Game 112: Champions of Krynn (1990)

     

Champions of Krynn

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (Developer and Publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS, Amiga, Apple II, 1992 for PC-98

Date Started: 27 August 2013

    
Champions of Krynn is not screwing around. Although it starts a new series, it seems to expect that the player has some experience with Pool of Radiance or Curse of the Azure Bonds and isn't particularly interested in battling groups of orcs and kobolds again. There's no easy introductory area. The first battle pits you against Draconians, an enemy unique to this campaign setting, and within the course of the first map, you're fighting difficult battles against spellcasters. The final fight of the first city features two dragons. The game is also very plot-heavy (at least during the opening stages), giving a greater sense of participating in an unfolding novel.

As much as I love the "Gold Box" engine, I'll be surprised if I'm not a bit fatigued by it come next year. 1990 saw the release of Champions of Krynn, Secret of the Silver Blades, and Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday, and we got three more Gold Box games in 1991--four if you count the online Neverwinter Nights. (It might be worth reviewing my coverage of Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds for the origins of the Gold Box series.)

Nonetheless, although they use the same engine, it would be disingenuous to suggest that they all look and feel exactly the same. As you can see from even the opening screen, between editions the games made incremental improvements in things like graphics, sound effects, music, interface, implementation of D&D rules, and other gameplay elements. Champions starts with an arresting musical number that takes full advantage of the latest sound devices (I have it set to CMS/Game Blaster). The graphics, while not yet composed for VGA (we'll have to wait for the 1991 series for that), still benefit from greater artistic effort. There's a new "level" setting that adjusts the difficulty of combat, and the game supports the use of a mouse or joystick, though I'll happily stick with the keyboard.

This opening image is better than anything the previous games accomplished in 16 colors.

Release dates are hard to nail down for 1990, so I'm not sure if Champions is the first, second, or third Gold Box game from 1990 (and thus the third, fourth, or fifth game overall), but it's probably the first released outside the Forgotten Realms series. As such, it offers the rare but interesting experience of playing a game in a familiar engine, and with familiar rules, but having to learn an entirely new setting, history, and lore.

The Forgotten Realms universe has always reminded me a bit of Los Angeles: a sprawling gallimaufry with no central core. The Dragonlance universe, in contrast, reminds me of nearby Irvine: a little sterile in its sense of being planned. Dragonlance was created by the husband-wife team of Laura and Tracy Hickman, and fleshed out in a series of novels by the Hickmans and Margaret Weis. I'm getting the following summary from various wikis, so my apologies if I misinterpret anything: Krynn is the world of the Dragonlance setting, and it is characterized by constant struggle among the various gods who created and influence it. These include Paladine (god of good), Gilean (neutrality), and Takhisis (evil). In the creation of the world, the gods created races that embodied their traits: elves from Paladine, humans from Gilean, and ogres from Takhisis. The god of crafts and forging, Reorx, tried to teach metalwork to humans, got annoyed at their irreverence, and turned a bunch of them into gnomes as punishment. Dwarves and Kender are races perverted from gnomes.

The character creation process is nearly identical to the previous games except for new races.

 
The history of Krynn is divided into five ages. The Age of Starbirth brought the creation of the world and its races. The Age of Dreams is marked by a series of Dragon Wars, conflicts between armies using dragons, who were created by Paladine but corrupted by Takhisis. During the third such war, Dragonlances were formed. They are the only weapons powerful enough to allow mortals to kill dragons.

In the Age of Might, a great nation called Istar arose on Krynn's main continent, Ansalon. The Kingpriest of Istar sought to rule the world and eradicate all evil but was naturally corrupted by his own ambition. When he began to challenge the gods themselves, they hurled a fiery mountain at Istar and destroyed it. The event became known as the Cataclysm, and the age that follows was called the Age of Despair, characterized by constant warfare. The culmination of this era was the War of the Lance, an attempt by Takhisis to conquer Krynn with evil dragons and armies of various types of Draconians, created out of the corrupted eggs of good dragons (Takhisis had been holding these eggs hostage to keep the good dragons from entering the war against her). The war was turned and won through the efforts of ten multi-racial champions of Paladine, called the Heroes of the Lance, and an ancient chivalric order called the Knights of Solamnia.

The last age, the Age of Mortals, sees further wars against evil dragons, the loss of immortality by the gods, and the eventual death of Takhisis. It is, I understand, the period of the current novels.

Champions of Krynn takes place during the Age of Despair, after the end of the War of the Lance, around a group of cities that were overrun by evil forces during the war. The Knights of Solomnia, entrenched in an outpost near the city of Throtl (occupied by hobgoblins), have been on a campaign to clean the area of evil forces. But lately, the commandant of the knights has been acting erratic, as if under the influence of an evil spell. A Knight of the Rose named Sir Karl has been dispatched to the outpost to evaluate the situation; the player's party of adventurers has accompanied him; and the game begins as Karl asks them to patrol the area and report back on the disposition of any evil forces.

I guess to fit within the paradigm of D&D rules, Dragonlance had to offer essentially the same (or similar) races. Otherwise, I can't account for how, in creating a brand new universe, the races still boiled down to humans, elves, dwarves, and half-elves, with the Kender substituted for halflings. There are, nonetheless, some unique variations. Dwarves are divided into hill dwarves (stubborn, hardy, rough) and mountain dwarves (more refined); elves into Silvanesti elves (tall, arrogant) and Qualinesti elves (shorter, friendlier). The Kender are characterized by curiosity, an odd sense of bravery given their size, the ability to "taunt" opponents into a mindless rage, and the ability to use a special staff-sling weapon called a hoopak. I'm sure that there are more subtle differences between these races and their Forgotten Realms counterparts that my more experienced readers can flesh out.

