Game 565: Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (1994)

        

Realms of Arkania: Star Trail

Original German name: Das Schwarze Auge: Sternenschweif ("The Dark Eye: Star Trail")

Germany

attic Entertainment Software (developer); Fantasy Productions Verlag (original publisher); Sir-Tech Software (U.S. publisher)

Released 1994 for DOS

Date Started: 8 January 2026

       

Star Trail is a sequel to Blade of Destiny, a game I played over six years ago but still remember reasonably well. I liked it but didn't love it, and I don't think I ever fully understood aspects of its magic or spell system. I can see why European players remember it with a certain nostalgia and pride. Not only is it based on a homegrown tabletop RPG (Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit's Das Schwarze Auge), but it's one of only a few European titles of the era to truly compete commercially with games coming out of the U.S. and Japan. attic, Thalion (Amberstar), and Silmarils (Ishar), all of whom had their first releases in 1992, were the only developers whose games went back across the Atlantic.

       

I've never played Das Schwarze Auge, but my understanding is that it's a bit grittier and offers more obvious parallels to European history than Tolkien-derived Dungeons & Dragons. The map of Arkania (later Aventuria, as Sir-Tech somehow got the rights to the name of the setting), the main continent of the setting, is a bit like Europe if it did not have Asia inconveniently attached to its east. There are obvious stand-ins for Italy, the islands of the Aegean Sea, Scandinavia, Iceland, the Netherlands, the Alps, and so forth. (Where Britain ought to be is a bunch of tiny, politically-inconsequential islands, which I can't imagine is an accident.) The cultures are drawn from throughout European history, including Viking Scandinavia (Thorwal), the Holy Roman Empire (Mittelreich), ancient Greece (the Cyclopean Islands).

              

Dwarves, alas, do not seem able to escape the "miners and craftsmen" label, no matter what the setting.

        

I like how the setting treats the "monstrous" races. It is impossible to imagine a Tolkien elf (surely the most insufferable of fantasy races) and a Tolkien orc sharing a drink in a tavern, but that would only be unusual in Arkania. Orcs are less incurably "always chaotic evil" and more just culturally different. They're primitive and tribal, like the Visigoths, and the primary threat of the Realms of Arkania trilogy, but they have an actual society and are capable of adhering to treaties. You could imagine some less bellicose members of the tribes quietly departing for life in the towns. I'm sure I'll encounter some of them. 

    

Blade of Destiny takes place on the northwest coast of Arkania. It involves the threat posed by the unification of the orc tribes under Chief Garzlokh. The Hetman of Thorwal charges a group of adventurers to retrieve an ancient orc-slaying blade. The party spends most of the game finding pieces of the map to the blade. At the end, one character uses the blade to defeat Garzlokh's champion, at which point Garzlokh agrees not to attack Thorwal but ominously suggests that the adventurers have simply deflected the orc hordes to another town.

     

Star Trail posits an earlier elf-dwarf alliance.

             

Neither the manual nor the opening cinematic give much hint as to the plot of the sequel, but the included map shows that it's going to take place in the Svellttal ("slender valley"), in the north-central part of Arkania, east and over the mountains from the first game's map. The opening cinematic, which kept crashing for me on one of its early scenes, appears on YouTube in full. It shows a group of dwarven smiths hammering away at a large gem, which one of the dwarves then holds up to peer inside (this is where my GOG-purchased version freezes). In it, he sees a dwarf and an elf, traditional enemies, uniting to face a horde of orcs together, then apparently later toasting their victory.

       

The player's first option is whether to play in "Novice" or "advanced" mode. The manual promises that with the former, the computer handles all the annoying details like character creation or allocating skill points while leveling up. I assume if you choose it, the game deletes itself from your hard drive and blacklists you from ever buying an RPG again.

 

Gameplay actually begins at the Temple of Peraine (goddess of agriculture and healing) in Kvirasim, where the player can create new characters, use default characters, or import characters from Blade of Destiny. This choice twisted me in knots for a couple of hours, and I will not be so far into the game that I cannot undo my decision based on your advice. New characters start at Level 1 with some basic equipment. Imported characters keep their levels (I think mine are an average of 6, but with enough experience to immediately level up) and more advanced equipment. (Although my character who had the Blade of Destiny at the end of the first game notably does not have it now.) That seems an almost game-ruining advantage. Then again, I didn't find the first game exactly "easy." 

   

The biggest reason not to use the imported party, however, is that all of the character portraits inexplicably come over as children. It is all the more mysterious because those portraits do not appear as options when selecting a portrait for a new character. The issue does not seem to be repairable. If I go into the character's setup and choose to change the appearance, my new selection doesn't "stick."

        

I thought the developers were German, not Japanese.

