#Pool of Radiance

[vintagerpg]

Once upon a time, SSI made a series of Dungeons & Dragons videogames collectively referred to as “Gold Box” games because their boxes were, well, gold. They were a mix of 3D exploration and top-down tactical combat with good graphics for the era (and they generally hold up pretty good today). The first, Pool of Radiance (1988), set in Forgotten Realms, was a big hit. Lots of people explored the pixelated ruins of Sokol Keep and the curiously named city of Phlan, and get warm, nostalgic memories at the mention of the name.

This is FRC1: Ruins of Adventure (1988), a squarebound D&D adventure boasting the same cover painting by Clyde Caldwell as the Pool of Radiance computer game. It sort of bills itself as a companion to the videogame, a way to translate its action to the tabletop, but apparently SSI actually fashioned the videogame out of the tabletop adventure framework (which does adhere in curious regular ways to the computing constraints of the videogame, with maps on 16x16 grids—they feel fine in the game but weirdly claustrophobic in the book). There’s a bit more in the book, too: a Zhent outpost, several lairs of monstrous humanoids I don’t remember from the game and a thri-keen settlement that definitely wasn’t there. There’s lots of background material and lore, too, of course, it being a Forgotten Realms product. And because it is such a loyal reconstruction (or progenitor), it functions as a pretty thorough tip book for the videogame too.

Is it good though? I dunno! It’s weird, for sure. It is kind of nice to see a D&D product that isn’t obviously panicking about how videogames are going to destroy the tabletop industry, at least? And it is a nice way to revisit the game without having to figure out how to make it run on a modern machine. Ruins of Adventure is a terrible name, though.

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Forgotten Realms: Pool of Radiance: Attack on Myth Drannor Cover Art by Gerald Brom

[retrocgads]

USA 1997

[dndhistory]

Let's Play Pool of Radiance (1988) - Part 22

This episode we finally start Pool of Radiance's Endgame! We take Stojanow Gate to get access to Valjevo Castle where the perfidious Cadorna ran to and where the Boss Tyranthraxus rules! We move into the castle, and navigate through the maze... only to get a bit lost!

The musical score in this episode was gently provided by Gorgon's Alter, taken with their permission from the album "Celestial Witchcraft".

Support independent artists and get it at Bandcamp: 

Opening Music "Life" by MORSCHT, taken with their permission from the album "a sacrifice of myself unto myself".

 Support independent artists and get it at Bandcamp:

https://morscht.bandcamp.com

Pool of Radiance was the first Gold Box game and the first game set in the Forgotten Realms. It used the rules of first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Find out more about the history of Dungeons and Dragons at The History of DnD Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr and Website! 

https://www.instagram.com/thehistoryofdnd

https://twitter.com/thehistoryofdnd

https://bsky.app/profile/dndhistory.bsky.social

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/dndhistory

https://dndhistory.org/

Title Card created by Raquel studio: https://www.instagram.com/raquelg_studio/

[badragonplays]

TSR DND ForgottenRealms supplement Ruins of Adventure covers the northern area of the MoonSea from the original CRPG Pool of Radiance.

[derkastellan]

Quick tour of the Gold Box games (Part 1)

So, given how much time I spent on the Gold Box games lately, I wanted to share some notes on the games, maybe also some relevant bits.

Pool of Radiance

Overall style: Mega Dungeon and Sandbox.

Overland Map: Traverse on grid, random and hidden locations

Quirk: Extensive level scaling which ups the challenge, especially in the beginning.

How does it fit in the line: This is probably the hardest title until the very end of the series. You find your bearings with the engine, its quirks, how the spells work, you have to sort out effective combat tactics. And then you're set. It's a great intro to both the Gold Box line and AD&D, but it surely does not tutorialize you. At. All.

Variety: You get the feeling of visiting many varied locations, some quests/sites have a different feel, some missions bypass the focus on combat. They crammed a lot into this one. Due to the limitations of the early engine you still feel like you battled a lot of the same enemies, over and over, and in waves. Still, many challenging set piece encounters that break the mold.

