Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 15: Gold Box - Secret of the Silver Blades (MS-DOS) - Part 1

Developer:

SSI

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Release Date:

1990

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Systems:

DOS, C64, Mac, Amiga, PC-98

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Today on Super Adventures, I'm playing the 11th Dungeons & Dragons video game, Secret of the Silver Blades! 

I'm playing the DOS version to be precise and I can already tell from this title screen that the game isn't going to be supporting 256 colour VGA graphics. That's fine though. 4 colour CGA was no fun for anyone, but Tandy and EGA hardware allowed artists a large enough palette to come up with something distinctive. They gave us a style tied to a specific time and place in history that otherwise would have never existed. A style with lots of magenta and cyan.

(I hope the VGA era isn't too far off.)

Secret of the Silver Blades is the third game in the Pool of Radiance saga, following on from the events of Curse of the Azure Bonds. This means I've finally made it back to the Forgotten Realms campaign setting after a surprisingly long stay in the Dragonlance universe. I'm also back to the Gold Box engine, so I already have a good idea of what this is going to be like.

Anyway, I'm going to be playing the game for a few hours, so there may be SPOILERS here for this and earlier games in the series.

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I still love this launcher. It's really convenient to have all the early PC D&D games in one place, sorted by series, with all the documents included as PDFs.

SSI were basically producing two kinds of D&D games at this point, the Silver Box games, made by developers like U.S. Gold, and Gold Box games, like Secret of the Silver Blades. If you think that's confusing, U.S. Gold wasn't even from the U.S. and half the Silver Box games weren't in silver boxes.

This is the third game in the series and I can import my old characters, though only from Curse of the Azure Bonds. Any Pool of Radiance or Hillsfar heroes have to be imported into Curse first.

I do have a team of heroes ready to bring over, but that's probably not a good idea as I never actually finished Curse of the Azure Bonds. In fact I really struggled in the game because my team was so low level.

Okay I've updated Gold Box Companion with a new version that can play music during gameplay and I've got DOSBox configured for screenshots, so I'm ready to go.

The classes have changed a bit this time, letting you choose from tribble, paladin, tribble, paladin, tribble, paladin, tribble, paladin, tribble, paladin, tribble, and a bunch of other stuff. Works for me, I wanted to make a paladin last time and accidentally made a ranger instead.

What happened here is that I used my powers of mouse control irresponsibly, clicking the wrong bit of screen and making it glitch out. The game's really happier when you use the keyboard.

Alright, I'm going to restart and get on with the very familiar process of planning out my party. You can just pick whatever you want and go with the scores the dice rolls give you, but Gold Box games aren't about having fun role-playing with interesting character builds. Your choices here really only determine how tough the turn-based tactical combat is going to be.

Humans can't multi-class, but their exclusive dual-classing ability is going to get very enticing around levels 13-15 (or so I've been told), so it's a good idea to make fighters and rangers with the right stats (intelligence, wisdom) to class-change into powerful magic-users and clerics. Now is apparently the right time to think about making the team you want to import into Pools of Darkness.

If you don't like the ability scores it's given you, you don't have to keep re-rolling, you can just edit them. Though different races have different limits.

In fact, this is apparently the point where an imported team from Pool of Radiance can really get screwed over, as the non-human characters are going to be hitting their level caps. Make a dwarf, gnome, half-elf or halfling and they'll start off already max level in whatever class you pick, with elves not far off. The one exception to this rule is the thief class, which doesn't have a level cap.

Gold Box Companion can bypass this little quirk of first edition AD&D if you want, otherwise it's better to have a boring team of humans. But dwarves are apparently the only race with any special interactions in the game, so I'm bringing one anyway! Demi-humans can multi-class, and if I make them a fighter/thief then they'll get all the advantages of a fighter and carry on levelling as a thief after hitting the fighter cap.

Oh not this again. I've done this 18 times already in the other games! I am so so sick of cycling through weapons and colours. And I have to do it, otherwise I won't be able to tell my guys apart! The game does at least start each class with an appropriate weapon, but they're always in a blue tunic or dress.

I know the developers were busy making a massive RPG, but I'm surprised that this character icon creator hasn't been improved at all since Pool of Radiance. Not on PC anyway. It's so obvious how it could be made better and I'm not just saying that because I've seen better versions in some of the Amiga ports.

Like, the Amiga version of Champions of Krynn adds a number of unique character icons you don't customise, so you can pick one of them and skip the whole tedious process.

I know that Secret of the Silver Blades has some of those icons in it too, as if you leave the title screen on for a while a demo starts featuring heroes with unique sprites!

Why do Sieglinda, Capet and Averoes get to look so cool, while all my heroes have the same generic look?

