Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 26: Gold Box - Gateway to the Savage Frontier (MS-DOS) - Part 3

This week on Super Adventures, I'm playing some more of Gateway to the Savage Frontier! Not to be confused with Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire or Journey to the Savage Planet.

It occurs to me that I've got no idea what your opinions are about me dragging games out for two or three parts instead of getting to the point and moving on. If it makes you feel any better, this is still the same amount of words and pictures as a two-parter, I just split them across three pages so it's less of a gruelling marathon to get through (for both of us).

Alright, you're currently reading part 3. You can find part 1 HERE and part 2 HERE. If you decide to stick around then beware of SPOILERS.

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Previously, in Gateway to the Savage Frontier:

My team of heroes have been on a run of bad luck.

They woke up in Yartar to find they'd been drugged and all their gear had been stolen. Needing work, they wandered the streets and ran into Krevish, who introduced them to some shady people in a secret room. They were sent to Nesme to track down a group of evil Banite priests and ended up killing them all, only to discover that they were plotting to save the Savage Frontier from an invasion by the equally evil Zhentarim! 

So now it's up to them to stop the bad guys conquering the region, a task made harder by the Banites being dicks and burning all their papers. The only clue left was a letter mentioning a Banite temple hidden behind a shop in the city of Silverymoon up in the Silver Marches.

And now, the continuation:

Rivers weren't really a thing in the other games, I always travelled to the other towns on foot (or by horse). Here though I'm finding docks and piers and boat rental places in every town, so I decided to finally take the hint and rent a boat to get to Silverymoon.

I'm starting to get the impression this is what I was supposed to do from the start, as all the fights out here have suddenly become incredibly easy. But I'm still picking up all the trash swords and armour that they drop afterwards, because I really need the money. 250 more short swords and I can get a level up!

Freeman is still level 1/1, that's how starved for money I am. He has 9 hit points!

SILVERYMOON (AT LAST)

Something I haven't really mentioned is how many tiny 1 tile rooms there are in this game. I'm used to rooms being at least two squares wide in Gold Box RPGs, but they really tried to pack a whole city into a  16x16 tile box here. I've never seen so many doors.

The good news is that I've found enough enemies lurking in all these warehouses and docks to afford to get Freeman up to 12 hit points! But you can see his name's gone right back to purple again because of all the XP I got at the same time.

I've been whining a lot about this, but I don't actually mind the game being stingy with its cash, because a: money has weight, you don't want to be carrying too much of it, and b: it means there's an actual purpose to it being in the game at all. In the last few games I had a fortune saved up in the bank because so much was coming in and I had nothing to spend it on. In this it's actually a proper reward.

Plus I can always just sell that expensive +2 ring of protection I got from the Banites if I'm really desperate. Though enemies are infinite and magic rings are not.

The game has a fondness for secret walls, though stumbling across this prisoner wasn't hard with all the yelling he was doing.

Erek explained to us (in a journal entry), that he works for the brilliant magic user Amelior Amanitas, and the guy's currently in great danger. Those Zhentil Keep folks have kidnapped him and they'll be taking him to Llorkh!

You might think a guy like this would join my team, at least until we've saved his boss, and yeah that's exactly what he's doing. I like that I'm collecting NPCs who are going to stick with me for longer than one dungeon in this game, that's a positive change. Though it's a bit weird that they don't ever say anything.
 
Also the guy's at level 3, so I guess that's where I'm supposed to be at this point in the game (some characters are, some aren't).

I carried on down the road and walked right into this scene.

I'm appreciating how much art this game has, as there's no way it could show a festival like this with the Gold Box engine. Sometimes it can show a person, but that's the best you're getting from it. The text is doing most of the heavy lifting though and it really makes this place sound nice. 

Everyone in Silverymoon is out for the Mielikki festival right now. There are banners flapping in the breeze, lutes playing, people singing. Even the birds are chirping along. I'm not used to this kind of cheerfulness in these games!

Last time I attended a celebration in a D&D game it was immediately interrupted by a zombie flying a dragon skeleton, but I don't have a feeling of impending doom here. There's nothing bad here, nothing to worry about. Well, aside from the weapon merchant.

I was checking out the shops in the area and found a guy called Broadhand. 

I'd never seen "Discuss..." show up in my list of options before, so I picked it and accidentally convinced him that we are fellow Banites from that temple in Nesme I raided.

Then I got the longest journal entry I have ever seen in one of these games.

I'm here to play the game not read the novelisation!

Long story short, the Savage Frontier is physically separated from the Moonsea by the Anauroch Desert, protecting it from the evil forces of Zhentil Keep. But the Zhentarim have found a way to get their armies across the Great Desert and the wizard Amanitas knows how to stop them. We need to find him and pretend that we're not Banites so that he'll work with us. We're not Banites, so that part should be easy at least.

