Dragon Wars, originally intended to be Bard's Tale IV before the blow-up between Interplay and Electronic Arts, marked a step in the evolution of the "blobber" format. Rebecca Heineman built a brand-new engine for it based on notes she left for herself while developing Bard's Tale III; compared to BT3, Dragon Wars features less linearity, skills-based PC development rather than class-based, and fixed item discovery rather than randomly generated treasure. Due to the aforementioned publisher blowup, the name change from "BT4" to "Dragon Wars" came relatively late in development, and as a result, dragons feature very little in a game that bears their name.
Hidden Messages#
Hidden in DRAGON.COM at 0x8 is a message most likely from Rebecca Heineman:
Created on an Apple ][ GS. Apple ][ Forever!
In the Tars Underground map, you can encounter a rival party of Adventurers at (03,01). After you beat them, step 1N 1E and the game prints a message saying "what a shame" it was about those adventurers you just killed. There's no indication whatsoever that you should do this, but if you happen to use Arcane Magic on this square, Captain Kirk checks in from the bridge of the Enterprise:
"The scanner reports a vessel approaching at warp 19!!"
"Spock?", Kirk says, "Intentions?" Spock scans the intruder. "Unable to tell, it seems to be doing evasive manouvers as if it is under attack."
Kirk looks over to the transport tube and sees a party just standing there completely bewildered. "Who are you?" are the last words said as the strange people vanish. "Illogical" says Spock.
Unused Enemies#
The "boss fight" of the Slave Estate is a Gaze Demon. Throughout the map you have the opportunity to pick up a broken piece of a mirror, and if you use the mirror before you enter combat with the demon, it turns the demon to stone. However, the map data includes a second, stronger Gaze Demon (3d6 breath weapon instead of the normal 2d6). It's possible that using the mirror was supposed to weaken the demon instead of killing it outright; as it is, the stronger demon is never used in the game.
The monster list for the mountain of Salvation includes a group of Warriors (28 DEX and a +5 AV, so they're gonna beat you up), but the random fight generator doesn't include them and there's no fixed encounters with them either.
Unused Items#
In the inventory of items that exist in Kingshome, there's a reference to "Great Plate", which has the same statistics as Heavy Plate but never appears as an item that you can pick up.
Similar items include:
- An "Elixir", not found in the Slave Estate. It casts the Sun Magic spell Heal, and if you try to use it on the statues in his sculpture garden it will fail to turn them back to living creatures.
- A "Dragon Wand", not found in the Nisir. It casts a 20-point Fire Light and would sell for $5000 if it existed.
The data structure for items includes a space for "item type". Normally this distinguishes a Helmet from a Sword, for example. However, there are item types for "Guns" (type 0x0a) and "Ammo Clips" (type 0x0f), neither of which appears anywhere.
Unused Abilities#
There are 26 skills on the level-up page, but the character data (byte offset 0x31) includes room for a 27th: Merchant. It's referenced in a few places — one of the Guard Bridges will let you through if you have Merchant 2, and you can use it to convince Ugly that you're a thief — but it's unavailable without hex-editing your saved game file.
There are three spells documented in the manual (and for which code exists to implement them) that the party can't ever learn, which makes them sort of a reverse easter egg:
- Light Flash (Sun): the Sun Magic equivalent to Brambles (Druid) or Dazzle (High); causes a group of enemies to miss their next turn.
- Prison (Miscellaneous): prevents a group of enemies from using the Advance action for the rest of combat.
- Wrath of Mithras (Sun): a zap spell that does 1d4 damage to a group at 90'. Several monsters cast this one against you.