Notable NPC: Cadorna the Traitor.

What I think: See this article.

What can we learn from it: Healthy mix of environments. All missions lead to the end goal, but not all derive from the same big bad. Good, explorable individual locations. How to vary the same enemies into evolving encounters that keep challenging you. And it really did a good one on backtracking - more of that would have done the series good.

What it could have done better: Give a tutorial or intro to the game, or guide you at the start. Maybe. Sometimes figuring stuff out the hard way is also very rewarding.

Curse of the Azure Bonds

Overall style: Separate locations, spanning multiple maps each (episodic).

Overland Map: Point crawl. Mid-game, additional optional locations become available to explore.

Quirk: Cameo by Elminster... if you happen to know him.

How does it fit in the line: Curse of the Azure Bonds feels like a sequel. It is not as tight as POR, nor as focused. It evolves the engine somewhat. You get a bit of a feel for the politics / conflicts south of the Moon Sea.

Variety: Yes, there are many varied locations, but to me most of them don't have much flair. Dracandros' tower and the thieves' guild / sewers at the beginning seem most memorable in terms of dungeon design. Definitely a lot more variety in enemies. It has a damn beholder - probably one of the most complex monsters in the whole line.

Notable NPC: Dragonbait, the saurial paladin whose emotions you can smell. (Nacacia, my ass!) He's on the cover, too.

What I think: COTAB feels a bit weak compared to POR. It starts a trend in Gold Box games' dungeon design - you can enter a lot of rooms in a non-linear way, but most of them feature just unrewarding combat you may skip. And you want to skip lots of it, really. Most of the game I don't remember, having played it one week ago. In POR, set piece encounter rooms often featured some reward - a clue, a story, a piece of gear, needed money and XP. You often had to do many of them, anyway, might as well tie them up in a good way. Not in COTAB - they just feel so skippable! And while you may spend your sweet time exploring optional stuff and could do the middle part in any order, the game rubs a recommended order in your face, so it narrowly escapes feeling linear after all. (The illusion wears thin but holds, I guess.)

What can we learn from it: COTAB tries its best to keep the point crawl lively by tying stories to each leg of the journey, and tries to avoid being too repetitive by making routes previously traversed safe.

What it could have done better: While it works for COTAB, the idea of "the GM can do things to me" bonds is... highly questionable. The party suffers "consequences" for things they never intended to do and had no chance to avoid - and for example gets banished from a whole country. In the context of a CRPG that's no big deal. But in your campaign, this could suck big time.

Gateway to the Savage Frontier

Overall style: Separate locations, spanning typically a single map each (episodic).

Overland Map: Huge map. And yet almost completely unused except for conveying amount of travel needed - there's only one location you visit which isn't a city and it is in the most obvious place imaginable.

Quirk: We're the heroes, and we're gonna walk into every house in town. Oh look! We surprised some spies!

How does it fit in the line: As a game Gateway seems considerably less complex, it feels almost like a tutorial to the other games. You spend considerably less time on each location, making each feel even less memorable than COTAB locations. Given the restrictions of character import/export you should play Gateway right after COTAB. Could of course be considered its own line.

Variety: Quite a bit, it reuses a lot of stuff all over. You don't spend enough time anywhere to let it bore you, anyway.

Notable NPC: Krevish, the harmless-looking fighter. He actually has quite some useful stuff to say over the course of the game.

What I think: This is the tutorial for gold box games you never got. The game is easier, features difficulty controls. It is actually fun in its own way but also rather simple - it's essentially a MacGuffin hunt with some clues, and if you fail to decipher the clues, you can traverse the map and ask a friend. A super quirky sage friend.

What can we learn from it: Gateway, by virtue of having a big map, helps us envision the sheer size of the frontier. Different regions of the map have matching encounter tables - something you quickly learn if you travel through the Troll Moors...

