Game 203: The Black Sage (1980)

   

The Black Sage 

United States

Poly-Versa-Technology (developer and publisher)
Released 1980 for Apple II

Date Started: 17 November 2015
Date Ended: 17 November 2015

Total Hours: 3

Reload Count: 16 (I was screwing around a lot)

Difficulty: Moderate (3/5)
Final Rating: 13

Ranking at Time of Posting: 18/201 (9%)

 
I know that a couple of days ago, I said I was going to save some of the new RPGs on "Keith's list" for later, and I truly did intend to do that. But then I started playing The Black Sage, just to verify it met my criteria, and damned if this goofy little game didn't strike my mood perfectly. I played all the way to the end in a single session, frequently laughing, sometimes with the game and sometimes at the game. It is perhaps important to the story to know that I was in Denver, where the altitude and things can cloud your judgement.

This dragon looks like he gets it.

The Black Sage is subtitled "an Ogres & Orcs adventure," a phrase that led me to a session of fruitless Googling before I concluded that the game is, in fact, the only "Ogres & Orcs adventure." Perhaps some of my more experienced readers can fill in the blanks if I missed something, but it doesn't appear that there was ever a tabletop RPG of the name. This makes it all the more weird that the game refers you to the "Ogres and Orcs rule book" (that's not my typo; the game can't decide whether there's an ampersand or a full word in the middle) if you're confused about any of the mechanics.

Exploring the rooms of the Black Sage's castle. This map and the dragon on the sub-title screen are the only graphics in the game. There is no sound at all.

               

The game begins by rolling you a character--with random values for strength, IQ, luck, dexterity, constitution, and charisma--and asking whether you like the character. The "Y/N" option at this point seems to be the same as hundreds of other RPGs, in which hitting "N" will generate a new series of statistics. But this game has a surprise for you:

This cracked me up and made me want to keep playing. You had to be there.

     

This is all too bad because something seems broken with the random generator. Every time I started the game anew, I got the same "random" statistics, so there was no choice but to like the character: a kind-of weak, really dumb, but spry and healthy adventurer.

The character begins the game with 1,000 gold pieces to outfit himself. He can select from a variety of swords, shields, hafted (two-handed) weapons, armor, and spells. All weapons but one have a strength requirement above 12, so I was forced to choose a cutlass for my primary weapon. I was similarly restricted to a "normal" shield. This left me plenty of money for spells, of which there are four: "What a Blast," "Where For Art Thou," "Seal Shut," and "Detect Magic." Alas, I lacked the rule book necessary to describe the uses of each of the spells, but I basically figured it out.

(Side note: I was at least 30, and already a Shakespeare fan of many years, before I realized that the word "wherefore" means "why" and not "where." Juliet is asking why Romeo is who he is, not where he is. This game is using it wrong.)

After outfitting yourself, the game verifies that you "are equipped the best you can be considering limitations of money and strength." To the unwary player, this sounds like an invitation to return to the equipment store and get more stuff. Ha. Instead, a "no" answer causes you to lose 2 IQ points and sends you forward to the next question: whether you want to enter the adventure. If you say "no," you're dumped to the prompt with a "why did you run this program stupid!!"

This game really enjoys messing with you.

  

A "yes" finds you in the Black Sage's castle, a high-resolution fortress of 34 interconnected, numbered rooms. As you enter, the game offers you a hint as to what room the Sage occupies. In what is probably another failure of the random number generator, I always got the same hint:

I still don't know whether this is so you can avoid him or find him.

       

The "figure in skating" is, of course, an 8, and Bo Derek, as Dudley Moore learned in 1979, is a 10. That meant I should look for the Sage in room 18.

Each room in the castle supplies a random encounter that, although goofy, generally gives you more role-playing options than the typical CRPG. For instance, the first room of the castle pits you against a sleeping ogre. You can try to "sneek" by him, slit his throat with a dagger, wake him up and fight him, or wake him up and talk to him. Success with each of these methods depends largely on your attributes. Sneaking requires you to make a saving throw based on luck, assassinating him rolls against your dexterity, fighting him takes you to standard combat (dependent largely on strength), and waking him up for a conversation...well, that leads to instant death here, but in similar scenarios it rolls against your charisma.

