Pools of Darkness: A Series of Amateur Mistakes

No, Elminster, we are absolutely not prepared.

   

Mulmaster: nothing special. A half-map, the city had some shops and services, including training, but the only point of the entire map was to fight some battles in the arena so I could get the attention of Arcam and get invited to his lair. A beholder, Arcam is the Realms-based minion of Bane's final lieutenant, the demon Gothmenes.
    

Most of the special encounters in Mulmaster were just to channel you to the arena.

    

The arena combat consisted of three rounds. The first had two black dragons; the second was three purple worms and three displacer beasts; and the third was half a dozen pyro snakes and salamanders. Easy stuff. Reading some spoiler sites post-game, I see that the battles are harder if you've been antagonizing the guards in Mulmaster.
   

For the rest of my life, whenever I see the word "arena," I will hear a voice in my head saying, "Good people of the Imperial City: WELCOME TO THE ARENA!"

    

We soon found ourselves in Arcam's antechamber, where he was giving orders to various mercenary companies. I thought he'd give us some orders and we'd go undercover, but he told us we were too dangerous and our orders were to die. Cue battle with a bunch of fighters, clerics, and whatnot.
    

It's like they don't know that "Delayed Blast Fireball" is a thing.

    

Once we won the battle, Arcam escaped into some tunnels. We had to chase him all around a series of small maps, fighting a bunch of undead (banshees, specters, vampires) along the way. There were some puzzles, like a maze that depended on having heard an earlier journal entry to know what ways to turn. You don't care about this stuff.
    

This happened about half a dozen times.

    

The difficult part of this level is that most of the fights were ambushes, meaning that the enemies got a free round. And since many of those enemies were level-drainers, I had to cast "Restoration" a lot. Oh, you know what turns out to be the case? Casting "Restoration" twice restores all your experience. It's good that they introduced that for Pools of Darkness. No, don't tell me that was the case in previous games. I will kill myself.
    

There's no way someone's not getting drained.

    

Arcam finally ran out of places to run and faced me with a couple other beholder types. They died quickly.
    

Arcam and a friend. That beholder in the upper-left grosses me out for reasons I can't explain.

    

Towards the end of Arcam's caves, I had to engage in a series of battles that recapped the game up to this point. There was one with a bunch of dragons, one with a bunch of spiders, and one with a bunch of Minions of Bane. None gave me much difficulty. Each was triggered by one of the artifacts I'd claimed from the previous lieutenants--horn, ring, talisman--so I suppose if I hadn't defeated those earlier maps, I wouldn't have been able to progress at this point.
    

Oh, no! Blue and white dragons arranged in a cluster! Whatever shall I use for a spell?!

    
At the end of the map was a final Pool of Darkness, one more trip to Limbo, one more greeting from Elminster, one more place to stash my gear, etc., before moving on to the final plane, which Elminster referred to as the "Dark Dimension."

Here I made Mistake #1, the full force of which won't be apparent until after the next posting. What I should have done--what would have been the moronically obvious thing to do--was try to take all my equipment through the pool, note what did and did not survive, re-load, and deposit everything that didn't survive. I think I would have ended up with my two Scrolls of Protection from Dragon's Breath, maybe my Ring of Protection Against Electricity. I don't know. As it was, commenters had already spoiled that the two Rings of Blinking and the Vorpal Blade would survive the trip, so I had those.

A related mistake--let's call it Mistake #1A--was not loading up on non-magical armor, weapons, and above all, missile weapons before entering the portal.
    

You know, I used to be in love with Sasha, but these days I'm getting sick of saving her all the time.

    
Having unknowingly made these mistakes, I pressed on. Immediately on arrival, I encountered a group of Drow torturing Sasha. I had to fight them with almost no weapons, but my spellcasters were up to the task. A few minutes later, and my party had some Drow equipment. That was the last we saw of Drow in the game.

Entering a doorway from the Drow encounter, we found ourselves in the middle of a horde of monsters, being swept along the streets. It soon became clear that we were in an evil version of Phlan--the map was exactly the same. The "ruler" of this mirror city was the undead Porphyrys Cadorna, who announced that he was planning to marry Sasha. I attacked him at some speech and ended up facing a host of Minions of Bane and undead.
    

I wish the game hadn't elided "honeymoon plans." Where is he planning to take her?

    
The map was, in fact, full of undead, all of the level-draining kind--wights, wraiths, specters, vampires--and of course in "Dark Phlan," the cleric's "Turn Undead" ability doesn't work. With the pathetic armor classes occasioned by the loss of my good gear, these creatures hit me plenty, and I had to cast "Restoration" multiple times after every battle, then often re-memorize a bunch of lost spells.
   

A typical random battle in Dark Phlan.

   
Dark Phlan had an inn, at least, but no shop or training facility (though I could go back to Elminster for that). As I explored the buildings, I had several encounters with Cadorna, who promised I wouldn't ruin his wedding, and fled every time.

"...and there must be a tiered vanilla cake with chocolate sauce ON THE SIDE!!!"

    
In the town hall, I met Gragnak Ulfim, the Phlan councilor who had kidnapped Sasha and brought her here in the first place. Sasha had previously spurned Ulfim's advances, so he conspired with Cadorna to stage a situation in which Ulfim would "rescue" Sasha from Cadorna's clutches, thus winning her love. After the kidnapping, Cadorna of course betrayed Ulfim, leaving him to wait in misery for Gothmenes to kill him.
    

Your name was "Ulfrim" in previous games.

    
Let's cover Mistake #2: At the ends of several battles, I had the opportunity to pick up missile weapons, arrows, and javelins. I eschewed almost all of these. It's annoying to switch between melee weapons and missile weapons in the game, and I never had much use for the latter. Sure, they helped in Myth Drannor, but they weren't vital to those battles. And I never took the time to figure out who can use javelins and how they work. So I left a couple of javelins +4 and Javelins of Lightning (not knowing, of course, that that's what they were) behind.

