Revisiting Pool of Radiance (1988), Part 4

 

The party takes on a mass of thieves in Kovel mansion.

       

In my previous experiences with Pool of Radiance, I found the three areas across the bay from downtown Phlan--the "wealthy area," the Temple of Bane, and Kovel Mansion--to be the least memorable of the bunch. They're presented as a kind of "suburb" of Phlan where the rich used to live away from the rabble-filled center of town. One map putatively holds a variety of manors and mansions (in truth, the same nondescript textures of every other map), long-since looted by monsters. One notable manor, Kovel Mansion, occupies its own map and has been taken over by thieves.

   

The "wealthy area" connects to the other two--Kovel to its north and the Temple of Bane to its west--so I did it first. It is essentially an extension of the Temple of Bane map, roaming with the same bands of orcs, hobgoblins, and ogres displaying Bane's holy symbol. You can kill any number of them and loot them for their symbols, but the encounters don't end until you've cleared the Temple of Bane. (These encounters exist in Ruins, but only in the Temple of Bane area.) It's easy to avoid combat, as all parlay options result in the enemies' peaceful departure. There are three sets of replies:

   

• Nice or Meek: "We have orders to check out suspicious individuals, but youse guys look harmless enough." After talking the four orcs wander away.

• Sly: One of the orcs says, "Oh, yeah. Youse them guys who know where de treasure is. We not supposed to kill you yet." The orcs then wander away.

• Haughty or Abusive: In a deep threatening voice one of the orcs says, "You moles better watch your step or you shall feel the wrath of Bane!" After saying this he spits and leaves.

         

This comment is really confusing until you read the module.

     

These might vary based on charisma or other attributes, but in any event I like how the game uses its conversation "stances" here.

   

There are a few fixed combats with the same types of creatures in the mansions, and searching some of the mansions results in various small treasures, including a really heavy tapestry not worth hauling back to town. In a cell in one of the mansions (gods know why a mansion has a cell) you get a clue that has always mystified me: Scratched on the wall is a message that reads "NORTH WALL. RI  T FRONT GLAS .  SE." There is nothing in the area that seems to have anything to do with a glass case. I now see from the hint book that this is a "false hint."

The tabletop module Ruins of Adventure offers the same basic map as Pool but annotates no encounters whatsoever. Instead, it offers the map as a kind of black template for miscellaneous NPC missions to recover treasures hidden before the fall. For instance, one of the special encounter charts offers this:

The princess with a problem: This encounter is designed to get the PCs to go to Sokal Keep, Kuto's Well, or Kovel Mansion if they haven't been there already, by having a beautiful princess hire them to go to one of them and retrieve a particular item or clear out the block, or something.

   

The Temple of Bane map in Pool consists of a central temple ringed by empty buildings. Clearing the temple (it used to be dedicated to Il-Mater) is the main quest of our companion, the cleric Dirten. The same parties of orcs, hobgoblins, and ogres wander the area.

   

The leather holy symbols looted from the orcs don't help avoid the random encounters, but they do help you get into the central temple, as they fool a blind orc whose job is to feel for their presence. This avoids a combat outside the temple and prolongs the time you have to explore inside before the orc leader, Mace, senses you and orders his followers to attack.

     

The crafty orc waited for us to find the good stuff.

    

Mace's army is likely meant to be saved for after the party acquires "Fireball." The arrangement of enemies is practically begging for it. I didn't have it yet, though, so I won the old fashioned way, with lots of castings of "Sleep," "Stinking Cloud," and "Hold Person." Again, my decision to make all my party members multi-class magic users really paid off. When the battle was over, Dirten left the party and I destroyed the altar to Bane, finishing off the area. 

       

This was a challenging battle without "Fireball"

      

The Temple of Bane is a rare area in which Ruins offers a more interesting adventure than Pool. First the backstory is different. The Pool party gets the quest when the town clerk tells them that Bishop Braccio (cleric of Tyr) wants to see them. Braccio foists Dirten, a human cleric, on the party. The goal is to clear the temple and rededicate it to either Tyr or Ilmater. It's a crusade. In Ruins, on the other hand, "Dirtan"--a gnome cleric--approaches the party independently, on a mission to find some relics in the temple.

Ruins offers a map of the area that's similar to the book, but mirrored so that the party enters the temple from the east rather than the west. The buildings on the periphery are not all empty, though: one of them is set up as Mace's living quarters. The party can encounter a large group of orcs there--they'll be surprised for one round if the party sports leather holy symbols--and loot Mace's collection of jeweled and silver maces. Mace himself may show up to help fight, but the module is clear that he cannot be killed in his residence and will always find a way to escape so that he can show up in the temple.

    

The tabletop module doesn't give you the ability to destroy Bane's altar.