       

The system offers 12 different character classes: warrior, Thorwalian, dwarf, rogue, jester, warlock, druid, magician, hunter, green elf, silvan elf, and ice elf. Each of them has an unnecessary female analog (e.g., "she-jester," "dwarvess," "magicienne"). Warriors, rogues, jesters, warlocks, druids, magicians, and hunters are assumed to be human. The materials don't suggest a lot of difference between warriors and Thorwalians. Rogues are what they are in other games; dwarves seem like a warrior-rogue hybrid; hunters are basically rangers. Warlocks and magicians differ as to the source of their magic. Druids take on the roles of both druids and clerics from D&D. Elves are small, tribal, and rustic in this setting. Green elves are most likely to live in cities; silvan elves live in the woods; ice elves live in the far north. They're all skilled at missile weapons and magic. Jesters don't make any sense to me at all.

    

Each class has minimum values in some combination of attributes, which in this system are courage, wisdom, charisma, dexterity, agility, intuition, and strength. Creation works by rolling seven consecutive values between 8 and 13; the player allocates them as they come to the attributes. It then rolls values between 2 and 8 for the system's seven "negative attributes": superstition, acrophobia, claustrophobia, avarice, necrophobia, curiosity, and violent temper. There's a way to create characters by specifying the class first, but the manual warns that the values are lower than if you go through the regular process.

       

Selecting a portrait for a new character.

         

From the attribute and class choices, the game determines your base values in nine combat skills (specific weapon types); ten "body" skills like "Climb," "Swim," "Dance," and "Carouse"; seven "social" skills like "Lie," "Haggle," and "Streetwise"; and nine "lore" skills like "Geography," "Alchemy," and "History"; nine "Craftsmanship" skills like "Pickpocket" and "Locks"; six "nature" skills like "Track" and "Herb Lore"; and two "intuition" skills: "Danger Sense" and "Perception." You then get a pool of 20 points to try to increase each of the base values. You can only increase each statistic between 1 and 3 times during creation and at each level-up (depending on category), and if you fail three times, you can't increase it at all. I found failure less likely during character creation in Star Trail than what I remember in Blade of Destiny. 

     

That's going to be limiting.

       

I created the following six new characters:

   

• Xamidimura, a female warrior. Skills primarily in weapons and body skills like "Physical Control," "Self-Control.” Since she'll probably be my default leader, I tried to give her a few points in things that a leader would need, like "Danger Sense," "Survival," and "Perception."

• Mahsim, a male Thorwalian. Since he's not the leader, he was free to concentrate on almost all combat-related skills.

• Gnomon, a male dwarf. Standing in for a rogue, he has modest combat skills but also "Climb," "Hide," "Danger Sense," "Perception," "Locks." The idea is that he'll be the leader in dungeons. I also figured I should have a dwarf and an elf if the plot is about elves and dwarves.

• Toliman, a male green elf. He's my social butterfly, the leader in towns. He has the highest charisma. I leveled him in "Seduce," "Haggle," "Streetwise," "Lie," and "Human Nature" as well as some lore skills like "History" and "Read/Write.”

• Lyra, a female druid. As such, she takes on most of the stereotypical druid roles, like anything to do with nature and animals, including "Herb Lore," "Animal Lore," "Alchemy" (though she started low), "Ritual," and such. She also shares healing skills with Lilii Borea. [Microsoft Word wants me to replace "druid roles" with "drug dealings." Checks out, I guess.]

• Lilii Borea, a female magician. Anything that was arcane and not covered by Toliman and Lyra, I dumped on her, including "Tongues," "Ancient Tongues," and "Arcane Lore." 

          

I'm not even sure what this means.

       

I tried to get everyone up in their primary and secondary weapons, although you can only increase weapon skills by 1 point during creation or level-up, so I couldn't go too far. All told, it took me well over two hours to go through all the skills, map them to each character and prioritize the point assignment. I'm skeptical of the utility of a lot of the skills, like "Drive," "Bind," and "Train Animals." I believe a few, like "Acrobatics" and "Instrument" are only valuable to earn money in taverns. But my assessment is from my experience with Blade of course; Star Trail could be a lot different.

   

It took me so long to allocate the skills that I found the next section of character creation, a micromanaging of what portion of my attack values go to offense versus defense, extremely unwelcome. I welcome any advice here, but I mostly left it alone.

       

What would you do on this screen?

           

Finally, spellcasters, of which I had three, get to allocate a starting pool of points to skills in various spells. Here, I'm reminded of the Arkania system of giving every spellcaster access to every spell in the game (78 of them, if I counted correctly), but then telling them how much they suck at them. Values go as low as -20, and you can't even try to cast a spell with a skill of less than -5. Most of my characters started in the negatives for most spells. While this somewhat makes sense for Level 1 characters, it's annoying that during creation and with each level-up, you cannot increase a spell skill by more than 2 points, sometimes 1. I remember barely using spells in Blade of Destiny and having no sense which ones are useful, so I mostly concentrated on leveling spells that the characters were already somewhat proficient in already. I welcome your opinions about what spells are absolutely essential.