Hang on, I was already searching for Amanitas! I feel like I met Broadhand and Erek in the wrong order. Not that I'm complaining, I like having the freedom to stumble into things.

I also stumbled across some directions in the debris of Amantias' room here in town. It's not much use to me without a starting point though. Also do I need to know the 'knock' spell for this?

Hang on, out of curiosity I decided to trace the route on the map using this building as the starting point, and I think it's leading me to the secret room I found Erek chained up in. Man, I really am doing this plot backwards.

Alright I guess I'm supposed to head south to find Amanitas before it's too late... but screw that, I'm checking out Sunderbar to the east instead. I mean, it's right there, I can't just turn around and go in the other direction without having a look.

SUNDERBAR

Well the NPCs in the party aren't saying much, but Sonic had a line at least. 

Hang on, "Save our strength for the battles that await"? That's a bit of a concern. No one's ever reminded me to go rest before. I don't need this inn though, I can just go rest out in the wilderness!

Actually, never mind, I keep getting attacked out there whenever I camp. I'll pay the 1 platinum for a room.

Turns out that Sonic was right to be wary, as this place is full of Zhentil fighters! I've visited the good town in the Silver Marches and now I guess I'm at the evil one.

These guys wear plate armour, the best you can buy, so it's taking a while for me to score a successful hit. On the plus side, they also drop plate armour, which sells for 200 GP! Every time I sell five of them I get a level up. This might be exactly where I need to be to finally get everyone's names to turn blue.

Oh hi, you're not a Zhentil fighter, you're an angry bird woman. And apparently a good singer.

It doesn't look like I'll be getting any plate armour from this fight, but it's not like I get to opt-out of it.

These harpies aren't so tough, but they just charmed my mage and made her switch teams, and I don't have a solution for that. It's been so long since I've fought an enemy that casts spells on me that I've forgotten what I'm doing!

I think I need the third-level spell 'dispel magic' to stop her from hitting my dudes, but I don't have a 'third-level spell' kind of team right now. Plus I wouldn't have thought to have it memorised anyway.

Oh no, they just charmed someone else! Well this just went downhill fast.

LATER, IN ANOTHER BATTLE

Hey what the hell, Erek just disappeared. Did someone cast invisibility on him or something? Is this a bug? It's kind of frustrating as he keeps getting in the way in battles and I end up accidentally casting spells on him.

My search for Amanitas brought me back to Everlund, where I once fought the owl bears. And they hugged Guybrush to death. This time though I've levelled up a bit, so I have a feeling things will work out differently.

Erek, what the hell dude? Why would you be standing right there?

See, I told you what he was like! Now he's going to be one-shotted by a bear that looks like an owl.

One owlbear was left helpless by my stinking cloud and I was able to kill him in one turn. The other resisted its nausea so it took a sustained assault from multiple directions to take them down. Erek was also taken out, but he was unconscious, not dead, so we actually won the battle!

My reward... another battle against owl bears. But after that I got this picture:

Damn, they went all out on the art for this scene!

I did it, I found Amanitas! Now he can tell me how to deal with the bad guys and stop the invasion.

Bloody hell! I think I've found a new winner. This has to be the longest journal entry I've seen so far in a Gold Box RPG. By including this picture I've increased my word count by 756 words. (+39 including the  red text next to the pictures they added to break it up a bit). 

I'll try to summarise:

Four statuettes were created in ancient Ascore for the defence of the city. Now the Zhentarim general Vaalgamon is trying to collect them all in order to open a safe path through the Great Desert so that the armies of Zhentil Keep can march through and conquer the Savage Frontier.

To find the statuettes the heroes need to reveal the pathways they must trace within their souls. So that's cryptic and unhelpful.

Amanitas has given us a few clues that I'm sure will make some kind of sense in retrospect, but the important thing is that we should begin by heading back to Yartar, where I started the game, and I guess look for the Kraken base.

Also he's given us a debit card, which is handy! It'll work at the vaults in Yartar, Neverwinter and Silverymoon, so I can store money in one location and retrieve it in another.

Well Erek's leaving now to look after his boss, so I don't have to worry about his invisibility bug any more. I'm so glad I didn't waste any money levelling the guy up.

YARTAR

Alright I did as I was told and returned to Yartar, where the game began. I'm not sure where I'm supposed to be going to be honest. I'm trying all the doors again, but they're mostly fish markets and boat repair shops.

Though I did discover I was carrying a jewel which is worth thousands, and spent it all on level ups. My team is all either level 4 or level 3/3 now, so they're a little more formidable. Well, except for Krevish, but he doesn't count. If he wants a level up he can pay for it himself with all the money he keeps hiding away after every fight.