As with the Forgotten Realms gold box games, there are class restrictions and level restrictions based on race; unlike the Forgotten Realms games, they're not so strict as to make non-human races entirely unplayable. (To be sure, I followed PetrusOctavianus's advice and looked at the tables for the third game in the series, The Dark Queen of Krynn.) Elves can rise to maximum levels as clerics, rangers, and mages, and dwarves can go the distance as fighters. Knights are a new class in this series that only humans can max in. They exist in three levels--Crown, Sword, and Rose--and must tithe percentages of whatever money they carry every time they enter an outpost. Like paladins in the Forgotten Realms, they have the ability to cast cleric spells after Level 6. (Paladins don't exist in this game but apparently become available in the second entry, Death Knights of Krynn.) Beyond this addition, the classes are composed of the standard variety: fighters, rangers, clerics, mages, and thieves. Multi-classing rules are the same as in Forgotten Realms, and there are no dual classes.

After studying the manual a bit, I decided to go with this party:

• Midsummer, a lawful good female human knight
• Dutch, a lawful good male human knight
• Grave, a chaotic good male Silvanesti elf ranger/cleric of the god Kiri-Jouth
• Atmos, a lawful good male Qualinesti elf cleric of Majere/white mage
• Squirrel, a true neutral female Qualinesti elf red mage/thief
• Coral, a neutral good female Kender cleric of Mishakal/thief

"Weeeeeeee are the Champions of Krynn..."

I went with so many multi-classed characters because they just make sense in this game. With development capped by level rather than experience points, a multi-classed character can get a lot farther than a single-classed one. Plus, it limits the likelihood that I'll bump against the caps and thus become annoyed with random combats. I figured it made sense to have multiple characters with both mage and cleric spells, and to explore the different types of mages and clerics. I like the idea of two thieves for the backstabbing ability. Between a cleric's armor and a thief's backstab, no one here is useless in melee combat.

I originally was going to go with a dwarf fighter for the second character but ultimately decided not to because screw dwarves. This way, a single knight doesn't have to ride herd on this ragtag bunch by herself.

Alignment has a more interesting role in this game than in the Forgotten Realms series. First, given the name of the game, it dispenses with any notion that you can role-play an evil party. Everyone is good or neutral. For mages, alignment determines the type of mage (red or white; each has different spells, though drawn from the usual list); for clerics, it determines the available gods, each of which conveys certain bonuses. For instance, clerics of Majere turn undead at two levels higher than normal. Clerics of Mishakal get extra spells.

Although I like the idea of creating your own character icons, I'm no good at it. The icons that SSI presents in its demo reels and NPCs always look much more interesting and sophisticated than mine. Here's a comparison:

Note the colorful and interesting outfits on these three demo characters.

And my pathetic attempts.

The game begins when the party accompanies Sir Karl on his mission to the outpost near Throtl. While he conducts his investigation, he directs the party to equip themselves, memorize spells, and scout the surrounding area, noting (via journal entry) that the worst monsters seen in the area have been hobgoblins. The process of purchasing equipment was a little odd in that the armory (unlike the shops in Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds) didn't have every item in the D&D catalog, just a handful of the most necessary items for the major classes.

The paltry selection of equipment in the starting town.

I was also interested to see that each character started with thousands of experience points, in some cases enough to make him or her Level 2 or 3 right at the beginning. I'd been assuming that we'd start as rank amateurs as usual.

The outpost was just a menu town, so as soon as I was ready, I hit the open road. Just one step later, I ran into a special encounter: a company of Draconians slaughtering women and children in a caravan. Combat began with a quartet of the creatures, Draconians of the Baaz type, who turn into stone when slain and thus trap the weapon of the character who struck the killing blow. He can retrieve it after the battle but must otherwise fight weaponless unless he has a backup. Well into the first maps, I kept forgetting to re-equip weapons lost in this manner, and I'd suddenly find that one of my knights was fighting with his fists.

The battle wasn't hard, and afterwards the game indicated that the last surviving Draconian took some kind of book from one of the dead bodies and disappeared. The women and children asked me to escort them to the outpost. It wasn't much of a role-playing choice, but it was a choice nonetheless.

The overland map is smaller, with fewer features, than the previous games.

Returning to the commandant's office, I found Sir Karl in the process of slaying the commandant, whose body immediately turned into a Sivak Draconian, shapeshifters who are able to fly. Indicating that the situation was "graver than he feared," he sent me to Throtl to find a knight named Caramon, one of the titular Heroes of the Lance and (I gather) a major character in the novels.

Throtl consisted of two 16 x 16 maps. Though the size was the usual Gold Box standard, the maps took me much longer to navigate than any previous game's, partly because the combats were so difficult (common enemies were clerics, mages, mid-level fighters, hobgoblins, Draconians, and undead) and partly because there was so much plot exposition. It transpired that someone named Myrtani had re-discovered the process used to convert good dragon eggs to Draconians, and the rituals were being performed in the catacombs of the city. As I battled forward, the enemy legions--satisfyingly scared of me--desperately tried to salvage what they could of the eggs and their documentation on the process and to flee before I could catch up to them. The maps culminated in a battle with priests at an altar, but many of the enemies escaped and I never did catch up with Myrtani.

During the process, I found Caramon in chains and freed him. Shortly afterwords, a young elven girl named Maya showed up and took him back to the outpost. There was a strong suggestion that she was a dragon in human form, and perhaps involved in some kind of relationship with Sir Karl.

The game continues the use of journal paragraphs to relay key situations and conversations.

Towards the end of Throtl, there were a few rumors that someone else was circumventing Myrtani to direct the corruption of the eggs, and that the enemy was withdrawing its forces (and eggs) to a keep called Gargath.

