Game 163: Secret of the Silver Blades (1990)

When the Gold Box engine was created for Pool of Radiance in 1988, it was perhaps the best RPG engine that could exist at the time, in particular for the specific adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons rules. Its primary rival in my mind is Ultima V, which is better for world-exploration and NPC interaction, but nothing through 1990 exceeds the Gold Box for combat. Little in the 26 years since has exceeded the Gold Box for combat, and I honestly wouldn't mind if the greatest hits of 2000s and 2010s regaled us with their graphics and sound during the exploration phase but tripped over to the familiar oblique angle and customizable icons of Pool of Radiance for the combat engine.

I've said several times--and I probably sound like an old man--that my primary problem with modern games is that I don't understand what's happening half the time in combat. My wife was just recently joking that my final words will probably be, "What?! Why did I just die?!" because she hears me shout it so often from both my couch and my office chair. I never shout that in a Gold Box game. The system so perfectly incorporates physical attacks, ranged attacks, spellcasting, item use, and skill use in a top-down, carefully-controlled environment that not only do I know why I died, I can usually see it coming and identify what steps I could have taken to prevent it.

More than any other RPG engine of the era, and more than only a few since, the Gold Box encourages complex tactics and strategy in combat. You rarely just reload, try again, and hope for better dice this time. Instead, you learn about your foes' strengths and weaknesses and respond accordingly. It's like chess in an RPG.

The Gold Box games are also the only ones in which I have strong memories of individual combats.

Other fans have reacted similarly, which is why the Gold Box ended up being such a long-lived engine. This is the fifth Gold Box game in my chronology, after Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn, and Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, and within the next three years, we're going to have eight or nine more.

The other day, a commenter asked me if I'd gotten tired of it yet. The answer is no, not yet, partly because I love the engine, and partly because I'm playing so many other games in between Gold Box titles. But while I'm not "tired" yet, it does irk me how few improvements we saw to the engine over the years. Adding a "Fix" command and improving targeting in combat were nice upgrades, but for the most part, the weaknesses of the engine in Pool of Radiance remain weaknesses throughout the series; among them are bland, featureless hallways; encounters that spring up suddenly when you walk into their squares; poor options for NPC interaction and dialogue; and the continued use of a paper "adventurer's journal" long past the point at which it was necessary. In some ways, the engine actually degraded between titles: neither Curse nor Secrets offer the same overworld exploration as Pool. And while it works for the adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons rules, I don't think it worked well at all in the Buck Rogers setting, where the lack of magic removes half the point of the combat engine.

In any event, it's been nine months since I've played a Gold Box game, a year since I played a D&D Gold Box game, and damn near two years since we heard from this little party from Phlan, so I'm certainly going into Secret of the Silver Blades in a good mood. I say this despite knowing that many people consider Secret the low point of the Gold Box titles, or at least the four-game Forgotten Realms series. I don't  know what their specific objections are, and I don't yet want to know. When I start a new game, I usually do a search of the comments in all previous games to get a preview, but I'm going to avoid doing that here so as not to poison my perspective. (I should mention that I have played Secret before, maybe 15-17 years ago, but all I remember is a little bit of the back story.)

In Pool of Radiance, the Level 1 party started out, grew in power, and restored the ancient Moonsea-side city of Phlan through a series of quests culminating in the defeat of Tyranthraxus, an ancient evil lately stirring up trouble. In Curse of the Azure Bonds, the moderately-powerful party headed to the Dalelands, south of the Moonsea, to investigate rumors about a princess of Cormyr. They got caught up in some factional strife when they were captured and branded by five evil organizations. One by one, they defeated the holders of their bonds, the last of whom once again turned out to be Tyranthraxus.