What it could have done better: Gateway should have utilized that map better, placing locations in the wilderness you need to look for. Instead it opted to place practically all its crawling in cities - and adding some "cities" / "dungeons" off the world map on islands. In comparison, POR's overland map was smaller and more condensed, and yet there was plenty of original content to discover, including randomly placed monster lairs. What seems bizarre are all these city maps that double as explorable dungeons, so you get attacked by barbarians or stirges on your way to the inn.

Secret of the Silver Blades

Overall style: Mega Dungeon all the way.

Overland Map: None. Instead you have a central teleport hub you can use to avoid traversing the huge ass dungeon over and over. Only Gold Box title without an overland map, and it shows.

Quirk: Enormous plot convenience with a wishing well oracle that can generate riddle answers for money and has teleporters wherever you need them to break the game into manageable chunks.

How does it fit in the line: Even at the time, I read a review of the game that was rather dismissive and biased me against it. It is, in a sense, the most linear of the games. On the other hand, it broke the mold in making all these maps that were not simple 16 x 16 grids but huge-ass sprawling and branching dungeons to explore and map out by hand.

Variety: The game sends you through a sequence of locations - ruins, mine, dungeon, glacier/frost giant village, boss castle. Each area is themed. It sticks to its themes well, and yet that makes it feel less varied, somehow.

Notable NPC: Vala, the original plate mail bikini girl. To complement her picture (eyes up here, buddy!) you get a combat icon that shows a lot of mid riff. No wonder she takes way more damage than my (overleveled) party!

What I think: This game shows the importance of imagination in early computer RPGs. It might have fared better and distracted better from its linearity if these locations featured in a modern remake in third person or 3D style. But by lacking any overland map and you returning to this village for resupplying the game feels smaller than it is. It actually took me the most time to beat due to its sheer size. And it still feels like you're nowhere, getting nowhere. They tried to break the mold on this one, but psychologically they failed. You need to manage your players' perceptions, too.

What can we learn from it: Most people probably would get bored of the same Mega Dungeon sooner or later, no matter how much variety you contrive for it. (Leaving "Diablo" aside, an entirely different gameplay experience.) It's not that they failed to try for variety, they really tried, it's just the psychology of the whole thing. Which tells us that in RPGs, the setting matters a lot. If you feel cramped into this tiny nowhere psychologically, the actual total size of the combat maps doesn't matter much. The story feels terribly local and limited through the way it is told. The game itself is massive.

What it could have done better: Lots, actually! - Combining size with lots of random encounters is rather tiresome! I kept lowering the difficulty to finish combats faster and since the manual said it lowered the likelihood of encounters. - The game treats giants as regular encounters, making you wade through hill, fire, frost, and cloud giants like they are a nuisance. By the end, even three Ancient Red Dragons at once become a mere blip on the difficulty curve. This shows us rather neatly why even AD&D 2e did a rebalancing there. If ancient dragons feel like somewhat challenging enemies, then it reduces the sense of adventure. - The game massively relies on a particular sort of enemies in mid- and end-game: Monsters with flesh-to-stone gazes. If you don't have mirrors, this is basically a save-or-die encounter and winning initiative is extremely important. If you have mirrors and equip them in time, it trivializes a lot of encounters instead. It's rather satisfying to turn a medusa to stone, though. (The Gold Box games do not consider the penalties, I think, for fighting while averting your gaze.) Most sought item in the game: Reflective magic silver shield - total: 1. Save-or-die needed to go away and won't be missed. 5e does this much better. - Iron golems suck big time.

[tiffany-smith]

Read Pool of Radiance this week and it head-hops SO much but honestly? Either its really well-done or sometimes it just doesn't matter.

Tbf ot headhopped ALL the time and VERY consistently it wasn't just. One random slip-up here or there like it WAS obviously on purpose but like. You can totally do it ig.

Reading weird poetry and short stories and unapologetically strange novels really does teach you that a lot of stuff people teach you about writing is just not true. Almost anything someone tells you must happen when you’re writing has an exception and writing advice has trends and fads just like anything else.