There were a lot of overheard conversations in the first map.

My initial attempt to fight the final battle against hobgoblins and two white dragons resulted in a full-party death, thanks to the dragons' breath attacks. On a reload, I memorized "Resist Cold" and cast it on all party members. That did the trick. When I returned to the outpost, I got a mission from Sir Karl to take word to the outpost near Gargath and to investigate the Tower of Gargath.

Some stray observations on my first outing:

• The game presents the player with a number of light role-playing choices, usually having to do with whether to attack or flee, but sometimes offering the ability to parlay with monsters instead of immediately fighting them. It's more than most games of the era offer.

• I had to retreat from the city several times during the first maps, return to the outpost, and train my characters to the next levels. By the end of the first two maps, many of my characters were Level 4 out of a game maximum of only 8 levels.

• Most of my characters are awful shots. Even at higher levels, they miss the vast majority of their attacks. So do the enemies, fortunately.

• The Forgotten Realms games didn't introduce combats of this difficulty until after my mages had developed mass-damage spells. Lacking those, I've been relying much more on lower-level spells like "Hold Person" and "Sleep." The game introduced a much more significant tactical challenge than I found in either Pool or Curse.

Against other clerics and mages, this spell is a lifesaver.

 

• I was just complimenting Dragon Fire for spicing up the game with creative room descriptions. Well, Champions does that, too. It was almost a little jarring to find in-text descriptions like the one below with nothing to actually find or do in the room.

• Visually, unfortunately, the dungeons remain uniform, drab, and boring. I was hoping the latest installment would offer better textures and something more interesting to look at.

• The "Enlarge" spell, so useful in Curse, doesn't work in this game. My characters resist it, as if an enemy is trying to cast an offensive spell at them. This even happens in camp.

• The major unit of currency of the Dragonlance world is "steel pieces." (It strikes me as kind of stupid to make your currency unit something needed for armor and weapons and such.) So far in the game, I haven't found a mother lode, but neither have I been to a shop with anything worth buying.

• Combat initiative seems less dependent on random rolls and more dependent on dexterity. My characters almost always go in the same order.

• The game awards miscellaneous experience for hitting plot points. I don't remember that happening in Pool or Curse.

 
So far, it's been a fun and challenging game, with enough variances from the previous two entries to keep me interested, but retaining what's best about the Gold Box series. I don't find the plot compelling just yet, but perhaps it's simply because I have no investment in this campaign setting. We'll see if it grows on me. I'm curious what my readers think of the Dragonlance setting compared to the Forgotten Realms.

Champions of Krynn: Final Rating

The flying citadel on the box is a bit of a spoiler.

Champions of Krynn

United States

Strategic Simulations, Inc. (Developer and Publisher)

Released 1990 for DOS, Amiga, Apple II, 1992 for PC-98

Date Started: 27 August 2013

Date Ended: 4 September 2013

Total Hours: 17

Difficulty: Easy-Moderate (2.5/5)
Final Rating: 56
Ranking at Time of Posting: 107/113 (95%)
Ranking at Game #403: 393/403 (98%)

Champions of Krynn is a good entry in a series that I've already blogged about fairly extensively, so this GIMLET isn't going to contribute worlds of new knowledge to our understanding of the Gold Box games. It makes effective use of a solid game engine, the lore and history of its campaign setting, and AD&D rules.

Because this game is essentially my only exposure to the Dragonlance campaign setting, it often felt very foreign to me, and it was always clear that Dragonlance fans (especially readers of the novels) would get more out of the game than casual players like me. Oddly, the game is probably more enjoyable to me in 2013 than it would have been in 1990, before I had the Internet to look up the characters and locations that the game uses. While this didn't make me go, "Wow! I'm actually adventuring alongside Tasslehoff Burrfoot! I'm never quitting this DOSBox session!," it did at least keep me from playing the entire game saying, "Who?"

The issue of difficulty was on my mind a lot as I played Krynn. The game strikes me as fundamentally too easy because, paradoxically, the battles are quite hard. When I played Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds, I adhered to my limited-save policy by which I saved at the entrance to each new map, but not after every combat or major event. This was the only way that I could preserve the edge-of-the-seat tactical tension of games like Wizardry and Might & Magic.

I started doing that with Krynn but soon realized it would be an exercise in frustration. The previous Gold Box games featured combats of relatively moderate difficulty (save for special examples, like the Beholder Corps), so there was a reasonable chance I could get through an entire map without having to lose my progress. Because Krynn's battles were so much harder, I realized I'd be tripling the time it took me to get through the game if I kept that save policy. So I did what almost every other player does and saved liberally throughout every map.

Doing so gave me a far different experience than I had with Pool or Curse. In those games, limited saving also meant limited resting, because I wasn't going to burn hit points and spells on random encounters unless I really needed the healing or the spell replenishment. I looked carefully for those rare spots in which the game told me it was safe to rest. In Krynn, on the other hand, I would take a chance on "Fixing" and sleeping in just about any corridor, and usually it was fine. As I discussed yesterday, the "Fix" command worked far more often than just sleeping, but even sleeping worked more often than it should have.

There's a special kind of challenge--a special kind of fun--that accompanies the navigation of foreign corridors at half your hit points and half your spells cast, when suddenly there's another attack by minotaurs, and you're carefully checking your spell and item inventories for anything that might help, because you've cast all your fireballs and lightning bolts and you've got one cure spell left and at least three people who need it. I missed that. I could have gotten it back by doing some tweaking, like setting the difficulty slider one setting lower and adopting a "save only twice per map" policy or something, but I'd rather the game didn't make me do such things. The Gold Box series could significantly ramp up the challenge by limiting either saves or rest breaks, and between the two, the latter makes the most sense. "Fix" shouldn't work where sleeping doesn't work, and you shouldn't be able to sleep except when you've cleared an area or have found a hidden location.

