Dungeons & Dragons Games Vol. 13: Gold Box - Champions of Krynn (MS-DOS) - Part 2

This week on Super Adventures, I'm just playing some more of the DOS version of Champions of Krynn, but I thought you might want to see the PC-98 title screen instead this time.

The game was released on just five systems this time: IBM PC, Amiga, PC-98, Commodore 64 and Apple II, so we've lost the Atari ST and Apple Mac - both 16-bit systems weirdly. The 8-bit C64 is still hanging in there, but this was the final Dungeons & Dragons game to be ported to the legendary Apple II. It had been the main platform for RPGs in the US, giving the world titles like Ultima, Wizardry and The Bard's Tale, but it had its last major hit in 1989 with Prince of Persia. A computer that couldn't run SimCity or Golden Axe didn't really have a place in the early '90s.

In fact technology had moved on so far by this point that the PC version of Champions of Krynn actually has Adlib sound card support! It's also one of the very few Gold Box RPGs to support the Roland LAPC, which is basically an MT-32 on a card (the next few games didn't support it for some reason). It doesn't really change much however, as I think the only music in the whole game is the theme tune at the start.

If you want to go back to part one, CLICK HERE.

If you want to see all the Dungeons & Dragons games I've played CLICK HERE.

Beware of SPOILERS beyond this point.

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Previously, in Champions of Krynn:

The War of the Lance is over and we won! But evil still lurks across the land and six playable characters have been recruited to patrol the city of Throtl. There they found that the draconians are up to something and hero Caramon Majere is in danger.

And now, the continuation:

I've made it to the top of the Throtl map and found two new allies, Kildirf and... Soldier. Somehow I don't think Soldier is sticking around for long, but the guy's more than twice my level so I'll make use of him while I can.

They're both from Caramon's party so I feel like I'm going the right way.

There are a lot of hobgoblins in this encounter, but a couple of casts of 'sleep' has already knocked most of them out. I think I'll let auto battle take it from here as the fight's basically won.

Oh no, Soldier died while they were auto battling! Properly died, he's not unconscious. I guess my guys had more important things to do than stick a bandage on him before he finished bleeding to death. On the plus side, I've been saving quite often so it won't set me back too much to load my game and try again.

SOON

Okay, I'm back in the fight and this time I took a minute to properly read the dialogue first. Specifically the part where Soldier betrayed us and joined the other team!

You might be thinking 'How did you not notice that Soldier was an enemy?' Well, look at the top of the screenshot; Gold Box Companion thinks he's still in my team. Plus I can still control him. Even weirder, Kildirf has turned traitor as well this time! Look at the map, he's a red enemy box (he's the one with 12 written on). I think I must have hit a bug.

I loaded the save again and this time I tried walking around the dungeon to enter the inevitable betrayal room from a different door. The fight actually took this into account, moving everyone around so that I came in from another direction. Which is cool.

Reality remained intact this time and the fight went well. I even picked up a replacement for Soldier afterwards, a knight called Strangbourn.

A LITTLE BIT FURTHER ON

Oh no! Draconians in the ceiling!

These portrait images aren't animated, so the picture has them frozen mid-fall. I don't know exactly what's going on with the guy in the top left, but I don't think he'll be landing on his feet.

Here's an example of what happens when you allow enemy clerics an opportunity to fire spells off. They've hit four of my characters with 'hold person', which has the same effect as 'sleep'. Now they can't move, they can't defend themselves, and it'll only take a single hit to knock them out of the fight.

I've always got to make it a priority to hit enemy mages and clerics and make them lose concentration on their spell, because their priority is to shut down my whole team.

Now my heroes are going to be knocked unconscious in a single hit and the survivors will have to waste four turns bandaging them all up. Unless... they somehow survive 7 turns and the spell wears off.

This isn't actually impossible due to how the enemy can't move past my units. Well, they can, but they don't want to, because it gives me a free hit on them. That means they probably won't enter any of the tiles I've coloured green.

In a theoretical situation where that 12 HP cleric at the top kills my Squall (34) and moves into his square, he still can't go any further. Even if he kills Terra (22) on the next turn.

