Pools of Darkness: Dis of the Spider Woman

A typical combat in this session with dozens of Drow. I have to try to make sure that every one of them takes damage every round.

   
In an effort to end my last playing session at an obvious stopping point, I played much more than I should have, meaning that I'm either going to have to summarize a lot of the adventures or this post is going to be very, very long. I'll try to strike a balance.

The game's structure became clearer in the process of defeating Thorne and the next lieutenant, Kalistes. The opening screens show Bane plotting to take over the Realms with four lieutenants. Each of the lieutenants is plotting an invasion from his or her own plane, with transitions between their planes and the Realms possible through the Pools of Darkness. I'm clearly going to have to travel to all four planes--stopping at Elminster's Limbo on the way--and kill all four lieutenants. The areas of the game that do not directly lead to a Pool of Darkness are, I imagine, optional.

As I wrap around the Moonsea, the paths to the lieutenants are getting longer. To defeat Thorne, I had to cross through three precursor maps before reaching his realm, which was just a standard 16 x 16 map. But to defeat Kalistes, I had to cross an 8 x 16 Zhentil Keep map, several small tower maps, a full-sized basement map, two more 16 x 16 maps of Drow, a large overland area with at least half a dozen small 10 x 10 maps, and finally three more full 16 x 16 maps. It took almost as long as the entire game up to this point.

In the process, I fought approximately one billion combats with Drow, driders (including a special type called "Pets of Kalistes"), and spiders. The Drow appeared immediately in Zhentil Keep and didn't stop until I was back in the Realms after killing Kalistes. Drow are a tough bunch, moreso in this game than I recall from past ones. They're all capable of spellcasting, and they have a decent chance of shrugging off your magic, depending on your level (Null Null laid it all out in an informative comment recently). If you don't stop them before they cast spells, they'll hit you with "Fireball," "Ice Storm," "Hold Person," and "Hold Monster." The Pets of Kalistes are capable of "Disintegrate" as well.
   

A typical combat of the region: driders, Drow champions, spiders.

   
Thus, when battle begins, the goal is to make sure every Drow takes damage every round, before they can cast. With other creatures, a single "Fireball" will handle that, but with Drow, a good 30-50% of them will avoid the damage. Even multiple castings doesn't guarantee anything. You have to pay close attention to who's been hit and try to get the others with the melee characters--characters who, once you cross the planes, are working with substandard equipment. I still don't think I reloaded as much as I did against the dragons, at least on a per-fight basis, but it became tiresome to have to micromanage every combat.

Spiders, Pets of Kalistes, and more Drow. There were dozens and dozens of such combats.

    
In contrast, the spiders--a typical combat might have some combination of electric spiders, enormous spiders, gaze spiders, and stone spiders--were mostly just annoying. Occasionally, one would poison a character and I'd have to cast "Neutralize Poison" to get him back on his feet and "Heal" to restore his hit points.
   

Those "enormous spiders" are really ugly.

   
The adventure began at the gates of Zhentil Keep. Drow accosted me as I tried to enter and demanded a 50 platinum tax. I had options to "Pay," "Bluff," "Attack," "Grovel," and "Leave." I decided to record each of the results just to see how it plays out and get a sense if this is a true role-playing option or just a "Morton's fork."
     

     

"Leave" simply returned me to the Moonsea map. "Pay" got me regular access to the Keep, where a store had a bunch of +1 weapons and armor, a magic shop sold scrolls, potions, and a couple of rings, and a training hall gave me admittance for 10 gems. "Bluff" got me the same access to the city, minus the 50 platinum pieces. So did "grovel," though it was a bit of a blow to my self-esteem.

"Attack" put me in battle with 8 Drow priests. The weren't very hard, but as I entered the city, an alarm was going off. I was still able to visit and use all the shops and locations, but successions of larger and larger parties of Zhentil warriors kept attacking me until I left the map. Also, a couple of NPCs referenced that I had set off the alarms.
    

This was kind of neat.

    

I rescued a man from being kidnapped by some Drow, and his daughter indicated that the Drow have been kidnapping a lot of citizens while the Zhent leaders turn a blind eye. In a house, a man named Mabril confirmed the story and offered me a partial map to the underground area where people are being taken. A message from a halfling woman named Traned "told of hideous rituals performed on good folk and sacrifices to Kalistes." Another NPC chastised me for attacking the guards but said I should be safe once I enter Manshoon's tower because the guards don't generally report their failures. He finished his intelligence by telling me of a secret entrance to Manshoon's tower. No word on who Manshoon is.

