Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 28: Gold Box - Pools of Darkness (MS-DOS), Part 2

Today on Super Adventures, I'm getting right back into Pools of Darkness. I didn't actually get around to writing about any of the gameplay in part one, and I feel like that's something people clicking on a game article might be interested in.

The Pool of Radiance saga started on nine systems, but now there are just four left: IBM PC, Commodore Amiga, NEC PC-98 and Apple Macintosh. That's one less than last time, as the venerable Commodore 64 has finally retired. It was the final 8-bit computer left standing, but that era is now over.

Those four systems were the only ones to get the full saga, and that includes the books. There are only three novels: Pool of Radiance, Pools of Darkness... and Pool of Twilight. So they skipped the middle and added an extra story at the end.

I'm still playing the PC game, but I thought I'd show the Amiga title screen this time for the sake of variety. It doesn't add much variety though, as it's the same picture with fewer colours. Commodore really needed to get that AGA chipset out earlier, as even the Amiga's looking dated now.

Alright, beware of SPOILERS beyond this point. Beware of gameplay too, hopefully.

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Previously, in Pools of Darkness:

So what happened was that the god of tyranny turned up and just snatched a bunch of cities. My band of adventurers have been consistently foiling Bane's sneaky schemes for 10 years and I guess he just finally snapped. Now the Moonsea region is looking a bit apocalyptic and things have gotten so bad that the wizard Elminster himself has decided to intervene. In fact he summoned the greatest warriors in the area to assist him and it turned out to be us, that's how bad things are.

I suppose now we have to go kill some servants of Bane then.

And now, the continuation:

The game has put me on the world map, which gives me a good overview of how screwed everything is. There aren't a lot of cities left for us to visit here, but there are a lot of craters.

It seems like the game might have a bit of that Bioware structure to it, where the player has a few options about where to go next. That's not unusual for a Gold Box game, but I'm used to also having a home base to return to, with shops and inns and a place to level up. This time I'm on my own.

I can move my little white circle around the world with the arrow keys, so I decided to walk over to a different crater. When I got there I was dragged into a conversation.

Hey, aren't you the mayor from Secret of the Silver Blades? The one with the chest like a Rob Liefeld character who kept asking me how my day was? The one who was apparently in Curse of the Azure Bonds somewhere as well? It's hard to tell with all the reused art in these games.

Turns out that Priam is the leader of a Red Plume force (the guys that chased me out of houses in Hillsfar). They're hanging around a pillaged temple with plans to get inside and grab some proper weapons from its armoury. It seems like I can genuinely turn down helping them, so there's some role-playing for you. But I want to get into that armoury too, so we're teaming up!

Priam is hanging out with us now, which is good as he's a much higher level, and has an army.

Damn, I'd barely taken a step into the entrance hall to this temple of Tyr when I was attacked by a million Banite cultists! I really feel like the game could've started me off with something easier for my first battle.

Though on the other hand, it gives me a chance to try out my new army and I do like annihilating evil cultists.

Hang on, why is the army standing behind me and not in front of me? They're the ones with the shiny armour and the more detailed sprites! They make my imported heroes look like NES characters in a SNES game, though my magic user's gotten a surprise makeover at least.

Fortunately I just have to look at those walls and the plain grey floor and my characters don't seem so bad anymore. Was this normal for a strategy game of this era, or did it look really dated by this point?

Sid Meier's Civilization (MS-DOS)

The most famous strategy game from 1991 has to be Sid Meier's Civilization, everyone knows this one. It's not really the same genre, but they're both top-down turn-based games sold on their thoughtful gameplay rather than their flashy graphics. I reckon Pools of Darkness wins when it comes to unit icons at least.

I had a look on Wikipedia for other turn-based tactical games released this year and it wasn't a long list.

The prettiest of them seems to be Battle Isle (on the left). There was also Game Boy Wars, The Perfect General and RoboSport (on the right). They do have more detailed ground, I'll give them that.

Pools of Darkness' static fighters and featureless floors definitely wouldn't have impressed anyone who'd played Wing Commander II, Streets of Rage, Eye of the Beholder or anything in arcades. But for a tactical game that came out three years before the first XCOM and Warcraft, it seems to look decent enough.