That's because moving into any of the green squares would mean getting hit by 28 or 36. He's stuck there now until they both die or move, and no one can get past him. 12 and 27 are safe.

Well, unless they just shoot them with an arrow.

I survived the fight and found guest star Caramon chained to a wall! And now I have to go find journal entry 73 to learn of his ordeals.

Alright, it turns out that the bad guys are about to start corrupting good dragon eggs again, like they did during the war. We really don't want War of the Lance II to happen, so we're probably going to be ordered to sort that out.

Suddenly, we hear a great crash from outside the room and a woman appears.

Hey, why is she the only one that's animated? Also who is she?

Whoever she is, she was sent by Sir Karl to get Caramon back to the outpost. So he'll not be joining my team then. In fact I'm losing Kildirf and my new buddy Strangbourn too!

I do have further instructions though: I need to find the key to the old temple. It's being held by cleric who lives in the south-west corner - which is a crucial bit of extra information mentioned in-game that I almost skipped. I really wish this had a proper quest journal.

Okay, Caramon Majere has been saved, onto the next mission.

SOON, IN THE OLD TEMPLE

Oh, are we not fighting? I only see people appear in the level like this when I hit a random battle, but this time it's actually giving me an opportunity to talk to them. Kind of.

There are no actual dialogue choices, the Gold Box games haven't caught up to The Secret of Monkey Island yet... but that's forgivable seeing as Monkey Island wouldn't be out for another 10 months.

Anyway, it turns out that 'haughty' was not the correct choice here. Then I chose poorly again in the next room by showing mercy to a lone cleric, who then ran off to find guards. It's fine, this isn't a stealth level. I'm here to stop bad guys before they corrupt dragon eggs and if the bad guys want to come to me, then that just saves me time.

A FEW FIGHTS LATER

Well I found the evil dragon egg corruption ritual, but walking in here interfered with the spell, causing the half-corrupted egg to explode and kill a bunch of people! That's kind of messed up!

The surviving clerics were furious, so I had to kill a bunch more people, but it worked out well for me as I got a magic flail and a potion for my trouble. Maybe even a health potion, I don't know.

I could head down the stairs to the next level of Throtl's dungeons now that the wards have been lifted, but first I'm going to take my loot back to the outpost and spend some coin to get it identified. Also Luneth earned another level up so I need to sort that out.

BACK AT THE OUTPOST

Almost all the choices you can make about a character's build happen in the character creator before the game even starts, but not quite all of them. Mages do get to pick a new spell, so I'm going to give Luneth 'stinking cloud', as that usually works out well for me. Enemies just wander right into it and get incapacitated, and it continues to work at higher levels than 'sleep' does.

Okay, back to the Throtl dungeon. Unless... I could just go somewhere else?

It's a shame that the in-game map isn't labelled, so I have to use Gold Box Companion's map to know where anything is. Or I suppose I could've checked the map in the manual.

I think I'll go check out Jelek... or maybe Sanction. Hang on, did they spell Throtl 'Throthl'? Every time I see the name it's got a different spelling. 

Amiga

Amiga players have a bit of an advantage here, as its towns actually are labelled! It's got nothing to do with the more powerful hardware, someone just thought it'd be a good idea to edit the picture and draw names on it. And they were right.

Oh, I've figured out what those three coloured circles along the top of the screen are, by the way. They're the phases of the moons! My white mages and red mages get bonuses depending on what phase their colour-coded moon is in.

JELEK

Hey, the other towns are actual places you can walk around! It's only the outposts that use a menu. 

And because this isn't an outpost my knights didn't have to pay a tithe! Works for me, I'm getting sick of being careful with who's holding the money.

There's a 'share' button to distribute the wealth equally among my characters and it's a great quality-of-life feature. So I'd like to use it instead of manually moving coins away from my knights' purses. I suppose I could just let the knights give a percentage of my money away and quit worrying about it, but there'll be something worth buying in one of these towns eventually and I'll be sad when I can't afford it.

I like how they only change the top half of the picture to represent different shops, that's clever.