On a related note, an anonymous commenter had a good point a few days ago:

Your sentence about re-trying the fight with cold resistance spells memorized does sum up quite nicely what I dislike about AD&D2 magic. You can almost never react to a battle situation with minor spells without first casting power word: load.

I felt this more in Krynn than in previous Gold Box games. Most of the major fixed battles followed a predictable pattern for me: I'd first stumble upon them unaware, then get slaughtered, then reload and cast my buffing spells (including battle-specific protection spells) before trying again. It would be really nice if games didn't force you to break the illusion of continuity this way, perhaps by giving some alert that a major battle is about to happen in the next square. It's not like it's unrealistic. Chances are, if three dragons are milling around behind the next door, I'm going to be able to see something through the cracks.

I mean, honestly, how does this kind of thing happen as a surprise?

Aside from these minor complaints, the game was a lot of fun, and I expect it to do well on the GIMLET; I would expect it to come out slightly below Curse of the Azure Bonds, but not by much. In the review below, I'm including some intelligence I received via correspondence with developer Victor Penman.

1. Game World. Like the Forgotten Realms Gold Box games, it's hard to rate this area independently of the large mythos constructed by the books, gaming guides, and modules. What we can say is that the Dragonlance realm is certainly tighter than the Forgotten Realms setting, with a more cohesive history and more consistent characters. As I indicated in the first posting, to me it feels like it goes a little too far in the other direction. If we can fault the Forgotten Realms for being a confusing, inconsistent patchwork, we can perhaps fault Dragonlance for at times feeling a little too engineered.

The game itself does a decent job integrating itself with the Dragonlance mythology, something that developer Victor Penman tells me was strictly regulated by TSR--they required SSI to "faithfully adhere to the Krynn mythos." In general, the game made me feel that I was the protagonist and the canonical Heroes of the Lance were the supporting characters, though it did skirt the edge sometimes.

There was one notable regression from Pool and Curse: the overland map is meaningless. Unlike Pool (which featured similar movement), there is nothing to "discover" in the mountains and valleys of the map. Unlike Curse, there are no special encounters that take place only on the road. Unlike both, random encounters are few and far between. The game might as well have just given me a menu of places to go.

And so much of the travel is automatic anyway.

On the plus side, the series continues to do well by incorporating the events of the game into an evolving world. I fully expected that when I journeyed to Kernen after the end of the game, I'd encounter dragons and Draconians in the same way that in Pool of Radiance, I could keep returning to the castle to fight Tyranthraxus. But instead I found a group of knights sifting through the rubble, willing to pat me on the back and throw me a party. Tavern tales continually evolved to reflect the progress of the quest, and cleared areas remain cleared. It was so good, in fact, that when I tied up a cleric at one point after interrogating him, when I returned to the square hours later, I got a message that "a bound and gagged cleric glares at you." Score: 7.

And this after a battle with minotaurs outside the inn.

2. Character Creation and Development. Essentially, we can say the same thing about all games of this era based on AD&D: there is a satisfying but not earth-shattering level of customization during character creation; character progression happens often enough; and it's satisfying to watch the characters grow in spell and combat power. However, the games lack the customization of skills and abilities that we see in third-edition AD&D and in many other RPGs throughout the 1990s and 2000s. One solid advantage to Krynn over its predecessors is that characters gain experience even when they seek alternatives to combat; I just wish the game would tell you how much.

Krynn did have some changes from the previous games, predominantly in the introduction of the knight class, the associated promotion levels, and at least one quest (Sir Dargaard's tomb) in which the class really mattered. The clerical deities and division of mages into white and red were also new, though I can't say they added a lot to the gameplay. The moon phases and spell bonuses and penalties they conveyed added to tactical considerations. I didn't find the races to be significantly different from their Forgotten Realms counterparts. The game stripped evil alignments, but this seemed less like a real loss than an honest acknowledgement that it would make little sense to go through the plot in any meaningful way as an evil party. Score: 7.

Coral achieves her maximum level.

3. NPC Interaction. The game featured about the same NPC level as previous Gold Box titles, but (as usual) with no dialogue or role-playing options. The NPCs in Krynn had more interesting in-game stories than any we found in Pool or Curse--I'm thinking particularly of the ill-fated Sir Karl and his dragon girlfriend--but still not at the level where I felt any significant attachment. The "attitude" options (whether to parlay nice, haughty, sly, etc.) appeared less often than in the previous games, there were no hirelings, and you didn't even have the ability to reject NPCs who wanted to join the party (not that it would have made sense anyway). Altogether, I think the game's approach to NPCs was slightly less than Pool or Curse. Score: 5.

What's wrong with this description?

4.  Encounters and Foes. This category remains a strength of the Gold Box series. The menagerie of creatures is well-described in the game's documentation (and of course in plenty of other sources), and this is one of the few series of the era where knowledge of a foe's strengths and weaknesses radically changes your approach to combat. Of particular interest are the four Draconian species [Edit: As Victar points out, it's five], each with unique characteristics and special attacks. I really hated the Auraks, but in a good way--a way that recognized their unique challenge.

Mr. Penman told me that the development team faced a problem regarding the canonical monsters of the Dragonlance setting: "There were not enough monsters, of different levels, to give good challenges for all levels of parties." He says that TSR actually created new monsters "just so we could use them in the game," but overall the lack of a menagerie the size of Forgotten Realms Monster Manual was responsible for many of the issues I noted relating to combat balance. (He didn't specify which monsters were specifically created for Krynn, but my money is on "mobats" as one.)

