Pools of Darkness: Won!

I actually think it's time for a big celebration and then I retire in Phlan with my riches.

    

There's a surprisingly large amount of game left to play after the "final battles" of Pools of Darkness. It's not the first game to allow continual play after winning, but it might be the first to have actual interesting content in the post-victory world.

Once you've struck the final blow at the end of the three battles, Gothmenes' wounded body (despite the battle screen clearly stating that you "killed" him) goes flying into the Pool of Darkness. Gothmenes cries out for Bane to save him, but Bane doesn't because of reasons.

    

 

I honestly did not intend to pull you back.

   

Gothmenes is consumed by the Pool of Darkness. Moments later, a vision of Elminster waves at you creepily from the same pool. He says that "the powers of good [have] undone all of Bane's plot" and "everything is as it was--only ye and I know what fate the realms almost bore." Some "fog lifts" and the party stands on a street in Phlan, where we were when the game began.

     

   

Okay, I know we're at the epilogue here, but could the storytelling have been any lazier? The party is somehow magically transported back to the beginning? Everything is reset? No one remembers? Why not just say it was all a dream? I wanted a victory parade, damn it!

But not all is the same as it was before, because NPCs who were in other places are suddenly wandering around the streets of Phlan. You meet Priam, wondering what adventures we could possibly have together, given how peaceful everything is.

   

You do realize the Moonsea is only a small part of the Realms, right?

   

Shal says hello and thinks she recognizes us but can't place us. Vala slaps us on the back and talks about stirring up trouble in Vaasa. Nacacia invites us to visit her in Elven Court someday.

   

Sure. Maybe I'll explore the ruins of Myth Drannor.

  

Finally, Elminster pops up and offers some nonsense explanation for the way things are ("when the greater powers returned the cities, 'twas needful of them to return time as well"). He says he's arranged passage for us on a ship to "a land ye can call home," as if Phlan wasn't good enough for that. He notes cryptically that there's a second ship at the docks that Rolf will tell us about. He then takes off for Shadowdale.

    

Is there a reason you're trying to get me out of here?

   

In the town hall, Sasha dismisses us completely.

    

You know what? I think I'm over you.

   

The seer in the old slums says she can't see our future.

You can take the party outside Phlan's walls and re-explore the entire Moonsea region. All of the evil fortresses are ruins that you can't enter. Manshoon has sealed Zhentil Keep. 

    

    

There are still scattered encounters in the wilderness, mostly with land-sharks.

All of the former craters now have menu towns.

    

There are no menu towns in the main part of the game. They programmed this just for the endgame.

    

The one exception is Mulmaster. If you visit there, a guard informs you that the arena monsters have escaped their pens, and you can run around fighting them if you want. Personally, I felt more sympathy for the monsters. 

   

Have you heard the "enemy of my enemy" theory?

    

Back in Phlan, Rolf offers you a choice of two ships. The one will bear the party to parts unknown, because there's no possible good a group of Level 40 adventurers could do in the Realms. The second ship "limped in with a busted mizzen t'other day" and the captain says "he is here to offer you a challenge."

   

    

If you take the first ship, you get a final series of screens in which the party ruminates on the changes they have wrought to the Moonsea region, feeling pride, etc., and once and for all abandoning any idea that you can role-play the games as an evil party:

    

You board the ship, which soon has its sails smartly set and a bow wave rising before it. You look back at Phlan and the Stojanow River rolling peacefully into the sea. What changes your hands have wrought!

When you first set foot towards adventure, the region was aboil with evil and corruption. Now, its citizens will know a lasting peace, free from fear. What wonders will they create in this golden age?

Turning your musings inward, you know a deep satisfaction in your deeds well done, and realize that it is time to say farewell to the land and the many people you met there.

    

Then there's the other ship. It takes you to Dave's Challenge, an optional final area of the game. (It's named after co-developer David Shelley; we had a dungeon of the same name at the end of Death Knights of Krynn). I gave it a shot after I resurrected my dead characters, healed, leveled up, and retrieved my old equipment from the hold of Rolf's ship--let's not worry about how it got there.

   

Sounds like an RPG developer.

    

The challenge is presented as a special dungeon erected by some lunatic for the specific purpose of challenging high-level adventurers. From the moment you enter, the only goal is to leave. It's a standard 16 x 16 map, but only about 60% of the squares are used.

    

Arriving at The Challenge.

    

I save-scummed liberally as I mapped the Challenge, trying to figure out the optimal order in which to do things. There are three major issues in the challenge:

1. There's only one place that you can rest. It's off a hallway where lightning bolts shoot at you randomly. You can only rest there three times.

2. There are squares where your spells are wiped away. Various sites say that you lose your "mage spells" or "cleric spells," but the reality is that you lose all spells for mage and cleric characters. Since all my spellcaster are dual cleric/mages, all of their spells get wiped on every square.

   

This happens all over the place in Dave's Challenge.

   

3. You play the dungeon with all monsters on "champion" level.

A central room contains a beholder who gives you hints the first two times you enter, then attacks with a large group of beholders the third time. I was only able to defeat them using the "run up/run away" trick.

   

Breaking one of the "bonds" that keeps me in the dungeon.

   

The goal is to break four "bonds," each aspected to a particular class: thief, mage, cleric, fighter. (If you don't have one of each of these, you can't win.) The thief's bond is the easiest--you just have to fight a single battle against some rakshasa and iron golems along the way. The others are much harder because you lose all your spells when you enter their areas. Some of the battles include multiple Blue Minions of Bane and are theoretically harder than the final battles in the main game.

