Death Knights of Krynn: Final Rating

Death Knights of Krynn
United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for DOS, Amiga, and Commodore 64; 1993 for PC-98
Date Started: 13 August 2015
Date Ended: 24 August 2015

Total Hours: 23

Reload Count: 19 (plus another 10-12 while "rest-scumming" in the challenge dungeon)

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)
Final Rating: 54

Ranking at Time of Posting: 188/196 (96%)

Raking at Game #437: 425/437 (97%)

As I closed my last post, I noted that my characters were 2-4 levels below the maximum they could have achieved in this game, despite having completed all the side quests I could find. I prematurely downloaded The Dark Queen of Krynn and created some new characters. I was happy to see that they started at about half my party's experience totals, so importing veteran characters does impart some benefit, but I still wouldn't mind another level or two. I was also eager to try out a variety of higher-level spells on more monsters, so I could properly update my "Gold Box: Spells and Their Uses" posting.

 

A commenter clued me in to a special dungeon called "Dave's Challenge" that opens up only once you've won the game. (The "Dave" in question is likely Dave Shelley, co-credited with "game development.") The documentation says nothing about it, so you have to be thorough enough to re-search the entire overworld map after winning to find it. It's in the far northwest corner, above some mountains, the middle of water. It looks like you shouldn't even be able to walk there. Getting there was no picnic. Soth may be gone, his plans in ruins, but the countryside is still crawling with undead and evil warriors.

Finding the challenge in the far northwest.

 

The dungeon is described as a "dim and decaying temple dedicated to Takhisis." As I entered, the spirit of a knight named Sir Vansward told me that he had died trying to make it to the altar of Takhisis and destroy it. He said I'd find a special amulet, capable of destroying the altar, with his body.

     
The dungeon was only one 16 x 16 level, but the "challenge" took on several forms:

• There were numerous secret doors (trapped) and trapped chests. My thief worked overtime, after hardly being used at all for this purpose during the game.

• Several places in which a thief had to sneak across a room or hide in shadows, skills not called up on in any other Gold Box maps that I can remember.

   

Why couldn't we have more stuff like this in the main game?

       

• Turning doesn't work at all and there are numerous spectres and vampires in the level. These monsters can naturally drain you, and you have to decide whether to suck it up or reload. (I reloaded; after all, I was there specifically to get experience, not lose it.)

   

When turning doesn't work, it's not easy to defeat a large group of vampires and spectres without any of them touching you.

     

• A hallway of battles against flesh golems and iron golems that respawn the moment you leave the squares.

• Resting is nearly impossible throughout the dungeon.

  

The "challenge" dungeon was one of the few I bothered to map during the game.

    
Both the material rewards and experience rewards were quite good. I found several +4 weapons and armor, a +3 hoopak (Coral had been using the +2 one brought over from Champions the entire game), and more gems and steel than I could carry. Before long, most of my party members' names had changed color, indicating they could level up.

Approaching the end of the level. Note the typical "tell instead of show" approach of the Gold Box games.

 

Defeating the level meant finding the dead knight's necklace in a pit in the middle of the map (avoiding fake ones) and bringing it to the altar room at the top. There, I had to fight a battle with 3 spectral dragons, 4 vampire mages, and 4 death knights, scattered around the map when the battle began. The spectral dragons can drain levels just like the vampire mages. The death knights, of course, were fond of casting "Fireball" every round, and they were mostly immune to spells. The vampire mages cast high-powered magic missiles, drain levels with physical attacks, and have a gaze attack that charms characters.

Death knights, vampire mages, and spectral dragons appear in small groups around the final combat map.

 

Given the state of my party when I arrived at the altar room, I didn't stand a chance. I probably wouldn't have even been able to make it back through the golem fights to the entrance by then. I was only able to prevail through "rest-scumming"--attempting to rest and restore health and spells and reloading if I got attacked. This took a while. Thus restored, I cast every buffing spell at my disposal and was able to win the final battle on the third try. I particularly enjoyed the hastened Midsummer running around the map and killing all three spectral dragons in one round.

When the final battle is over, the altar is destroyed by the necklace, the dungeon collapses, and you find yourself outside. The first time I won, I made the mistake of not saving and walking one step. My beleaguered party was immediately attacked by a large group of hatori (sand crocodiles) who killed two of my characters in the first two rounds. I had to reload from an earlier save in the dungeon and fight the final battle again.

That was a load-bearing altar.

    
When it was all over, I made my way to Cekos, sold all my excess equipment, gems, and jewelry, and bought all the arrows +2 and Darts of the Hornet's Nest that I could afford. (I look forward to seeing why these are particularly valuable in Dark Queen.) I then returned to Gargath Outpost, leveled up four of my characters, memorized new spells, and made a final save in preparation for Dark Queen next year.

"Dave's Challenge" was suitably challenging. I cheated a bit, I guess, but the real game was over at that point, wasn't it?

This is the only time I remember a message like this appearing in a Gold Box game. We could stand more of them.

    
Before moving on to the GIMLET, let's check out the fake journal entries. Perhaps reflecting the developers' abilities to put more text in the game, there aren't that many total journal entries this time around. Champions had 88 entries and 57 "tavern tales"; Death Knights has only 66 entries and no tavern tales. But a full third of them--23 entries--were ones I didn't encounter during the game. Some of them might have been real and I just missed them. Obvious fake ones included one in which the commander of the Kalaman garrison was revealed as Soth; a pair of entries in which Durfey and Lenore are tortured by the "Snake King"; a trio that would have had the party wasting time plodding around the mountains searching for the Rod of Omniscience in an non-existent city called Sudulto; and one in which Maya is revealed to be a servant of Soth. They're all reasonably clever.

A pair of bogus journal entries.