Okay I really don't know where the game wants me to go, so I'm going to have to check the clue book.

So to find the secret base, I have to give up looking for the secret base. Well that's some brilliant game design, players love to waste their time and get frustrated.

It seems like the Kraken base is going to have a lot of fights with no chance to heal and recover spells between them, so it's going to be a gauntlet that tests my knowledge of the game systems and spells, along with my tactical ingenuity.

Nah, I'm not in the mood for that kind of Curse of the Azure Bonds 'lock the player in a maze until they git gud' crap. I've been playing this long enough anyway.

Fortunately I've already seen the fight you get at the end of the Kraken dungeon. It's in the demo you get when you turn the game on.


CONCLUSION

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I think my mistake here was to go exploring. I mean you have to explore the town you're in, checking all the doors and tiny one-square rooms, looking out for secret passages. You won't get anywhere without a bit of aimless wandering. But exploring the world and visiting other locations seems to be pointless until the plot sends you there.

Plus if I'd gone straight to where the game told me to, I would've gotten to the money faster and I would've been able to level up! Though like I said, I actually appreciate that cash is a lot more scarce in this, so far at least. The other games shower you with riches and then give you hardly anything worth spending it on. And that money has a weight to it, you can be at a severe tactical disadvantage because your pants are so full of coin you can hardly walk. (It was still frustrating though, wasting all that XP).

Another thing that makes Gateway to the Savage Frontier different from earlier games is that it has VGA graphics and Sound Blaster sound! Lots of great new portraits, in a bit of a different style to the earlier games. Okay the graphics are basically EGA art redrawn for an Amiga and there's no music still, but it's another step above earlier titles. The Gold Box games are getting just a little slicker over time, with players getting the benefit of automatically memorising spells, automatically targeting the nearest enemy, being able to walk past a street sign without stopping, and other engine improvements they've added along the way. It's still limited by having to run on the C64 though, relying on the Adventurer's Journal booklet for a lot of its story text instead of taking advantage of current machines having hard drives and maybe 16 times as much RAM. You can't even look up what your objective is, and I really needed to in this one.

The game was released on three systems and I don't even have to play the C64 and Amiga ports to know which I'd recommend. I've heard some bad things about the Amiga version, that it runs slow and it's unstable, though the real deal-breaker is that it doesn't have Gold Box Companion. Having that automap and the overview of the battlefield is so damn helpful that I wouldn't want to live without it. Oh, plus it adds music, if you've got any you want to hear.

I feel like I'm repeating myself here, but it's hard not to when I'm basically writing about the same game over and over. That said, they do manage to have their own personality and structure, despite having to work within the limitations of the engine. This one's more about fighting inside towns instead of clearing out ruins (Pool of Radiance) or fighting through enemy bases (Champions of Krynn). Hey, now that I've played all the Gold Box 'volume 1s', I can actually try to judge which works better as a starting point.

• Pool of Radiance is game #1 so it's the default starting point. It's very non-linear in its structure, letting you tackle some areas in whatever order you like, and I'd call that a positive. It has the most archaic controls, it's a bit less user friendly, and it has fewer classes, though Gold Box Companion helps with some of that. It doesn't help when dozens of enemies show up to every battle however.
• Champions of Krynn is more linear, though it's also more story driven, with lots of events happening as you progress through a dungeon. I'd hesitate to recommend it as a starting point because of how tricky its enemy types can be right from the start, but it's pretty decent and has a distinct Dragonlance flavour.
• Gateway to the Savage Frontier is the friendliest and its fights may be more suitable for beginners. Fewer tricky enemies and spellcasters. It also looks the best. Man does it expect you to read a lot of text though, and like with Champions if you go exploring the world you'll only find disappointment.

I guess my answer is... I dunno, they all have their strengths and weaknesses, and any one of them could work as someone's first Gold Box game. Though they all have awkward low level combat where you don't get the fun spells and you keep missing all the time. Well, unless you cheekily import a Curse of the Azure Bonds party with a bunch of items and high level magic that shouldn't even be in the game and just destroy everything you meet.

Anyway, Gateway's not the best Gold Box game, it's not the worst Gold Box game, but it is unambiguously another Gold Box game, and the fact I'm not thoroughly sick of them yet means they must be doing something right. So I suppose this should get a gold star.

• If you want to see the whole list of the D&D games I've played so far click HERE.

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Okay, there are just three more RPGs left before I'm done with the first decade of D&D games, and only one of them is a Gold Box game. So I could be writing about that next week, or I could be writing about something else. You might be able to figure this one out yourself with the clue I've given you.

Do you have any feelings about Gateway to the Savage Frontier? Are they good feelings?