The series also continues to show strengths in the numerous encounters, allowing the player to either avoid or pursue combat, to act slyly or bluntly, to favor brawn or intelligence, depending on his or her preference. A lot of the encounter options led to essentially the same outcomes, or offered choices between manifestly smart and dumb actions, but they still offered far more than most other RPGs. Such choices will become far more consequential in later games, and with a greater ability to really play a role, but they're still welcome here. Score: 7.

I'm not saying I agonized over this one, but it was nice to have the choice.

5. Magic and Combat. Yet another category for which it would make sense for me just to write a standard "Gold Box entry." I love the engine, it supports enjoyably tactical use of spells and melee attacks, and I could happily spend hours fireballing, lightning-bolting, and backstabbbing enemies. While the magic system doesn't break new ground, the list of spells is a good balance of offensive and defensive, and they must be used tactically to have a chance at victory. This game had harder combats than the previous two, but fewer large, long combats, which I missed a bit. I felt like too many combats in Krynn required "getting the jump" on the other party and wiping them out quickly, and fewer involved the types of long-term tactics that I loved in, say, the kobold battles in Pool of Radiance. Nonetheless, it remains an excellent combat engine and the primary reason to play a Gold Box game. Score: 7.

My Kender uses her "yell" ability, a new feature in this game.

6. Equipment. Another area that I could just copy and paste from my reviews of Pool or Curse. There are lots of weapons, armor, rings, girdles, gauntlets, wands, scrolls, bows, and other items to buy and find, and the game provides a solid "weapon upgrade" almost every map. The shop selection was smaller than in the previous games, but it's not like players were carefully weighing the choice between a glaive-guisarme and a guisarme-voulge anyway. I still don't like that the magic equipment all appeared in fixed positions, and there are no good item descriptions.

There were some small innovations in this game, such as the hoopak, the Solamnic plate, and the Dragonlance. I didn't miss ioun stones. Still no helms or boots. Score: 5.

Perhaps the best-equipped character I've ever had in any Gold Box game.

7. Economy. I've just entirely given up on the Gold Box series when it comes to this category. As usual, the game offered far more treasure than my characters needed for the few paltry things they could do with it. Training doesn't even cost anything in this game. The stupidity of "steel pieces" was balanced by the usefulness of the "vault," though I only ever made deposits. If it wasn't for the magic shops, there would be no reason to collect money at all, and the shops barely sold anything worth buying. (My characters are all going into Death Knights of Krynn with scores of arrows +1 and a few superfluous Wands of Magic Missile.)

I asked Mr. Penman about this, and he attributed this problem mostly to the AD&D rules, which gave experience rewards based on both enemy hit dice and the amount of treasure collected. Since TSR required SSI to use official rules for both experience and treasure, I guess I see how it went wrong, but I still think it should have been fixable somehow. My suspicion is that they just didn't consider it a problem. Penman somewhat brusquely told me that, "Following the rules and providing XP were our concerns, not what people spent money on." Score: 2.
 

8. Quests. The main quest of Krynn is more epic than the previous games, and perhaps a tad more confusing. I rather liked the low-key nature of the plots of Pool and Curse, in which you saved a city rather than the entire world, and I was sorry to see Krynn reverse this trend. Nonetheless, it's a decent story, well-framed within the Solamnic order, and I was never confused about what I was supposed to be doing. In addition to the main quest, the game had a few side quests, although I didn't realize they were side quests until I'd finished the game and looked at a walkthrough. Technically, the crypt of Sir Dargaard, the third outpost, the ogre base, and rescuing the slaves below Neraka were all optional. Score: 5.
 

Bit by bit, the quest unfolds.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. The graphics are a little improved from the previous Gold Box games, which weren't so bad to begin with, with the exception of the bland and generic 3D-view corridors and rooms. We had pretty EGA cut scenes and animated monster portraits, and much better use of current sound hardware than I remember in Pool or Curse. The newly-installed mouse support made things worse, but it was easy to disable. Overall, I found the interface intuitive, but my complaints are still the same: unnecessarily having to choose "move" before moving in combat and having to re-select spells every time you go to memorize. I hear these elements get fixed later. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. Krynn was much more linear than the previous games, though there were some minor choices in quest order during the mid-game. It was also shorter than the other two: 17 hours compared to 19 for Curse and 30 for Pool. I talked about the difficulty issues above; while I can't honestly say that they were worse in this game than the others, I did notice it more. It's "replayable" to the extent that different party combinations would alter the tactical challenge. Score: 5. 
 

This provides a final rating of 56, which is 4 points less than Curse (and 8 points less than Pool), but still my seventh highest-rated game. I swear, if any Gold Box game would simply retain Pool of Radiance's extensive side quests and nonlinearity, and then fix the economy, it would rocket to the top.

Since the ad mentions only Pool and Curse as previous SSI D&D games, I'm confident I'm playing the 1990 games in the right order.

 
Scorpia's review in the April 1990 Computer Gaming World is her usual mix of regurgitation of the manual, commentary, and blatant spoilers. She spends a lot of time complaining about how characters unconscious at the end of combat don't receive experience, which I agree is stupid, but it's been part of the game mechanic since Pool. She also complains a lot about how the Knights of Solamnia take away all the good equipment at the end of the game. Since I'm fairly accustomed to starting every sequel naked, I don't really see what the fuss is about. (Has there been a single sequel yet, other than The Bard's Tale II, in which equipment transfers from the first game?)