       
As we discussed a couple of posts ago, I expect the game to GIMLET at around the same level as Champions and Curse of the Azure Bonds, but not as good as Pool of Radiance. Let's check it out:

1. Game World. The setting is the same as Champions, of course, and the Dragonlance universe brings a lot of lore and backstory to the game. But I was alternately bored and annoyed with this particular game's approach to the story. The plot is both bland and nonsensical, and relies too much on characters you'd have to read the books to understand. It is, on the other hand, a responsive game world, with actions taken in some areas leading to repercussions in others, and NPCs reacting appropriately to the party's accomplishments. A mixed bag. Score: 5.

A knight greets me appropriately after I've won the game.

2. Character Creation and Development. As I discussed in the first post, I like the Dragonlance approach to characters better than the Forgotten Realms. There are few racial level caps, and the various races, sub-races, and classes have clearer and more interesting strengths and weaknesses. It's much more fun playing a Silvanesti Elf cleric of Kiri-Jolith than just an "elven cleric."

Like most sequels, the game suffers from the fact that you have more fun going from Level 1 to Level 8 in the first game than from Level 8 to Level 12 in the second. But the rewards are still pretty good, particularly in terms of spells, extra attacks, and backstab multipliers. I also like that there are several places in which you gain experience for non-combat solutions to problems. A strong part of the game. Score: 6.

3. NPC Interaction. There's a cast of characters who flesh out the story and impart bits of lore and quest assistance. The writing and characterizations are somewhat bland, and the series remains weak in dialogue and role-playing options. The couple of NPCs who joined the party--including squads of Solamnic Knights at various locations--were a welcome addition. Score: 5.

One wonders why the game bothered to give me a "talk" option here.

        
4. Encounters and Foes. This category is relatively strong, just like most Dungeons & Dragons titles. We have a well-stocked menagerie of monsters with various strengths and weaknesses, all well-described in the manual. There are maybe a few less than the previous game. I mourn the loss of the non-Sivak Draconians and I hope they reappear in Dark Queen.

Non-combat encounters are only average, with several role-playing options on each map. Although none of them are real nail-biters, few other games of the era are offering encounter choices at all. Score: 6.

5. Magic and Combat. Gold Box standard. There's not much I can say that I haven't said in the five previous games. Even through the modern era, it's rare to see this good a turn-based, party combat system, offering innumerable options with attacking, spellcasting, using items, and special abilities. The challenging nature of combat in Death Knights encourages the player to make full use of all his options, including carrying multiple weapons and trading them as the situation demands.

I feel like Death Knights offered fewer resting opportunities than previous games, making it important to conserve energy and spells through an accumulation of combats. Overall, a well-balanced use of a great combat system. Score: 7.

Magically, my characters are starting to feel pretty powerful.

 

6. Equipment. No new ground in this one. Every map brought one or two new equipment rewards, and with the dragonlance and "Olin's quarterstaff," we have two of the few artifact items in Gold Box games. As always, the items are all in scripted locations, which I don't care for, and there wasn't really anything interesting to buy. Boots of Speed made an appearance; still no helms. At least the Knights of Solamnia didn't commandeer all my good stuff at the end. Score: 5.

My lead knight's inventory as we end the game.

       
7. Economy. Not only does Death Knights make no improvement here, it somehow gets worse than the previous games. Healing and training don't even cost money, and the knights don't have to tithe any of their earnings. There is only a single shop worth buying anything at, and all they sell are magic arrows and darts. Meanwhile, I left millions glittering in the sun because it was too heavy to carry. Gold Box remains horribly disappointing in this category.

Nonetheless, I'm going to reluctantly give it a score of 2 rather than 1, since it does feature a potentially-useful "money sink" in the form of the +2 arrows, which sell at a crazy 15,000 steel pieces for 10. They could be part of a legitimate combat strategy in this game and apparently have a lot of value in the next. Score: 2.

8. Quests. Probably the best approach since Pool of Radiance. The main quest is only so-so, and with only one outcome, but I loved the number of side quests. Fully half of the game world is optional. Score: 6.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The interface remains excellent, with redundant keyboard and mouse options, and a few improvements that I outlined in the first post. Though the game doesn't take advantage of VGA yet, it didn't really lose any points on that account, and overall the graphics were fine, although I'm still a bit sick of bland corridors and rooms. Sound effects are tolerable but optional. Score: 6.

The cut scenes and monster portraits are well-drawn and animated; I just wish the game showed more in the normal environment.

     
10. Gameplay. I loved that Death Knights returned to a mostly open world. Although certain plot events trigger in a prescribed order (as they do in, you know, real life), I like that you can visit areas ahead of their importance to the plot. In this, it felt a bit less linear than Champions. The game lasted exactly the right amount of time for its content, and the difficultly level was perfect: usually challenging, but almost never unfair. Score: 6.

That gives us a final score of 54. This is actually lower than I would have thought; I gave Champions a 56 and Curse of the Azure Bonds a 60. I don't see anything I want to change, though, so we'll go with it. It still puts the game on the "Highest Rated" list, which is going to be dominated with Gold Box games unless the other franchises start bringing it.
  

By this time, I guess clue books were pretty much standard game accompaniments. I could understand buying one for something like Eye of the Beholder, but anyone who needs one for this game is pathetic.

   
For a truly annoying contemporary review, we have to turn to our old friend Stuart Campbell of Amiga Power. In the November 1991 issue, he rated the game at 60%, apparently after creating characters and fighting one combat. He spends half the short "review" discussing why he should have never been given the assignment in the first place. His main point is that he can't enjoy the game because he's not a Dungeons & Dragons fan, ignoring the fact that his most serious under-qualification is not knowing anything about CRPGs. "You could argue that there's not much point in my reviewing it at all, and I'd tend to agree," he says. So would I. What kind of idiotic magazine was this?

