems invariably spotted by the dwarf. I kind of wonder if there are similar special opportunities for the other nonhuman races, but really, this isn’t an environment for elves to do much (apart from exercise their natural ability to find secret doors, of course).

I’ve been encountering a lot of Umber Hulks lately — there aren’t a lot of different monster types in the mines, so what types there are, I’ve been seeing a lot. Umber Hulks have a gaze attack that produces effects equivalent to the Confusion spell. It seems to be broken.

Confusion is supposed to make characters act at random — there’s a table to roll on for the effects. One of the possible effects is attacking your allies instead of your enemies. This never happens to the PCs. It almost happens, though. At one point, when I directed a confused character to attack the enemy, I received the same confirmation prompt that I normally get when I accidentally try to attack an ally. Clearly, the game considered that character to be on the enemy’s side — but I was still in control of the character’s actions. And control seems to be the nub of it. Perhaps the testers were always leaving their characters on autopilot during combat, in which case they’d attack whoever the computer thinks they should be attacking.

As if to confirm this, I found and freed a captive NPC who joined my party. (This is something that happens fairly frequently in this series. Generally speaking, they stay with you only while you remain in the dungeon where you found them.) Being an NPC, her actions weren’t under my control, and when she became confused, she started hitting the PCs — and hitting them rather too well. I had to cast Hold Person on her to restrain her, and then faced the problem that, as long as she was still considered an enemy by the combat engine, the combat wouldn’t end. I really botched things here. I wanted to take her down and then heal her, but wound up just killing her instead. Dead NPCs, it turns out, are removed from the party, rather than kept around for resurrection like PCs. But — and here the whole situation started feeling really unclean — I got her equipment as loot from the encounter. And it’s really good loot.

You want to talk about moral dilemmas in games? This one was a humdinger. I start to suspect that the key to making a good moral dilemma is to make it unexpected and, if possible, unplanned.

Hunting for these staff pieces is getting tedious. There’s not a lot of variety in the mines, or a lot of challenge either. Pretty much the only thing that can stop me now is a series of cheap KO’s from monsters with save-or-die abilities, like basilisks or wyverns. Actually, that that’s not quite right: neither of those monsters technically kills you if you fail your saving throw. The wyvern’s sting misleadingly produces the message “[character] has died”, which caused me to quit without saving when I first encountered it back in Pool of Radiance, but it’s really an effect that my cleric can cure with the Neutralize Poison spell. And while I don’t yet have the Stone to Flesh spell to undo the basilisk’s gaze, the temple back in town does.

It’s inconvenient to run back to town with a partially-petrified party, though, so basilisks are best dealt with before they can get a stare off, either by blasting them with magic or by having everyone temporarily equip mirrors in place of their shields. Only once have I failed to do this — it was a mixed encounter, basilisks and something else, and I failed to scroll the viewport far enough to notice that the basilisks were there. I won the fight, but with 2/3 of the party down. The fact that the survivors were presumably each lugging two statues wherever they went didn’t seem to slow them down, but I still wanted to end the situation as quickly as possible. So rather than go all the way back to town, I decided at first to check out the abandoned temple in the mines, where the dwarf who sent me after the staff pieces in the first place hangs out. I figured that there was an outside chance that a guy who spends his time in a temple would turn out to be a cleric, and that he might possibly be able to cast Stone to Flesh. If he wanted the staff badly enough, he might even cast it for free!

(I should note that this last point was misguided, as the temple in town also cures the party for free. This didn’t happen in the previous two games, but that’s fitting, given their plots. In Pool of Radiance, as I said before, the player characters are no one special, just a bunch of adventurers seeking their fortune, and the temples in Phlan had set up shop to share in that fortune. In Curse of the Azure Bonds, the PCs’ motives were basically selfish. But here in Secret of the Silver Blades, the heroes were summoned specifically to save the city. When you’re in town, randomly-occurring color messages continually remind you that the populace is pulling for you. Helping you along by waiving fees is part of that, unusual though it may be for a CRPG.)

