Sword Dream
And specifically, the "Spirit of Darkness" module
Italy
Independently developed; originally published by VideoCOM, later released as shareware
Released 1993 for Macintosh
Date Started: 24 December 2025
Sword Dream is an Italian RPG creation kit for the Macintosh, published in several versions between 1993 and 1997. It was distributed first by a commercial publisher, then as shareware, and it found its way on a couple of shovelware packages. The kit allows for the creation of tiled, turn-based Dungeons & Dragons-style scenarios with some of the look and feel of the SSI Gold Box games. Version 1.0 came with a sample scenario called Spirit of Darkness. I should have played it last May, during our "darkness" phase.
This is only our second Italian RPG, after Time Horn (1991), although two earlier ones (1984's Buio! and 1985's L'isola dei Segreti) are on my backlist. Still, it's not a country that really churns out titles, so it's a fresh experience. The primary author, Luca Accomazzi (based in the Piedmont region at the time), was well-known in the Italian Macintosh community: he was a columnist for MacWorld and later wrote several books on OS X and iOS. He was joined by Eugenio Spagnolini for the graphics. When local distribution through a traditional publisher failed, they released it as shareware in Italian, French, and English. They updated it in 1997 with a 3D engine, which I have listed as a separate title on my master list.
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| A shot from the tutorial that comes with the kit. |
Unlike, say, Unlimited Adventures, there's not much evidence that it was successful in its primary goal as a kit. Almost no scenarios have survived. Documentation for a 1995 update of the kit mentions several scenarios (Return to Dawn Valley, Secret of Greywood, Nile Trial, Quest for a Paladin) that could be downloaded from a short-lived web site (too old for the Internet Archive, alas), but all but one (Nile Trial) were written with the involvement of the original team.
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| The title screen from Spirit of Darkness. Accomazzi had a relative in Boston collect his shareware fees. That relative is now the director of the NASA Astrophysics Data System at Harvard University. |
Spirit offers no backstory except that a shadow is falling over a peaceful valley. The game starts, as apparently all scenarios do, with a "party" with no members. You can move an icon around the screen, but it comprises no one. Party members must be recruited from various buildings and institutions. Here, a nearby Wizard's Tower offers mages and a nearby town offers fighters (recruited from bank guards), rogues (found at the brothel), clerics (at the temple), and rangers (at the inn). Paladins are supposedly possible with the engine, but they don't appear in the sample scenario.
Inviting a character to join the party basically has you created him from scratch, with typical Dungeons & Dragons choices and limitations. Attributes are the classic D&D six (on the usual scale from 3 to 18); races are human, elf, dwarf, and gnome. Alignment is set by clicking in the right spot on a two-axis graph to make the character chaotic and good, plain good, order and good, neutral, chaotic and evil, plain evil, and order and evil. The character sheet has no explicit declaration of sex; the manual mentions both male and female characters, but all of the portraits look male to me. You can click on the portraits to cycle through features like mustaches and beards, but the main portrait stays the same.
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| Recruiting a rogue. |
Once created, the characters can outfit themselves in an equipment shop in town. In addition to weapons and armor, they need rations to eat every day and lanterns to explore the dark dungeon. There's no way to trade money between characters, so you can't create a bunch of characters and then dismiss them to get rich.
The scenario comes with a pre-created party consisting of one of each character class. You can add more party members, up to eight, but the game warns you that the scenario is balanced for five. I originally created my own party but ended up reverting to the default party when a couple of my members were killed.
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| Buying items at the only shop. |
Once the party is in order, the only thing to do is explore the only dungeon available—a mine at the north end of the 8 x 8 outdoor map. The mine and the outdoor area around it host typical first-level enemies like goblins, kobolds, giant rats, and giant spiders.
Combat transitions to a tactical grid on which characters can attack in melee range, use ranged attacks, cast spells, and flee. The only major difference from SSI tactical battles of the era is that you're timed in Sword Dream. If the character fails to act within about eight seconds, his turn is considered "passed." This is particularly annoying because it takes about that long to bring up the spell interface, select a spell, and target it.