The weapon shop is selling composite long bows, which don't seem to do any more damage than short bows but they cost a lot more so I want them. (I think they've might have a longer range.)

Though I got the best deal outside in the street, when I ran into a bunch of thugs trying to mug me. Turns out that they were tougher than the draconian forces I've been fighting in Throtl, and better equipped too - I took the banded armour from their corpses with gratitude. 

So it was suppose it was worth paying the town of Jelek an early visit.

NERAKA

Next I visited Neraka, the capital city of the evil territories. Unfortunately it wasn't so great for loot.

On the plus side, I ran into the annoying dragon men that shoot magic at you from a distance and explode when they die! They're still annoying. I remember in Heroes of the Lance I'd shoot a 'web' spell at them to incapacitate them, Spider-Man style, and now I wish any of my characters knew it.

There's really not much going on here though, so I'm moving on.

SANCTION

It doesn't seem like there's much of anything in Sanction either; it's like a ghost town.

I'm glad that there are no NPCs in this game that I need to track down and talk with to move the story along, but it'd be nice if there were any NPCs at all. Maybe someone with a side quest for me.

I feel like I've wandered onto a stage that's been built for a later scene in the story, and none of the actors are here yet. In Pool of Radiance I could just wander off to another city district and have RPG adventures, and Curse of the Azure Bonds gave me three different quests to complete in any order, but this seems a lot more linear.

So I should probably go back to Throtl and get on with the plot.

Hey, it took a while but I finally got into a fight on the world map! I didn't think the overworld had random encounters, but it turns out that they're just rare. So far at least.

These guys look tough, but they're pushovers really. In fact, now that I think about it, I haven't actually lost a fight yet. Maybe I'm good at RPGs now!

Or maybe I just have an overpowered party and I'm taking on the easiest challenges in the game.

THROTL - FLOOR #2

Alright I've hiked back to Throtl, made my way through the corridors to the stairs in the temple, and now I've reached floor #2 of the game's first dungeon. It looks a bit foreboding and befouled but at least all the screams are distant ones.

Turns out that this level is a lot like the floor above, as I'm getting some scripted fights and a lot of random encounters in between. Sometimes the scripted events give me a bit of text to read, or even a journal entry if I'm lucky. 

Oh damn, this is the best journal entry yet! The game's just given me a whole map of a place called Gargath Keep, showing all of its... teleporters? Oh, they're just circular stairs. And X marks the "Possible Treasure".

The bad guys are interested in Gargath Keep because it may contain a dragonlance - a weapon powerful enough to kill even a dragon. Man, what is it with all these enemies trying to claim my dungeon loot?

Speaking of loot, I've picked up some unmarked magic bracers, an unlabelled magical wand, an unknown hoopak... a whole pile of unidentified treasure. 

I'm fine leaving this stuff as a mystery for a while and continuing with the dungeon, but someone just earned a level up and I really need to go home and get them some training. Plus I could always use some more arrows.

It shouldn't take long, I'll likely only have to fight three or four random battles on the way back out.

BACK AT THE OUTPOST SHOP

Turns out I'd picked up a hoopak +2! Well that's Zidane sorted out for the rest of the game, and I'm not even joking. Hoopaks don't do a ton of damage, they're only usable by kender, and they look like a stick with a catapult on the top, but they're extremely convenient as they're both a melee weapon and a ranged weapon at once.

If an enemy moves next to someone with a bow, that unit can't attack until you go to the inventory screen, unequip the bow, and equip their sword and shield (or whatever). But a kender with a hoopak can just hit them with it. In fact they can still do ranged attacks too!

Oh, I also discovered that I'm carrying a fortune in gems somehow. I started selling them so I could deposit the coins in the vault, but stopped when it occurred to me that I might someday come across an item for sale that costs more money than I can physically carry. These guys need a debit card or something. 

BACK AT THROTL - FLOOR #2

Alright I'm back on floor two, facing all its various threats. It's usually a bunch of rats, or a cleric with an army of zombies I can 'turn', but this time it's all mages and clerics and I don't like it.