I was struggling to find where I fit as a writer until I found writers like Daniel Olivias who wrote short stories in ways I’d never seen before. I owe a lot of my current inspiration in my writing to Latin American magical realism writers. Finding magical realism and surrealism really opened doors in my brain that had been shut before.

You can get weird with it. You can get weird in content, weird in form, weird in structure. You don’t need a plot. You can tell a story backwards, you can just sit in an idea, you can explain, overexplain, skip explanation, get political, start ideas, end ideas. No ifs ands or buts you can just throw traditional story structure out the window.

I know what kind of writer I am now. A weird one. You don’t have to be held to standards of predictability, genre fiction, markets, tropes. You can just do whatever. Truly. Honestly. Completely. For ten words or a hundred thousand.

[drow-apologist]

you have 0 pp

[ultimacodex]

Through the Moongate 18 - Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny

Through the Moongate 18 - Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny This episode covers the development and release of "Ultima 5" across various platforms.

Subscribe on Zencastr | Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe on Google Play | Subscribe on Spotify | Subscribe on TuneIn | Subscribe on Stitcher Podcast Topic(s) Andrea Contato’sThrough the Moongate, per its Kickstarter page, “illuminates the path of the Ultima games’ history and the creative people behind this landmark series. It also covers some of Origin’s other games, especially Wing Commander,…

[y-rhywbeth2]

Is anybody else occasionally weirded out by the lack of day-night cycle in BG3? I'm not complaining: it doesn't matter in the slightest, but the fact that time doesn't pass/there's no option to wander around the map in the dark just feels weird in some way. Maybe I'm just used to having them in games.

[vintagerpg]

The multimedia extravaganza mostly dried up after Azure Bonds. The next SSI game got a tie-in novel, but no adventure book. TSR pretty much ignored SSI after that. In 1994, TSR opted to not renew SSI’s license. Black Isle made some notable D&D videogames, and then, for some reason, came Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor (2001), from Stormfront Studios (who had previously worked on the AOL Neverwinter Nights and the SSI Savage Frontier games). It wasn’t as bad as Temple of Elemental Evil (2003, and totally unplayable), but it was close.

Tie-in novels had been back for a little while, based on the strength of the Baldur’s Gate games’ popularity, so no surprise about this videogame also getting a novel. However, it also, briefly marked the return of the weird tabletop companion book, perhaps because the videogame was the first full digital implementation of the 3E rules (probably to its detriment, as it had been developed as a 2E game and been converted mid-development).

Anyway, Pool of Radiance: Attack on Myth Drannor (2001), exists, one of the not very common soft cover 3E books. Novelty: it ties into the videogame, rather than re-enacting it. The plot centers on the machinations of the Cult of the Dragon and their attempt to use a pool of radiance to empower one of their dracolichs. It seems mostly OK, but veers into some truly weird shit, like the naked man and the deepspawn living in weird symbiosis? I dunno, there are some mysteries I refuse to investigate, even for you, dear readers. A box of text at the end explains that the characters in the videogame destroy the body of the dracolich, but the heroes of the tabletop have the chance to destroy its phylactery and make victory permanent. Seems like a lot of work, honestly. Let the dracolich be free to eat garbage and do crimes, I say.

The art is nice, at least. Ted Beargeon and Vince Locke inside, a nice Brom on the cover.

[downfalldestiny]

Radiance in white 🤍 !.

[retrocgads]

USA 1997

[dndhistory]

Let's Play Pool of Radiance (1988) - Part 19

This week I manage to fail at pressing record for a whole mission to Zenthil Keep! However, I do manage to press record in time for a rematch at the Kobold Caves and we finally get that done! Expect a long series of battles, as we survive by the skin of our teeth! 

The musical score in this episode was gently provided by Old Moth Dreams, taken with their permission from the album "Winter Ghost Tales".

Support independent artists and get it at Bandcamp: 

Opening Music "Life" by MORSCHT, taken with their permission from the album "a sacrifice of myself unto myself".