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| The combat window. I've accidentally hidden the turn timer off-screen. |
By now, you've noticed elements of the interface. Like many Mac games, Sword Dream doesn't take you away from the operating system and into the game's own world, but rather emphasizes the OS with multiple windows that the user can independently re-size and re-arrange and lots of cutesy icons and buttons. The "Finder" icon remains perpetually visible, and you can see the desktop (including other open windows and icons) beneath the game. This is because Mac users, no matter what else they're doing, always want to be reminded that what they're fundamentally doing is playing with their Macs.
(When taking screenshots of Mac games, I often forget, as you see here a few times, that the menu bar is actually part of the game interface and ought to be included.)
There simply is no way to construct a good layout of these windows, particularly since the game insists on having each character window appear separately. If you have five characters, there isn't enough room to display the entire card along one side of the screen, but if you overlap the cards, you can end up obscuring one or more of them depending on which card has the foreground.
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| A reasonably good arrangement of the windows, except that I have 5 characters. The second character's index card is hidden behind Thor's. If I don't overlap them, however, there isn't enough space on the left side of the screen to show them all. |
If
you want to see the character's entire statistics sheet or inventory,
you have to expand the card by clicking the box in the upper-right of
the window. This action has no keyboard backup. The expansion messes up
the order of the windows. Exchanging items between characters means
expanding one window, dragging it out of the way, expanding the second
window, dragging the item between inventories, then dragging both
windows back to their original locations.
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| Trading. My window arrangement is now a hot mess. |
The interface offers both a "transcript" (a blow-by-blow of what is happening, particularly in combat) and a narrative window that gives a brief description of rooms and encounters. I rather like the latter, though I find it difficult to keep an eye on it. There are keyboard backups for movement and most actions,
which is admirable, but a few key actions, like opening the character's
inventory or targeting a ranged attack, must be done with the mouse.
As usual, I turned off music. The MIDI quality is fine, but the song selection doesn't quite fit the action. I only heard two tunes during the brief time I had it turned on. One, during regular exploration, was inexplicably "Jingle Bells." The other, during battle, I couldn't identify, but it was slow and contemplative and not something that you'd expect during combat.
Other sounds are mostly annoying. A satisfying "clunk" when a weapon connects in combat is always good, but not at the expense of an annoying honk whenever you hit the wrong key or the "coyote howl" whistle from the main theme of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly that accompanies every pop-up message. (No disrespect to that masterful theme, of course, but the whistle without the answering trumpet call is like an itch you can't scratch.)
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| The cleric's pitiful Level 1 spellbook. |
If you've played Pool of Radiance, you remember how the first foray into the slums with Level 1 characters is quite hard. Mages can cast one "Magic Missile" spell and then they're out. Clerics are similarly weak, with maybe one "Cure Light Wounds," but at least they can wear armor and wield proper weapons. Any character can get knocked unconscious from an unlucky hit. Spirit of Darkness is the same, perhaps worse, in this regard. Mages are extra useless because not only do they get a limited number of spell slots, but most of their spells must be accompanied by material reagents, purchased in the mage's tower.
Meanwhile, many of the enemies you face (principally giant rats and giant spiders) are capable of poisoning the party, which saps damage every round, a condition that a Level 1 party has no ability to survive. You can fortunately save and load anywhere, but even still, during my first couple of hours with the game, I kept accidentally saving when my characters were poisoned or had been killed in the last battle without my noticing because of the inability to see all character statistics at the same time.
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| Time for a reload. |
Also like Level 1 Gold Box characters, this party is looking at a lot of dead kobolds and goblins before they hit Level 2. Characters earn an equal amount of experience and gold after a successful battle, but not much of it. After a dozen or so, I had nearly 200 experience points, but the experience bar suggested that the next level wouldn't come until about 2,000. Presumably, there are treasures and special encounters that produce experience rewards. I just haven't found them yet. The manual for the kit describes a lot of higher-level character abilities and spells, but I don't know whether Spirit of Darkness offers sufficient content to reach them.
You see nothing in the top-down exploration interface. You slowly reveal squares as you explore, but you have to step on every one to trigger associated treasures and encounters. I don't know how large Spirit of Darkness is, but it's at least two large levels.