A magic shop in the Keep sells Elixirs of Youth. Although buying these elixirs won't take up even a small fraction of my wealth, knowing that they're there means I'm not as reluctant to use "Haste" (which ages everyone a year) liberally.
    

Some potential money sinks here.

    

I entered the tower through the secret entrance. It consisted of three small levels going up and one larger level going down. I did the up levels first. There were dozens of fights with Zhentil forces, including clerics, mages, and warriors. At one point, there was a journal entry that said Manshoon released a "Gelt" in the corridors; a search of the Forgotten Realms wiki turns up nothing, but in any event I never encountered it so I don't know what that was about.

At the top of the tower, Manshoon trapped us in a force field and said that he intended to summon a creature that would help him "subjugate" the Drow--"and the dreary fool Marcus, and that imbecile Arcam, too!" Marcus was mentioned later in Kalistes's realm, though I never met him. I assume he's the same Marcus who ran the Black Circle in Secret of the Silver Blades. No idea who Arcam is. Anyway, I never actually ran into Marcus; I just heard about him.

Anyway, Manshoon summoned his creature inside the force field with us. It turned out to be an old woman. When Manshoon got confused and asked who she was, she called him an "insolent wretch" and started tearing down his tower as he fled. The party had to flee collapsing stones, and I never saw Manshoon or the old woman again. I never really had a solid idea who he was.
    

Either this demon crushed herself, or my party just walked off leaving a dangerous planar creature roaming Zhentil Keep behind us.

    
In Manshoon's basement, Drow were loading captured villagers into wagons. A halfling fighter named Traned joined me for a while but left towards of the end of the map to escort freed villagers to safety. Not much else to say about the map. Lots of battles with Drow, carrion crawlers, and umber hulks. It culminated in an exit to another Drow map.
    

Frankly, fights like this, in which all enemies are vulnerable to "Fireball," are mostly just a waste of time these days.

    
Early on the next map, I ran into Silk, the Drow rebel and leader of the Swanmays adventuring group. I had previously encountered her in Curse of the Azure Bonds. In that game, she made Goldeneye an honorary member, but she didn't seem to remember that here. She gave me some advice on getting through the traps later in the map. She joined me for a while but took off once we'd rescued the other Swanmays from prison.

Silk has updated her look since last time. Comparison.

    
Other encounters on the map had me freeing innocent people from being turned into ichor used to create Kalistes' Pets. I had to find some Essence of Pure Light and pour it into something called the Fire of Night to stop the process. Traned showed up again as I transitioned to the final map before switching planes--some kind of temple to Kalistes.
     

Nothing to do with the discussion above--I just happened to capture this shot at the perfect moment.

     
The temple adventures included finding an antidote to a poison that was keeping the slaves docile. It became clear that a lot of the slaves were going to be used for food. Various messages indicated that portals would soon be opened in three locations in the Realms, and Kalistes' minions would go pouring through. At one point, I stumbled into a room where an oracle bade the Drow to "Guard our Lady and her hands that open doors." This became an important clue soon afterwards, when I entered the room containing the Pool of Darkness. Within the room was a statue of Kalistes and three portals to various places in the Moonsea area. It was clear that the minions were supposed to come out of the Pool of Darkness and then enter the other portals.

After a huge battle with Drow and spiders, the game gave me an option that I don't remember ever happening in a Gold Box game before: I had to type an answer. [Later: Commenters corrected me: typed answers are quite common in Gold Box games, going all the way back to the first. I don't know why I didn't remember those occasions.] The question was what to destroy to stop the ritual from proceeding. Remembering that the oracle had referred to "hands that open doors," I typed HANDS. My party smashed the statue's hands, the portals disappeared, and everything was quiet on this side of the Pool of Darkness.
    

    
I stepped through. Elminster greeted me and congratulated me on stopping the invasion. He said I'd have to go to Kalistes' realm and stop whatever she's doing to cause perpetual night in the Moonsea area, something I didn't even realize was happening until this moment.
    

"Don't let the portal hit ye in the ass on the way through."