Hang on, my character Lightning is 'charmed'? What does that mean? Is this a spell I've seen before?

Oh it puts my unit under enemy control! So now I'm a man down and this party of magic users I'm fighting now has a powerful cleric/ranger on their side. That I don't want to kill.

Lightning's an elf so she should be resistant to charm, but I guess it only works 9 times out of 10.

Unfortunately I don't actually know what to do about it, except for maybe wait out the timer. Only 177 more turns to go before charm wears off and Lightning stops trying to kill everyone!

In the end I decided to go with a wild and innovative plan: I killed all the enemies, cast 'hold person' on Lightning to buy myself a few turns, and then I made a run for it. And my strategy... worked! The battle ended once my other five characters left the combat area and I returned to the dungeon screen with Lightning back under my control.

SOON

Oh no, I really didn't want to have to fight a boss at the end of these tunnels.

I've already seen how tough dragons are in the other Dragonlance games. One of them wiped out my whole eight-person party almost instantly in Heroes of the Lance (not hard to do, to be fair), and 25 of them were enough to conquer entire nations in War of the Lance.

And now my six heroes are fighting two of them on their own.

I honestly didn't expect that to go so well.

It really did take just one 'stinking cloud' spell and a single arrow to kill that dragon. The most awkward part was equipping the bow.

I suppose it goes to show just how powerful mages are in these games. Also the dragons had 14 hit points and my knight has 56, so I may have ended up overlevelled. I'm not sure how that would've happened though, as the random encounters I fought on the way to the shop and back hardly got me any XP.

BACK AT THE OUTPOST

Alright I reported back to Sir Karl and he said we're moving this show to another outpost near Gargath. There are dark plots afoot.

It seems like Sir Karl is going to be an important character in this story as I keep finding journal entries talking about his girlfriend who is 40 years younger than him. Not sure where that subplot is going, not sure I want to know.

GARGATH

Hah, this dude thinks his sword is ice cream!

I did actually stumble across the reason he's doing this in the manual. He's poisoning the blade with his saliva so it'll paralyse his enemies. Another enemy using paralysis attacks, just what I need!

Gargath seems to be under enemy control, but my contact got the team hoods to wear and told them of an NPC they need to visit. It's all very undercover spy stuff. Unfortunately my heroes aren't the kind of spies who can talk their way past guards, so I ended up having to fight my way out of this situation.

Anyway, Zidane found a secret door and got us into Gargath Keep. Now I need to use that map I found to locate the dragonlance and foil any enemy schemes I come across along the way.

GARGATH KEEP

Oh no, these enemies are poisonous? I don't have anything to cure that. 

In fact I didn't even get a chance to cure it, as the dude died the very same turn he was bitten. Usually I have a few turns to bandage my character up before they die, leaving them unconscious, but if these guys poison someone, they're just dead. It's not necessarily permanent, this is a world with resurrection spells, but I've read that if you raise dead characters then they'll lose a point of constitution they won't get back.

I'm just going to load my last save instead.

Two characters have level ups ready and I'm almost out of arrows, but I decided to carry on and walked into a room of enemies playing dice. They were a little surprised when I asked to join them, but they saw a chance to make some money and invited me in.

Then they scammed me with loaded dice!

Anyway, I killed them all, and then continued further into the keep.

EVENTUALLY

Whoa, more (mostly) full screen art! I don't see this often.

I chased a bad guy called Myrtani up a spiral staircase, taking on enemies every floor or so, and found that the bad guys wouldn't let me sleep to recover spells. 'Fix' usually worked to get my health back, but I need those spells too! That's not my only problem though, as the top of Gargath Keep's tower is the tiniest space I've ever had to fight in and Myrtani has a boss battle waiting for me there.

Against three dragons.

Good thing I saved a cast of stinking cloud!

I didn't even need to cast it twice, as once I killed the middle dragon, the one at the top came down into the cloud and gave himself nausea! The dragon at the bottom was unaffected, it's random if the spell works or not, but my swords worked just fine. 

Myrtani ran off with the dragonlance, so I've missed out on that, but at least I've shut down their egg packing operation. And now I need to fight my way back out again with the 60 arrows I have left.