       

Yay! After five character levels, I'll be at Level 0 with many of these spells!

           

At last, my characters stood in the Temple before the décolletage-revealing priestess of Peraine. We engaged her in dialogue, hoping to learn something about why we were there. "Please wear fewer weapons when you next enter," she said, which was my first clue that the game had given the characters some starting equipment.

   

Blade of Destiny handled NPC dialogue by having a box show up on the main window with the NPC's statements. Sometimes, the player got full-sentence options for responses. Star Trail changes things by bringing the player to a full-screen dialogue interface with a list of keywords on the right. Normally, I might regard the change from full sentences to keywords to be a regression, but the full-sentence options in Blade were so goofy and counter-intuitive that I far prefer what they've done here.

        

That doesn't really tell us much.

        

The priestess gives me nothing and kicks us out of the dialogue window after I ask too many things she knows nothing about, so I reluctantly leave. Right outside the temple, we immediately get some answers. An elf named Elsurion Starlight welcomes us to the city in the name of his brother, King Elestir Starlight. Apparently, we've responded to a summons. Elsurion takes us to a tavern, orders a round, and gives us his pitch:

    

As you know, an Orcish uprising was crushed once before, but only by the cooperation of the Dwarves and the Elves. As a sign of their friendship, a magical artifact, the Salamander Stone, was created to mark the occasion. But the friendship has sundered, and the Salamander Stone lost. In order to resist this new Orcish threat, the Salamander Stone must be delivered into the hands of the Dwarf Ingramosch!

       

That was a weird name to give a stone meant to mark the friendship between Dwarves and elves.

         

He lets us know that Ingramosch is currently away from his people, staying in the town of Lowangen. The Salamander Stone is rumored to be in a "dwarven pit not too far to the south." He pays the tab and leaves.

    

No sooner has he left than a "wealthy businessman" named Sudran Alatzer approaches and says that Elsurion Starlight was lying to us.

       

Well, no. He said he was the brother of the king.

        

He says that elves and dwarves will never be allies, and that if we bring the Salamander Stone to Vindaria Leechbronn, he'll pay 1,000 ducats. After that, we are free to move about the city of Kvirasim, which I cannot find on the game map.

     

For some reason, the cinematic zooms in on Alatzer's eye when he says something to contradict Elsurion. Maybe it's supposed to detract us from his absurd claim.

              

At first, it seems like nothing has changed in the largely Might and Magic III-inspired interface (in terms of overall appearance, not function). A panel of nine icons offers options for splitting the party, switching between parties, reuniting the party, checking the automap, casting spells, making camp, and various disk options. The same options appear if you right-click on the screen or hit "9" on the keypad. The rest of the keypad allows for movement and looking up and down. Clicking on the portraits brings up character sheets and inventory screens. Overall, there is a satisfying amount of replication in how the player approaches different commands. 

       

You can click on the panel to the right or right-click to get a contextual menu with the same options.

          

Some differences between the two interfaces start to become apparent, and they're almost all positive: 

         

• Although the game has tiles just like its predecessor, the transition between them is animated, giving the illusion of continuous movement if you hold down the movement key.

• You can rotate the horizontal axis to look almost straight up and down. I wonder if this will ever become important or useful. 

• The automap is so much better. Blade's just had tiles and colors. In Trail, not only is it much cleaner and clearer, but you can also zoom in and out, make annotations, and move the party to different parts of the city by clicking on the  map.

     

The much-improved automap.

        

• There's a new journal that records bits of the plot and quests. You can add your own entries to the journal and find entries based on an indexing system. 

                      

The journal offers an entry that transitions between the two titles.

          

• ESC works more reliably to exit screens in Star Trail. 

• Some screens have cosmetic changes. For instance, the character sheet/inventory screen now has a texture behind it, along with some decorations, rather than a relatively plain background. 

       

The inventory screen from Blade of Destiny (left) and Star Trail (right).

      

• If you sit too long without doing anything, Star Trail activates a "screen save" that rearranges the tiles on the screen. I could do without that.

        

The 1990s obsession with "screen savers" made its way to video games.

      

• Fortunately, you can turn that option off in an "options" menu that's more extensive than the first game. Here, you can not only turn music and sound on and off independently of each other, you can also assign them different volumes. 

   

Overall, it's a solid interface, with some nice upgrades. I start relatively happy.

   

I'm going to end things here, as before I really get into the game, I want to collect your opinions about whether to go with my Blade party and, if so, whether there is any solution to the "child portrait" problem. The power level variance between imported and created characters is so significant that I can't imagine that it's not too easy for one party or too hard for another.

   

Time so far: 3 hours