   

3 of 7 Minions of Bane on this map. If I didn't have my items, this battle would be harder than the final battle in the main game.

    

I say "theoretically" because I had one major advantage here that I didn't have in Gothmenes' palace: items. I had lots of wands, potions, and scrolls in my cache back at the Phlan docks, and once I saw what awaited me in Dave's Challenge, I was able to reload and buy more. Since I hadn't burned them earlier in the game, I had two Scrolls of Protection from Dragon's Breath (and each scroll is capable of multiple castings), which really ended up saving the day.

    

The most important item in the game.

    

After a few false starts, I learned where my spells would disappear and made sure to cast every buffing spell before that happened. I carefully spaced out my rest breaks. I ultimately was able to break all the seals and make my way to the final battle, where a mysterious voice indicated that he'd rescued Gothmenes, Tanetal, Thorne, and Kalistes. Immediately before the battle, all your spells disappear yet again.

  

Wow, Dave has some serious power.

    

The final battle comes in two waves, with no rest in between. First, Tanetal and Gothmenes attack with a bunch of Bits o Moander and maybe 8 Blue Minions of Bane. I never would have survived the breath attacks of the Minions without using the Scrolls of Protection from Dragon's Breath first, but with them, it wasn't too hard. I concentrated my fighters' attacks on Gothmenes and Tanetal (despite the "champion" level, each went down in a single round from a hastened fighter) and then the Moander bits while my mages used scrolls and wands with "Fireball" to kill the Minions of Bane.

   

Killing Gothmenes never gets old.

    

The second battle was with Kalistes, Thorne, and a bunch of Pets of Kalistes and Red Dragons. Again, it wasn't so bad. My high-level characters were immune from the "Disintegrate" and "Charm" spells the enemies tried to use, and the scrolls kept me safe from the dragons' breath. It took a long time to whittle them down, but I wasn't in a lot of danger in the meantime.

   

Part of final battle #2.

    

Without those scrolls, I'm not sure the battles would have been winnable. I'm grateful for my hoarding tendencies.

When the battle was over, I wandered around before walking into a square that asked me to "Repeat the mystic clue." I had no idea what it was talking about. I still don't. I looked through all my screenshots for any kind of clue and couldn't find any. Eventually, I had to consult a spoiler site to learn that the clue is "Oh, well"--comma and all. Does anyone have any idea how I was supposed to know that?

Entering the clue took me to a small "reward" area where I found a chest with thousands of gems and jewels, two Girdles of Giant's Strength, two pairs of Boots of Speed, and some high-end weapons. There was also a fountain that I didn't know what it was doing at the time (it just says "you get wet") when you enter, but apparently it was increasing my experience by 400,000 for each trip (up to the maximum you can achieve between levels). 

    

The largest treasure reward in the series.

    

Beyond that, an exit led back to Phlan, where I leveled-up, rested, and saved, then exported my characters for....well, nothing, I guess. Perhaps a replay at some point in the future, or maybe I'll use them to trounce my way through Treasures of the Savage Frontier.

    

You'd like to think so, but you have nothing on Wizardry IV.

    

Two quick notes:

• The druid's "Protection from Fire" apparently never wears off. When I checked which spells were in effect at one point, she had multiple editions of the spell active, since the previous ones hadn't been "eaten up" by fire attacks in previous combats.

     

I guess she really doesn't need any more.

    

• Recovering all spells at these levels, after your mind has been wiped, takes almost 5 days of rest. The game maxes the automatic resting at 2 days, so you have to rest 3 times in a row to recover everything. I didn't know this at first and spent a lot of time wondering where all my spells had gone.

It's been a long game! Let's GIMLET the thing and get back to the list.

*****

As for that list, the next game is anyone's guess, and you might see some dramatic shifts to the "recent & upcoming" list in the near future.

I would really like to play Fer & Flamme, which turns out to be Ubisoft's first game, except I can't find a manual and I can't get past the character creation screen. The game makes you manually type in the character class, and without a list of valid options, I'm stuck. I've tried French translations of common RPG class types--guerrier, voleur, sorcier, etc.--to no avail. [Edit: Someone found the manual already and sent it to me.]

At the same time, I'm having trouble finding a workable download of Le Fer d'Amnukor, the sequel to Tyrann, which exists only for the Oric. I'm new to the emulator, so that might be causing part of the problem.

Moonstone is proving so frustrating that I might add a "keyboard control only" restriction to my master game list. I have a Logitech controller that, after some effort, I basically have working with DOSBox, but either it's reading my inputs erratically or I just suck. I can't even win the practice battles. Adjusting the CPU speed doesn't seem to help.

Knightmare is giving me the usual issues working with the Amiga, which in this case means that it freezes on loading most of the time, and when it doesn't, it doesn't stop asking me for a disk even though I've inserted one. No luck with the ST version, either. This one is probably more solvable than the others, but I reached it after a string of failures with the games above and was low on patience.

As for Fate: Gates of Dawn, I sank 8 hours into it last week and didn't get any further than mapping a few partial levels of catacombs. The game is indecently large, and I'll probably need double that time to encounter enough plot points to have anything to write about.

So barring any movement on the above, the next post you see might be on Legend of Lothain or Heavy on the Magick, neither of which I've looked at yet, so heaven knows whether I'll have any problems with them.