What was I doing again? Oh right, annihilating cultists.

My team is hilariously under-levelled, but I  Cast Kaylee's 'hold monsters' spell on the enemy clerics and it successfully paralysed them before they got any of their own spells off. I didn't even know that worked on humans!

For the rest of my characters I've been telling them to Move toward one of the enemies, sword-first. If I repeat this for enough turns someone will eventually fall down. With advanced tactics like this, you can tell I've played a few of these games already.

In my defence, if there are two units next to each other and one moves away, the other will get a free attack on them. With everyone starting off so close and being unable to back off, this was always going to turn into a brawl.

Anyway I won the fight and got 7028 XP for my trouble! Not a bad haul for the first battle. I've also got an lot of enemy loot to look through, but fortunately I know the trick to this now: if I cast 'detect magic' it'll put an asterisk next to anything worth my attention.

What the hell? Everything is magical in this game, my spell is useless! Even picking it all up isn't going to help, as I can't get anything identified until I find a shop. I could be taking eight Long Sword +1s while leaving behind the Long Sword +3: Arctic Blast Edition.

Okay, I'm putting Gold Box Companion's auto-identify feature on, because this is just ridiculous. I still have to pick everything up before I can see what it is (and then equip it to see what it does), but at least I'll know what to drop.

I was very impressed with how 'hold monsters' worked in that battle so I should memorise it again so I can use it in the next fight. Fortunately that works automatically in this, I just need to rest and... 

Wait, why can't I rest? Where's the rest option gone?

No, game, you don't understand, I need to rest. Resting is how I get my health and spells back in these games.

I guess I just have to keep going until I find a room that's safe to sleep in, because I can't sleep here.

I continued deeper into the temple and got the option to automatically chase a dude around the hallways. What I need to find is a place to rest, but there was no way I wasn't going to pursue him. 

So that's the story of how I ended up in a second battle before I'd recovered from the first one.

At least I've still got some fireballs left in the tank.

I read somewhere that you need a paladin in your party in order to control NPC units, otherwise they do their own thing. Fortunately I do have a paladin, and I commanded my Red Plume troops to go stand in front of the vampire so it's not my guys that get level drained.

The fight was actually going pretty well until Kaylee got killed. Proper killed, not knocked unconscious. She can be resurrected, but I hear it costs a point of their constitution and I'm not doing that. I'll just keep replaying the fight until I get it right.

I beat the vampire on my second attempt, but one of my Red Plumes collapsed from level draining, which sucks. Probably not literally though; I don't think they drain a character's levels from their neck.

Now I've got six inventories full of +2 magical gear to sort out. Plus Priam has an inventory, but anything I give to him probably stays with him forever. It's a shame really, as if he could just give this gear to his men then they wouldn't even need to visit an armoury!

You might be looking at this thinking "How can you tell that the Chain Mail +3 you have equipped is better than that Banded Mail +2 you're carrying"? Well... I can't, to be honest. I'd have to either look it up or equip each of them and write down my stats.

Banded Armour +2: AC 2 to -6 (8 armour)
Chain Mail +3: AC 2 to -6 (8 armour)

Okay, it seems like they're exactly the same! One of them might limit movement more than the other, but I can't test that while everyone's loaded down with +2 swords.

I also got these torn pages, which seem very important and will hopefully make more sense later. 

I'm gonna put them away for now though and check my clue book, because what I really need is a room to rest in! After two massive battles I'm really out of spells and low on health.

It's weird, because this whole floor seems pretty safe at the moment. I keep expecting to run into random encounters, but all I'm finding are empty rooms and unlit braziers that hint at some kind of puzzle.

I found the room that lets me rest, thank you clue book! Alright, now I'm happy again. I can automatically heal up by pressing 'Fix', automatically get my spells back by pressing 'Rest', and then finally relax. And save my game.

There's a nice cosy picture on the camp screen for this game. It makes it feel like we're outside in nature, not resting in someone's office. There's still no music playing though. I'll have to set up my updated version of Gold Box Companion to play some suitable soundtracks. Maybe Castlevania would be a good match for this place.

