Pools of Darkness: Welcome to the Party

The new party does some good deeds.

    
When I was a kid, I would have been too sentimental to blithely drop party members--party members who had been with me since the beginning--just because their dexterity wasn't high enough. It would have filled me with some kind of ineffable saudade. My loyalty to these fictional party members would have ensured that they stayed with me to the bitter end, even if it meant that I couldn't conquer the final battle.

But I've grown hard and jaded over the years. Karnov is gone, replaced with Festia, a human fighter who started at Level 14. I immediately dualed her to a thief. Brutus is gone, replaced with a mage (Navarre) who I immediately dualed to a cleric. Cesario and Viola hit the road in favor of Dromio and Dromia, brother-and-sister clerics who I immediately dualed to mages. Every new character has 18s in dexterity as well as their primary attributes. The characters who wandered into the sunset did so after giving up their equipment first, although it was interesting to note that new characters in Pools of Darkness start with +3 weapons and armor.
     

My new thief is dualed immediately from a Level 14 fighter.

    

Bolingbroke the paladin and Goldeneye the ranger remained. I thought this gave me a tenuous thread back to Pool of Radiance before I remembered that paladins and rangers didn't exist in Pool of Radiance. I had created them in Curse of the Azure Bonds. My entire party has now been recycled.

I did all of this before all the opinions had arrived in response to my last post. I guess in the end it might have made more sense to create all the new characters as fighters and then dual them to spellcasters, or perhaps dual my paladin and ranger, too. (Until a recent comment, I didn't think that was possible for paladins and rangers to participate in dual-classes, but I guess I was thinking of second-edition AD&D rules.) Even if it isn't perfectly optimal, I think I'll go with this combination. Once Navarre, Dromio, and Dromia exceed their old levels in their new ones, I'll have three spellcasters capable of "Delayed Blast Fireball" (plus several regular "Fireballs," "Lightning Bolts," etc.) and "Heal," plus three solid fighters, including one with a devastating backstab.

Starting the game anew with all my spellcasters at Level 1 did pose some early challenges, but it wasn't too bad. The ogre battle in Phlan got them all immediately to Level 2. The hard part, after the game started in earnest, was finding a training hall so I could keep up with their rapid leveling. Eschewing my previous pattern of exploration, and saving Vala's quest for later, I explored a couple of promising icons before I found, in the top-left of the map, a giant fortress that had a stable training facility.
    

Guffaw all you want. My spellcasters will soon be able to cast "Fireball" again.

   

It was a good map for grinding low-level party members, as there were only a few mage battles. Most of the combats were with giants who could do physical damage only. My ranger, under the influence of a Potion of Speed and armed with a Long Sword vs. Giants, cut through them like tissue paper. By the time I cleared that map, all the new characters were up to Level 10 and the mages were starting to pull their weight with "Fireball" and "Lightning Bolt" again.

The fortress seemed to be a kind of rallying point for the forces of evil, all seeking to prove themselves to Bane. Its various rooms held all kinds of giants, ogres, ettins, human fighters and mages, Fire Knife assassins, and otyughs. Fights among the groups were apparently common, even encouraged, by the ruler of the fortress, a hill giant shaman. At first, we could explore only half the map--consisting of a few places to rest, many fights, the training hall, a store, and a tavern.
   

My spellcasters slowly advance in their new classes.

    

In the tavern, a fighter named Kardal approached me and said he was working as an agent for Sasha. He's heard rumors of a massive army assembling and a "Gathering," and he recommended that I defeat some nearby cloud giants to gain the shaman's admiration, thus allowing me access to the second half of the fortress.
    

This is supposed to be a tavern. By 1991, this kind of sparsity in graphics is becoming a bit laughable.

    

I did as he suggested and began exploring the upper part of the map. I soon came across Kardal being tortured by giants. Before he died, he told me that the "Gathering" is of dragons in "unheard of numbers," led by Thorne. I guess he must be the red dragon from the opening screens.

The series has always offered minor role-playing choices like this, but I think there are more in Pools of Darkness than in most previous titles.

    

There were a couple of dragon battles later in the fortress, neither large enough to be considered the "Gathering." One had three white dragons and one red dragon; another had one white and one black dragon. Both occasioned a reload as I better prepared/buffed for them, and it occurred to me how much better the Gold Box combat system would be if there was an automatic "buffing phase" before each battle, because there's just no way that you're going to cast six "Resist Fire" spells and six "Resist Cold" spells in the opening rounds of combat. Either you use the spells before combat--which means having some warning that a combat requiring them is coming--or you don't use them at all. Since the Gold Box games rarely give you any warning about the composition or existence of an impending combat, a "buffing phase" would end the tiresome cycle of entering combat unprepared, getting killed, reloading, and then casting buffing spells.
    