     

The encounter with the old blind orc outside the temple is identical. However, the party isn't attacked as they explore. Mace wants the relics, too, it turns out, and he's content to let the party search where they want, attack who they want, and deface what they want until they unearth the relics. (This is only hinted in Pool by the "sly" encounter dialogue with orcs, as above.) But if they don't find anything within two hours, Mace orders the attack and 40 orcs swarm the party from the outside. "If the characters try to flee," the module says, "the orcs pursue relentlessly, even to the gates of civilized Phlan."

  

Like the game, the module also offers three caches of equipment hidden beneath floorboards. You get six clerical scrolls, five magic user scrolls, four illusionist scrolls, four potions, a Wand of Fear, Dust of Disappearance, seven gold and silver statuettes of gnome kings, and eight +1 magical weapons. When I read that, I was thinking that this is a much better deal than Pool gives you, but in fact the game gives you almost all the same things, except you only get a couple of scrolls and the seven statues only sell for 87 gold pieces instead of the thousands that they're worth in Ruins. In previous tries at this game, I must have missed some or all of the caches because I absolutely do not remember the Dust of Disappearance making an appearance in Pool. I would have used it during the kobold battles.

      

That sounds like a pretty miserable deal.

        

The module is silent about how Dirtan reacts to the artifacts and which ones he demands to keep. My Dirten was happy enough to have cleared the map and didn't want anything.

    

Dirten leaves the party.

  

I returned to civilization before trying Kovel Mansion. It's a thief-intensive area, and I wanted to see if my thief would level first. I did my usual round of visiting Sasha, identifying my magic items, selling what I didn't need, distributing the ones I wanted to keep, and resting to heal and re-memorize spells. As readers of my previous Pool of Radiance coverage know, the economy is horribly broken in this game. There's hardly any reason to spend any money on anything after the initial equipment purchase, and you keep amassing more and more of it. By this time in the game, you can safely leave every silver and gold piece on the ground and you won't run out of money before the game's end. However, I've been forcing myself to pick everything up. I wanted to see how much total wealth I could amass by game's end. Well, I won't be able to answer that question because something has gone wrong. At one point in the shop, I went to pick up my cash, and I found that the party had 65,542 jewelry pieces (they can carry maybe 5,000 of those, and they'll barely be able to move). Since individual jewelry pieces sell for thousands of gold pieces, my party is the richest group of people ever to set foot in the Forgotten Realms. They only occupy that top spot for a few minutes, though, as I have to leave about 65,000 pieces of jewelry sitting on the shopkeeper's counter. I hope he has a hell of a safe.

      

I want to know how I got 65,542 of something. I could imagine all kinds of errors that would give me 65,535 of them, but I would think that would be the maximum.

   

Halfdir was able to train to a Level 5 thief. Hoping that's enough, I head back across the bay to Kovel Mansion. It has been occupied by a band of thieves, and the council has given me a quest to clear it out. My preparation was hardly enough; I guess you want more like a Level 7 thief here. Halfdir missed most traps, set off the ones he detected, and failed to pick almost every lock. I made it through with "Knock," "Cure Light Wounds," and bashing. The place is curious. There are two large battles with thieves between Level 1 and 6 (mostly Level 1) plus lots of individual battles with single thieves who try to backstab you as you explore the rooms. There are a lot of traps, some the moment you walk into the room, some attached to chests and coffers and such. You get some scrolls and low-level magic items here. 

    

This takes me back to Wizardry.

     

There's no single named leader, but one of the Level 6 thieves has a suit of leather armor +4 on him, so that's probably him. However, there's evidence that some crafty leader has been collecting copious intelligence on the resettlement of Phlan. The area is useful mostly for this lore. You find a number of documents with individual bits of information organized into "facts," "strong rumors," "rumors," and "vague rumors." It's from these scraps that the party learns that Porphyrys Cadorna is employing thieves and mercenaries, and that the Boss is a dragon (possibly a metallic one, odd as that would be) and holed up in Valjevo Castle. Valjevo is surrounded by a hedge maze, and the thief leader has a map of one of the maze's quadrants. You also get some flavor text that fleshes out the characters of Bishop Braccio (he opposes selling "miracles") and council leader Ulrich Eberhard (he hates Cadorna and is cheating on his wife).

     

These bits of intelligence are important to Pool but not found in Ruins.

    

Except for the map, which is completely different, the Ruins module is faithful to Pool here, down to the random thieves surprising the party members with backstabs. The module mentions various traps and ambushes, and groups of around 18 thieves Levels 1 through 6. There are some creative traps that would have been hard to model in the computer game, such as a room that locks and slowly fills up with burning oil and a room where a net falls from the ceiling. You find the same basic sorts of treasure, including a short sword +2 and a cursed broad sword, but nobody has a +4 leather armor. The scraps of information are entirely lacking from the module, however, and the rumors the party finds in Pool are not delivered in any other context in Ruins. Braccio and Eberhard have less presence in the module, where they're mentioned only once in a brief paragraph.