Scorpia's July 1991 Computer Gaming World review calls it "standard 'Gold Box' fare," which surprises me a bit because I didn't know the term "Gold Box" was in use that early. She complains about all the level draining, which I suppose ought to have made an appearance somewhere in the GIMLET because I did find it annoying. She praises the open world nature of the game and suggests there are more things to find post-winning than just "Dave's Challenge." (I think she's mistaken and is describing places that are in the game proper, but I could be wrong.) She concludes:

In general, there's a humdrum feel to the game. We've been this way before and play tends to have a mechanical quality. There are no puzzles to speak of, little scope for true role-playing, and even the side quests begin to look depressingly similar after a while. So, perhaps it's just as well that SSI is now experimenting in new directions with their Legends line (Eye of the Beholder) and the rumored Citadel of the Black Sun project.

 
Now, on the one hand, I find these comments a little mystifying. This was 1991. What games was she playing that did offer "true role-playing"? You could count on one hand all the games through 1991 that had side quests at all. She's writing like someone who already has Baldur's Gate and Morrowind on her computer instead of schlock like Elvira II and HeroQuest. And having played Eye of the Beholder the previous month, she must have been fully aware that it wasn't anyone's savior when it came to role-playing. (As an aside, here is an interesting account of what happened to Citadel of the Black Sun.)

On the other hand, perhaps she simply feels some of the angst that I've felt with every Gold Box game since the original. I think there's one respect in which I'm different than most reviewers: I don't punish games for using the same mechanics as previous games, even many previous games, unless the mechanics are bad. If the engine is good, I don't complain that it's old. I wish there were still Infinity Engine games being released in 2015.

But I am critical of titles that don't reach their full potential even within the confines of their engines. Death Knights, though highly rated in comparison of the totality of games I've played, could have been better. Secret of the Silver Blades could have been better. There's nothing about the Gold Box engine that requires bland writing, lackluster storytelling, limited encounters, and an awful economy. There's no reason that every title since Pool of Radiance couldn't have improved on the original instead of falling short of it. Every time I play a Gold Box game, I enjoy the satisfaction of a good engine--perhaps the best of its time--and yet simultaneously lament what could have been. Perhaps that's where Scorpia is coming from. The Gold Box series is like a lazy genius who always tops the class in grades but still under-achieves.

It'll have plenty of chances to rouse itself yet. We still have Gateway to the Savage Frontier, Neverwinter Nights, and Pools of Darkness this year; Treasures of the Savage Frontier, The Dark Queen of Krynn, and Buck Rogers: Matrix Cubed in 1992; and some Unlimited Adventures modules in 1993. I'll probably check out Gateway in another 10-12 games, then Neverwinter, and play Darkness towards the end of 1991.

I guess I'd better play some more Antares before I forget how, but I hope it's escaped no one's notice that we have a major landmark coming up.

Death Knights of Krynn: Won!

Nice title-drop.

 
This probably should have been two postings, maybe three, but I had to take a long break for some work last week, so rather than prolong things, I figured I'd best push through to the end.

When I last wrote, I had left the High Clerist's Tower, having failed to stop Soth's forces from stealing several corpses of knights, including Sturm Brightblade [this sentence originally said "Sturm Majere," but as per the comments, I was getting my Sturms mixed up]. I was on my way back to Vingaard to consult with Sebas Astmoor, an ex-follower of Soth who had "seen the light" and was holding back some secret about how to defeat him. Alas...

I apparently had one more hoop to jump through. Sebas told me to go to the Dragon Pit, in the mountains to the northwest. He really didn't give me any clue as to why. The Pit turned out to be the same "musty cave" I'd previously explored, but this time Sebas gave me a map showing a secret door. 

On the way, I got hijacked by another side-adventure when I came upon a group of Kuo-Toans rounding up peasants and forcing them on a slave ship. The game didn't even give me the opportunity to decide whether I wanted to save them. 

The game cleverly elides how I was able to disguise all my weapons, armor, wands, potions, dragonlance, etc.

Kuo-Toans are fish-men. I always get them mixed up with Sahuagins. I was wondering what mythology they come from, but apparently Gary Gygax created them from scratch. I thought they lived under water; I didn't realize they had ships.

In this depiction, they look more like frog men.

Anyway, the ship turned out to be a fairly linear map in which I freed a bunch of slaves, stopped the beasts from sacrificing a slave to their god, set the ship on fire, and jumped off as it burned. I got a bunch of experience and another mace +4 for the effort.

Squirrel, who just got Level 6 spells, tries "Disintegrate" on one of the leaders.

As I arrived at the Dragon Pit, I was joined by Maya, Sir Karl's silver dragon lover from Champions, who'd been absent since the beginning of the game. She indicated Karl was nearby and flew off after a brief chat.

Given the name of the dungeon, I expected to find lots of dragons. What I found instead were lots of undead dragons, mostly in random encounters. These guys don't have a breath attack, but they hit hard in melee combat. There were lots of other undead in the area, including some recent knight-to-wight converts.

Durfey's special dialogue indicated that his staying with my party wasn't a bug.

The Dread Wolf showed up and taunted me, saying that Maya had been killed. As I pressed through the dungeon, I ran into Sir Karl a couple of times, always heading off in some other direction, claiming he was too "busy" to deal with me. Eventually, he ordered the wolf to stop me. The Dread Wolf attacked with a party of wights and skeleton warriors.

He was capable of what seemed like 13 melee attacks in a single round, but he didn't have any special attacks or defenses, and I was able to kill him and his horde without losing anyone. As he died, he claimed that "Takhisis will return [him] when she walks upon Krynn." It was an anticlimactic end to the beast that had been taunting me since the beginning of the game. I thought he was going to turn out to be a bigger deal. I still don't really understand what his story was.

