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