The Stack

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.