She has a good point that the copy protection system has you look at keywords from the journal entries, which you're not supposed to read ahead of time, but I didn't have a lot of trouble just counting the words while ignoring the text. Anyway, despite a review that mostly consists of complaints, she ends by saying, "actually, [it's] a pretty good game overall." Always one for le mot juste, that Scorpia.
 

MobyGames's round-up of both contemporary and current reviews suggests that it was regarded as a solid game in its own time and is remembered as a "classic" by modern reviewers. 

The SSI developers have always struck me as slightly more anonymous than those at other companies. You don't see names like Richard Garriott and Brian Fargo jump out from their credits; rather, they emphasize a "development team" and rely less on big personalities. In Krynn's credits, Victor Penman is the most prominent name, with sole credits as "project manager and developer" and "director" and co-credits as "original story" and "writing/dialogue/story," so it was to him that I chose to write, even though he credits Keith Brors and Paul Murray as the "creative and technical talents" behind the Gold Box games.

Penman's passion was wargames--in which, of course, SSI specialized--but by the late 1980s, the company thought that RPGs were the wave of the future and assigned Penman there. His history starts strong as one of two developers/designers for The Eternal Dagger (1987) and one of five developers on Pool of Radiance. Though he was almost absent (just "playtesting") from Curse of the Azure Bonds, but he comes in as the project manager for Secret of the Silver Blades, Death Knights of Krynn, and the two Buck Rogers games, and as the producer of Pools of Darkness. Basically, a lot of the Gold Box series games have his fingerprints. His last credited game is an action title called CyClones in 1994; since then, he's been a project manager on other software ventures.

The character on horseback on the hill announces the sequel.

I look forward to seeing how the Krynn saga continues in Death Knights of Krynn, but we'll have to wait until 1991. For now, after a brief return to the 1980s, I'm on to a dungeon-crawler called DarkSpyre.

Game 199: Death Knights of Krynn (1991)

It was just about time for the predictable comfort of a Gold Box game. I have four of them to play in 1991, and I don't want them to get all clumped together at the end of the year.  I've spread them out like oases, knowing that I'll reach one every 8-12 games regardless of how bad or difficult the intervening games are.

I have no doubt that, just like its predecessors, Death Knights of Krynn will end up within the top 10 or 15 percent of games I've played as part of this project. I know that I'll enjoy the experience, particularly when it comes to combat. But what I also know--or at least suspect--is that the game isn't going to "wow" me. Gold Box used up all of its "wow" factor in Pool of Radiance, and since then it's been coasting on incremental improvements. That's fine--they're still great games--but it's too bad that SSI didn't continue to push the envelope the way that, say, Origin did with each new Ultima game (at least through 1992).

This game takes place a year after Champions of Krynn.

      
If you're just joining me, the Gold Box series is a collection of officially-licensed Dungeons & Dragons titles from Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI). Although not the first officially-licensed D&D games, they are the first to actually use D&D rules and themes. Starting with Pool of Radiance in 1988, the series spanned 12 titles in 5 settings through 1992, plus a construction set called Unlimited Adventures in 1993. This is my sixth Gold Box game.

Really? That's the helmet you're going with? You look like a droid.

  

Death Knights is a direct sequel to Champions of Krynn (1991; link to my first post), set in the Dragonlance universe. The games take place after a series of novels concerning the "Heroes of the Lance" and their war against the minions of the evil goddess Takhisis. A key plot point in the novels and in the first game involves the creation of "Draconians" out of the corrupted eggs of good dragons. In Champions of Krynn, my party worked for the Knights of Solamnia and foiled a plot to unleash a new horde of Draconians on the unsuspecting continent of Ansalon. Although I defeated the architect of that plan, the Draconian Myrtani, at the conclusion of the game, it was hinted that Myrtani was simply a lieutenant of a more sinister leader, a Death Knight named Soth. (The character appears extensively in Dragonlance literature.)

Sniff. I will try to remember the good times I had with the skeletal dragon.

       
As you may recall, my triumphant party at the end of Champions was:

• Midsummer, a Level 7 lawful good female human knight
• Dutch, a Level 7 lawful good male human knight
• Grave, Level 7/7 chaotic good male Silvanesti Elf cleric/ranger
• Squirrel, a Level 7/9 true neutral female Qualinesti Elf red mage/thief
• Atmos, a Level 7/7 lawful good male Qualinesti Elf cleric/white mage
• Coral, a Level 7/9 neutral good female Kender cleric/thief

I rather like my party. Everyone but Squirrel is capable of casting at least some cleric spells. I have two mages to back each other up and two thieves for backstabbing opportunities. I was happy to see that level caps go all the way to 14 for most classes and 18 for thieves. Oddly, new characters in Death Knights start at Level 8, suggesting that I didn't grind enough in Champions. I've never seen imported characters end up at a lower level than new characters.

As a quick reminder, the Dragonlance games do a few things different from the Forgotten Realms variants. You can't play evil characters, which wouldn't make sense given the nature of the plot. Elves and dwarves are divided into sub-races with special strengths and weaknesses. Mages specialize in white, red, or black (NPCs only) magic and have spells limited accordingly. They get bonus spells at different phases of the moon. Knights--which don't exist as a class in the Forgotten Realms setting--have several "orders" that they can progress through; higher orders mean more spells but also more experience to advance. They can also take command of NPCs in combat. "Kender" are halfling expies and have a special weapon called a hoopak and a special ability to taunt enemies into a mindless rage. All of this makes character choice and development more meaningful in Krynn than in Pool of Radiance and its sequels. 

Importing characters from Champions worked flawlessly, and for the first time in a Gold Box game, all the equipment came with the characters. The Knights of Solamnia had made off with my best stuff at the end of Champions (including a Girdle of Giant Strength and a Dragonlance), but I still have some +3 weapons and armor, which is better than brand new items.

