Secret of the Silver Blades: Giant Problems

A late-session battle had me allied with frost giants, fighting fire giants.

For laughs, let's review something I said in the last post:

I did a scan of my levels before posting this, and I was surprised to see I still have quite a way to go. My paladin is Level 12/15, my thief 13/18, my ranger 13/15. My two mages are Levels 13 and 14 out of 15. Only my cleric, at 14/15 and only about 20,000 points away from the final level, is likely to max out any time soon. If I'm about halfway through the game (which I suspect only based on the number of journal entries I've circled), that means the pacing isn't too bad. As we know, I hate running into level caps long before the end of the game.

Within a couple of hours after I wrote that, everything was all shot to hell. The creatures and puzzles of the subsequent areas delivered such copious experience point rewards that everyone except my thief is now maxed, and the only reason my thief isn't is because half of his experience points are being wasted on a multi-class in which he can no longer advance.

I've ranted before at how much I hate level caps that are achievable well before the endgame. Here, this is mitigated only by the knowledge that I'll be able to use some of the excess experience when I get to Pools of Darkness. I say "some" because the game only lets you increase by one level at a time, so you can only accumulate so much experience above your current level. For instance, the paladin's level cap in Secret is Level 15, which requires 2,450,001 experience. If I accumulate more than 2,800,001, I'll be able to immediately increase to Level 16 when I start in Pools. But the game will cap me at 3,150,000, or 1 point lower than the amount needed for Level 17. If I get that high, I'll be able to level up once in Pools, fight one battle, then level up again. After that, I'll have to start earning points towards Level 18 as normal.

Will I reach that cap? Almost certainly. My paladin currently has 2,875,194, or enough to go to Level 16 if Secret supported it. I can't imagine I won't earn another 275,000 before the game's end. When experience no longer matters, you're no longer working for anything. It feels as if a paid position has suddenly turned into a volunteer job.

When I last posted, I had explored the nine levels of the Verdigris mines and re-assembled Oswulf's Staff. The 10th level led to the dungeons of the Castle of Twins, home of the Dreadlord. The moment I arrived, an apparition of the Dreadlord started taunting me.

My party played with baby ocelots for a while and then, regrettably, had to continue on.

This kept up throughout the 10 small levels of the dungeon. The apparition showed up regularly to mock and trick me, sometimes concealing a trap, sometimes concealing treasure, sometimes just being a jackass. At the stairway to every level, it offered me the choice of a riddle or a combat. I took the riddle each time, and they were moronically simple, most of them variations on riddles we've encountered in dozens of places before. A sample:

• "You feel it, you never saw it, and you never will." (YOUR HEART)
• "You must keep it after giving it." (YOUR WORD)
• "It's as light as a feather, but you can't hold it for 10 minutes?" (YOUR BREATH)
• "Runs smoother than any rhyme, loves to fall but cannot climb." (WATER) 
• "You break it if you even name it." (SILENCE)
• "It passes before the sun and makes no shadow." (WIND)
• "You feed it, it lives. You give it something to drink, it dies!" (FIRE)

Honestly? Babies in the womb have heard of this riddle.

I actually got the first couple wrong because I didn't know he was going for YOUR HEART and YOUR WORD instead of MY HEART and MY WORD. A wrong answer kicked us back to the Well of Knowledge, where a 100-gem donation got the answer from the Well.

The dungeons were populated by Black Circle mages and fighters, medusas, basilisks, fire giants, hell hounds, ettins, and fearsome beasts called "pyrohydras" capable of up to 12 attacks per round.

Thankfully, despite their names, they didn't seem to have any resistance against "Fireball."

Worst of all were the driders, which the Forgotten Realms Wiki tells me are Drow that have been transformed into spiders from the waist down, usually for failing their goddess. When I first encountered them, I had a very negative knee-jerk reaction, but I couldn't remember exactly why. It turns out that they're all magic users, favoring "Magic Missile" and "Lightning Bolt." I needed to incapacitate them each round to have a hope of survival. Fortunately, I was overloaded with Necklaces of Missiles, Wands of Fireball, Wands of Ice Storm, and my own memorized spells, so it wasn't terribly hard, especially where the base had several safe places to rest.

Driders are no fun.

The driders offered an interesting side-quest. They had a base off of one of the dungeon levels, and journal entries found there suggest that they weren't originally allies of the Dreadlord, but they got curious when the ice started to melt and sent parties to investigate the area. The Black Circle ended up paying them to help with some sort of ritual that I interrupted. I don't know what it was going to accomplish, but it involved the sacrifice of a warrior named Stiffbeard. With the temporary help of his companion, Sir Deric, I scoured the base, saved Stiffbeard, and prevented the ritual.

The party gets a one-level companion.

Deric and Stiffbeard were part of a previous party of adventurers hired by the town. I found remnants of them in several jail cells and notes throughout the dungeons. I guess they were doomed anyway, given that they didn't bother to take time to assemble Oswulf's Staff.

I was reasonably sure that the top level of the dungeons would take me to the Castle of Twins proper, where I would face the final showdown. It turns out the game had a lot more in store for me. I did find the door to the Castle, but after defeating the Fire Giants who were trying to melt the ice on it, I found it was still frozen shut.

If I had just waited a few more minutes.