When I made it back to my dwarvish taskmaster, I was dismayed to find that all he did was complain that I had only found four of the staff pieces, and then send me on my way. His failure to cure my party wasn’t even the dismaying part; I pretty much expected that. The dismaying part was that I thought I had found five pieces. I had stopped in the middle of exploring mine level six. As anticipated, I had lost track of where I had found things, and now faced the prospect of re-exploring every level I had already been through. Except it would be worse this time, because on four of those levels the staff piece was already removed, and the only way to establish this would be to search every inch.

Not liking this, I cast about for better ways, and finally did what I should have done long before: I consulted the Well of Wisdom. It did not disappoint. It didn’t tell me the exact coordinates of the remaining pieces, but it said just about everything possible short of that: what level each piece was on, what direction to take from the central shaft to find them. It turns out my missing piece is on level 3.

Advice and guidance figure big in this game, mainly because the maps are too large for the player to reasonably be expected to explore them thoroughly. And that’s not a bad thing: it makes the player replace exhaustive searches with a more deliberate, purposeful style of play. I do think it could stand to be more consistent about it, though. As far as I can tell, there’s no guidance towards finding the entrance to the mines in the first place. It’s located close enough to the Well of Wisdom that you’re expected to just run into it on your own. It certainly worked that way for me. But once that happened, it got me to stop looking for guidance, and that was bad.

The area around the Well of Wisdom forms the hub of Secret of the Silver Blades. There are sixteen two-way teleport gates there, leading to significant places throughout the game, but they need to be activated from the opposite side before they can be used. It’s a reasonable way to make the player earn progress in the story, but only have to earn each bit of progress once. (I recall Ultima Underworld 2 did something similar with doors that could only be unlocked from one side.) I currently have five of the teleporters activated, which I suppose means I’m somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the way through the game.

My current mission is similarly subdivided: I’m scouring the various levels of the mines for the eight pieces (one piece per mine level) of an important artifact, a staff once owned by the big bad’s little brother. ¹Actually, I don’t know which of the brothers is older; I phrase it the way I do because it sounds good. And this reminds me once again of Ultima Underworld 2, which also had a backstory involving two brothers, with no indication of which was older — which, I hear, resulted some consternation, and an emergency post-release story meeting, when the game was translated into Japanese. A character talking at length about his brother in Japanese without saying whether he’s an older or younger brother is about as natural and easy as a character talking about his sibling in English without mentioning the sibling’s gender. The mines are large: the point where you enter has coordinates (50, 50), and the tunnels spread in all directions from there, for an implied 100×100 potential size, although the upper reaches, at least, don’t reach nearly that far. But so far, I haven’t found it necessary to map them. Following the right-hand wall has sufficed to produce the first three staff fragments. This technique is not guaranteed to always work — there could be loops in the tunnels — but I can worry about mapping once I’ve seen it fail. Or once I start actually encountering monsters that pose a threat to me again, and decide I need to know the shortest route back to the exit.

Understand that the staff doesn’t show up in your inventory, or indeed anywhere else in the entire user interface. It’s a notional staff, a staff that exists only at the plot level. This is consistent with the approach taken throughout the series so far, starting with the books you recover from the Phlan library in Pool of Radiance. Curse of the Azure Bonds makes a major point of three artifacts (a helm, an amulet, and something I can’t remember) that you need to defeat the end boss, but you only see them in cutscenes. But that’s all quite easy to keep track of: the CotAB midgame has three villains, and each is linked in some way to one of the three items. Whereas these staff pieces have next to no context: they’re all found in undistinguished crannies in indistinguishable tunnels. If I were to set the game aside for a few months, as I have done with many other CRPGs, I doubt I’d be able to remember which tunnels had already yielded staff and which still need scouring. And the game wouldn’t help me. I’d have to keep notes manually or something.

The Well of Wisdom is essentially Secret of the Silver Blades‘ version of Pool of Radiance‘s council clerk, giving you leads on what you should be doing next. Except it doesn’t do it for free. You have to feed it gems in large quantities. There’s thus a natural connection between the Well and the mines (where the gems come from), and part of the story involves the Order of the Black Circle, the evil wizards who control the mines, trying to get control of the Well also.