The map culminated in a temple, where Gothmenes was about to officiate the marriage between the tearful Sasha and the vile Cadorna. I intervened, of course. (I guess if you don't, Cadorna bears away Sasha for good.)
    

I'm not sure that a player who says "No" at this point shouldn't go to actual Hell.

      
There was a large battle between us and Cadorna, several Minions of Bane, several Banite clerics, and several warriors. Again, not much trouble.

Oh, my! How will I stop all those spellcasters, just leaving the red Minions of Bane for my fighters to clean up?

    

At the end, a grateful Sasha gave us two Rings of Protection and went to hide. Dark Phlan still spawned plenty of random encounters after that.
    

You're going to want to remember this screen later.

    
Outside the gates of Dark Phlan was a huge iron wall. I had to blow the Horn of Doom to bring it down. Gothmenes appeared and objected. There was another battle with Minions of Bane, which were getting kind-of old at this point.
    

Will you bear me away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where my flesh shall be devoured, and my shriveled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye? No?

   
Blue and Black Minions of Bane are theoretically quite deadly, as they breathe the same types of acid and lightning (respectively) as blue and black dragons. Blue Minions of Bane are also surrounded by an electricity shield that works much like "Fire Shield" for mages: when you attack them in melee combat, you take double the damage that you do to them. But both Blue and Black Minions are vulnerable to "Fireball" and thus generally die in the first round. Remember this later. Red Minions of Bane, which breathe fire, are immune to "Fireball" but have no special melee protection and thus don't last long against melee attacks.
    

A battle with all three types of Minions, preparing to kill 2/3 of them.

     
When the battle was over, I blew the horn, brought the gate down, and stepped forward into what I didn't know then, but know now, was the final area: Gothmenes' Palace. The game made me decide how to divide the horn, ring, and talisman among my characters.

I"m not sure if we actually hear "shrieks of a thousand tortured souls" or if that isn't just a metaphor to describe really loud shrieking of iron.

    
There were several tough battles early in the palace, mitigated by the fact that we could rest anywhere. First, "Sasha" appeared and asked where Elminster was. I declined to tell her, and she turned into a rakshasa and attacked with several colleagues. This was a difficult battle because the 12 or so rakshasas were spread out in groups of three, all far from the party's starting location, and I only had a few missile weapons. They were able to get off a lot of spells while I tried to close the distance and engage them in melee combat. Oh, and I fought the battle before a helpful commenter alerted me that raskshasa are not immune to Level 9 spells. So it took me a couple of reloads.

Good try, but Sasha isn't that pro-active.

   
There was another huge battle with dragons, but I had long passed the point where dragons were scary. Everything that wasn't red or skeletal died in one casting of "Delayed Blast Fireball."

Before long--and before I'd mapped the entirety of the rest of the dungeon--I blundered through an arch and into the final area. "Elminster" showed up and asked to accompany me. I wisely refused. He turned into another rakshasa and attacked, but he was alone and didn't last long.
    

This was satisfying, even though I didn't really need it.

    
After the battle, I overheard a dialogue between Gothmenes and one of his minions. It indicated that Gothmenes was "winding the Tantalus clock" and expected to be back, with Elminster in his captivity, in about an hour. That gave me that long--every couple of minutes punctuated with a "Bongg!"--to explore Gothmenes' chambers.
     

Clever...what now?

    
Given what was about to happen, I feel like the game is unforgivably opaque about what's going on in the final area. Having finished it and looked at walkthroughs afterwards, I get it, but I didn't at the time. Basically, the party has as long as Gothmenes is searching for Elminster (it's shorter if you betray his location to the Sasha-rakshasa) to explore his chambers, find as much magic loot as you can, and get an artifact called the Crystal of Bane from a well. This latter feat can only be accomplished by a cleric wearing the ring obtained from Kalistes. In my case, that character was my cleric, Navarre, which turned out to be a good thing.
   

    
It would be easy for a party trying to explore in a systematic way to miss the crystal entirely, so I was lucky there. But in general, I wasted time by having "search" active and not covering every corner of Gothmenes' palace, where I would have found some more weapons and armor for the final battle. I did discover a cache of missile weapons and arrows, but I left them alone because (MISTAKE #3) who the hell wants arrows?

When the clock struck like 30, Gothmenes returned and ushered in the final battle, which I'll cover in detail next time. But before I go, let's cover the granddaddy of mistakes--Mistake #4--which I make so often it's practically a disease.

You see, I didn't understand that at the point that all the "bongs" start, you can no longer return to Phlan, the inn, Limbo, training, your equipment cache back in the Realms, etc. Once Gothmenes winds his clock, you're stuck in his palace until the final battle. Yes, I should have realized something was going on. I put "amateur" right in the frigging title, okay?!?!

So what was my mistake? I saved.

In my usual save slot.

In, in fact, the only save slot that I had been using since after the battle with Thorne about 40 hours ago.

Why is it so hard for me to use multiple save slots? The game gives you 10 of them. My inability to use separate slots before key moments is particularly unforgivable because I'm supposed to be thoroughly documenting this game on this blog. After finally winning the final battle (yes, I did win, although I allowed myself to cheat a little to make up for one of these mistakes), I even saved over the same slot again, so I couldn't re-fight the final battle for the purposes of analyzing it for the next entry. This is one bad habit that I really need to shake.

Next time, we'll see how these mistakes came together to doom me in the final battles. And we'll see why I seriously contemplated exporting all my characters, starting a new game with them, and doing the entire game again.

Time so far: 51 hours
Reload count: 54