I don't remember dragons "terrifying" my party members in previous games.

   

Eventually, I reached the shaman's chambers. By then, he must have decided that my party was too dangerous, because instead of granting us an audience, he just attacked. It wasn't a difficult combat. When it was over, I looted his vault and found a note indicating that some kind of fire giant leader, and fire dragons, would likely be found in the next map. A doorway led from the fortress to a set of caves. I decided to leave this for later exploration and return to my previous pattern.
    

Games never give you follow-up dialogue when the big boss realizes how badly he's underestimated you.

    

I repeated my explorations of Vala's caves, blocking the Vassan army, and then resumed my pattern of exploring east-to-west in north/south strips. My first encounter was in a crater that had formerly held the City of Melvaunt. An army encamped there led me to a Temple of Tyr, now inhabited by "dark forces," preventing the army from accessing the armory within. The leader, Priam, asked if I would help them re-take the temple.
   

Easy there, Tex.

   

The temple consisted of four small 8 x 8 levels that I didn't bother to map. Right as I entered, a soldier on guard sprinted upstairs, and I had the option to follow him. I did so, and the game controlled my movement as we ascended a couple of levels, right to a large battle with warriors, Banite clerics, black mages, and a vampire cleric.
     

It was an occasion for "Fireball," and "Fireball" rose to the occasion.

   

Though small, the temple had a neat story and some fun role-playing encounters. A book told a story about an Elven maiden named Laurellin and her human lover, Brimwulf, a knight of Tyr. Laurellin was betrothed to an elven lord, so when she made plans to run away with Brimwulf, her father raised an army and besieged the Temple of Tyr. Refusing to abandon his brothers, Brimwulf died in the ensuing battle and Laurellin killed herself by jumping from the tower. Now, Brimwulf's spirit haunts the catacombs and Laurellin's haunts the bell tower.
     

Not an awesome role-playing choice, but a choice nonetheless.

     

Through a series of role-playing encounters that required me to pay attention to the journal entries (to successfully perform a ritual) and to not do obviously-bad things like loot the temple, I restored Tyr's altar, re-lit the braziers, reunited the two lovers in death, and created a beacon to summon the good armies to the area. I'm sure it was a completely optional area, but it was a satisfying one.
    

That sounds really uncomfortable after about 20 minutes.

I guess an evil party would say "no"? I should have experimented. If the game wasn't such a pain to reload, having to go through copy protection questions every time, I'd be more inclined.

    

The next area I explored was a "large farmhouse" where all the people had been slaughtered by vampires. My party killed the vampires and buried the family. "One small blot of evil has been destroyed," the game noted. Pools of Darkness is shaping up to have a lot of these little side-quests and encounters.
  

Systematic exploration is necessary to reveal all the special encounters.

   
As I wrap up, I've just entered a fortress in the middle-north of the map, which promises to offer more giant battles.
  

Miscellaneous notes:

• Sasha has agents scattered around the Moonsea, huge armies have gathered, and fortresses have been built to accommodate them. Just how long was my party in Elminster's Limbo?

• The game suggests a default icon for new characters based on race and sex, much preferable to the old method of always starting with an unarmed, long-haired human.

• The previous games would allow you to try to sleep anywhere, often interrupting sleep with encounters. This game simply doesn't offer sleep options in clearly-dangerous areas.

• Most of the encounters in the wilderness are with undead. My characters are generally capable of turning all of them within 2 rounds.

• When you first fire up the game, if you don't choose "(P)lay" within a few seconds, the game goes into "demo" mode and no key-mashing in the world will allow you to escape it until it's finished, about 10 minutes later. You have to kill the emulator.

   

The long "demo mode" concludes.

    

Do I even have to mention the economy? As usual, it's broken from the beginning. Yes, there's a "magic shop" in Phlan, but the Wands of Magic Missile that it sells under-perform physical attacks by spellcasters, and in any event, there are only so many that you need. So far, I've only needed money for item identification. My characters came to the game with thousands of gems and jewels, and I've left thousands more just sitting on dungeon floors after each battle. On the plus side, this topic segues into a couple of interesting guest posts by a long-time commenter. I'm going to offer them this week in lieu of my own entries (I'm going to a conference), and by the time I return this weekend I should be back on a regular schedule for the rest of the fall.

Time so far: 8 hours
Reload count: 4