Pool of Radiance Part Two – Sic Semper Tyranthraxus

Well, that was quick.

As I had mentioned in the previous post, one of the greatest strengths of Pool of Radiance is that the game offers a huge world to explore while still tying the dozens of areas together with a rudimentary plot.  The problem I ran into with just taking on areas at the order in which the city council requested them is that the game wasn’t necessarily meant to be played this way, and I ended up brute forcing my way through the two most difficult areas in the game while just barely powerful enough to survive.  Had I followed the cluebook closer, I probably would have been able to take the hint about how the graveyard is located on the page before the final castle and saved it for later (or ignored it altogether, like I did a few other areas).  But instead I persevered, despite the fact that half of the monsters in the area can level drain.

Level draining is a bizarre and hateful little ability that may require some explanation. Wights, vampires, mummies, and the rest of the combined Universal/Hammer horror pantheon have attacks that go far beyond merely hurting a character.  Most of them have a chance to inflict diseases when they hit you (which in this game translates to making a character sluggish and unhealable until you have access to a Cure Disease spell) but almost all of them can drain a level of experience upon touching your character.  And in a game where your levels rarely exceed six, this can be a pretty big problem.   And just like the pen and paper game, levels stay drained until you cast a 7^th level Cleric spell, in a game where the maximum spell level is 3^rd.  The way the game gets around this is by plying your characters with Regeneration scrolls, which your Clerics can cast at any level.  But even after reading a fistful of scrolls you still have to spend the 1,000 gold pieces it takes to train back each level lost, one of the few serious uses for money in the game.

Once you clear out Sokal Keep, your party has the option to expand its racial cleansing services to the wilderness surrounding Phlan.  This is where the game starts to feel a lot more like a Dungeons and Dragons game proper, as the encounters become a lot more varied than goblin-variants by the dozens and the areas that you explore gain a lot more character.  Unfortunately, I made the assumption that the Kobold Caves would be the easiest of the areas outside of Phlan, and spent a while throwing myself against the final fight there.  While Kobolds are one of the easiest monsters to fight in Dungeons and Dragons, they often make up for it by being one of the best races at creating traps.  Not coincidentally, the Kobold Cave is one of the few areas in the game that actually utilizes traps, including siege weaponry hidden in the walls to shoot down your wounded characters between waves of combat.  It’s also one of the few wilderness areas that cannot be completed diplomatically, ending in a giant melee against hundreds of kobolds supported by annoyingly tough and regenerating enemies such as trolls and giant boars, both of which can get up after being slain.  Fortunately, at this point you most likely can cast Fireball, which quickly becomes the bread and butter of the party’s Magic-Users, as a well-placed fireball can cook twenty or more enemies.  Unfortunately, there are very few challenges between the Kobold Cave and the end-fight, beyond the genre-standard teleporter maze in one of the other wilderness areas.  By the time you have access to Fireball, the game is pretty much decided in your favor.

That isn’t to say that the other areas are any less interesting.  In fact, the option to diplomatically and/or cleverly solve most areas is honestly refreshing, especially since the alternatives are usually a somewhat arduous fight against hundreds of low level enemies with next to no chance of hitting your Fighters.  Granted, the diplomatic options usually involve fighting waves of Kobolds (again) or 1^st level Thieves, but they at least let the game tell a story at its own pace and build a world that is interesting enough to save.

As most of the auxillary characters will tell you, Phlan is currently conquered by a demon named Tyranthraxus, who is marshaling the various evil races and factions in the area using the titular plot device, the Pool of Radiance.  What exactly the Pool of Radiance does is never strictly defined, but it has let Tyranthraxus (inexplicably not the name of a metal band) succeed in summoning more and more powerful monsters in his service, causing friction amongst the orcs and other races you completely wiped out before you knew all this anyway.  Most of the quests in the wilderness area involve convincing other races to not join Tyranthraxus, which can be accomplished either through politeness or mass-murder.  Eventually, the one city councilman that was given a proper name (and therefore the evil city council member you were vaguely warned about in the beginning of the game) sends you on a diplomatic quest against the Zhentarim – the go-to evil secret society in the Forgotten Realms setting – which ends predictably in a failed assassination attempt against the party and the resultant go-ahead to the end-game.

You can pleasantly complete almost the entirety of the final area (a massive and literal hedge maze) without getting into combat, which at this point is largely an annoyance, by visiting a laundry at the beginning and disguising the party as monsters.  If you play your cards right, you can even recruit Tyranthraxus’ second-in-command to help with the final boss fight, though the lightning bolt wand he wields is completely useless against the bronze dragon Tyranthraxus is possessing, and the AI is too inept to properly use it against the horde of 8^th level fighters you have to slay beforehand.  The last fight is actually pretty difficult, but like most of the encounters that aren’t solved by judicious applications of Sleep and Fireball, both the Fighters and Tryanthraxus are susceptible to the various forms of paralyzation available to your party.  If nothing else, the image of a giant dragon murdering my party one by one until a Stinking Cloud or Wand of Paralyzation stuck so a fighter could casually slit its massive throat is hilarious, but an anti-climactic ending to an otherwise fantastic game.

Of course, once you finish the last boss fight, the game isn’t entirely over.  Your characters are rewarded a ludicrous amount of gems and jewels and there are hints dropped that you may want to max out your levels so you can transfer your party to the next game in the series, which I won’t be doing due to the fact that the optimal party for Pool of Radiance (Cleric/Fighter/Magic-Users) actually hit their racial level cap at the end of the game, leaving them unable to advance much further and ultimately leaving you relatively under-leveled in the sequel.  So instead I liquidated the party’s magical items and jewelry stash, and just hope that Morrissey, Twinbee, Ziggy, Halliburton, Masonry, Eggshell, and the other various characters I had abandoned shortly after the slums can retire comfortably after splitting slightly less than ten tons of platinum coins between them and let a younger, more versatile band of adventurers save the world through a slightly enhanced engine that allows more versatility.

So would I recommend playing Pool of Radiance this far into the 21^st century? Yes, I absolutely would with the caveat of using the cluebook or Game Banshee’s absurdly detailed walkthrough on hand.  But even if you want to play the game without spoilers (which is unquestionably how it was meant to be experienced) there is still a lot of fun to be had in just setting out on an adventure, and figuring out where to go next through trial and often fatal error.  I’d also recommend the Commodore 64 version, which has slightly worse graphics that are only noticeable on the monster close-ups, but has a mercifully muted color palette that is marginally better on the eyes.  Like almost any D&D campaign of note, it has also seen a reinterpretation in the Neverwinter Nights 2 engine that apparently comes highly recommended, though I can’t personally attest to that. But despite the relatively limited tactical scope, Pool of Radiance is absolutely worth a glance as not just a historical curiosity, but as a remarkably solid and well-aged blueprint of what the next fifteen years of computer RPGs would look like.

 

Posted by Shadax on October 10, 2011

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