 Support independent artists and get it at Bandcamp:

https://morscht.bandcamp.com

Pool of Radiance was the first Gold Box game and the first game set in the Forgotten Realms. It used the rules of first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Find out more about the history of Dungeons and Dragons at The History of DnD Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr and Website! 

https://www.instagram.com/thehistoryofdnd https://twitter.com/thehistoryofdnd 

https://bsky.app/profile/dndhistory.bsky.social

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/dndhistory

https://dndhistory.org/

Title Card created by Raquel studio: https://www.instagram.com/raquelg_studio/

[braisedhoney]

Hey there captain! o7

Just wanted to ask if u had any further info for your hollow knight oc (or basically just you as a hollow knight character)? :0

I'm mostly just curious! I kept wondering if they would be a passive character or attack the Knight like the rest of the enemies? Or a bit of both?

I got rather excited to see u have an interest in hollow knight, Your design for your sona is really good and fits in nicely with all the other characters!!

ello there! o7

i've liked hollow knight for a while now actually!! huge fan of the art and game in general, i just never found the occasion to chat about it on here lol. lil guys in masks is kinda my thing, so of course i love em.

thaaaat said, i'm not sure if/how my little bee character would fit into the lore. i think my bee guy would be passive. depending on how much time passed, i can imagine them trying to travel in search of a possible cure for the infection.

if i had to spitball though, i'd say they first set off in a bid to try and cure the members of their hive—not sure if it'd be the same hive or a different one from the one that exists in the game–that were effected by the radiance. since bees don't have the signature glowing orange eyes or anything, the first time one of them went rogue must've been really shocking.

whatever it was, i imagine that they had their own little crew that they strove to protect the whole time. maybe they went as a group, maybe they stayed back at the hive, but either way they probably got captain as a nickname instead of a title.

if it is the same hive as the game, it would be both interesting and tragic if the knight encountered my character out in the wild, kind of like you do with quirrel. a little flavor text here and there would get you the info that they're searching for a way to help their hive and crew. they probably don't know that everyone else is infected, or that the queen is dead. (or if they do, they're deeply in denial about it.)

also they don't take the mask off, and the little lines along the bottom are carved in. ("Why do I wear a mask? Little knight, there are some questions you will not find answers for, whether it be for your own sake or the sake of others. My face is of little consequence, to my mission or yours.")

[derkastellan]

A detour to the Pool of Radiance (Thinking about sandbox design in 5e - Part 2)

Let's enter the wayback machine and travel back to... 1988? Yes, that's when "Pool of Radiance" came out, an "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" computer RPG that's still rather playable today (I replayed it last week) and was innovative to boot.

Computer games had taken a massive leap forward in terms of complexity when floppy disk drives became wide spread, allowing new content to be loaded into a game after it had been started. This took games from simple recreations of arcade classics (pew pew!) or little action adventures to complex roleplaying games very quickly. The Wizardry series, the Ultima games (Ultima V released in 1988 as well), the Bard's Tale games... and yet there was still plenty of room left to innovate, and Pool of Radiance occupied a lot of it in one feel swoop.

(The picture references "Nox Archaist", a game intentionally programmed to run on the decades-old Apple II, but released around 2020.)

POR did several things that games had not done before it. It implemented mass combat on an actual grid like you would see when playing tabletop (with dozens of enemies acting in their turns), and it implemented a rather big subset of the AD&D roleplaying game, down to some of its most obnoxious quirks. Gary Gygax may have been the first person to formalize an RPG rule system for publishing (though we should credit Dave Arneson with pioneering the idea of an RPG and being the first Dungeon Master before that), but his rule/game designs... had room for improvement. (Hey, being first ain't easy!) AD&D wasn't a balanced game, and oddly enough, the developers of POR took that and ran with it.

