| Treacherous Waters | |
| by dec1910@aol.com | |
| Measle’s Review | |
A word of caution to any budding scenario designers out there about file names for your scenarios. The Blades engine only accepts the first sixteen scenarios in alphabetical order so you have a higher chance of getting your game played if you begin your file’s name with the letter “a” than with “z”. Perhaps this is why Treacherous Waters, which has a file name beginning with a “w”, has been unplayed for so long. I don’t know about you, but my folder tends to get cluttered up with epics that I start and haven’t got around to finishing yet as well as a few of my own works in progress.
Treacherous Waters (by dec1910@aol.com) is a nifty little scenario from the early days of BoE scenario design. All the action takes place on a single piece of outdoor terrain and it has a plot involving two popular themes among early designers: pirates and crazed barnyard animals.
It’s everything a first scenario should be, not overly large, not overly ambitious, not overly buggy yet still highly playable. It won’t inspire you to drop your jaw gaping at the grace and artistry of the programmer, it will do something much more important for a young designer, it will inspire you to say, “You know, I could have done that.” And hopefully go out and do it.
The plot is fairly linear and it does suffer from a common trap of when you finish one quest you just happen to find the special item that will allow you to start the next. Use of special items is quite good though. One of them is a whetstone that you can use to improve your weapons in combat but if you want to progress, you have to give it up. It’s a judgment call by the player as to when they feel the party is strong enough to not have to use it any more.
There’s a
few unformatted terrain bits and some bugs that while not earth-shatteringly
fatal, can be a little annoying and a few secret passages that you wouldn’t
guess at without a magic map spell that are crucial to finishing but the pacing
is good and there’s always a surprise in store plotwise.
Worth a look. 7/10