My mage/thief and some of her imported items.

          
The game commences one year after the defeat of Myrtani. (Although imported characters have not actually aged a year.) The party has gone to the Knights of Solamnia outpost at Gargath to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the victory. Gargath was at the center-north of the Champions game map but is at the southeast of the Death Knights map; it seems to be the only repeated location.

This game takes place slightly northwest of its predecessor.

The introductory screens describe how Lady Maya, the beautiful silver dragon in human form, gives a eulogy for Sir Karl, our deceased ally from Champions. Suddenly, a skeletal dragon attacks the proceedings. Riding on the back is none other than Sir Karl, who has been corrupted as a Death Knight. He snatches a Dragonlance and rides off, the enraged Maya in pursuit, leaving skeleton warriors mounted on nightmares to fight the party and our Solamnic Knight allies.

Why does he have to be fat?

To be fair, I guess for him, honor and virtue didn't really "succeed."

Death Knights thus begins, just like Champions, with a relatively difficult battle. I liked it a lot, but I wouldn't have wanted it to be my first exposure to Gold Box combat. I don't remember encountering nightmares (undead horses) in a CRPG before; they're capable of blinding characters with smoke. The skeleton warriors were particularly difficult, as they're immune to magic, have high armor classes, and start with over 60 hit points. Two of my characters were unconscious before the end of the battle, and I'm sure I wouldn't have won if I hadn't started with half a dozen knight NPCs.

After the battle, I was free to wander around the outpost, which was besieged by the evil forces. There was a shop, a bar, a bank, a temple, and a training hall, and a series of micro-quests, like helping the temple clerics heal the wounded, patrolling the ramparts, and helping to bury fallen knights. In the cemetery, a journal entry revealed that Sir Karl's grave had been torn open and corrupted, and investigating it got me bitten by snakes.

A recounting of the scene from the adventurer's journal. If you're new to the Gold Box series, its games frequently tell you to consult journal entries for longer text passages or images.

 
At one point, I encountered a Dread Wolf, who spoke to me and said that he'd foil all my attempts to interfere with Soth's plans.

Eventually, a small group of warriors, mages, and clerics attacked the outpost. They weren't difficult to defeat (not immune to magic, among other things). When the battle was over, I was summoned to the commandant's chambers, where an old "knight emeritus" told me of a prophetic dream he had. He couldn't remember much, but a magic device called a "sleepstone," tucked under his pillow, had recorded it. He told me to take it to a Dream Merchant in Vingaard to decode it.

The commandant, Sir Bertil, told me that the Dream Merchant is "in Kalaman this time of year," however. Consulting the map, I saw that Kalaman was at the top, so I left the outpost and started in that direction. Within a couple of steps, I was in a random battle with several undead enemies that I don't remember from other games, including zombie mastodons and zombie minotaurs. It's a benefit that so many of my characters have the ability to turn undead.

A frequent message while traversing the wilds.

Rather than slavishly follow the game's instructions to go to Kalaman, I stopped in the city of Dulcimer on the way. The city was populated with the undead. As I entered, a text screen told me that: "Zombies fill a market to the east. A dog lurches past, pursued by an undead child." I was soon greeted by a lich, calling himself the mayor of the city. He asked if I'd ever visited Cerberus. Thinking he wasn't talking about my experiences in Elvira II, I said no, and he told me that I could "explore freely" except for the eastern exit and his private chamber.

Awfully friendly for a lich.

I didn't bother to map the Gargath outpost, and I didn't map Dulcimer, either. I normally like to map, but I wasn't in the mood for some reason. The "Area" command in the game shows you enough of the surrounding area to figure it out, and as long as you pay attention to the coordinates, it's not hard to make sure you step on every square in the 16 x 16 maps.

Naturally, I ignored the mayor and went for his private chambers. Before I entered, a specter appeared and told me that while destroying the lich would allow me to enter "Voice Wood," it was a bigger deal than simply defeating him in combat. I would have to find his phylactery and destroy it.

In the room beyond, the lich attacked me with several specters and wizards. It wasn't a difficult battle--"Fireball" was helpful given how they were arranged--but the specters managed to drain two levels from both Midsummer and Dutch.

Fighting the lich and his allies.

Once I killed the lich, I ran about town until I discovered the phylactery buried in a garden and destroyed it. All the undead collapsed at this point, and the game told me that "a great onus of evil has been lifted from this town." Clearly, I did this area a little bit out of order, but I made a note to return when I need to enter the "Voice Wood" for whatever reason.

Or when I need some undead eggs.

Returning to the road, I made my way to Kalaman, where I got my lead characters restored at a temple and leveled up some of the others. The knight commander, Daine, was eager for my help countering the growing influence of Lord Soth. He introduced me to "the beauteous Ariela, my advisor and consort," who told me that the Dream Merchant had a pavilion in the city's bazaar. She also warned me about Sebas Astmoor, "Soth's favorite and a potent cleric," who "left scenes of incomparable horror" the last time he was in Kalaman.

This is essentially the first time the party has heard of "Soth" in the game, although I guess he was probably pretty famous in the game world from the War of the Lance.

The bazaar occupies more than a quarter of the northwest of Kalaman. It's a maze-like area full of tent walls that you can tear through if you reach a dead-end, although that seems kind of jerkish. Anyway, when I approached the Dream Merchant, a bunch of guards suddenly shapeshifted into Sivak Draconians and attacked.

A true role-playing choice.