    
We went through the usual process of dumping our items for safekeeping and entered the Pool of Darkenss naked. On the other side, we were immediately greeted by a woman calling herself the Eyes of Kalistes. She asked if I had "help at the temple" and demanded that I name who had helped me--another fill-in-the-blank. I decided to play along and see what became of it. She didn't care for TRANED but reacted immediately to SILK. Apparently, she used to be a Swanmay named Cynthia and now had to serve Kalistes, who can see through her eyes.
    

I assumed that the "right" way to play this encounter was not to give up our allies, but I took the time to see what would happen. This turned out to be a good thing.

    
I had to solve a quick quest were I assembled some items for Cynthia and she mocked up replicas of my party members, making it look like they were dead, so Kalistes wouldn't be constantly hunting for us as we explored her realm. She then demanded that we kill her to preserve the secret, and we reluctantly complied. I'm curious what would have happened if we'd bypassed or fumbled this series of encounters.
       

      
Cynthia's 10 x 10 area exited into a large overland map bisected by rivers of lava. I wasn't expecting this at all. And it soon became clear that, much like the Moonsea map, there were hidden sub-areas all over the place. I think I discovered  6 of them. They all used the same 10 x 10 map and had a variety of combats, treasures, and special encounters.
   

This is the first Gold Box game to feature more than one overland map. You arrive in the far southwest and end up at Kalistes' fortress in the far northeast.

      

At least 6 maps in this area used the same layout, although the encounters were in different places.

   
In the first one that I explored, I found a "disgruntled slave" of Kalistes who promised to show me a hidden way into her fortress. When we left the sub-map, the game took us immediately to the fortress and the hidden entrance. I decided to leave and keep exploring the overland map first, which turned out to be a good thing because I ended up finding some artifacts that made Kalistes' fortress much easier.
   

That doesn't seem like a great reason for treason, but I guess we'll take it.

   
In another sub-area, I met a Drow woman named Dennia who wanted me to help rescue her son, Hern, from Kalistes' testing grounds. (Those who pass the test apparently become Drow mages; those that fail become driders.) Her daughter had previously failed the test, and Dennia's brother, Daris, was apparently intending to kill Hern to avoid the possible shame of two family members failing.
   

Her portrait is shot from kind-of a weird perspective. Are we all on the ground for some reason?

   
The testing grounds were in the middle of the outdoor map, the only full 16 x 16 map aside from Kalistes' palace itself. In the edges of the map, we (for some reason) freed a bunch of driders, who in turn gave us hints as to passing the testing ground.
   

A hint for what already would have been the easiest riddle of all time.

    
The testing ground itself was pretty easy. The first test was just to be strong enough to push over a wall. The second, I had to opt to press forward despite the game telling me I was scared. The third was a fight against driders, the fourth a fight against Drow mages. The fifth had me answer a riddle whose answer was obviously BANE. The sixth was to keep walking through an obviously-illusory wall of flame. After that, we met up with Hern, and I forgot to take screenshots so I can't remember exactly what happened, but in the end, Daris was transformed into a drider because his plot had failed. This was related through a bizarre journal entry that, unlike all the others, was told as if written from the point of view of one of the party members.
    

Another keyword puzzle.

    
There was a final battle with a Pet of Kalistes named Shest, and after that I was able to pick up a "ward" that allowed safe passage to Kalistes parlor, as well as a bunch of amulets that theoretically kept spiders at bay. (I still got attacked by lots of spiders, but a few of the random encounters ended without combat.) There were some previous messages about the ward that I forgot to write down, but  I guess it belonged to a lieutenant of Kalistes named Locaste, and Daris had it temporarily for some reason.
  

The few times this actually worked, it was welcome.

  
In a final area before assaulting Kalistes' fortress, I picked up a dwarf NPC fighter named Storm Harngrim. He said he was part of a shipment intended to be food; his sister was still missing. He stayed with me for the rest of the adventure.
   

At least, I hope "has a taste for" means food.

   
When we got to the entrance to Kalistes' fortress, we were treated by the sight of her lieutenant, Locaste, getting devoured by spiders because he didn't have his ward.
   

I'm not sure "horror" is the right word.

    
Kalistes' fortress was two levels, but with very big rooms, so it didn't take long to explore. In an early encounter, we rescued Storm's sister, Arta, from the cooking pot. There were several other areas in which we freed slaves.
   