The series of games started by POR, which later on became known as "Gold Box games" due to their packaging, kept many of the bizarre "features" of 1st edition D&D. There were level caps for demi-humans in most classes, you could multi-class demi-humans (level up in multiple classes in parallel) and dual-class humans ("change jobs" and acquire a second class to level up in). There was "To Hit Armor Class 0" (THAC0) rolls and descending armor class, and many other things that have ensured that AD&D is the least emulated old school system, largely confined to the mostly forgotten OSRIC and the setting-focused "Hyperborea" game with that looong name. (And the "Advanced Edition" companions for games that focused on being more like "Basic D&D", of course.)

Oh, and the bizarrely huge list of medieval and early modern melee weaponry.

And somebody packed all of that into a game fit to run on the Commodore 64 (where it became one of the first three games I bought, beside "Ultima V" and "Pirates!") or the Apple II, gaming systems that were still wide-spread but nearing the end of their technological relevancy at that point.

But this is neither an article about early computers and their games, nor is it an article about Gygaxian "realism" in gaming, or AD&D itself. It's about the actual content of POR and what we can learn from it.

Background

The back story of the game is that Phlan was a city north of the Moon Sea, a major trading hub with the barbarian lands of the North. It never got to rival the big cities of the South, but Phlan was a thriving merchant community. Given its exposed position it fell twice to monster onslaught. And now the second time to rebuild has come.

The tabletop companion module says the city was overrun by armies of monsters 50 years ago with a unique level of organization. The game hints that this was due to a corrupted Pool of Radiance being used by the general commanding the onslaught.

After the ruin of Phlan the plot thins a bit, as somehow the general is still looking for ways to actually spread his power further. (The adventure module hints at a back and forth of forces that hardly explains why someone could stop such a unique force without any other major conquests.)

Within recent time an expeditionary force led by some of the older powers and families once reigning over Phlan cleared out a small part of the ruins and erected a stockade. They are hoping they can commission adventurers to clear out the rest of the city, while providing the essential services needed as well.

Story and Structure

The basic hub of your adventures is this stockade of New Phlan where you can buy gear, rest, sell your loot, level up, hire NPC help, and ... have bar fights? This is where the central questgiver resides, the Council of Phlan, or rather, its busy clerk.

The game then mixes mega dungeon, gating, and sandbox to let you set Phlan free. The mega dungeon aspect is the bulk of the city south of the river, with another smaller subsection north of the river.

The city blocks of the south are:

An area of slums.

A former residential area around the city's major well.

The library of a sage.

An open-air marketplace.

An area used for warehousing.

The gate to the city's castle and the castle itself.

(This alone translates to 11 maps crammed within the same 16x16 grid dimensions. Each step represents multiple 5' spaces and in fact the game generates battle maps from the actual game map you're traversing!)

The northern block housed two areas of mansions and the city's major temple, a veritable cathedral. Further removed from the city (and separate) is its graveyard.

The city itself also had a fortress protecting it from the sea, Sokol Keep on Thorn Island. It's now overrun by undead.

All the blocks of the south are connected (also with the block containing the stockade). You can in principle roam around here and look for adventure as far as your power permits. While the game attempts to structure your adventures, it doesn't prevent you from mucking about in this part - except through the increasing nastiness of "the residents."

Gating occurs at several points. If you set over to Sokol Keep and bring it back under council control, some sea lanes open. Then you can reach the northern blocks and the surrounding wilds (which you can explore on horseback on an overland map). There are entry points to the western part of the city from the wilderness map as well, allowing you to circumvent the ruins in between.

In fact, in the beginning you have only two points of access, the slums and the island keep.

A rough start

There are quite a few posts even from recent years of people complaining that this game kicks their butt. The beginning of POR is indeed challenging to overwhelming as it is neither as linear as it seems nor does the AD&D-based engine work as many computer gamers have come to expect.

You see, your best bet to survive in this game is to get your characters up to level 2, but since this is AD&D 1st edition your major source of XP are not monsters, it's gold and treasure. In other words, it's the loot that matters, not your kill count.