In a courtyard, Maya landed next to my party and warned me about a Death Dragon ahead. Karl appeared. In a scripted cut scene, Karl attacked Maya with a dragonlance, wounding her, and she flew off with the lance still embedded in her, and Karl still clutching the lance.

The Death Dragon appeared and attacked. In the first round, he "breathed death" and killed Atmos at once. Again not willing to lose my elf cleric/mage, I reloaded and tried again. The second time, the dragon chose melee attacks during the first round, and I was able to kill him in just a couple of rounds. At the end of the combat, the dragonlance suddenly came crashing down into the courtyard, without any suggestion of what had happened to Karl and Maya. But my lead knight has a dragonlance again!

This couldn't have happened before I got attacked by the Death Dragon?

And that was the end of the dungeon. As I exited, I encountered an obelisk that said: "For Maya and Sir Karl Gaardsen, the war is over. They have found the peace that was denied them for so long." Huh? Who had time to erect that? And what actually happened? Is Karl dead? Is Maya? Maybe we'll find out in Dark Queen of Krynn, but they never showed up again here.

Back I went to Vingaard and Sebas, only to find him missing, with signs of a struggle in his house. One piece of evidence was left: an earring that the game assured me belonged to Ariela.

I had to look through my previous posts and screenshots to remind myself who Ariela was. She was the "consort and advisor" to Daine, the knight commander in Kalaman. I returned to Kalaman and presented the earring to the knights. Instead of arguing that "hey, lots of earrings look like that," Ariela freaked out, killed Daine ("Curse you. I was almost fond of him."), and ordered her aides to attack. Naturally, they turned out to be Sivak Draconians (a plot device that is getting kind of old), and she turned out to be a red dragon. Fortunately, I had a dragonlance, which does as much damage as the wielder's current hit points.

Do any of the Knights of Solamnia date normal women?

When she was dead, Ariela dropped a key that read "Denissa" on it.

Before she had attacked, she had ordered some aides to "take our captive at once to our mistress Kitiara... Do not let Soth's warriors take him alive." I hadn't encountered this name before, but a quick Google search revealed that Kitiara is a major character in the Dragonlance books. The beautiful human daughter of a Solamnic Knight, Kitiara was a lover of both Sturm Brightblade and the hero Tanis Half-Elven despite stepping mostly on the "evil" side of the line. From the summary I read, during the War of the Lance, she was an uncomfortable ally of Lord Soth, "who had become obsessed with her and planned to bind her soul to him for eternity." When she was killed near the end of the war, her "soul vanished before the death knight could bind it."

These events then indicate some other faction operating in Krynn, antagonistic to my purposes but also to Soth's. I was curious how this was going to play out.

The captive turned out not to be Sebas but a random knight who had been imprisoned with Sebas. He related a message: "the key to Soth's doom is the Rod of Omniscience. This fellow found it and hid it in a place called Voice Wood." Voice Wood could be accessed through the city of Dulcimer.  Dulcimer, you may recall, was the city I had liberated from a lich early in my adventure.

I returned and entered the Voice Wood, a large tangle of vines and shrubbery where it wasn't always clear which direction you could go. Sprites alerted me to the presence of evil mages.

In a game that doesn't allow evil alignments, you can script things like this.

Long story short, the area took a long time to map, and there were several battles with parties of black mages. Ultimately, I reached a clearing where the "Spirit of the Voice Woods" gave me the Rod of Omniscience after I promised to use it only against Soth. The spirit indicated that the password to Soth's keep, Dargaard, was the word "Denissa" that appeared on Ariela's key.

Once again, I wish I'd saved and reloaded just to find out what would happen if I said "No."

Three things happened before I assaulted Dargaard.

1. I returned to Gargath Outpost for training, item identification, and resting. I think there are only two places you can train in the game, at Gargath and Kalaman, which is a little inconvenient. Gargath is also the only place that has a bank. Anyway, the keep was besieged again by Sivaks, and I had to fight several battles to clear them out. When I was done, a message told me to see the commander of the outpost, and he told me that "our foes have left" and awarded me a bunch more experience. It occurred to me that I was probably supposed to stick around at the beginning of the game and keep fighting until all the attacking parties were killed. Instead, I fought one battle and headed out into the world.

2. It occurred to me that the plot had never taken me to the city of Cerberus or its graveyard. I revisited and found that the mayor had recently been slain. The two maps took me a couple of hours, but in interests of time, I'll summarize quickly: a mage in town had conspired with Soth's forces to kill the mayor, kidnap the city's cleric, and raise the dead in the graveyard. To stop them, I had to kill a bunch of undead, rescue the cleric, find a buried cache of wards, and set them up all over the graveyard. This ended the threat.

A satisfying side-area.

3. On the word of commenter Kirben, I returned to Cekos to see if there really was a magic shop. There was. It sold exactly two items: 10 arrows +2 for 15,000 steel pieces and Darts of the Hornet's Nest for 5,000 steel pieces. I sold all the gems and jewelry in my possession, which came out to 194,517 steel pieces. A couple of scrolls I didn't need rounded that out to 195,000. This bought me 130 arrows +2.

That seems a little steep for 10 arrows.

The graveyard in Cerberus turned out to contain a hidden passage to Dargaard, but I don't think going that way made a huge difference. The keep was three levels, full of undead, but also a reasonable number of places to rest. Turning in the keep didn't seem to work very well, and I had to take care of even low-level undead with "Fireballs" and melee attacks.