Instead, I had to exit the dungeons via a long, maze-like "crevice" running east through the glaciers. The crevice led me to a city of frost giants, from which there was an exit to another crevice running back towards the castle and the upper levels. As we discussed in the comments to the last post, the second crevice nonsensically continues running east instead of doubling back to the west, meaning the castle dungeons and castle are miles apart. Perhaps the glacier picked up the above-ground part of the castle and deposited it elsewhere, like a glacial erratic.

The first crevice had a long sequence in which I kept hearing a woman's screams and finding evidence of a struggle. Following these clues, I eventually came upon Sasha, the clerk of Phlan, being dragged along by the Black Circle. I saved her, naturally, but she wasn't exactly as grateful as I would have hoped.

Pretending to be leading me to a "fabulous treasure" she'd heard about, she instead led us to a teleporter and jumped through, making her escape. The ruse was unnecessary. I would have been glad to help her. The last thing I got from her was a pouch full of gems and a note that read, "I'm sorry but I needed to escape. This pouch is for you. Seems like old times." So she did remember us from our time together in Phlan! Why did she speak about us in the third person when we met earlier?

The ill-timed arrival of the Black Circle convinces the frost giant king I'm not his enemy. This is after I've slain about 5,000 frost giants.

I had already faced fire giants in the dungeons, and the crevice brought me face-to-face with both frost giants and cloud giants. My ranger, armed with a Long Sword vs. Giants, cleaves through them nicely. The frost giants apparently live on the glacier and are upset that it's being melted from under them. When I reached the frost giant city, they assumed I was responsible and attacked. I had to fight dozens of long battles between frost giants and mastodons before I finally reached the chambers of the frost giant king. I helped him defeat some Black Circle invaders and convinced him that I wasn't responsible for the destruction of his home. He allowed me free passage through the city after that, and as I close this post, I find myself in another set of crevices leading back to the castle and, presumably, the endgame.

Oh, now we're not so cocky.

Some notes on all of this:

• I don't like how linear the game has been. Pool of Radiance seemed almost completely open, Curse of the Azure Bonds less so, and Secret of the Silver Blades not at all. It makes me wonder what direction Pools of Darkness will go.

• There ought to be a name for a trope in which you're delving deep in a dungeon and you find remnants of a previous expedition, only there ought not to have been any way for the previous expedition to get there because you have all the keys and magic items that they presumably would have needed for passage.

• Several journals noted ominously that the Black Circle was "thawing out the purple worms," and indeed I encountered them at the exit from the dungeons and in a couple of other places. I thought they were pushovers. I don't know what all the fuss was about.

This seemed to be setting up a more deadly confrontation than what was delivered.

• Going all the way back to Pool of Radiance, the Gold Box series mystifyingly loads up fire giants with ridiculous quantities of platinum. Every battle with them produced at least 5,000 pieces; some produced up to 15,000. This is all for no reason, of course, as there's nothing useful to spend money on in this game, and trying to carry that much would just make me ineffective in combat. I left their treasure in the dungeon corridors.

• The dungeon levels were all fractions of normal map sizes, so I didn't bother to map them. There were teleporters back to the Well of Knowledge every couple of levels. Since resting in the Well is worry-free, these conspire to make the game a little too easy.

• The dungeon had several "gyno-sphinxes," who took portions of my treasure for clues. The clues had to do with the locations of keys, which were so easy to find that I don't know why the game thought I needed clues. I don't think I've otherwise heard of a "gyno-sphinx." Does it just mean a female sphinx?

How we know that David W. Bradley didn't work for SSI.

• "Power Word: Stun," one of only a handful of Level 7 mage spells, seems oddly under-powered. You have to be adjacent to the enemy you're casting it on, and all it does is render him inert; it doesn't make him "helpless" (and thus killable in one blow) like "Hold Monster." "Hold Monster," which affects up to 4 creatures and essentially kills them, seems like such a better option--and at three levels lower. I don't know why any player would give up a "Delayed Blast Fireball" for "Power Word: Stun" unless I'm missing something.

Setting out across the glacier to the final battle.

Between ettins, hill giants, fire giants, frost giants, cloud giants, and storm giants, I think that Secret of the Silver Blades has a greater variety of giants than any other D&D game I've played. Is this the full Forgotten Realms canon? Or are there aqua giants and smoke giants out there somewhere?

I expect the next post will be the "Won!" posting, followed by an update on Gold Box spells.

****

Some "Master List" news: A couple months ago, after I played Ring of Darkness, someone linked me to the "World of Spectrum" site whose archives had dozens of ZX Spectrum RPGs that were not on my master list. I cursed, groaned, equivocated, got angry at some commenters, but eventually sighed and added the games to my list.

Since then, every game that I or commenter Tristrom Cooke has investigated has turned out to be a) not at all an RPG; or b) a quasi-RPG (maybe 2 of my 3 core elements) but so abysmally bad that it encourages me to use the "3 elements" defense to banish it from my lit. This has happened to literally about 15 games in a row.

Hence, my new policy: MobyGames and Wikipedia are the only sources that I trust sight-unseen. (They've had some mistakes, too, but they're mostly right.) I'm not going to add any other games based on other sites' lists. I will only add games to my list if a commenter has had direct experience with the RPG and can personally attest that it meets my three core elements. Looking at screenshots and telling me that it "seems like an RPG" doesn't count. I need you to have actually played it or have found a reputable source that describes it in enough detail that it obviously meets my criteria.

In this spirit, I have removed everything I added from "World of Spectrum" pending any commenter testimony on individual games.