It would be better if the game made this more obvious as your first missions are to clear the slums and retake the keep. Clearing the slums does indeed involve a lot of combat, and you are required to beat a certain amount of random encounters and all set-piece encounters in order to progress. (The game doesn't tell you this, it just awards you the mission of, well, "clearing the slums" with no clue what it entails. I've seen guidebooks for this game disagree completely on what this means in game terms.)

There's just a few problems. First of all, as mentioned, the random encounters don't give much XP. Second of all - they scale! The stronger your party is, the more enemies you will face. In fact, at first you meet a handful of orcs, kobolds, or goblins. Then there are more per patrol, and joined by slightly tougher "leaders" with bows. Then goblin patrols might even be led by a bug bear! In other words, you don't really outgrow this mission, and yet you have to beat it.

The best way to level up in the beginning is venturing deeper into the slums and find the hidden treasures. The loot will level you up faster than any combat would. Besides, given that there are a few magic items hidden about, your combat power increases faster. (In turn you can safely rest in any rooms where you have beaten an encounter. Too bad nobody tells you so.)

Being at level 2 increases your staying power a lot. Besides, you need all the loot to pay for leveling up? Tough break, heroes. But you can't beat the slums just yet. You probably need to be level 3 to do that... because hidden in the most dangerous part of the slums (harder encounters) is a TPK in the making, a close quarter combat with trolls and ogres.

Say what?

So, your real best strategy is to level up through finding treasure, then venture to Sokol Keep where most of its quest can be beaten by paying attention to clues - and one sizable combat you won't survive at level 1 because you fight 50 enemies. This becomes doable around level 2 or 3, go figure. That second spell slot, mages!

In fact, you're better off eliminating a group of bandits in Kuto's Well first. Also, around this time Mendor's Library opens up for you - the area around it is safe to rest (making it a good forward base for exploring further into the city), but you can't get into the building proper without obtaining the Knock spell at level 3.

And then you return to clear out the slums for real, thanks to the OP Stinking Cloud spell, also unlocked at level 3.

In other words, you're backtracking. When you're stuck, you can explore new avenues opening up around you.

(A bizarre artifact of this system is that you can clear the required number of random encounters faster if you don't level up your characters - which you only can in town anyway - and handle all the random encounters by staying close to the city gate in "search mode." But that's really gaming the game. And a tad boring to do 15 times in a row.)

Linear and not

Another way to keep track is how the council awards missions and rewards (hey, more XP through treasure). But not all of them are created equal. You can optimize the order to match with your party's capabilities.

Example: Valhingen Graveyard. This is a threat not only to New Phlan, even the big baddie gets scared of the undead pouring out of the cemetery and tries to send his toughest cleric there. (Too bad you learn this by taking a letter from the priest's dead body... oops.)

Basically someone is making undead. And the threat grows. Now, in the tabletop module it grows exponentially, which makes no sense. (They're not breeding, duh, nor is one undead making the next two.) In fact, each section has a specter beavering away, making new undead. In the computer game this is tied to the strength of your party. (Which grows as time passes.)

The mission ends up being raiding the site, battling your way through the undead legions, eliminating the specters making new undead, and finally finding the vampire behind it all and end it. If you don't eliminate the vampire, he will raise the specters again. If you don't eliminate the specters, they will make more undead. Both with some delay, but that just gives you breathing room and the ability to do the mission in chunks if you want. (You better not delay too much "between visits." If you do, you're doing it over.)

Even though the game does try to motivate you to do this mission ASAP, you're better off holding off until you're level 6 - at least your cleric(s). Because then their ability to "turn undead" makes a huge step forward. This actually makes the mission substantially easier.

In fact, at this point your cleric will outright destroy lower level undead. Good luck figuring this out with the little the manual - see above - gives you. The real table is in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (T means "turned" without a d20 check, D means "destroyed" - you just roll for how many are affected):

But I digress.