Alright I've put together a crew. I've got a virtuous paladin, a shifty thief, a pair of sharp-shooting rangers, a genius magic-user and a healer.

You might be wondering why I have two rangers instead of having another powerful magic-user. Well, my thought was that later on if I find I need more magic I could always dual-class Book and turn him into a holy cleric.

Hey, there's a bit of intro text in this one. And there's the frozen castle from the title screen on the top right!

There's also a mine shaft surrounded by ruins and a small walled town next to it.

I guess the walls are invisible.

The protagonist was bored and ready for another adventure, so it's fortunate really that they got yanked into the air and pulled down to the ancient well at the base of the glacier. Though the process has left the heroes without any of their enchanted equipment. Or pants.

In reality players didn't have to wait long for the next adventure. It took 23 years for Baldur's Gate III to come out, but the third Pool of Radiance game was released just a year after the last one.

Though it probably felt like a while at the time, with four Dragonlance games coming out in the meantime. It's actually nice to see the Forgotten Realms get some attention for a change!

The heroes are greeted by the mayor, Priam. He's apparently a returning character from Curse of the Azure Bonds, but I don't think I got far enough to meet him. The dude's got a chest like Rob Liefeld's Captain America, so I would've probably remembered if I had.

He's also a former Red Plume, and I've definitely met them before. They're the guards that chase you around in Hillsfar when you're caught thieving.

The guy has a lot to tell us... and the protagonist records it as journal entry 37. The idea is that you look up the text in the Adventurer's Journal booklet, but thankfully I have Gold Box Companion to just show me the relevant entry in the window without any messing around.

Ah, it's a typical 'dug too deep and unleashed the evils from under the earth' scenario. This happens all the time in stories. There's Lords of the Rings, the Star Trek episode Devil in the Dark, the Doctor Who serial Inferno, the 1951 movie Superman and the Mole Men (I just watched that the other day, it... wasn't very good).

Alright, this is going to be a two step operation:

1. Free the Well of Knowledge in order to use the portal in the mayor's back room.
2. Finish the rest of the game.

Seems simple enough.

We were basically kidnapped and all our stuff is gone, but aside from that the folks here have been very nice to us. I can sleep in the mayor's house whenever I want, and they're giving me money and equipment to get me started. 

They've actually given me some good stuff too. Lots of enchanted +1 and +2 items. The Gauntlets of Ogre Power will immediately cancel out the penalty of making a female warrior in 1st Edition AD&D, so my ranger will be at full strength now, literally.

I'm doing the same stuff I did in earlier games, walking around the starting town, marking all the shops on my map, loading up on weapons and arrows, but this has a bit of a different vibe to it. For one thing, people are all cheering us on. I accidentally walked into someone's private residence and they invited me in for a pleasant chat.

Also I can store weapons and money in the bank, solving the issue of being over-encumbered by my wealth. Champions of Krynn did it first, but I'm glad the feature stuck around.

And now that's done I'm ready to free the Well of Knowledge! But I'm going to wander off into the Ruins of Old Verdigris instead, because Pool of Radiance has got me into the habit of clearing monsters out of the old town one block at a time.

I was curious about where Verdigris actually is, so I looked it up and it turns out we weren't teleported to a distant foreign land, we're just up in the mountains north of Phlan, where the first game begins.

The BioWare games got me used to D&D RPGs taking place all along the Sword Coast, but these Gold Box games can't seem to stray too far from the Moonsea. Curse of the Azure Bonds got as far west as Tilverton, but the heroes got kicked out early on and ended up walking back.

LATER, IN THE RUINS OF OLD VERDIGRIS

I've been walking around the ruins for a while now and I'm so confused. Is this a teleporter maze?

You can tell from the map that I'm jumping around all over the place and some of the doors aren't even showing up. I was wondering when I was going to come across a bit of proper old-school frustrating-as-hell dungeon design in these games and it seems like I've found some.

I hate it already.

Though I love that it's letting me play with the fireball spell on these random encounters from the start! 

I got really good with this spell in Baldur's Gate, I was able to judge the range of it so precisely that I could incinerate enemies standing an inch away from my guys without them getting even slightly singed. But this is a very different game and I need a little more practice. Sorry Zoe!

This is a turn-based tactics game where you move and attack with each unit separately. Though if I fire off a 'hold person' spell in time, then up to three enemies will not be moving or attacking. Starting off with a level 9 magic-user with a ton of spells to memorise really helps! 

LOTS OF WANDERING AROUND LATER.

Man, even the developers knew that this teleporter maze was frustrating! Yes, please save me from this place, I can't figure it out at all.

Okay, I realise now that I made a mistake coming here instead of doing the thing the mayor told me to do. I'll go through the portal in his wardrobe and sort out the Well of Knowledge for him.