Four or five times, I got drained by vampires, specters, or wights. Unless I missed something, there isn't a single "Restoration" scroll in the game, and thanks to my multi-classing, my clerics hadn't reached seventh-level spells. After the second time I dragged my party all the way back to Kalaman's temple to restore levels to a drained character, I adopted a reload policy for draining. As often, I reflected that it would be nice if these undead had a chance of draining you on a successful melee attack, rather than an inevitability.
     

Dammit, here comes another reload.

     
Early in the first level, I was joined by a woman calling herself "Lenore." She said that Soth's minions had killed her husband, and she was looking for valuables to steal so her children could eat. She wanted to come with my party and scavenge bodies in my wake.

Thanks to my previous research, which included images, I suspected this woman was in fact Kitiara, but I decided to let her stay to see how it played out.

On the first level, I freed a bunch of servants by destroying a gem and killing all the patrols. As I approached the second level, Lenore insisted that she had to leave to check on her children, and Durfey--without even checking with us--left to "escort her safely home." I knew that wasn't going to end well.

Durf, we're in the final dungeon here.

On the second level, I found Sebas, moments away from death, who confirmed that the Rod of Omniscience was his secret. He warned me that Kitiara wanted it "for her own purposes." Later in the level, some mages had turned some peasants into rats, but I killed the mages and found a reversal spell. The level culminated with a battle against priests trying to turn Sturm Brightblade into a death knight. 

This is my policy when people call me "Fools."

There was a death knight in their party, but I think it was supposed to be someone other than Sturm. I soon found out that death knights are able to cast "Fireball" even when they've been damaged already in the round. But he died in a couple of rounds. Once they were all dead, grateful clerics took Sturm's body back to the High Clerist's Tower and I continued on.

The last level was very linear. There were a couple of sections where I had to choose among three doors, and a voice taunted me that two of the choices led to death. Indeed, one of the three choices led to an (easy) battle with were-tigers or were-boars, and one damaged me when I tried to open it. There was no logic to the choices, so I just figured out the path through trial and error.

It would be nice if this was an actual, you know, puzzle.

I soon came across "Lenore," who claimed that she and Durfey had been attacked by death knights on the road and Durfey had been killed. Sure, and you escaped and for some reason decided to come all the way back here.

They really do think we're a bunch of "fools."

Durfey, somehow already converted to a death knight, was the penultimate confrontation of the level. He attacked me with specters and a couple of iron golems. It wasn't a hard battle--"Fireball" took care of the specters and "Lightning Bolt" slowed the golems. When I killed Durfey, the game noted that in his final moments, "you recognize the Durfey you knew and befriended."

The final encounter.

     
I've often complained that the Gold Box games give you no intelligence about impending battles despite the fact that your characters should logically be able to see a horde of death knights and iron golems 10 feet in front of them. For that reason, when I finally stumbled upon Soth and the final battle, I didn't have any compunction reloading and casting some buffing spells before facing him. At my levels, we have a pretty good selection of them. "Bless" and "Prayer," of course. I cast "Protection from Evil, 10' Radius" on a couple of characters. "Enlarge" goes to my first four. Everyone gets "Resist Fire" now that I know death knights cast "Fireball." "Fire Touch" is a neat sixth-level mage spell that causes melee characters to deal extra fire damage. The two mages get "Fire Shield." And for the final battle of the game, I was willing to spend a year of my life on "Haste."

Earlier, I had found that either "Invisibility" doesn't work or death knights can see right through it. It didn't do anything in previous battles.

The battle commenced and I recorded it. Watch it here:

  

Soth dies in literally the first action--a series of "Haste" and "Fire Touch"-fueled melee attacks from Midsummer, wielding the dragonlance. One of his four associated death knights dies soon after. At 01:05, Squirrel fries the entire line of iron golems with a "Lightning Bolt" before they can act, slowing them down for a few turns.

At 01:16, something happens that proves to be the only real problem in the battle: one of my knights gets "terrified" by a death knight. This is something they can do. Fortunately, 4 of my 6 characters have the ability to cast "Dispel Magic," but I'm worried that he'll flee off the map before I can cast it on him. When he does flee at 01:22, fortunately it's to the west where he can't get away, and I still have a chance to undo the damage.

A death knight makes with one of several "Fireballs" at 01:19, but "Resist Fire" mitigates the damage. At 01:47, after yet another character has been terrified, I discover another advantage of being a death knight: you can reflect "Magic Missile" spells.

Fortunately, in the next few rounds, I get everyone "Dispelled" and take out the death knights, leaving only the iron golems. My mage/thief, equipped with a long sword +3 and Gauntlets of Ogre Power, ends up being surprisingly crucial to this process.

Everyone's in reasonably good shape at the end. Overall, I found the battle a little easy, although it would have been a very different story if I hadn't buffed first, so you can decide for yourself whether I cheated.

At the end of the combat, Soth started to "regenerate," so I struck him with the Rod of Omniscience. For some reason, this caused him to get sucked into a whirling vortex.

Lenore revealed herself as Kitiara and tried to grab the Rod. After a struggle, she messed around with it and caused an explosion. The party got sucked one way into a portal, she another, and we wound up in the High Clerist's Tower. There, the knight commander expressed his belief that Kitiara and Soth had been sucked into alternate dimensions and "there is no leader for the evil forces to rally around."

Thoughts on the end:

• I didn't really like the entire plot. Soth's goals are unclear, the step-by-step progress is a little nonsensical, and too much depends on knowledge of characters outside the game itself.

• I don't know why a Rod of "Omniscience" is something that you strike people with, or why it defeats Soth.

• No dragons in the final battle! In fact, only one dragon after getting the dragonlance! What the hell?!

