Pool of Radiance: The Great Outdoors

Tip: Your Level 6 party will not slay a silver dragon.

The game world in Pool of Radiance is much larger than I remembered. I had forgotten about the outdoor area entirely until I took a boat from Phlan to the north part of the city to deal with the graveyard and Temple of Bane. Apparently, I could have left the city at any point after clearing Sokol Keep.

Moving around the outdoor map is done from an isometric viewpoint--the only time in the game, other than combat, that you see your party top-down. They somehow acquire horses the moment you step outside. The boundaries are somewhat arbitrary, but the coordinates go from 2,2 in the northwest to 41,29 in the southeast, suggesting a total map area of 1,053 squares (although some of these are blocked by water).

And I was determined to explore every one.

When I left town, I knew of three things I needed to find and do in the outdoor map: stop the kobolds from joining the enemy, find the source of the river's pollution, and stop the nomads from joining the enemy. But I wasn't sure where to find any of these things except a vague idea that I should probably investigate the large pyramid upriver. Still, paranoid that I'd miss some vital encounter on the north side of the Moonsea, I went as far east as the map would allow me, and started methodically traveling north and south, looking for anything interesting.

What I found were random encounters. Lots of them. And with enemies that I haven't encountered anywhere in the game so far: driders, wyverns, phase spiders, stirges, tigers, centaurs, nomads, displacer beasts, thri-keens. Many of them poison, which absolutely sucks in this game, because you have to hustle back to town and neutralize the party member to revive him. I generally find that the same strategies that work in town (e.g., being abusive to kobolds) just instigate fights here. Of course, you can't parlay with non-sentient creatures. I find that "flee" hardly ever works.

Fighting wyverns around stumps and logs.

Outdoor combat differs a little from indoor combat. First, you tend to start far away from your enemy. This is great if your enemies are melee fighters and need to come to you, but bad if they're spellcasters and missile fighters, and you need to trek to them. It can take two rounds just to get next to your foe. Second, there are a lot more terrain features in the outdoor map--logs, stumps, felled trees, shrubs, rivers--and you can use these to your advantage to protect certain party members or funnel your enemy to a particular position.

Fireball comes in handy outdoors as well as indoors.

In the exploration pattern I followed, the first fixed encounter that I came across was a ruined castle surrounded by a drawbridge. Immediately upon entering, I was greeted with an "anti-magic shell," and I was grateful I had multi-classed my spellcasters as fighters. Inside, I found a host of lizardmen and giant lizards, and something tickled my memory saying that I wanted to do something else before I explored here, so I kept going.


   
High in the mountains, I entered the cave of a silver dragon, and I chose the option to "challenge the evil leader of Old Phlan." The dragon responded with the screen at the top of this posting, at which point I apologized. The dragon accepted my apology and gave me this:


Bollocks. I knew I did the cemetery out of order. Continuing on, I came to a "small, dark cave" that turned out to be occupied by two wyverns and a little bit of treasure. Near that was a camp of nomads.


   
They turned out to be friendly chaps who threw me a party before asking my help defeating marauding bands of kobolds. The three battles that followed were embarrassingly easy, and at the end, the nomads promised not to join Tyranthraxus.

I agreed, and he said he was leading me to the treasure chamber, but he actually led me to the location of a wyvern, which he expected to kill me. Unfortunately for him, I had already dispatched the wyvern. He lasted only moments longer.

I tracked down the kobolds themselves to a cave to the southeast. There, I fought a series of epic battles that left the kobold king and two of Tyranthraxus's envoys dead. I videoed all 25 minutes of it, but I'm going to make you wait for that until tomorrow, when I post again about turn-based tactical combat.

It's worth noting that by this point, I've stopped bothering to pick up coins. I only take jewels and gems, and even those I'll probably never cash in. I'm far too overloaded with wealth.

I could have returned to Phlan at this point and gotten a nice reward, but I figured I'd clear up the third of my outstanding quests, and I headed upriver from Phlan to the location of an odd pyramid--the likely source of the Barren River's pollution. The nomad king had referred to it as a "Pyramid of Evil."


    
The pyramid was one of the most difficult levels so far in the game, partly because of the tough encounters with high-level fighters, lizard men, driders, displacer beasts, and other creatures, and partly because it was composed of a series of teleporters that made mapping difficult (there were also no coordinates and no area maps). This message was frequent:


    
The secret was that each teleporter had two potential destinations, and I just had to map everything methodically.

Destroying the river's pollution.

I had to translate some dwarven runes (this game really gets a lot of mileage out of the codewheel) to get the password to the inner keep: NOKNOK. There, I found the mad sorcerer Yarash, who has apparently been experimenting on lizardmen in an attempt to create a sahuagin.


     
He wasn't hard to kill, and a search of his papers afterwards showed that Tyranthraxus had tried to force Yarash to join his forces, but Yarash refused and swore to "send an army of unstoppable aquatic creations down the Barren River and sink your precious castle" if Tyrantraxus bothered him again. Other notes indicated Yarash was aware of the silver dragon to the northwest and the kobolds to the east.


     
In another room, I freed some lizardmen who, in gratitude, gave me a password should I encounter other lizardmen. It translated as SAVIOR. I'll head back to their castle later and try it out.

As I left the pyramid, the effects of my environmental crusade were immediate:


     
What was kind of neat, too, was that back in Phlan, a message on a square next to the river which had previously said, "You walk near the polluted Barren River" now says, "You walk near the beautiful Stojanow River." I guess fixing the pollution problem not only cleaned up the river, but changed its name!

I got my three rewards from the clerk and was, of course, given three new quests:

• Lizardmen are preparing to join the enemy. I need to stop this. That one should be easy.
• The "heir to the house of Bivant" needs to be rescued. She doesn't say from whom. I'm not really sure where to find him.
• The third quest came from my old friend Lord Cadorna, who wants me to deliver a message to a Zhentil Keep outpost to the west.

Lord Cadorna assumes I've never read Hamlet.

As I close up for the day, Octavianus is a Level 7 fighter--he only gets one more. Karnov is Level 6 in both fighter and thief, so he has a little ways to go in both (thieves max at 9). Zink has hit his level cap as a cleric (5) and is a Level 6 fighter. Lame Brain and Duskfire are both Level 6 fighters and Level 5 mages--they get one more mage level. Koren, as I said last time, is maxed as a Level 6 cleric. My best weapon is a bastard sword +3, and my best armor is leather +4. I've got quite a large selection of wands and scrolls.

Again, big kobold battle coming tomorrow. I think I'm getting fairly close to the end.