  
Secret of the Silver Blades starts with the party having "grown bored with peace and yearn[ing] for adventure." They need yearn only a short time. To the northeast of the Moonsea, somewhere in the Dragonspine Mountains (you could visit part of them in Pool), the residents of the mining town of New Verdigris are facing a threat. Dumping chests of gems into their Well of Knowledge, they wish for "champions to defeat the evil that infests our mine." The party is suddenly yanked from wherever they are, flown through the air--catching a glimpse of New Verdigris's glacier and a castle embedded in the middle on the way--and deposited, naked and unconscious, on the streets of the city. This part of the back story is manifestly intended to explain why the party has none of their equipment from Curse; otherwise, the game could have just started with them responding to a request for assistance and riding into town like normal people.

When the party finally wakes up, the mayor of New Verdigris explains what's happening: three months ago, the miners delved too greedily and too deep, and "monsters boiled forth" from a new shaft. The monsters first infested the mines, then the ruins near the mines, and may soon take over the city itself. "You must save us," the mayor concludes, "before we are overwhelmed."

From the demo screen. What horrible character names.

  
So far, the back story isn't too bad. I always prefer these modest "save a city" quests to those where I have to stop someone from world domination. Of course, the former can easily turn into the latter, as we saw with Neverwinter Nights. Still, for now the main quest has something of the feeling of Pool of Radiance.

I imported my winning team from Curse of the Azure Bonds. It consists of:

• Bolingbroke, a lawful good male human paladin of Level 10.
• Karnov, a true neutral male dwarf fighter (Level 9)/thief (Level 11). He won't be able to progress any more in fighter levels.
• Goldeneye, a chaotic good female human ranger of Level 11.
• Brutus, a chaotic neutral male human who started as a fighter, reached Level 8, then dualed to a cleric and reached Level 10.
• Cesario, a lawful good male human who started out as a cleric, reached Level 9, then dualed to a magic-user and reached Level 11.
• Viola, a chaotic good female human magic-user of Level 11.

As I discussed in my first Curse posting, with the sole exception of thieves, non-human characters are unfeasible in the Forgotten Realms Gold Box series because of level caps.

The imported characters prepare to set forth.

Characters created in Secret start at Level 8 with 200,000 experience points, and all my characters are Level 10-11, starting with around 800,000 experience points, a huge difference. This means that the early game might be a bit easy, but it also means that I won't experience much advancement in Secret, since the characters cap in this game at Level 15. I also realized late in this session that my ranger, who had been wearing a Girdle of Giant Strength at the end of Curse, imported here with 24 strength even though the Girdle didn't come with her.

As the game begins, the mayor gives the party 20 gems to sell plus a decent selection of magic items, including Gauntlets of Ogre Power, a halberd +2, a shield +1, and several +1 weapons and armor. The mayor says I can use his house to rest, and he has a teleporter that will take the party directly to the Well of Knowledge in the ruins. After that, the exposition ends and the party is free to explore the city.

You can jump right to the heart of the ruins or find your way there through corridor exploration.

I was thinking about ways I could increase the challenge and variety of my fifth Gold Box outing. Usually, I'd do this with limits in the party selection (e.g., all mages, no mages) but I didn't want to do that here for legacy purposes. Instead, I came up with this: I won't allow my party to memorize more than one of each spell unless they've already memorized one of every other spell of that level. By increasing the variety of spells, it will ensure that I actually try neglected spells like "Slow," "Feeblemind," and "Dimension Door." It will also keep me from abusing mass-damage spells like "Fireball" and thus will increase the tactical nature of combat. We'll see how it goes.

Probably only the third time I've ever cast "Confusion" in a Gold Box game.

  
New Verdigris was nothing special--a standard Gold Box 16 x 16 map containing the mayor's house, a pub, a training hall, a bank, a temple, and an armory. There's really no reason it couldn't have been a menu town. Eight buildings are labeled "private residence" and have nothing in them. One building has an old man who spins tales; another houses "Marcus the Wizard" who has no interest in seeing me but is willing to sell some trinkets through a servant. There's a probable 12-to-7 that Marcus will be the subject of some special encounter later.

In contrast to the Phlan armory, where you could buy every obscure variety of polearm, New Verdigris has a paltry selection. Incidentally, if an RPG armory is selling something weird like a "cute yellow canary," you pretty much have to buy it just in case.