The game let me keep playing, so I slinked back to the Gargath outpost to level up and identify some of the items I'd found in the keep. Despite hitting almost all the side-areas I could find, my characters are all 2-4 levels below their maximums for this game, which is a refreshing change for a Gold Box title. My spellcasters are all one level below their maximum spell levels, even. Thus, before we wrap this up, I may have to do some grinding so I can properly document "Otto's Irresistible Dance." Plus, there's something called "Dave's Challenge" that a commenter just wrote about...

Time so far: 20 hours
Reload count: 17

Death Knights of Krynn: Good, but Still Second-Best

The big bad makes an appearance.

Pool of Radiance remains my highest-ranked Gold Box game, and that's not because it was the first. My GIMLET system doesn't give points for freshness or originality; it gives points for doing a good job incorporating various RPG elements. Later Gold Box games ranked lower because I thought they did worse than Pool even though they were newer. Mostly, they managed to delete or mess something up that Pool had done reasonably well. None of them, for instance, have offered the same quest system that I loved in the first game. None allowed NPC hirelings after the first. The "attitude"-based encounter system mostly disappeared. The economy, which was bad enough in Pool, got a lot worse in subsequent entries. Open world exploration disappeared until Death Knights. Buck Rogers used the tactical combat system that I loved, but rendered it partly meaningless without the spells. And I never found the back story and main plot as compelling as when a low-level group of adventurers was trying to help restore civilization to a small corner of the Moonsea.

Looking at my ratings sheet, only once has a Gold Box game exceeded the value, in any category, that I originally awarded in Pool of Radiance: the score for "Character Creation and Development" in Champions of Krynn. That's a reflection of Dragonlance's more interesting approach to races and classes.

Does the trend continue in Death Knights of Krynn? A little. There are three ways in which it's not quite as good as the original:

1. Its plot is not quite as compelling as some of the others. The quest to reclaim Phlan from monsters (Pool of Radiance) could be seen as a conflict of civilizations (with associated moral questions about whether the descendants of ancient residents truly have a "right" to land) without getting too deep into D&D's boring "absolute evil" motifs. Curse of the Azure Bonds was about factions and how they allied and clashed. But here we have a main foe (Lord Soth) who wants to take over the world just because he's evil and his god is evil. (If the books offer something deeper, let me know.) This is common enough in RPG-dom, of course, but George R. R. Martin, Steven Erikson, and others have spoiled such simplistic plots for me, and if I can't even imagine a more complex set of machinations beneath the surface, I don't enjoy the game quite as much.

2. It somehow manages to make the economy even worse than its predecessors, where it was already horrible. I've already left hundreds of thousands of steel pieces on the corpses of my enemies. I've found no stores selling magic items, and this game doesn't even make you pay for training the way the previous ones did. I have over 500,000 steel pieces in gems and jewels stashed in the bank in Gargath outpost (the bank, by the way, appears nowhere else), and I bet I'll never have to go back and get any of it. If money is so plentiful that you can buy anything you want from the game's opening moments, you don't have an economy at all.

There is literally no point.

     
3. It has a more limited selection of monsters. With 39 different creatures, Death Knights would seem to have about as many as Pool of Radiance's 43, but the variety isn't the same. It was fun to figure out the best tactics against the various Draconians in Champions of Krynn, but here the only ones to return are Sivaks. Around 10 of Death Knights' monsters are simply bestial undead that have no special attacks but hit hard and die hard. There are no creatures in this game capable of causing cold damage, disease, paralysis, blindness (save the nightmare's temporary smoke blindness), or stoning, removing the need for a significant percentage of cleric spells.

I'm encountering these crocodile things for the first time. They're very tough.

    
Death Knights does a few things quite well. It restores the value of open-world exploration from Pool and the side-dungeons from Curse, and of course it has the superior Dragonlance approach to characters from Champions. It takes place right in that Level 7-12 sweet spot where each level-up still makes the character noticeably more powerful, but the characters aren't yet so godlike that they never use half their powers. But while I'm enjoying the game quite a lot--perhaps as much as any Gold Box game since Pool--I'm once again a little irked that the developers didn't try just a little harder and make it just a little better. We don't have that many Gold Box titles left, and it will be depressing if we leave the series without any of them having exceeded the quality of the 1988 original.

When I last posted, Lord Soth the Death Knight was taking over everything, and I had just arrived in the city of Vingaard hoping to consult with the Dream Merchant and figure out what the old knight's sleepstone revealed. In contrast to the other maps so far, the passages of Vingaard were narrow and twisty, and wrapped back on themselves in some non-obvious places, making mapping difficult.

The Dream Merchant's attire looks slightly out of place for this setting.

           

Eventually, I found the Dream Merchant in his shop and gave him the stone. He sent my characters to sleep to experience the knight's prophetic dream:

You and many heroic Knights are at a celebration, feasting merrily. You see a long-faced man in dark robes who doesn't seem to belong. As you try to accost him, he disappears in the crowd.

Suddenly Sir Karl is there before you. You smile, even though you know he is dead. 'Thom! Give me your sword!" he cries and you do so at once. He jerkily takes it and you notice silver strands attached to his arms and legs. The strands lead up to a monstrous man, whose face covers the sky. He laughs like thunder and pulls Sir Karl to him.

All turns black as you plummet into dark catacombs. You grope in the darkness, tearing through walls of gossamer spiderwebs, until you see a speck of light and head for it. It is a candle held by the long-faced man. There is a string around his wrist, but it has been cut. As you draw near, a door shuts and the candle is blown out. This happens again. On the third try the candle flickers, but stays lit. You step past a red door into a small bare room. The long-faced man transforms into a young Solamnic Knight, who hands you an ornate key the color of blood. "For every key, a prisoner," he warns, then you awake.

