Pool of radiance android dosbox6/23/2023 ![]() ![]() As was remarked often by disappointed purists back in the day, Pool of Radiance offers nothing close to a full implementation of the byzantine collection of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hardcovers. When starting Pool of Radiance, the first order of business - after getting past the irritating code-wheel-based copy protection, that is - must be to create your six-character adventuring party. And, while I wouldn’t accuse the writing of being precisely good, it is knowing and entertaining in its pulpy cheesiness - and really, how much more can one expect out of such an artificial narrative experience as a traditional monster-bashing CRPG? Dorte and I laughed at the writing a lot, but, hey, it was good-natured laughter we didn’t go in expecting Shakespeare. In addition to flavor text, you’ll also find maps, diagrams, and illustrations inside the paragraph book to further enrich the experience. ![]() To my mind, though, Pool of Radiance‘s paragraph book is richer and more interesting than that of Wasteland. As in the contemporaneous Wasteland, much of that story is moved into an accompanying booklet of paragraphs. More interesting to me is the game’s method of telling the more immediate story of your own party of adventurers. Those like me who couldn’t really care less how Phlan fits into the greater Realms don’t have to worry about it. Those who are invested in the Forgotten Realms as a setting will be able to situate Phlan on a map of the Realms and enjoy the lengthy explication of the region’s history and geography included with the game. You can’t have every party saving the world when said world needs to be shared by hundreds of adventure modules, source books, computer games, and novels. In addition to the decidedly modest heights to which characters are allowed to rise in Pool of Radiance specifically, the need to fit the Gold Box games in general into TSR’s existing milieus tended to rein in such excesses. There are, thank God, no “Chosen Ones” or existential universal threats in Pool of Radiance, a welcome distinction that largely holds true throughout the Gold Box line. In these, as in Pool of Radiance, the stakes for the campaign world are relatively low but the stakes for the players’ party couldn’t be higher. Like so much about Pool of Radiance, the scenario harks back to the tabletop Dungeons & Dragons experience, to iconic low-level adventures like Gary Gygax’s own The Keep on the Borderlands and the classic British module The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. Instead of saving the world, you’re “only” out to save a little town called Phlan that’s been largely overrun with monsters in recent years. It’s surprisingly modest in scale and scope, at least within the over-the-top context of ludic fantasy in general. The story is appropriate to the characters’ somewhat limited powers. Still, there’s a big difference between level 1 and level 6, and the thrill of seeing your characters advance and grow in power, so much at the heart of an RPG’s appeal, is the greatest at the lower levels. This article describes what we found therein.īeing the first game in a series that would spawn three direct sequels, Pool of Radiance limits your characters to somewhere between level 6 and 9, depending on class this is strictly a low- to mid-level adventure, reserving the real power-gaming for its sequels. My wife Dorte and I recently played through Pool of Radiance as the first stage in a grander project of trying to take the same party of characters through the entire four-game series that it begins. As Wizardry had been replaced by The Bard’s Tale not so long ago, so was The Bard’s Tale now replaced by the Gold Box. The latter was more than enough to move Pool of Radiance and the Gold Box line it spawned into place as the 1B to the Ultima series’s perennial 1A, replacing the Bard’s Tale games, whose own shooting star was now in the descendant. ![]() Coming as it did near the end of the line for an 8-bit CRPG tradition that began in earnest with the original Ultima and Wizardry games back in 1981, it’s easy to see it as the culmination of that tradition, blending the ideas and approaches of its predecessors with its own brand new commercial trump card, the Dungeons & Dragons license. Pool of Radiance is one of the most important CRPGs of all time in terms of both design and the genre’s commercial history. ![]()
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