SOME TIME LATER

Okay, I've scrubbed the black hand off the altar of Tyr to earn myself a temporary stat boost, and I've delved deep into the temple basement.

Incidentally, I like how they've split the 16x16 map into four separate 8x8 floors, that was clever. I'm kind of surprised by just how many rooms you can pack into an 8x8 block of tiles.

They had gotten even more clever with the map in Secret of the Silver Blades, creating a massive nightmare maze out of repeated rooms, but that made exploring tedious and the Gold Box Companion automap absolutely useless. Splitting it into floors like this only makes the in-game map useless. Seriously, it won't even let me activate it, not that you're missing much. Gold Box Companion's map is so much better that I'm basically using it as my main screen as I'm walking around, and ignoring the tiny 3D view of first-person flick-screen graphics.

Sadly I read a bit more than I should've done while checking the clue book for information, and learned that I needed to go down to the scary catacombs and pass a test given to me by a ghost with a tragic backstory. 

It's probably for the best though, as I might have slain the belligerent ghost of his beloved before learning who she is and denied them both a happy afterlife together.

What you're supposed to do instead is purify yourself with water, kill a monster to get a bowl, fill it with fire by killing the fire elemental, collect the lamp, and then light the braziers upstairs with the spirit flame. The clues were in that journal entry I found!

Alright, now that the encroaching darkness has been swept from the temple I now have free access to temple services, like healing, so that's cool. But now I must move on without my army. The Red Plumes are going to stay behind instead of using their shiny new weapons from the armoury to help me save the world.

My next stop was a cave in the north, where I found a Silver Blade called Vala who's wearing some of that high-defence RPG armour. And she actually recognised us as fellow blades!

I'm sure I read somewhere that one of the artists for these games wasn't keen on how they had to draw women as sexy '80s fantasy clichés, and they had gross discussions about it with someone else who worked there. It stuck in my head, because I don't think the women I've met in these games have really matched that description.

Don't get me wrong, they're not not drawn sexy, especially the NPCs running shops, and I'm not counting Alias in Curse of the Azure Bonds as she's from a book. But Vala definitely fits the cliché.

So now I have Vala on the team. She's a level 23 fighter, with max STR, DEX, CON and CHA. She's got 6 times the total experience of my paladin imported from Silver Blades and 15 times the XP of my fighter from Pool of Radiance. If Vala ever leaves my team during this quest I will be entirely screwed.

She also has a very shiny shield... which she is giving to me as a gift!

Alright, so Vassans are bad and they're creating a tunnel to invade the Moonsea. Man are they going to be disappointed when they find out all the towns are gone.

Their tunnel-digging elementals are drawn to four magic objects created by a wizard. Now I'm wondering why my own wizard never created anything cool. Where's the menu option to have Kaylee craft a World Stone?

I walked around the corner and ended up facing these guys. It's hard to tell from this tiny picture, but they've got 123 HP, while I'm averaging around half that. I clearly need to do some levelling up, and I would if I could!

You can tell by the yellow experience bars under Selina and Ivy that they're ready to level up right now, they just need to visit a trainer first. Unfortunately there aren't any trainers here, so my under-levelled team can't get better, no matter how many fights they win. It's like Curse of the Azure Bonds all over again.

Though I think I'd actually stand a chance here, if these magic users would just stop wiping me out in three blasts of ice storm!

I'm only level 8 or whatever, I don't have the health to tank this kind of assault! And I can't interrupt them by dropping a fireball on them all at once, because they're magic-resistant drow and they barely even notice that it happened.

My Silver Blade ally did her best to turn the tide of battle (mostly because I have direct control and sent her to do that), but once my characters start dying I have to quit and load a save.

So this happened again, and again, and again, until the dice landed in my favour and my heroes all survived the initial magical barrage. Selina only has 2 HP left, but she ain't dead. She isn't even unconscious.

Oh come on, leave Selina alone! I don't know how to cure feeblemind!

I got her behind a wall where she'd be safe and pressed Q to quit and end turn. Unfortunately this is not what Q does. Q turns on AI autopilot for that character.