   
Amidst multiple fights with Drow (the random encounters in this area never ended), I found a book that offered some intelligence on Marilith demons, which I guess is what Kalistes is. Anyway, it suggested that to lure her to battle, I had to threaten her children. When I ultimately found her egg room on the bottom level, I didn't just threaten them; I destroyed them. Kalistes indignantly appeared.
  

What? Like squashing your young is worse than unleashing spider hordes on the Realms?

  
She attacked with about 18 allies: Drow mages, priests, champions, and Pets of Kalistes organized into three groups. As usual, they tore me apart on the first try, when I was unprepared, and I had to reload, buff, and try again.
   

Properly ready for combat this time.

   
I defeated her on the second try by letting loose liberally with "Delayed Blast Fireball" (three of my characters have it) and having my hastened fighters destroy Kalistes herself in the first round. There aren't many enemies, no matter how powerful, that will stand up to consecutive attacks by two hastened, high-level fighters. That's how Thorne went down, too.
    

Can you believe I forgot to get a shot of Kalistes in combat? This is one of the small scattered groups she attacked me with.

   
With Kalistes dead, I recovered a magic ring from her corpse. Little did I know, the battles weren't over. The previous "disgruntled slave" revealed himself as an agent for one of Bane's other lieutenants and attacked me with several snakes, earth elementals, and a bunch of "bits o' Moander." I'd hoped I'd seen the last of them in Curse of the Azure Bonds.
    

    
Since my characters were still buffed, it wasn't too hard, particularly once I remembered that the Moander pieces were vulnerable to cold, not fire. Oddly, the agent himself wasn't part of the battle, and he wasn't mentioned in the aftermath. I assumed he slipped away.
   

The real final battle of the area.

   
Storm departed to lead the slaves to Freedom. I had to slog all the way out of Kalistes' fortress and across the map again, fighting about a dozen more random combats on the way. Elminster was excited that I recovered the ring, saying that the sun would shine again and "no longer will vampires fly at noon." Before long, I was back in the Realms, my good equipment in-hand again, and ready to start exploring the southern regions of the Moonsea.
   

Elminster fails to keep his cool.

   

Miscellaneous notes:

• My paladin and ranger are apparently no longer gaining any spell levels. My paladin stopped at 2 Level 4 spells and my ranger stopped at 2 Level 3 druid spells.

• I killed a beholder at one point. I honestly forgot where this happened, but I have a screen shot. He died quickly.

   

They look cooler in this game than in Azure Bonds.

    

• In a couple of the sub-areas, a drider galloped up and spouted some nonsense, then galloped off. I was never able to make any sense of this. Seriously, if anyone has any idea what this was about, let me know.

    

Not that I would have any idea what kind of a response to make.

    

• Similarly, in one of the areas, when the party encountered "fresh dirt at a wall," the game gave me the options to leave, dig, or--absurdly--"sing." Choosing the later produced this result, followed by a battle with spiders:

   

Some programmer was bored, I think.

• All the doors in Kalistes' realm have that little spider on them. Aside from looking kind of goofy, it's funny to imagine some bureaucrat having to take time out from conquering the Realms to ensure that someone's doing all the appropriate carving.

• As we've covered before, you stop earning experience when you're about to earn enough for your second new level (above your current one). You know that's happened when you finally get back to civilization, train, fight a single battle, and are able to train again. This happened with most of my characters during this adventure. It's a little infuriating, because I must have wasted thousands of experience points.

• I don't think I mentioned before that the overland maps are slightly animated, with rivers and lava flowing.

• I probably waste more time and hit points trying to engineer backstabs than I save by executing them. What I particularly love is when my thief can execute two backstabs in the same round. Whenever that happens, I shout "double-play!" I suppose when she's hastened, I could go for triple-plays and quadruple-plays. I'll try to record it if it looks like it's going to happen.

  

This never stops being satisfying.

   

I suspect I won't be able to cover the next lieutenant in a single post, but we'll see. Now that I have the top-level mage spells, I want to offer an update on the various Gold Box spells and their uses; that might be up next or the one after.

Time so far: 26 hours
Reload count: 29

Pools of Darkness: Dragonslayers

The party finally finds a Pool of Darkness.