     

When I finished with Kovel Mansion, I had four active quests from the Council:

   

• Valhingen Graveyard.
• Stop the nomads from joining the enemy. 
• Stop the kobolds from joining the enemy.
• Find the source of the river's pollution and end it.

  

I didn't feel that my triple-classed clerics were ready for the graveyard. The other three requests require leaving Phlan for the overland map. The overland map offers coordinates with the origin point in the northwest. The party can travel from 2 to 41 on the x-axis and 2 to 32 on the y-axis, although owing to the irregular shape of the shores of the Moonsea, the southernmost square in any column can be as low as 24.

  

In addition to Phlan and its boat landings to the east and west, the wilderness area has seven locations. From west to east, these are: the ruined castle in the middle of a swamp in which lizardmen live, the kobold caverns, the camp of the nomads, Yarash's pyramid, the dragon cave, the buccaneer base, and Zhentil Keep. While the map looks mostly similar in Ruins of Adventure, and is roughly the same size (Ruins uses hexes, of course), many of the locations are different. Ruins has the kobold caves, the nomad camp, and the lizardman camp, but not the other locations. There is a mission to Zhentil Keep, but the keep does not appear explicitly on the map, and I gather from the description that the party is meant to travel there more ore less automatically rather than actually moving across a hex map. But Ruins curiously has additional locations, including a hobgoblin cave, an orc camp, and a thri-kreen village. These locations are more heavily detailed than the ones that came from Pool; the hobgoblin caves take up five pages, for instance, compared to only a single page (or sometimes half) for any of the Phlan sections. I wonder whether the hobgoblins, orcs, and thri-kreens were added by the module authors or whether they were originally planned for Pool but later cut. The thri-kreen camp in particular has some seriously cool items, including a short sword +3 and a Ring of Protection +2. The hobgoblin caves serve up a long sword +3 and a Ring of Regeneration.

     

The outdoor map from Ruins of Adventure. Why "referee" and not "dungeon master"?

    

Exploring outside in Pool puts you at risk of random combats with monsters like kobolds, gnolls, trolls, giant lizards, and spiders. These are consistent with what Ruins offers in the wilderness, but Ruins also has a lot more. I gather that a long and varied list of random encounters is part and parcel for tabletop RPGs. I'm not sure how often the dungeon master was supposed to roll for them (that's probably in the Dungeon Master's Guide), but assuming that the characters are wandering through a forest, there are 1d20 potential encounters, including elves, wild boars, ogres, stirges, bandits, hill giants, phase spiders, snakes, black bears, jackals, leopards, and a pilgrim under attack by one of the other monsters. Seven of the potential outcomes have you refer to other charts with their own 1d20 selection of possibilities. Some of these are "special" encounters, in which instead of just getting hit with enemies, something unique can happen. Some examples:

    

• The group meets a beggar asking for a bit of gold to help fill his stomach. If the party gives gold, the beggar tells them a generic password good for several places in the inhuman areas. It they don’t pay up, he gives the “curse of the beggars;” for the next ten encounters, there are 2 hit dice more of whatever faces the party than there should be.

• A single inhuman warrior comes up to the adventurers and challenges one of them to personal combat. The fight is to the death and the winner takes the equipment of the loser. If the PCs all attack, the challenger simply runs. There should be a 10% chance of magical treasure with every fight. The list of monsters should include: orcs, ogres, humans of various types, goblins, and hobgoblins.

• The doppelganger attack: The doppelgangers are designed to replace PCs that fall in battle. These doppelgangers then start attracting large numbers of other doppelgangers in a series of constant attacks on the party.

• The Rumor Monger appears with news.

• The bardess Tabat wishes to join the group for three adventures.

      

It's rare to find a CRPG that implements random encounters like this. Some of the later Gold Box games, in addition to monsters, had wandering merchants, clerics, and trainers. Even this one has a few interesting things, like the party sees a dragon flying overhead or meets some friendly nomads. But can you think of any CRPG that has random encounter tables with the level of breadth and depth of a tabletop module? There are plenty of games with a large variety of encounters, but they're almost always fixed.

      

A rare non-combat random encounter on the Pool map.

      

I can only wish there were more interesting encounters in Pool. As much as I like the combat system, I've always hated fighting outdoors in every Gold Box game. The rules of the terrain are hard to figure out (e.g., you can stand on the base of a tree but not the top), distances and area-of-effect rules change, and the maps are absurdly large, with the enemy usually starting a couple dozen squares away. Emulating the game, I typically set it to auto-combat and then hold down the "warp" key combo. If the enemy is too tough for that, I'm more likely to kill the emulator and reload than spend 20 minutes fighting a group of boars for 25 experience points.

    

The pyramid is my least favorite of the Pool quests, but I suppose I've come this far, and it frankly seems downhill after that. There's no way I'm going to try the kobold caves until I have "Fireball," and I think either the nomad camp or the lizardman camp benefits from having gone to the pyramid first, so I guess that's next.