More importantly, this arrangement gives us something that the previous two games lacked: a money sink. This is something the system really sorely needs, particularly considering how heavy money is. I commented before about how I wasn’t even picking up platinum pieces in the last game, and for a while, I was dropping them without consideration here too, until I remembered that I didn’t have to: the town where you start the game actually has a bank where you can deposit your loot. The same bank will exchange coins for gems. So I assume that the designers saw that people were leaving heaps of treasure on the battlefield and decided that this was a problem worth solving. I’m still accumulating money far faster than I can use it, but at least it’s not reducing my combat movement rate.

One thing bothers me about that well: it’s a magical body of water with a mind and a will, and therefore possibly an agenda. I mean, we all learned not to trust magical bodies of water back in Pool of Radiance, right? Furthermore, if the Well turned out to be evil, it would just be continuing a theme of betrayal that seems to be a big part of this game generally. The Black Circle, for example, pretended to be benevolent for quite some time, aiding the hapless miners in order to hasten their digging a tunnel to let the monsters out. You’d think that the name “Black Circle” would have been a tip-off that they were evil, but apparently the miners were desperate or greedy enough to let it slide.

Another day of little play. Lacking much new to write about, I’ll correct something I said earlier. I said that the larger-than-16×16 regions were unimportant, and that they didn’t have events attached to fixed locations like the important areas do. While I maintain that this is true in Curse of the Azure Bonds, it’s not in Secret of the Silver Blades. SotSB, like the two games that preceded it, uses a system of numbered text passages in the manual that you’re expected to look up when instructed by the game. Some of them aren’t actually text passages, but rather, maps, or fragments of maps. Some of these guide you to specific places in the larger areas.

Actually, the previous two games did this on occasion too, but I didn’t find it useful there, because I tended to explore everything exhaustively anyway. It’s not hard to do when the world is in such small chunks. But here? I recall reading somewhere that the Gold Box games were known for their vast dungeons, but that seemed like a lie until this game. The game’s central hub — the Well of Wisdom ¹UPDATE: Looking back, I find the game calls it the “Well of Knowledge”. But I have it as “Wisdom” in this and subsequent posts, and I don’t intent to bother changing it., which provides teleport gates to other important areas you’ve already visited — is a standard 16×16 sector that’s actually embedded in a much larger labyrinth, which seems to take the place of wilderness in this game. I don’t think it’s the only such embedded sector, either, because the notion of embedding is worked into the story: in the game’s intro sequence, you see a castle engulfed by a glacier, like a fly in amber. This, I’m told, is the lair of the end boss. Although not yet explicitly stated, it seems likely that the monsters that have been flooding from the mines ultimately come from tunnels dug from that castle.

Just a brief note today, corresponding to a brief play session. My time has mostly been spoken for the last few days. This will end soon, but I can’t help but feel like I’m dragging my heels again, like when I was just starting Pool of Radiance — perhaps because I’m no longer rushing to access sequels on schedule. (There is one more game left in the series, Pools of Darkness, but I don’t feel like I have to start that next week, because I have other games from 1991 I can do instead.)

But also, I may be getting tired of the gameplay. I’ve made a lot of comments about the subtle differences between the Gold Box games, and how the user interface incrementally improves, but the fact is, the bulk of my time spent playing the game is still a matter of maneuvering guys around on a battlefield, casting the same few spells, and then going through the ritual of resting up, re-memorizing spells, and identifying any enchanted loot I found. Bosses break this up a little, but they’re a minority of the play time. The one thing that really changes as I advance is that my higher-level characters have more spells and more hit points, and therefore can have more battles between rests.

I vaguely recall a passage in the first edition Dungeon Master’s Guide about how the players should regard monsters as obstacles, not goals. (Presumably this is the rationale for providing XP for treasure.) A lot of CRPGs break this idea, to the point where players spend time wandering around explicitly looking for random encounters. Here, though, I’m really feeling like random encounters are just getting in the way of me doing what I want to do, which is advancing in the plot in a timely fashion. In the previous two games, there were ways to avoid a lot of the random encounters, usually by means of the “Parlay” option. (One dungeon in Curse of the Azure Bonds had random encounters with giant slugs, which could be avoided by simply stepping out of their way.) But that hasn’t even been an option here.