But instead of running back to get killed, Selina spent her next turn bandaging a wounded Kaylee to save her from dying. Then she automatically fired arrows from a distance, helping me finish off the last enemies. It was one of those 'the AI with magical brain damage is still better at the game than I am' moments.

Anyway, my fighters may be low level, but with 'enlarge' cast on them they have the strength to deal out some respectable damage. Drow may be magic resistant but they're not sword resistant, and the battle is starting to go my way for once.

It took me a while and I nearly got my entire team wiped, but I actually managed to beat the very first encounter in the area! I may be in trouble here.

I had to make camp and use the 'Fix' command a bunch of times to get back to full health after that epic battle. 

Though Selina still hasn't recovered from feeblemind and I have two characters who need training, so I've decided that the best thing to do is to leave Vala behind temporarily and head off across the darkened plains once more. I know where I can find temple healing and then after that I can start looking for a trainer.

I ran into a merchant caravan on the overworld and they offered to show me their wares! Let me think, do I want to accept or not...

They don't have anything amazing, mostly just +2 bows and ammo, but they're selling a fine long bow for 5000 platinum and I want it. 5000 is almost too much money any one person to hold, but that's fine as I can pool my whole team's coins, plus I'll get a bunch of cash for selling the loot I've acquired so far.

I like the gap after "cloak", it makes it feel like they're expressing how disgusted they are that I would try to sell this pathetic item to them. The best they can do is to dispose of it for me (by giving it to one of their kids).
 
Moving stuff between characters hasn't gotten any less time-consuming, especially as I have to get to their inventory through their character sheet each time. I have to go into one inventory, make some space, exit out, go to another inventory, trade some stuff across, and repeat until everything's where I want it. Lots of going back and forth and exiting out.

Oh crap, I accidentally exited out of the shop and they won't let me back in. I didn't get a chance to buy the bow! I really wanted that bow. Well, I really want it now anyway.

Man, that's annoying. At least the temple was able to cure Selina, so I can tick that off the to-do list now.

The overworld seems to be where the game keeps most of its random encounters, but they haven't been a huge problem for me. Even my pathetically weak team can wipe the floor with them, it just takes a bit of time.

My plan is to head out to the places on the map that look like fortresses, as I've heard there might be training there. And if I happen to run into another merchant caravan selling bows along the way, well that wouldn't be the end of the world.

I was going to make a joke about it actually being the end of the world, but I think this whole Moonsea crisis is more of a localised apocalypse. We could always just walk off to Baldur's Gate or whatever and forget about Phlan.

SOON

I've wandered into a camp where mercenaries are gathering. Apparently this is where the bad guys recruit and train their evil minions. You'd think that this is the place that I'd least want to be right now, but my band of well-armed heroes look just like a band of well-armed mercenaries, so I was able to talk them into letting me in!

I mean, the game didn't give me any dialogue options or anything that advanced. I just selected "Talk" and let my paladin's charisma do the rest of the work.

Turns out that they have free level up training here! They may be bad guys, but their training still counts, and they even give you a hearty slap on the back when you're done. 

I levelled everyone up, but they're on the verge of levelling up again. This is because it won't let you store enough XP for two level ups; you're stuck 1 XP short and any further experience you earn is just thrown away. That's what I've read anyway, and it sounds pointless and frustrating enough for me to believe it.

Oh, I also have the option here to change class. This permanently ends the character's progress in their current class and starts them at level 1 in a new one. The trick is to do this around level 15ish, maybe higher. They lose access to their previous abilities, but once they get one level higher than they were in their original class they get them all back. I've heard that dual-classed ranger/magic users are particularly powerful.

So am I going to dual-class someone now? Not at level 9, no. I think I'll leave that until later.

Damn, why is this guy's art so much more realistic than everyone else's? Is it because the other characters are based on portraits from the old games and this was a guy who worked at SSI? 

He's running a shop in the mercenary camp but he only sells cheap stuff, no fine bows. It still gives me an opportunity to sell my loot though, so I can finally clear out my inventory. This is all magical loot as well, so it's going to be worth a fortune.

Oh right, money has weight. Even with my augmented 23 strength I can only carry a few thousand platinum, so I left 17,837 coins on the table and walked out. I don't think this game even has banks to store your excess money, not in this plane of reality at least.