   

After my last post, combats increased enormously in difficulty. This is not a game in which you can switch to "quick combat" and watch your characters slowly destroy the enemies in effective, if less-than-optimal, ways. (Among other things, spellcasters under AI don't account for the "bounce" effect of "Lightning Bolt," nor do they seem to care who's in front of them when they cast "Cone of Cold.") For the first time in my Gold Box experience, I find myself regularly casting healing spells in the midst of combat. In no previous game would I have sacrificed a paladin's opportunity to attack so he could "lay hands" on an injured cleric. I'd have risked the cleric falling unconscious and not getting experience for the battle. In Pools of Darkness, however, my characters rarely fall unconscious: they die. Anything powerful enough to knock them out them is powerful enough to wallop them below -10 hit points.

The next quest in my east-west exploration served up an interesting plot that revealed itself only in pieces. In summary, two mages from Phlan, Quil and Kimarr, discovered in Thar a fortress that had belonged to a wizard named Taydome. Sasha's mission had been to visit the two mages and inspect the fortress.

At some point, either because of Bane's takeover of the Moonsea or just concurrent to it, Kimarr decided to keep Taydome's fortress for himself, making use of a magic spell that bends the minds of ogres and giants to the ruler's control. Quil went into hiding in the fortress to oppose Kimarr and managed to secrete Sasha in a safe place, but was unable to get her out of the fortress. And Kimarr made some deal with Bane that made him immune to Quil's magic. It was into this situation that the party blundered. An early battle with cloud giants leaves the front door locked and the party unable to leave.

I think every option here leads to combat.

   

As I explored, I found numerous scribbled notes from Quil (although I didn't know his name or anything about him) that slowly filled in the back story.

   

    

Confusing things, a warrior named Ruoln joined my party, claiming to have been one of Sasha's guards, and further claiming that both Kimarr and Quil had attacked the Phlan delegation. Ruoln later turned out to be Kimarr in disguise; he had only joined my party in hopes that we'd lead him to Quil and Sasha. Eventually, he got frustrated when we didn't do it fast enough, left the party, and ordered a bunch of hill giants to attack.

   

          

Letting NPCs join the party in any Gold Box game is always a 50/50 proposition. What bothers me is that even if you're suspicious from the outset, there's no way to role-play preparation for the eventual betrayal. To be fair, I can't think of any other game in which you can. I remember figuring out immediately the villain of Throne of Bhaal, but I still had to play the entire game according to the villain's plan instead of just killing him or her.

As we explored the fortress, we freed some of the captured Phlan warriors and killed a lot of giants. This was too bad, because it was clear that they didn't really want to fight:

   

    

Eventually, I came upon a scene in which Kimarr had discovered Quil and was about to kill him. Joined by some of the Phlan guards I'd freed, we fought a final battle against Kimarr--in black dragon form--and a bunch of giants. I forgot to screen-shot it, but he killed my cleric in the first attempt at battle. As usual, I reloaded and, knowing the final battle was coming, buffed in the appropriate location with "Bless," "Prayer," "Protection from Evil," "Mirror Image," "Enlarge," and so forth. I killed Kimarr on the second try. Quil led me to Sasha, who tersely offered her gratitude and magnanimously allowed me to rest anywhere in the fortress, as if a whole 16 x 16 map of safe resting spots is necessary.

    

    

Next map: a "small stockade," only 4 x 6 in dimensions. The weary captain in charge of the stockade told me that dragons keep attacking, and he asked for my help. One battle against dragons, in which I controlled a bunch of "Phlanarian Warriors," and the map was done.

   

     

Next up was a village at a crossroads. Some giants had invaded and were holding the villagers captive. I killed them and got some magic items, none better than what I already had, as a reward.

    

I prepare to "Fireball" a pack of giants. The various fire giants in the middle will be immune.

    

After that, I returned to the giant fortress where my party had begun its explorations--the only place so far to offer a training hall and shop. I had previously declined to continue my explorations out of the fortress and into a series of tunnels, but I did this now.

The tunnels were ruled by a fire giant mage, Ungelow, who thanked me for killing "that simpering fool of a hill giant"--she even gave me some magical treasure as a reward, warning me not to go further into her caves. Of course, I ignored her. For the first time (I think) in a Gold Box game, the cave offered some of the navigation obstacles that we see in other first-person titles in the Wizardry line, including spinners and a never-ending hallway. (They were presented as part of Ungelow's illusion magics.) Unlike Wizardry, though, Pools of Darkness made it clear what was happening and provided easy solutions.