BACK AT THE SECOND OUTPOST

Alright, I am back with the loot! Turns out that I had a 'long sword +4 vs. reptiles' in my bag, which seems pretty useful with all the dragons around.

Also, I got a ton of experience from that dragon fight, 5000 XP, which is enough to bring my whole team to level 5. This means that my mage can learn fireball! I've done two cities so I should be turning the game off now, but I want to go fight more draconians and play with my new fireball spell.

Nah, I've already played with fireball in Curse of the Azure Bonds and there are another 5,000 Gold Box RPGs after this, so I should just call it a night. Next game though, it's going to be wall to wall fireballs.


CONCLUSION

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I can absolutely believe that Champions of Krynn was SSI's next RPG after Curse of the Azure Bonds as it feels like no time has passed between the two. It looks very much the same, it plays very much the same, and it is, once again, just more Pool of Radiance... except sometimes not.

The biggest difference might be the change of universe from the medieval fantasy setting of Forgotten Realms, to the medieval fantasy setting (with more dragons) of Dragonlance. There is actually a lot of Dragonlance specific stuff going on here, like the new races and enemies, and the subclasses for your magic users. Plus the story is all about the War of the Lance and the corruption of dragon eggs.

This focus gives the game a different feel. In Pool and Azure Bonds your team of adventurers can really go where they want and their quest is to help themselves as much as anyone else. In this you're basically agents on a mission, and you do each objective in turn. Every few rooms there's another surprised cleric or a description of a creepy sound to remind you that you're playing through a story. It apparently opens up a bit later with some optional side quests, but I actually like that it hasn't repeated the same formula so far. The games would get very repetitive otherwise.

I ran into a bit of trouble in Azure Bonds when I got locked into a quest and hit a difficulty wall, but I didn't have that trouble here. Combat wasn't effortless, but my multi-classed elf squad was up to the task. It would've probably been more of a challenge if I'd accepted the dice rolls it'd given me for their ability scores at the start... so I'm glad that I didn't. Being able to save everywhere helped too, and you can also adjust the difficulty anywhere now as well. 

Azure Bonds had some improvements to make things less frustrating (like letting you automatically heal in camp, and not making you fight 30 enemies each battle) and Champions continues that work, adding a vault for your money and mouse control for the DOS version, finally! I reckon it plays better with the keyboard, but it's an option. A lot of the problems I had were familiar ones however. It still gives you nothing to save money for, swapping weapons is still a pain in the ass, and the copy protection kept trying to catch me out.

Plus you still have to re-memorise spells, the automap is still a bit rubbish, there's still no music, and half the game's text comes in a separate booklet. Fortunately all these issues are fixed by Gold Box Companion, and I wouldn't have had the patience to stick with the game without it. I relied on it being attached to the DOSBox window, giving me a dungeon map and a battle overview, and telling me when it was time to run home and level up.

The other versions have their advantages though. The Amiga version has better graphics, a better character creator, and this awesome-looking desktop icon:

Meanwhile the PC-98 port is great if Japanese is your first language. It even has a soundtrack, and I think most games should! There are also the 8-bit ports if you're nostalgic for those systems in particular and feel like some disk swapping. But once again the DOS version is probably the one to go for.

Would I recommend Champions of Krynn as someone's first Gold Box RPG? I dunno, maybe? It is the first of its saga, giving you low level play with limited magic, so it would definitely make the shortlist. Even if some of the enemies might be a bit awkward for beginners.

Would I recommend the game in general? Yeah actually, I think I would. The Gold Box turn-based combat gives it a solid base that's held up pretty well, and even when the D&D rules are being weird, they're at least faithfully weird. So I'm giving the third of the Gold Box games another gold star!


I'd be happy to play this some more. Even if it's just to test out my fireball spell.

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Okay, now that I'm done talking about Champions of Krynn, what did you think about it? Have you played it? Does it look like something that you'd want to play? Is there anything that I should've mentioned about it but didn't?

Oh, also there's a clue to the next game over on the left. Guess what it is to win a chance to feel clever.