THE DOMAIN OF THE WELL OF KNOWLEDGE

I was expecting the Well of Knowledge to look a bit more impressive. This is more like the Storeroom of Knowledge or the Cupboard of Knowledge.

Maybe the impressive bit is through one of these doors. I need to be careful though as I hear the clash of arms. 

Oh hey it's a dude with a sheep on his head.

I've heard that the Black Circle mages are friends with the townsfolk and I already know the Banite priests are all kinds of evil, but I don't really feel like I should just walk into someone else's fight without all the information. So I guess I'll choose 'Duck'.

Ducking kept me out of the fight, but the winners turned on me next! That's fine though, as they became losers soon afterwards, and I got to keep all their gear.

The spell 'detect magic' is great when you need to know what's worth taking, as it puts an asterisk next to anything enchanted. It doesn't identify it though, or let you know if it's cursed, so I'll need to take this stuff back to a shop.

I continued exploring the domain of the Well of Knowledge and it's a relief to be walking around somewhere normal. When I go through a door I actually enter an adjacent room instead of teleporting halfway across the map. Though the rooms contain inactive teleporter gates, so normality isn't going to last. 

The random battles are a drain on my health and spells so I decided to take a chance and see if I could rest in one of the portal rooms. This turned out to be a mistake as the enemies just barged in and woke me up. But I'm doing alright.

The trouble with fighting groups of mages and priests is that they're typically going to have a few spell casters of their own. They're manageable if I can paralyse or interrupt them before they get their spells off, but that requires careful use of my resources.

One of my most powerful resources is the spell 'stinking cloud', which has a chance of making anyone inside it gag from nausea. This means they can't do anything and I can kill them in one hit. The catch is that it has terrible range, and if I find out the caster can't hit anyone from where they're standing without hitting my own guys, then I have to cancel. This wastes the turn and the spell!

The UI could be a little more helpful. An indicator telling me a spell's area of effect would also be nice!

Oh damn, the spell 'slay living' just straight up slays someone huh? Well that's that then I guess.

I know that characters can be resurrected, but I've also heard that it costs them one constitution point and I'm not using their ability scores as a lives counter. So I'll be loading my last save game.

This is what I've mapped of the Well of Knowledge so far. 

It's very symmetrical and every L-shaped section has an inactive portal at the corner. So there are maybe 20 portals in total. Seems like a fast travel hub to me.

The one I've marked with a [1] is the portal back to the mayor's bathroom, but the other portals are unlabelled so I've no clue where any of them lead. There are also doors around the outside, but I don't think leaving is a good idea. It's another bloody teleporter maze out there.

I dunno man, I guess back then developers assumed that people buying a sequel had already beaten the first game and were looking for something more challenging.

Alright lets see you guys cast 'slay living' spells in a stinking cloud while my dudes are pelting arrows at you. Wait, those jerks had the nerve to cast 'hold person' on me! That spell can turn the tide in an instant as now there's nothing I can do to stop them cutting down my front line badasses.

As least I was able to get a bandage on the casualties this time, so they're unconscious but not slayed. Now I really need to rest and heal after the fight. It's a good thing the game has a 'fix' command to automatically cast healing spells during rest.

You know what these games could use though? Health potions. It's weird because Baldur's Gate is so full of potions that I gave up thinking about them and put them all in a bag out of sight. But I guess the Moonsea is having a potion shortage.

EVENTUALLY

Man, I've tried to sleep and gotten woken up by fights so many times that almost everyone's gotten a level. I'm not sure I've made any progress on clearing the Well of Knowledge area out, it seems like this game has unlimited random encounters, but at least I've got something to show for my work.

Oh, plus I still need to get that magic gear ID'd. Hopefully some of it is worth a bit of cash, not that I have much to spend it on. 

There are a few expensive wands in the magic shop and that's it. These games really don't know how to use money to reward and motivate the player.

Alright, I'm going back to the ruins again for a change of scenery. The level can teleport me around all it wants, but if I keep going I'll have to find the way out eventually. It'll be tedious, but at least I can turn on quick battle and let my characters fight the random encounters themselves.

I'm pretty sure they're tough enough to handle these guys now. Probably.

DEEP IN THE RUINS OF OLD VERDIGRIS

Horrifying smells... that's awesome! I mean, that's a message I've never seen before, so it means I must be making progress.

I come across arrows on the floor sometimes, but when I head in that direction I just end up walking into a wall. Man, I feel sorry for the people playing the game in 1990 who tried mapping this maze out on graph paper. There's no way you can know that it's spinning you around and teleporting you across the map if you're not watching it happen on Gold Box Companion's automap.

You can't even use the game's own automap in the ruins as when you press the button it says "NOT HERE". You have to work this one out yourself! Or check the clue book for directions I suppose... which isn't a bad idea actually.

