The Stack

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.

The final area of Curse of the Azure Bonds does something singularly cruel: it locks you into a final 16×16 map sector until you either die or win the game, sending unlimited numbers of random encounters at you as you explore, while not letting you rest at all — the power of the sole remaining bond compels you to keep on moving. Since your supply of both spells and hit points is limited, it behooves you to find your way to the final chamber, where you confront the demon Tyranthraxus, as efficiently as possible. In other words, the solution is to explore thoroughly, mapping all the while, until you stagger half-dead into the final encounter, and then restore an earlier save and do it right this time. And while you’re at it, take a moment to trek back across the country to that one city that has a magic store and pick up some healing and speed potions for everybody. Speed potions are the key to killing powerful creatures quickly in this game, letting your warrior-types get in extra blows. Sure, the Haste spell does the same thing, and doesn’t cost you money, but money flows like water at this point (it got so I wasn’t even picking up platinum pieces any more), and it’s better to save your precious, unrenewable spell slots for something more directly deadly.

Really, though, the limited amount of spellcasting you can do in the endgame doesn’t matter as much as you might think, because by this point in the game you’ve doubtless picked up a bunch of wands and other spellcasting items, some (all?) of which can even be used by warrior-types. And if you’re at all like me, you’ve hoarded them without using them, so they’re all at full charge. Tyranthraxus has an army defending him, but what with one guy using a Wand of Fireballs, and another guy using a Necklace of Missiles (the missiles being fireballs), and another guy just plain casting Fireball, the defenders don’t last long. The fireballs don’t affect Tyranthraxus, though. He’s basically a fire god, but I don’t think that’s why; I think he just has a high magic resistance. D&D didn’t really do much with intrinsic elemental resistances at this stage in its history. Even the Efreets ¹I suppose I should pluralize it as Efreeti, but I want the plurality to be unambiguous — unlike the AD&D Monster Manual, which left a lot of players thinking that Efreeti was the singular. Curse of the Azure Bonds itself uses the term “Efreetis”. that I encountered earlier could be hurt by my fireballs, and they’re from the Elemental Plane of Fire, for crying out loud.

I don’t think I mentioned the name Tyranthraxus in my writeup of Pool of Radiance, but he’s the end boss there as well, albeit possessing a different body. And he retains some of the same habits, like letting strangers wander his territory unmolested by patrols as long as they mention his name when questioned. It’s different here, though, because until you get rid of the final bond, saying that Tyranthraxus is your master is actually the truth. Also, there’s good reason for those patrols to leave you alone: Tyranthraxus actually wants you to come to his lair, where his master plan would come to fruition, were it not for a last-second NPC-thrown monkey wrench. He turns out to be something of a puppet master in this game, manipulating you into ridding yourself of the first four bonds so that he can have exclusive control over you. That mysterious cloaked figure who I thought was probably Elminster? Not Elminster. Elminster doesn’t show up at all. Perhaps he was only mentioned in the manual to fool the player as I was fooled.

Anyway, that’s another Gold Box game down. By now I’ve pretty much gotten used to the user interface, including the peculiar key combinations required for diagonal movement on my laptop. (I did try an external keypad, but found it even more awkward than the combinations.) But also, the user interface is improved over Pool of Radiance in a number of ways that weren’t obvious at first. Remember how I said that what the game really needs in combat is something more like a rogue-like interface, where you can just move the current character without hitting a key to go into movement mode? CotAB supports something very close to that: there’s still a separate movement mode, but you automatically switch into it from the main action mode when you press a direction key. So, yay incremental improvements! Let’s hope they keep coming.

One bond left. That means I’m into the endgame. There are five villains, but you defeat one in the intro chapter and one is saved for the very end, so the midgame has three. The last one I beat, the cult of Moander, was such a cakewalk that I suspect I’ve been doing the three middle sub-quests in the wrong order (if indeed there is an ordering; possibly they’re all designed to be accessible to new characters, and just became easier as my characters leveled up).