    

It's not a navigation puzzle if you call attention to it!

    

At one point, I came across some hill giants who let me in on their plan to collapse a wall on top of Ungelow. But when I tried to go along with them, it turned out that the idiots had sapped the wall in the wrong direction, and it ended up collapsing on us instead.

    

Never trust the engineering of hill giants.

    

At another point, I ran across a group of Fire Knives. It was an interesting encounter. Ungelow had apparently contracted with them to kill the hill giant shaman, but we wiped out their assassination team (on the previous map) before they could accomplish it. As I came across the remaining Fire Knives in Ungelow's cave, they were debating whether to cut their losses and depart or attack my party to claim the treasures that Ungelow had given us.

    

One Fire Knife has a good point.

    

It all ended in battle, of course, but it's so much more fun when battles have some kind of context. Recall the post I wrote all those years ago about encounters; this would be somewhere between a Level 1 and a Level 2A encounter. It's nice to see the genre evolving.

Through more giants, iron golems, and medusas my party cleaved a path. Ungelow showed up with a final offer to make us part of her army, and give us 300 gems, if we'd just stop. Again, so much more fun than the norm. We denied her, blundered into one disastrous final battle in which the fire giant shamans wiped out half the party with "Hold Person"...

   

     

...re-engaged it properly buffed, and won. In the last squares of the map, someone shouted, "Warn the dragons! Have them prepare for battle. They must fly sooner than expected." A final battle of the map against a handful of dragons served as a taste for what was about to come.

The series of maps culminated in a map full of dragons, and it was perhaps the most difficult single map that I've faced in the Gold Box series so far. Fighting dragons is always a dicey proposition, as no buffing spell (outside of "Mirror Image," which only mages have) protects you from the lightning, poison, and acid attacks of blue, green, and black dragons. Blue dragons are the worst--they always seem to find a way to bank their lightning breath off walls, so the same character gets hit at least twice. And there's some bug that lets them make the attack across great distances, and even through walls.

    

This area had a lot of large battles with multiple dragons.

    

As we explored the map, two things became clear. First, it was meant for characters who already had "Delayed Blast Fireball," not those who were working back up to it. Second, my cleric was a huge liability. Because of low hit point rolls when leveling up, he had a max of 41 hit points, rarely enough to survive even a single breath attack from the dragons. I reloaded because of his death alone at least a dozen times. I eventually gave him one of the "Rings of Blinking" that I'd received earlier, but I still don't understand how it works, and it didn't protect him every time.

As commenters have pointed out, there's an easy way to avoid breath attacks from most dragons: force them to physically attack you first. For whatever reasons, dragons don't breathe if they've already made a physical attack in the same round, so if you have a character run up to them and then run away, you force the dragons to make physical attacks at the character's fleeing backside. A high hit-point character like my paladin, wearing Boots of Speed, can run around the battlefield and neutralize half a dozen dragons as long as he goes first in the round. I'm ashamed to say that I succumbed to this tactic more than once. It seems cheesy, but when something is part of the game and you know it works, it's hard not to do it--especially when the alternative is lots and lots of reloading.

   

Goldeneye prevents these dragons from using their breath attacks by making them attack her.

   

The dragons were ultimately ruled by Thorne, one of Bane's lieutenants, but in the local map they responded to Modthryth, leader of a "Cult of the Dragon" who has some process for turning dragons into dracoliches. The map was full of a bunch of vignettes in which Modthryth was moderating combats between dragons, dragons were fighting with each other over the right to the dracolich conversion, dragons were pleading their case to Modthryth, and so forth.

   

A couple of many special encounters in this area.

        

The map offered something fairly new to the Gold Box experience: a large 4 x 4 room in the center that, whenever I returned to it, offered up a different encounter. Usually, once you "clear" a room, that's the end of it, but this room had a different group of dragons and a different vignette every time I entered. There were a couple of combats, one encounter with a wounded red dragon who said that Modthryth is "abusing the power that Thorne gave him," and so forth.

   

A decent role-playing encounter.

I guess this was predictable.

    

The ostensible goal of the map was to defeat 4 large dragon battles and recover 4 keys that would let me into the final area. There, I fought a final combat (much easier than the random ones throughout the map) against Modthryth and two dracoliches.

