The Stack

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.