In Moander’s pit, I teamed up with Alias, the protagonist of the novel. I honestly didn’t think she was going to show up in the game, seeing how her function in the novel is taken by the player characters, but I suppose the leaving her out would have made a lie of the box art. Taken directly from the novel, and repeated within the game as its splash screen, it shows the heroine with her 80’s hair and ridiculous peekaboo armor. That armor seems to be her chief defining visual trait: the makers of the game even went so far as to make a special combat-mode sprite for her, with a visible diamond-shaped flash of skin on the chest.

The reasons behind this character design are as obvious as the target demographic it’s intended to appeal to. Selling games through sex appeal is hardly new, and hardly rare. At least the cover art here shows something that’s actually found in the game, which makes it more honest than a lot of games of the same era. But still not especially honest: anyone who bought it with the intention of ogling Alias during gameplay would probably be disappointed in her EGA representation, and also in how little time she sticks around. The idea of making good on the promises of the cover art — of making a young woman in revealing clothing into a constant feature of gameplay — really didn’t take off until Tomb Raider, which was still years away at this point.

The bait-and-switch approach is still alive and well, though, and has reached its pinnacle with Evony, the mediocre web-based kingdom-building game whose infamously irrelevant ads, showing pictures of lingerie models, have far passed the point of being distinguishable from satire. I’ve blocked Evony ads on this site, because I frankly find them embarrassing, but if there’s one good thing they’ve done, it’s exposing the sleaziness of game advertising in general through a kind of reductio ad absurdum. It’s easy to get inured to exploitative imagery, but now, when I look at Alias, I can’t help but see her as a step on the road to Evony.

I said in a previous post that Curse of the Azure Bonds is a sequel to a novel, but was told in reply that it’s more like a re-imagining. And I can easily believe this. But if so, it’s one those peculiar sequel/remake hybrids, like Desperado or Evil Dead 2. I keep running into characters from the original who mention that something similar happened to a friend of theirs a while back.

In fact, the game is full of continuity nods, to the extent that I spend most of my involvement with the plot wondering what the significance of various things is. At one point a war broke out, and I overheard some people looking for “red plumes”, as if I were expected to know what that meant. And, well, okay: red plumes are in fact mentioned at one point in the manual. They’re a mercenary force from the city of Hillsfar. Perhaps I would be familiar with them if I had played Hillsfar, another SSI game in the same campaign setting, released around the same time as Pool of Radiance (but with a different engine). But are they good guys or bad guys? There isn’t much to indicate this in your early encounters with them, and it’s something important to know in a combat-based RPG. At one point, a Red Plume shouted for help stopping some escaping prisoners, and I had to make a snap decision about which side to help. The one thing that helped me there is that the prisoners were said to be “Zhentil spies”, and the Zhentrim are one thing I am familiar with, from their appearance in Pool of Radiance.

In fact, Zhentil Keep and even Phlan are visitable in this game. Phlan is just another city not directly related to the story, but it’s definitely the same Phlan: the dungeon-type area attached to it is an as-yet-untamed district of the city. (What, I missed one?) I suppose that the more of these Forgotten Realms games I play, the more experiences I’ll have to relate to the made-up names. And I suppose this is the appeal of these shared settings.

And it makes me think once again about the potential of games for education. If I’m going to be absorbing facts about a setting, why not make it real-world knowledge that might possibly have practical application? Well, for one thing, no one has exclusive ownership of facts about the world; once you’re a Forgotten Realms fan, you’re locked into buying official Forgotten Realms products, which is a plus for the developers. Also, it’s probably easier: basing a game on facts would require research, whereas using a fictional setting just requires making things up. I mean, okay, there’s some research: breaking continuity with other works in the same setting is, while inevitable, frowned upon and avoided, so there is a certain amount of established material that Forgotten Realms authors would have to learn. But the key words there are “certain amount”. It’s finite, definite, and completely knowable. This is probably part of the appeal of fantasy worlds for the audience as well: it’s not messy and uncertain like our knowledge of reality.