"Whaaaaa...," my characters said, but fortunately the Dream Merchant was there to interpret it for me: An evil man is gathering powerful weapons and warriors. My only hope is a man in dark robes who has cut his puppet strings. I can find him by first finding the candle and then by traveling through red doors. ("If you go through a gray door, he will disappear.") He will introduce me to a young knight who holds the key to everything.

A side effect of the experience was that every time I tried to rest afterwards, I woke up screaming. I couldn't heal or memorize any spells. I returned to the Dream Merchant who promised me an elixir to end the nightmares, but I needed to help him first by entering his dreams and killing the dogs that were causing him nightmares. The ubiquitous Dread Wolf seemed to have something to do with it.

       

I ended up having to fight three battles against hellhounds. They weren't so much difficult as annoying, as they had the tendency to flee as soon as half of their numbers were killed. I had to chase them into the corners of the map for the final kill. Anyway, when it was all over, both our dreams were okay again, and the Dream Merchant took off for an extended vacation.

         

At first, I thought the candle/door puzzle would apply to a different map, but then I realized it was here in Vingaard. The "candle" referred to the shingle outside the inn. If I started there, there was a sequence of red doors that wound through the city. If I didn't start with the first red door, nothing happened, and if I entered a regular door at any part of the sequence, it was broken. But as long as I followed the sequence of red doors, I got a series of messages...

       

...culminating in an encounter with a cleric named Sebas Astmoor. When I entered his room, he threatened to kill himself, then wanted me to swear I worshipped good or neutral gods. When he'd calmed down, he told me that he was a former Cleric of Majere who had been corrupted by Lord Soth. Soth had sent him on a quest to find some artifact--he wouldn't tell me what it was--but once he had it in his hands, he "saw Lord Soth's folly and [his] own unworthiness." He hid the artifact and ran away from Soth's service.

He told me to go to the High Clerist's Tower, where "evil is afoot in the tombs." If I could stop it, I'd be worthy of the rest of his secret.

I love how the game suggests speed is of the essence, as if I couldn't wander around literally for years and still find the exact same encounters when I finally decided to act.

       

The High Clerist's Tower is far on the west side of the map, so I resumed my north/south exploration pattern to get there. Discoveries along the way:

1. A gnome village called Quazle. The place did a good job playing up the eccentricities of gnomes, the various guilds they belong to, and their needlessly complex inventions. They insisted, for instance, that I tour their museum of inventions, where the game warned me, after numerous exhibits, that I ran the risk of literally being bored to death. (I didn't stay long enough to discover if this would really happen.) I had to "flee" to get out of there, and throughout the rest of the map, I kept getting random encounters where some gnome insisted that I go back and finish the tour.

Jan Jansen would be at home here.

It transpired that some gnome named Quax had invented a camera, which would have made the Sage Guild obsolete, so they asked the Engineering Guild to create something that would destroy it. Quax barricaded himself in his workshop and put traps around it, and a minor civil war ensued. As I explored, gnomes kept popping up and shooting things at me, thinking I was the "enemy."

When I finally breached the workshop, it turned out that Quax had been dead for at least a year. Some wizard from Myrtani's old army had killed him and taken over his workshop to have a quiet place to practice magic in, with the ultimate goal of becoming "the most powerful wizard on Krynn!" I put an end to his plans and got some potions and Eyes of Charming. The gnomes didn't acknowledge or notice my victory, so I left.

Has there ever been an evil wizard who didn't refer to his enemies as "fools"?

       
2. A farming village that had fallen under the corrupting influence of an evil meteorite. Some evil mages had arrived to study it, and an impostor took the place of the town's good wizard. I freed the good wizard, killed the impostor and his allies, and destroyed the meteorite. It was a small 8 x 8 map that took maybe 15 minutes.

        
My reward from this quest was something called "Olin's Quarterstaff." I parked it with my ranger and didn't think much of it until he favored it over his long sword +4 in quick combat. Every time he strikes someone with it, it has a chance of stunning them for the rest of the round. Very handy, and also very rare for a Gold Box game to include an artifact weapon that isn't found in the usual tables. I assume "Olin" refers to Olin Silverhaft, a Knight of Solamnia who appears in some Dragonlance novels.

3. The city of Cekos. It seemed like a normal city at first, but it soon became clear that the population had been occupied by Sivak Draconians in human form. The Sivaks were chasing rumors of an ancient dragon treasure hidden beneath the town, and a man named Igorf--another treasure-hunter--joined my party.

An encounter with a statue in the city. I was hoping he gave me a Scroll of Protection from Dragon Breath, but it was just a random mage scroll.

         
The town consisted of about half a dozen battles with Sivaks, and it soon became clear that Igorf was a copper dragon in human form. Midsummer's abilities as a knight allowed me to control him in combat, which I think makes this the earliest traditional RPG where you can control a dragon. (1990's Dragon Lord is responsible for the slight equivocation.) Unfortunately, there's no command that allows me to use his breath attack, but he did have mage spells through Level 4 and a powerful melee attack.

            
The map culminated in a small area beneath the town, where I suddenly ran into 4 blue dragons--a difficulty none of the previous combats had prepared me for. (I would have faced 5 without Igorf.) The map was oriented in such a way that there was nowhere to hide, and plenty of walls for the dragons' lightning attacks to bounce off and hit multiple characters at once (or the same character multiple times). After a couple of battles that went poorly, I sucked it up and used "Haste." Coupled with "Enlarge" and one use of the exploit by which if you walk up to a dragon and walk away, he swipes at your retreating back and loses his turn for the round, I was able to defeat them.

Although "Stinking Cloud" caused them to cough, it didn't stop them from breathing.

          
After all that effort, I was hoping for some nice magic items, but what I got was this:

        
The game seems to be under the illusion that money is an actual "reward."