 

In this particular case, slitting his throat is the most rewarding because you get experience for both the successful action and the ogre's death, as well as 10 mithril pieces from the ogre. But it's not always that easy.

A lot of the options are jokes. In a couple of cases you can "stand and wait," which does nothing except require you to "hit any key when you want to stop standing around and waiting." In at least one encounter, choosing the option to "throw up" dumps you to the prompt with the admonishment that "that is absolutely disgusting; you will no longer mess up my castle." In one encounter, a "low-level commoner standing in front of you" turns out to be you in a mirror, and any offensive action ends up killing you. A "successful" charisma roll against a beautiful sorceress results in her falling in love with you and imprisoning you forever.

Here are a few of the many rooms:

Successfully dueling them rewards you with money and experience; talking to them (and passing a charisma roll) leads them to show you a few tips and increases your dexterity and charisma.

Throwing a coin in the well gives you an attribute bump.

Say what you want about the game, but I'm pretty sure I've never encountered this in another RPG.

Hmmm...there only seems to be one "good" role-playing choice here.

Ah, lesson learned.

           

When you do have to fight, the game rolls a series of statistics, shown in the shot below, that ultimately determine the damage to your constitution. I didn't find that straight-up combat with most fixed creatures was survivable for more than a couple of fights. You really want to play this more as an adventure game than a traditional RPG.

  

A lot of the encounters add or subtract from your attributes, and "solving" some of the rooms properly gives you clues that help in other rooms, including this one that explains a way to get out of the castle.

         

In almost every room, at least one option leads to instant death (or instant dumping you to the prompt), and I suspect that someone playing this honestly would have to restart about a dozen times before successfully navigating the small castle. (The game offers no save ability.) I liberally used save states and probably re-loaded twice that many times screwing around with the various options.

You get screens like this one a lot. I thought it was very funny at the time.

  

Revisiting a room generally finds it empty, although occasionally there's a random monster like an orc or hobgoblin in there. In contrast to the fixed encounters, the random ones are usually easily beaten in combat.

This is one of the times I laughed at the game. Even accounting for various possibilities, the language could have been less tortured.

  

The Black Sage himself resides in Room 18, near the middle of the castle. If the goal is to defeat him, I'm not sure how you do that. Even visiting his room after successfully exploring all the other ones, the only options lead to him freezing you in place with a spell and demanding "the amount of gold that you are worth." If you offer too little gold, you lose attributes before he kicks you out of the room. If you offer a moderate amount, he takes it and nothing changes. If you offer all your gold, he releases you and lets you keep it "for being so generous."

With no clear way to defeat the Sage, the goal just seems to be to get out of the dungeon with some riches, which include a large diamond and a magic sword. I found three methods of exiting the place, one of which doesn't even give you a choice when you find it.

This blew my mind. It took me a while to articulate why it wouldn't work.

  
Upon exiting, you can sell or keep your riches. If you got enough experience to advance to Level 2, you can choose to increase your attributes by varying amounts.

Since the game ends after leveling up, this doesn't really qualify as character development.

  

After you save your character...that's it. There's no way to "load" a character in this game, so I can only imagine that the author intended to write more Ogres & Orcs adventures in which you could use the saved and leveled characters. I can't find any evidence that any other games were produced in the series.

Even this one is about as obscure as it could be. Its publisher is "Poly-Versa-Technology"; Googling the company shows no results not attached to The Black Sage. Was it a real company? Was The Black Sage even really "published"? It feels like something a wise-ass but somewhat skilled teenager programmed in his high school lab. The written manual that accompanied the game probably had more clues, but it seems to have been lost to the ages.

A couple of days ago, I thought this was the best game ever, but luckily I descended from 5,280 feet before calculating the GIMLET. I give it a 13. It gets 1s in almost everything except I liked the encounter system (3) and the gameplay was short and challenging enough (3). So far, both of the games to offer detailed encounter menus have been somewhat juvenile humor titles (the other one that I can think of is Girlfriend Construction Set). Why haven't real RPGs adopted this dynamic? Some of the Gold Box titles perhaps come closest.

Even though there's one more pre-1984 game on the updated list--1981's Doom Cavern--I'll be returning to my listed rotation for now, adding it as soon as I clear off one of the others. Even though my initial reaction to Keith's attempt to "help" me was somewhat negative, quickly burning through a couple of early titles has really helped ease me back into regular blogging.

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