The quest is offered to you twice. At first you're kind of pointed the way. Then you are even formally commissioned (and given magic items to help) to do it. And yet, it's still wiser to wait. In fact, on my latest run-through I delayed clearing the Temple of Bane because not doing so meant a NPC cleric stayed in my party, I leveled both clerics up, and then did the mission with two level 6 clerics as my holy "firepower."

No matter what, the mission is hard. It's oddly one of the few real chances to grind, though. Skeletons and such don't give much XP, but you're given treasure rewards by the council for each undead killed in the graveyard, effectively boosting the XP you receive.

But the decision when you feel ready to do this is up to you. In different playthroughs by different people it will have happened at different times.

Quest marker vs sandbox

There's a general structure to the game, tracked by the missions the council gives. Only after you make enough progress on this quest marker will you open up the finale. But it's up to you to delay some missions. Fighting large groups of enemies becomes substantially easier after you gain the Fireball spell at level 5, for example!

It's reaching these milestones that makes you feel your party's growth in power vs the difficulty curve. When your fighter starts cleaving multiple goblins or kobolds at once. When you cast Stinking Cloud or Fireball for the first time. When your cleric just turns low level undead to dust instead of making them flee.

And so this also influences how you do missions. You can wait for being awarded missions, but you can also explore the maps - the wilderness, the mega dungeon. You can even get rewards for clearing other city blocks if you eliminate enough random encounters.

The wilderness itself has a bonus feature. Not only do different parts have different encounter tables. There's an off chance you stumble across a monster lair (yes, it's random!) and fight your way to some interesting loot.

Dungeons and Wilderness and Scaling, oh my!

So, having said all that, lets put it all together.

First, let's talk XP. Tying XP to treasure means that the most interesting leveling in POR happens at points defined by the game designer, when making your way to hoards of money and gear. Some of them are gated behind key combats, but some are just hidden. The equivalent to this in 5e could be milestone awards, but you're probably best of giving away additional XP if you want to boost your party that way - usually to the amount of an encounter. (It's in the DMG.)

It's interesting, though, that POR in effect, but without outright stating it, did something similar to milestone leveling whereas most other games favored the grinding approach of bringing down enemies for XP. (The "Might & Magic" games stands out for being similar to POR in this, having specific treasures boost your XP dramatically.) The game keeps you motivated to find hidden treasure and accomplish missions this way and while you wade through a lot of monsters in doing so, you never have to grind. I breezed through the game in two days (knowing it quite well by now) without ever having to go "XP hunting", a testament to the balance possible.

You could reduce XP awards for combat if you want to, but then you'd better be on your toes of allowing to evade combat and dealing with it creatively. It's no fun to slog through it on tabletop and get diminished rewards for "doing it anyway."

Next is the mix of big dungeon and other gates areas, including the equivalent of a hex crawl. The balance here is notable - before you can tire of the mega dungeon, you can branch out into differently themed missions elsewhere (free a kid from being sold into slavery, battle it out with a tribe of kobolds, invade the lair of the wizard that poisons the river, etc).

Then there is the notion of sandbox dynamics. When you clear up the Stojanow River you also can traverse the river safely on the overland map. In the adventure module (but not the video game) at some point there's a counter attack on the stockade in an attempt to end the "hero threat" once and for all. Certain events in the game only take place when the respective missions have been awarded - changing parts of the locations. Contrast this with the "you always arrive at the right time" approach taken by many 5e campaign modules (described in the first article).

To top it off, the mix of scaled content vs not-scaled content is interesting. Some things get easier if you tackle them later, some stay challenging, with some content bordering on "Nintendo hard". (Kinda-sorta.) Please note that the game scales its random encounters, something you could emulate by prepping several versions of them, considering the "tiers of play" or a somewhat finer granularity. We'll talk about making things more dynamic in the next article, though.

Buy it on Good Old Games and get a whole slew of Gold Box games along with it. Or buy a scan of the original companion module. Or both.

And if you buy the game, really read the quick reference card for how to navigate menus with your hot keys. No arrow keys for you, no. 7 and 1 are your friends.