To recount, I met 5 types of Draconians in Champions of Krynn. Baaz are melee fighters whose skin is so tough it can capture a character's weapon for the rest of the battle. Kapaks can paralyze with their melee attacks and dissolve into pools of acid when killed. Bozaks explode when slain, damaging everyone around them. Auraks are the most difficult. They cast "Fire Shield" as their first spell, making it damaging to hit them in melee combat. Once you kill them, they immediately come back to life with 20 hit points. Kill them again, and they come back to life a second time, immortal and immobile--for three rounds, at which point they explode in a fireball.

Sivaks have the ability to change their features and impersonate humans--dangerous for plot reasons, but not in combat. I killed them quickly. Unfortunately, others kidnapped the Dream Merchant and got away. Wandering around, I found a note asking me to meet in the center of the bazaar after 16:00. "Since we both seek to stop the Lord Soth from coming to power," it said, "why not bring the sleepstone and the Dream Merchant together under rules of truce?"

I slept for a while, restored my spells, and went back to the bazaar. At 16:00, I was greeted by a red dragon leading a pack of blue dragons and carrying the Dream Merchant. The Merchant begged me to give them the stone, saying that "its message will not benefit these creatures." But I refused and found myself in battle with three blue dragons.

I'm not a fan of blue dragons because there's no "Protection from Lightning" spell. Sure enough, they slaughtered me in the first battle; none of my characters was able to withstand more than 2 breath attacks, and I just couldn't kill them fast enough. Fortunately, I learned that after 3 breath attacks in a row, the dragons stop using them. When I reloaded, I cast "Mirror Image" on my two spellcasters and had them loiter around the dragons while everyone else ran behind a wall to safety. The dragons' breath attacks affected only the mirror images for the first two rounds, after which I felt I was safe. I brought everyone else back on the battlefield and killed the dragons.

Immediately afterwards, the Dream Merchant croaked out "Crook! Vin..." and vanished. (This turned out to be instructions to visit him on Crook Street in Vingaard.) The Dread Wolf appeared and ordered his allies to attack, and I faced another battle with clerics, mages and evil warriors.

I love it so when they line up like this.

It appears that the next stop is in Vingaard.

I should have said "No," just to see if the game immediately ended.

Now that I've had a few hours of exposure to the game, I can report several changes in the mechanics from its predecessor:

• The game remembers what spells you've cast, so you don't have to re-memorize the same ones over and over. You can memorize new ones if you want, but otherwise you just have to rest to re-memorize the old ones. This is a very welcome addition.

• "Next" and "Previous" no longer target allies when aiming in combat. Yay! I've been complaining about this since the first combat in Pool of Radiance.

• In combat, the game remembers who you last aimed at. If he's still alive in the next round, he's automatically targeted. Another very welcome feature.

• SPACE has stopped working to center spells. Instead, there's a new "center" command--but it only works if you're cycling through enemies with "Next" or "Previous," not if you manually aim. This is a bit of a regression, but since the SPACE trick wasn't documented, it might be a benefit for some.

• We're back to having to hit "Move" at the beginning of combat to start walking, instead of just being able to go right to the movement keys. Boo.

• You now have the option to end the battle immediately when the last enemy dies, instead of having to deplete everyone's turn first. This is a good addition.

In total, the good changes outweigh the bad ones. Coupled with the "Fix" command introduced in Curse of the Azure Bonds, they address almost everything that was wrong with the original interface.

Other notes on gameplay.

• As I said about the last few Gold Box games, they feature a pleasing redundancy in keyboard, mouse, and joystick commands. If you're using the keyboard, you just hit the first letter of the command. To use the mouse, you click on it. And if using a joystick, you move it until the right command is highlighted and hit the button. It's refreshing to meet a game that accommodates every player's style. I'm naturally using the keyboard almost exclusively.

• I was surprised that the game doesn't support VGA graphics. I guess this is the last one that didn't, which means that I'm probably playing it in the right order for 1991.

• I keep hoping that the Gold Box games will start showing more in the environment than just wall textures, and I keep suffering disappointment. 

Would it be so hard to show a mound?

• It's been a running joke throughout the Gold Box series that the economies are horribly, horribly broken, loading up the player with so much money that the characters quite literally can't move. This is the case here from the first minute. In the first combat, I noticed that no one was capable of moving more than 3 spaces because they were carrying thousands of steel pieces from Champions. I dropped them all for mobility's sake. Even so, I left the outpost--the very first map of the game--with 12,000 steel pieces in the bank, mostly from selling enemy bracers. There has been nothing interesting to buy so far.

Why are bracers so damned valuable?

• Have we ever had a discussion about how turned undead provide no experience? Why is that fair?

• I love that the series has used the same full-party death screen since the beginning. I'm picturing a bunch of dragons and skeleton warriors breaking out the booze and dancing the night away.

• The "adventurer's journal" concept is starting to feel very dated. Surely, there's no longer any space reasons that they couldn't have put the text on the screen. I think it's more of a copy protection issue than anything else at this point.

Nothing about Death Knights of Krynn so far has felt familiar, so I'm guessing I never played this one, even in the 1990s. On the other hand, the plot hasn't exactly been gripping so far (I'm running around trying to get a dream out of a stone?), and the nature of the storytelling has been a little clumsy. 

But man, am I happy to be back in Gold Box combat again. It's been since Moria, which I stopped playing back in February, that I've rated anything higher than a 4 in this category. I never get sick of the tactics and challenge that this combat system provides.

And I never get sick of this.

Time so far: 3 hours

Reload count: 2

*****

In list news, I tried to get Return of the Ring working, but I couldn't get it running stably with a Dragon 32 emulator (the only platform it was released for). It was a tape game, and it kept wanting me to rewind, play, and advance the tape, and the emulator controls didn't seem to do the job or I didn't understand them. I think it's more of an adventure game anyway, despite being a sequel to an RPG.