Secret of the Silver Blades

Did You Know?

• The game contains only one song, composed by John Halbleib, his last game for the developer before being replaced by Tom Wahl.
• The game includes a difficulty selector that changes the power of enemy creatures.
• It is the first Gold Box game in which random encounters do not stop after a certain point.

Plot

Three hundred and seventy-five years before the game's events, twin brothers Oswulf and Eldamar built a castle in a large valley in the Dragonspine Mountains, and the town of Verdigris was founded below it. The town prospered under the brothers' guidance: Oswulf was a paladin, Eldamar a mage. As Eldamar aged, his obsession with immortality led him to study lichdom. Oswulf tried to stop him but failed, and Eldamar became a lich known as the Dreadlord.

Unable to kill his brother, Oswulf sought help from a band of adventurers called the Silver Blades. The Dreadlord, believing they were summoned to slay him, gathered armies of evil creatures. The town was overrun and abandoned. With the Silver Blades, the monsters were driven back to the castle.

Oswulf still refused to kill his brother, so the Silver Blades researched a spell that encased the entire valley in a glacier, freezing everything alive. Oswulf sacrificed himself to guard the castle. Some of the Dreadlord's followers outside the glacier's effect later formed the Black Circle and, fifteen years ago, broke the spell. As the glacier melted, miners reopened the old mines of Verdigris, founding New Verdigris.

The mines held vast gems, but as miners descended, monsters frozen for over three hundred years emerged and retook the mines. The miners took their gems to the Well of Knowledge, which granted wishes. The party was summoned to New Verdigris by the Well at the townspeople's wish to protect them from the monsters.

Reception

Secret of the Silver Blades sold 167,214 copies, the last Gold Box game to exceed 100,000 sales. Scorpia of Computer Gaming World in 1990 called it 'Hackmania' due to its combat emphasis and described it as the most linear Gold Box game, though she liked the story and deemed it typical of the Forgotten Realms series, appealing to fans of Gold Box or hack-and-slash games. In 1993 she called it the 'most boring' Gold Box game, for hard-core slicer/dicers only. Dragon #163 gave it 4 out of 5 stars. GameSpy stated it would never reach the classic status of much of SSI's previous work. Amiga Action scored it 87%, praising its continuity and new features like character porting and new monsters, rating it above Champions of Krynn.