The Mayor had a few journal entries to convey, starting with the revelation that he used to be a Red Plume--a soldier of Hillsfar--who was probably in Yulash when my Curse party came traipsing through. The entry refers to "a band of blue tattooed adventurers" but he doesn't seem to be aware that that was us. He also talks about a "magic brotherhood known as the Black Circle" and that "it was based on their divination that we extended our lower tunnels." Marcus turns out to be a member. The Mayor assures that the organization is "studying ways to stop the monsters" but given that their name is, you know, "the Black Circle," I think perhaps they're up to something more sinister.

Having finished exploring the city in less than an hour, I turned my attention to the ruins outside the city's gates. Apparently, the teleporter in the Mayor's house will take me deep inside those ruins, to the Well of Knowledge, but I'd rather find it through exploration first. Only a few steps into the ruins, I found myself in the first battle of the game, a random encounter with a group of bugbears and griffons. Later combats--all random, so far--served up ogres, hill giants, hell hounds, and crocodiles. One wonders how these diverse creatures have all been surviving in the depths of the earth.

It's still fun when they line up for "Lightning Bolt." Too bad I only have one of these at a time.

One change from previous games soon became clear: the ruins are not confined to a 16 x 16 grid, or even a series of them, as with all previous D&D Gold Box titles. (Curse had some areas smaller than 16 x 16, but they always fit with other such areas to make up a map that was 16 x 16. Buck Rogers had larger, more irregular areas, but that wasn't a D&D game.) So far, I've explored to an X coordinate of 28. There are also large "unused" areas (unless access is through some later teleporter); this isn't technically "new," although it's rare in previous games and the areas were small.

The corridors are long and winding, with a lot of switchbacks and few alternate paths, so that two squares only a coordinate apart might take dozens of moves to traverse. More than any other Gold Box game so far, it feels like you're really in a maze. I haven't decided if this is good or bad.

Was drawing the arrow too hard?

I've been a bit disappointed in the graphics and sound, which haven't advanced at all since Curse. The game still only supports EGA graphics, and the corridors are still uniformly bland and featureless. While I like the turn-based gameplay better than Captive, I confess I miss actually being able to see and hear enemies in the game world instead of suddenly stumbling into their squares with no warning.

I'm just saying, maybe I would have seen these things from more than 10 feet away.

Aspects of the interface also haven't changed since Curse, with both good and bad results. On the good side, I love that the mouse/keyboard/joystick options are all redundant, so you can use them in whatever combination you want. If you want to use the keyboard, you just type the first menu option. If you want to use the mouse, you click on the option. If you want to use a joystick, you scroll through the options and "fire" on the one you want. Every game ought to be like this until we get to continuously-moving 3D interfaces in which you absolutely need the mouse to navigate.

On the bad side, the developers still haven't fixed some of the annoyances from Pool and Curse. In combat, pressing "Target" still scrolls through your own characters instead of jumping right to the enemies. There's still no "Center" option for fireballs and other area-effect spells (although the spacebar works as an undocumented feature), and after killing all the creatures, you still have to perform an action for every remaining character in that round. The game doesn't remember what magic spells you memorized last time, so you have to manually select them again. They're minor things, but I know they get fixed eventually and I wish the series would hurry up.

And of course they haven't done anything about the awful economy. Within about six fights in the dungeon, I had more platinum pieces than I could even carry. The vault in town will store it all and even trade platinum for gems, and there's a magic shop that sells wands of "Magic Missile" (but nothing really cool like wands of "Fireball" or Girdles of Giant Strength).

Overall, it's nice to be back in a familiar setting and interface that I know I like, but I wish the game had "wowed" me a bit more at the beginning. Pool, Curse, Champions, and even Buck Rogers all had introductory sequences that made you feel you were entering some grand new adventure, not just walking into a standard dungeon next to a standard menu town. Here's hoping Secret gets a little better, but even if it doesn't, it won't be so bad.