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| Starting out in the Valley of Dawn. |
After a few false starts, I started with a new party consisting of two fighters, a ranger, and a thief. I figured I'd train up a mage once I got the other party members to Level 2.
The scenario takes place in The Valley of Dawn. "Anyone with a sensitive soul can feel that something is amiss," the narration window says. "It is as if a dark spirit has invaded the valley, bringing gloom and evil in its wake." As noted before, the small 8 x 8 map consists of a Wizard's Tower, a mine, and the town of Smalltown. There's what looks like a corridor heading south along a river, but if you try to go that way, "the very air seems to reject your presence, and you are sent tumbling the way you came."
As for Smalltown, it used to be a wealthy, peaceful place, but "nowadays, most of the town is abandoned, ruins abound, and the inhabitants are nowhere to be seen." Despite this ominous narration, a bank, inn, temple, shop, and brothel all seem to be doing fine. The castle is abandoned, though, with a sign outside promising a "princely sum" to whoever can "free Smalltown from the Spirit of Darkness."
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| Moving around town. This party has no members yet. |
Each of the buildings has a small interior to explore, but I don't think there's anything to find there. Instead, the player is meant to go right to the shop's special menu. However, some of the buildings have locked doors and inaccessible areas that indicate possible secret doors, so I'm not sure. The manual says nothing about doors, locks, or secret doors.
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| Some of the menu options in the Wizard's Tower. |
The only menu options for the brothel are to recruit a rogue, buy rations, and spend the night. Spending the night has the same effect as doing so at the inn. Spellcasters can memorize new spells and everyone gets hit points restored. There's no indication that any hanky-panky is going on.
At the bank, you can deposit or withdraw gold and recruit fighters. The inn has options to stay the night, buy regular rations, buy weak or strong drinks, buy iron rations, recruit a ranger, leave a character temporarily, recover a character, and talk to the barkeep. Staying the night fully heals the party (whereas resting on the road only heals one hit point). The barkeep has a few tips depending on how many drinks you buy and of what type:
- Welcome, adventurer. Nice to see somebody looking healthy and strong. Care for some money? Try the mines.
- Have you been to the temple? It's so old that we of the valley forgot the name of the saint.
- When you'll enter the mines from the main entrance, keep your left to reach the stairs to the second level.
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| I love "Yeah" as the party's reaction to the tip. |
At the temple, you can heal various conditions and recruit a cleric. The shop is unique in having no exploration area; entering just takes the party right to the buy/sell interface.
Outside, the Valley is generally a safe place, but if the party stands still long enough, they'll be attacked. Some of the attacks are odd. Whether through a bug or just sadism, giant ants are impossible for a Level 1 party to hit. You can also get "attacked" by a unicorn, the only response to which is to flee, which gets you a bunch of gold pieces, as if you had won a battle against a traditional enemy.
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| Are there other "friendly" encounters in the game? Time will tell. |
"There's some evil lurking here," the game says as you enter the mines. It notes that the miners have all abandoned the area, but curiously there's still an old man passing out lanterns in a Level 1 room. The narration window flags several other "encounters" as we explore corridors and hit dead-ends.
- Many exhausted gold veins.
- Someone has scribbled on the wall in blood: "Saint Cuthbert shall free us from the Spirit of Darkness." It looks fresh.
- We find a couple of gems on the ground.
- A bunch of rocks block a passage. Its placement seems to be deliberate.
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| How do you purposely create a landslide in a dungeon? |
We fight lots of battles against giant rats, giant spiders, goblins, and kobolds, except that every time I get infected by something, I have to flee combat and reload. Eventually, I just start proactively fleeing anything that causes poison or illness.
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| Hello, no. |
Eventually, I find the stairs to Level 2, where Level 1's enemies are supplemented with skeletons and giant ants. It becomes clear to me that I'm going to have to engage in a bit of grinding to survive. I have no idea how many levels make up these mines, nor how long the scenario will take to win. I know we're all eager to get to 1994, but it's not Sword Dream's fault that it came last on the 1993 list, and I want to give it the full treatment before moving onward. My judgement so far is that it does a decent job replicating a typical Dungeons & Dragons module, but with a lot of cutesy Mac stuff I could do without.
Time so far: 3 hours