4. A musty cave. There were about a dozen squares of passage and a dead end. Either I'm missing something, or I have to come here later.

Atmos, Squirrel, and Coral can all level up, but it's a long trek back to a training facility.

          
That brings us to the High Clerist's Tower. A check of a Dragonlance wiki reveals that the High Clerist is one of the three leaders of the Knights of Solamnia and head of the Order of the Sword. When I offered Sebas's warning, he expressed skepticism but led me to the catacombs to check it out. Sure enough, the place was swarming with undead.

This is a pretty cool illustration.

 

An NPC knight named Durfey joined my party as we battled through the catacombs. It wasn't a large map, but there were a lot of combats with skeleton warriors, both fixed and random, as well as undead giants pounding away at the tower's foundations.

      
It soon became clear that Lord Soth's forces were in the catacombs for two reasons: first, to liberate a red dragon that had been imprisoned there in human form; second, to steal as many corpses of dead knights as possible to reanimate as Death Knights. One of the knights they had stolen was the powerful Sturm Majere, another character from the books.

The forces were led by the very-much-alive Sir Garren, who I'd met at Gargath outpost and had become corrupted at some point in between.

          
The battles were long and draining, and there was no place safe to rest. Although the undead giants could be damaged with magic and even turned, the skeleton warriors were immune as usual, and there were dozens of them before the end. Suddenly, having a party in which 5/6 of the members could cast cleric spells didn't seem excessive.

Fortunately, the end battles weren't very difficult. They started with the red dragon, who chose to attack in melee combat instead of using his breath and died so fast I was embarrassed for him.

Oh, come on! You said we'd "soon be ash." I even bothered to cast "Resist Fire" for this!

   

When I encountered Garren, the game gave me the option to yank the sword from his hand. Since this isn't a normal option, I reasoned there must be something special about the sword. Indeed, when I succeeded, Garren reverted to his good self and said he didn't remember much after he started investigating the piles of weapons and armor that Sir Karl had tossed into the outpost back on the game's opening screens.

It's too bad we can't see metrics for the various choices in games like this. I want to know what percentage of players choose "Leave" at a time like this.

       
At the end of the map, we encountered Soth himself. He shot a bolt at Garren, but Dutch jumped in front of it and blocked it, sucking up the 19 damage. Soth then asked if I was willing to "challenge him personally." I said yes and found myself in 6-on-1 combat with him. He had 59 hit points. One of my knights went first and knocked him down to about 35 in two successful attacks. My mage/thief went second; I went around behind him and did 40 damage in backstab, killing him. That was pretty anticlimactic.

I feel bad for the guy. Isn't he supposed to have minions or something?

      
Naturally, he wasn't really dead. He got up, taunted me some more, and took off. I should have reloaded and fought the battle again. I don't even know what kinds of special attacks he has, and next time I'll be unprepared.

Actually, this encounter helped validate the utility of resistance.

 

The High Clerist has nothing else for me, so I guess the next step is to return to Vingaard and speak to Sebas again. Durfey didn't leave at the end of the High Clerist's Tower. I don't know how long he'll stick around, but it sure is nice to have another mace against the skeleton warriors.

 

Miscellaneous notes:

• In Pool of Radiance, the "Look" and "Search" commands were important. ("Look" is one-time use; "Search" is always on.) They revealed treasures and clues that simply walking through an area didn't, and each map had at least a couple such locations. But you'd encounter more monsters if you walked around with "Search" on all the time, so there was a trade-off. Subsequent games weakened the importance of the command, and in Death Knights, I'm honestly not sure it does anything at all.

• When you encounter parties of people in the wilds, you don't know if they're good or evil; you just know that they're a party. If you attack, you run the risk of attacking innocent travelers, so most of the time I choose "Talk." About half the time I do that, they're evil and attack; the other half, they offer some rumor or other tidbit of wisdom and I get experience.

If I hadn't already found the shipwreck, this would have been a clue.

         

• For some reason, the "ce" is cut off of "experience" in a lot of places in the game. I'd be lying if I said that the run-on sentence didn't bother me a little bit, too.

Excellen!

    

• For the first time since Pool of Radiance, I think, many areas of the game actually make use of the day/night cycle. Some stores are only open during the day, and some encounters on maps are specific to day or night. This freaks me out a bit and I wonder how many encounters I might have missed because it was the wrong time of day.

This appears to only happen at night.

    

• I hate wilderness combats. I've hated them since Pool of Radiance. The enemies start too far away and take forever to close the gap; trees block you from casting spells and shooting arrows; and the blast radius of spells is reduced.

• Because I hate wilderness combats so much, I started experimenting a bit with "quick combat," which can be activated for the entire party or just one character at a time. I turned spells off so my characters wouldn't waste them or hit each other with friendly fire. Generally speaking, it's not a good option for this game. The characters don't concentrate attacks and don't try to damage spellcasters first. There aren't a lot of combats in this game that you can just breeze past; every one is a challenge. That's a good thing, but it also feels a bit bizarre when a random combat comes along and just destroys my party. I'm used to random combats being throw-aways.

• Vingaard has a lot of seemingly-useless shops, selling things like candles, shoes, and blankets. The game lets me buy these things, and takes my money, but nothing shows up in my inventory. I don't know if these purchases have any effect on the party.

Wow, that's a long post. It illustrates how much time I spent playing the game yesterday instead of getting work done like I was supposed to. That's the sign of a good game, though.

Writing these posts actually helps a lot with playing the game. I find that in the heat of exploration, I tend to read journal entries and on-screen text quickly, impatient to move on to the final battle of the area. These postings force me to re-read and reconstruct everything, and it ultimately makes the story stick with me better and makes the game more meaningful. So thanks for that.

Time so far: 12 hours
Reload count: 10