Just outside of the starting area in Secret of the Silver Blades, there’s a district that doesn’t fit inside the usual 16×16 map sector. Places like this started cropping up in Curse of the Azure Bonds, but I didn’t pay much attention to them there, because they were in places obviously disconnected from the plot. I don’t really think this one is connected to the plot either, but the plot here is less of a driving force, at least at the beginning, so I decided to explore it anyway.

I had some suspicion that an area that seems like it doesn’t fit in the usual map grid would turn out to simply have wraparound, or at least somehow fit together jigsaw-style into a neat square. There was at least one dungeon in CotAB that pretended to be long and skinny, but was composed of strips that naturally fit together into a 16×16 block. But that really doesn’t seem to be the case here. So the game engine is capable of supporting larger areas. And yet, the important areas still seem to be limited to the standard size, and I have an inkling why. It has to do with triggered events. In important areas, stepping into particular spots will produce effects ranging from simple descriptive text to monster encounters to plot events. Traps and hidden treasure caches may also be bound to particular map tiles. I’ve seen similar events in the larger areas, but they’re not actually bound to locations: if I go back to an earlier save and explore the same area again, they’ll happen in different spots. So, I hypothesize that the designers implemented special events in terms of a list of coordinate references, and opted to keep those references limited to 16×16 — which, as I pointed out before, fits neatly into a single byte. Whatever model they’re using for the walls is clearly more freeform.

Another thing about the large area here: it smacks of procedural generation. There are a lot of repeated identical rooms and pointless dead ends. I don’t think the game actually generates maps procedurally at runtime, but it could easily have been generated randomly during the authoring stage, either by a computer program or even by rolling dice. There’s even a certain amount of tradition to the latter approach: the first-edition Dungeon Master’s Guide had a section on generating dungeons randomly. (I tried it in a live session once. It didn’t work very well.) But who knows? Maybe the designers just threw in the identical rooms and dead ends to make it labyrhinthine and confusing. But it would be more effective at this if I didn’t have my map coordinates on the screen all the time.

So! Let’s get to it. The silver blades: what is their secret? I don’t know. I don’t even know what the silver blades are yet. The game opens with no mention of them, presumably because they’re secret. Instead, we have (ye gods) a something-evil-in-the-mines opening. Well, fair enough: the series hadn’t tackled this cliché yet.

First impressions: They’ve really devoted some attention to improving the engine this time around. The visual presentation hasn’t changed much (apart from reorganizing the character sheets and adding some new wall textures), but they’ve added support for two major pieces of add-on hardware.

One is the Ad Lib sound card — yes, just the original Ad Lib, not the Soundblaster, which means that we just get FM synthesis, not sampled sound effects. Laugh all you want. The Ad Lib was a tremendous improvement over the previous state of the art, the PC internal speaker. It doesn’t seem to get used much here, though: the only bit that really takes advantage of it is the intro sequence, which has background music. Still, even that little goes a long way toward making the game feel more professional than its predecessors.

The other new hardware is the mouse. This makes a big difference in a fundamentally menu-driven game. But then, the menu system had gone through something of an overhaul anyway, mostly for the better. Vertically-aligned menus are now navigated with the up/down keys instead of the difficult and unexpected home/end of the previous two games. Consequently, I’m having to retrain myself; I keep reaching for the wrong keys here. Of course, using the up/down keys like this means that you can’t scroll through a menu and use the up/down keys for movement within the world at the same time, and accordingly, movement has been separated out into its own mode. I complained about having to manually switch into movement mode in combat in Pool of Radiance, but it’s not so bad in this context, because once you’re in movement mode, you tend to stay in it for a long time. In combat, you had to switch back every round.

So I’m a bit disappointed to see that we’re back to having to manually switch into movement in combat as well, undoing one of CotAB‘s chief improvements to the UI. But you can’t have everything, I suppose.