They included the clue book in the Steam release, so it's totally not cheating for me to check.

Dude...

It was never a teleporter maze, it was developers being clever and making a gigantic labyrinth out of reused pieces of a smaller map. Whenever two rooms have the same shape it reuses that area of the level, teleporting the player around. It's an ingenious cheat to get around the Gold Box engine's limited 16x16 map size.

Unfortunately there's one drawback: it's a gigantic labyrinth! How do you even map this? How am I supposed to remember where I am when it keeps interrupting me with fights?

Well, okay I could use the compass and the coordinates... but I don't want to.

Alright, I started at the top left where it says "To New Verdigris", and I'm going to head across to the Well of Knowledge on the right, collecting the treasure at "2" (up near the red text) and "5" (just above the Well) along the way.

Oh, it turns out that the Well of Knowledge is in the Ruins of Old Verdigris! When I took the portal from the mayor's house, it brought me over to that big white box on the right side of the map. That's why the doors around the outside took me to a maze, because it's the same maze!

The clue book mentioned that the treasure up at "2" was a dragon's hoard, but I was kind of hoping that the dragon was out.

Okay, I'm going to flee, attempt to heal up and memorise some spells, and then I'm going to start a fight with a bloody dragon.

I have been reading up a bit on general combat tactics and people recommend using the level layout to your advantage. Use chokepoints to limit the number of enemies who can engage you, stand next to a wall to prevent enemies from flanking you, that kind of thing...

... shame that advice was all entirely useless here, as the game put me in a small box barely big enough to fit a dragon and two ogres. Speaking of boxes, they should've painted this battle to use as the box art.

Anyway that was the whole fight! The most dramatic part was when I couldn't do a close range attack with a sling, so I had to stop everything, unequip it and get a sword out of my bag. Though the dragon cooking everyone with fire breath was also a bit tense. There's probably a lesson in there about learning 'resist fire' before starting a fight with a dragon. It's only a 2nd-level spell!

Alright, I got a shield, a wand, a ring and a flail from that. I'm assuming it's all magical gear that'll be worth a fortune even if I can't find a use for it myself, so I'll find a space for it in my inventory... somehow. At this point I'm pushing my luck even picking up coins as my heroes are all getting overloaded. My fat sacks of cash are seriously weighing me down, limiting my tactical potential.

My plan was the head straight to the next bit of treasure marked on the map, but it's becoming obvious I should be hiking back to the bank to store what I already have. There's actually a portal right here I could've used to fast travel back, but I haven't finished the Well of Knowledge yet so the portals aren't active.

I just want to get a proper rest, man. My characters are worn out, my magic-user has 5 HP, we don't need to get interrupted every time we make camp. Alright, just a few literally-identical hallways to backtrack through and then I can relax in the mayor's back room. My sanctuary.

SOON

Oh you are kidding me. I made it back to the mayor's house in New Verdigris, pressed the rest button, and bloody ninjas attacked! This is the safe zone mate, go bother someone in a dungeon.

What's really annoying is that they use fast acting poison that kills a character dead before you can even try to remember if you memorised 'neutralise poison' (of course I didn't). And I don't mean they're 'dying' or 'unconscious', I mean it straight up kills them. If they score one good hit on you, your dude is poisoned and then dead in the same turn. I need better saving throws.

After reloading and trying to rest here three times, the ninjas finally stopped bothering me and I got a good night's sleep. 

Right, time to sell all this +2 junk filling up my inventory and put my money in the vault so I can move 12 squares a turn again instead of 3. Though I might keep a couple of platinum coins on me to restock on arrows.

The funny thing about the vault is that I believe it's saved as a separate file, so if you start a new game all your stuff will still be in there. It would be a bit game breaking if there was anything decent to spend it on.

I'll also need to keep hold of some cash to pay for level up training... actually I think training halls may be free in this one, because of how great we are. Everyone in this town loves us so much I'm surprised they haven't put a statue up yet. I bet they sing songs about us in the tavern.

It's a bit of a shame really that I haven't achieved anything yet. 

I didn't explore the whole labyrinth and reach the next area, I didn't clear out the Well of Knowledge and activate the portals. Even the money I've accumulated is kind of worthless to me.

But sometimes just getting a proper sleep and some level ups makes me feel like I'm step closer to victory. Next time I go to the Well of Knowledge I'll be strong enough to claim it. Next time I go to the ruins maze I'll be persistent enough to... find something in it. But that's all going to have to wait because I've given you enough words to read already.

TO BE CONTINUED

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Next on Super Adventures, it's more of this! That's probably not a big surprise if you've been following the pattern, as every Gold Box game so far has been a two-parter. 

Funny thing is that the games are all basically the same, so who even knows how I keep finding so much to write about them?