Anyway, I found a room to camp in for the night. It was occupied, but I killed the evil mercenaries without much trouble and trained for two more level ups in the morning.

Then I headed out across the overworld again. I've gotten some levels and Selina has her wits restored, so I'm ready to join back up with Vala to help her sort out those Vassans.

A random farmhouse encounter, that's new! 

I'm actually getting into the game right now, going across the landscape, ending up in situations. Unfortunately there were vampires lurking inside and I hate those guys. They weren't much trouble, I just don't like anyone who can level drain me, even if Gold Box Companion gives me an easy way to fix it.

The heroes continued their journey and arrived back at the cave, where they discovered...

... nothing. Vala isn't here anymore, she's gone. Man, this game really knows how to piss me off.

You might be wondering how I didn't see this coming. Well, I did, I made a save before leaving just in case she left the party permanently. But I didn't expect to spend so much time outside before coming back. If I load my save I'll lose all the XP I earned.

So now I've got two choices: 1. I load my save and throw away two hours of gameplay to get Vala back. 2. I try to make it through the dungeon without a level 23 warrior with 155 health backing me up.

Actually I have a third choice: throw away all of my progress and start again with a properly levelled party, maybe even download a Secret of the Silver Blades save with some good items. I could also import my current heroes into a new game, so they'll start off a couple of levels higher than last time. That's a very roguelike way of playing it.

But I think I'll go with a secret fourth choice: quit the game here so I can finish writing about it.


CONCLUSION

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There's another title screen for you, from the PC-98 game.

I don't think I can really judge Pools of Darkness, because I keep hearing how this game is ridiculously hard and you need a godlike team of ranger/wizards with imported +5 weapons to stand a chance, but I was making decent progress with a bunch of low-level wimps on normal difficulty. Seems like I haven't gotten to the real Pools of Darkness yet.

Though I have gotten to the part where finding good magical loot is like sorting through a haystack after every fight for a needle that looks like the rest of the hay until it's been identified. I've reached the part where money is something you leave behind at the shop because carrying it is pointless and impossible. And I've definitely reached the part where leaving an area to level up causes you to permanently lose an ally.

I wanted to share my opinion on the part where you cross over to other dimensions through limbo and have to leave your weapons behind, so it's a shame I didn't get that far. But I've read that it can be fixed with a patch. In fact there are a lot of things in this game that can fixed or worked around with tools created by players, which shows that a: the game has real problems and b: the game has real fans.

On the plus side the graphics have improved a bit, and the level design is far better than the giant mazes in Secret of the Silver Blades. I like that this is one of the games where you can roam around and visit other places. Plus the turn-based tactical battle system gives it a rock solid foundation, even if it's not really improved over previous games.

That's Pools of Darkness all over though really: more of the same, not really improved, and considering that previous games had some really obvious flaws that's a problem. It still doesn't tell you how much damage a weapon does, it still has that awkward character editor, it's still missing music. And having to check a journal to read what people are saying to you feels especially archaic in a game that came out the same year as Monkey Island 2.

I've seen this kind of stagnation before, like in Core Design's original Tomb Raider games, which stubbornly refused to evolve and went from cutting edge to critical disasters. It's not so bad for genres where the core design is a solved problem, like racing games, platformers, boomer shooters etc. AGS-based adventure games have been getting away with using Beneath a Steel Sky's interface for decades, because it ain't broken and the novelty comes from their narrative and puzzles. But when a publisher releases 8 Gold Box RPGs over 4 years with the same obvious problems, it starts to feel like they were just churning them out on an assembly line.

Though I'm asking myself "Would I put this back on and play it some more?" Despite all its issues. Despite knowing that I'd be walking right into a difficulty wall. I think my answer would be "Sure, I'd play this for a little longer". I don't think I'll ever finish it, but I did enjoy it.

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That's it, I'm actually done with the Pool of Radiance saga! In fact, I'm only supposed to be playing the first 10 years of D&D games, so I'm pretty much done with Gold Box RPGs for now.

Thanks for reading all or some of those words, now I'm looking forward to the words you've got for me. Do you have opinions on the Pool of Radiance games? And do you have an idea about what game's coming next?