    

     

Now, beyond that final battle was one of the titular Pools of Darkness, leading to other planes. I confess I don't really understand what's happening with these. In this case, the portal is clearly there to lead to Thorne, since he's responsible for the dragons. And I did get to him--but only after a stopover with Elminster in Limbo first.

    

     

So I guess Elminters magic is somehow...what?...intercepting my party in between the paths that the portals would normally take you to? I'm not sure. Either way, Elminster offers training and item storage. This is necessary because, apparently, magic items don't survive the transitions between planes. This is, of course, a blatant way to relieve the party of their most valuable stuff and make the planar areas more of a challenge. But I frankly didn't mind it. It was fun to try to assemble a new batch of equipment on the other side of Limbo, just in time for my final battle with Thorne. A lack of shops or item identification mechanisms on the "other side" makes this even more of a challenge.

    

Bolingbroke stores items in Elminsters vault so they won't be destroyed on their way to Thorne's realm.

    

I guess a lot of players circumvent this system. Since one of the create/add/remove party members screens exists on both sides of Limbo, it's possible to store your items with a couple of mules on one side, remove them from the party, and then add them back on the other side. I consider this an "exploit" on my "Cheats & Liars" scale, so I'm going to avoid it.

Naked and equipped only with spells, my party appeared in Thorne's cave. As we progressed, we kept hearing horn blasts in the distance--Thorne summoning the "Gathering" of dragons to attack the Realms. The horn, I later discovered, was created from the horn of a ki-rin--celestial, lawful-good, unicorn-lions. Later, I found a place where his spirit had created a safe room for resting.

    

Near the ki-rin's body, I found my first cache of weapons and armor.

    

A thief named Raizel was among a bunch of prisoners I freed from some cages. She agreed to join my party, then kept begging me to go off in search of Thorne's fabled treasures, cached around the dungeon. But I took the continual horn blasts as a sign that time was of the essence, and I pursued them. 

    

Raizel tries to distract us from the mission.

    

At the end of the map--with lots more dragon battles in between--we came face-to-face with Thorne. As usual, he taunted us as fools and said that the last blow of the horn would start the dragon war on the Realms. He attacked us with about 8 red dragons--who, by the way, are strangely not immune to "Delayed Blast Fireball."

   

  

Buffing with "Resist Fire" helped a lot against the red dragons, but my party really felt the loss of their equipment in this battle. Instead of missing most attacks, the dragons did heavy physical damage--especially Thorne, who was immune to magic. "Haste" and "Enlarge" were absolutely required to clean up the lesser red dragons before taking on Thorne. It took me 4 tries to win the battle with no party deaths.

   

Bolingbroke attacks Thorne while the other party members work on the other dragons.

    

When the battle was over, the spirit of the slain ki-rin appeared and explained that his horn was one of only three artifacts that I would need to turn against Bane's forces. Raizel stuffed her pockets with gems and jewels from Thorne's hoard and then took off.

    

      

I finished mapping the dungeon and found several additional treasure caches, each of which gave me tens of thousands of experience points and offered me gems, jewels, and platinum pieces that--per the subject of the last two postings--do me nothing at all. However, the experience contributed to party leveling, and when I was finally done with Thorne's dungeon, my characters had finally exceeded their original levels in their new ones. Dromio and Dromia can now cast their cleric spells again (and use their cleric weapons and shields), and Navarre can cast his mage spells again.

   

Re-memorizing Dromio's cleric spells.

      

Elminster was excited that I'd found the Horn of Doom and said that "with the Horn of Doom safely out of Bane's grasp, the storms will cease over the Moonsea," which will allow aid to come to the region. I'm not sure if that does anything for me materially, but we'll see. I returned to Limbo, destroying everything I'd picked up in Thorne's realm in the process, retrieved my equipment, and headed back to the Moonsea region. It looks like the next stop is going to be some scary-looking fortress on the western shore, assuming I don't run into some miscellaneous farmhouses first. Once I get there, I'll be half-done with the game in an overland mapping sense.

  

   

Now that I'm pretty far into Pools of Darkness, I'll say that I enjoy the richness of the plot, the large amount of detail and nuance the creators put into the dungeons, and the variety of special encounters. I don't think we've seen those factors at this level since Pool of Radiance. Thus, it's possible that Pools of Darkness will finally outscore it in the GIMLET.

Time so far: 16 hours
Reload count: 18