PoR: entry 12 (computer glitches in medieval times)

Trying to tie (or maybe sever is a better word) loose ends, we delved back into the Old Rope Guild from the very beginning and eliminated some monsters there that beat us up something fierce at the beginning. Here's a nice little map of the guild. Yep, that's right. At the beginning when faced with this very same area, I sort of shrugged off the mapping, but It's like second nature now.


We gloriously leveled Silver up and managed to get her a fireball spell. At about the same time, we became concerned about carrying around all sorts of junk that we may or may not need. That's when we remembered that we still have Disposa just chillin' back at town hall. She briefly joined our party just long enough to saddle her with the junk. Turns out, she was carrying a couple of magic user scrolls! One of which was actually fireball! So, being the greedy person that I am, I restored a previous game so as to give Silver a different third level spell so she could have both. Strangely, the character of Disposa disappeared from the town hall along with the scrolls. Somehow, in the course of my loop-holing I either removed the character completely from the game or fell into the same glitch I dealt with before that deleted some characters. Hopefully, hopefully she didn't have an item that I absolutely need later.

After much swearing, I decided to continue the game.

Even though we lost several spells to this DOS-era silliness, our spirits rose with how unbelievably cool the fireball spell is. The spell should just be called "kill 15 guys." Silver the Enchantress used it to great acclaim in clearing the cathedral full of hobgoblins and orcs in Sokal Keep.

Unfortunately, the keep still isn't cleared. The ghosts keep talking to us, but we don't know what to tell them. We need to find the right word. According to the journal entry associated with theis portion of the game, Ferran Martinez is a prominent character in the keep's history. We thought that maybe name checking the Mexican would prove fruitful, but no. Should've seen that coming considering his name is spelled two different ways in the entry. Perhaps the graveyard will provide the information we need.

While looking around we found a hammer. The screen was like "do you want this?" and we were like "Heck, yeah! Free hammer!" Wonder what its deal is.

So I think it's back to the graveyard. It's also back to getting Silver's xp points up about 50,000 so she can learn all the spells we need "the old fashioned way."

PoR: entry 11 (bird down, still flightless)

That blasted Wyvern is a goner!

It only took a couple of tries, but we finally killed the bird. It was a combination of weakening spells, blinding spells and noxious cloud spells, but we did it safely and efficiently. Give our regards to its family.

So now, we can safely rest in the large cave right? Wrong. Now that the beast has vacated the lair, the kobolds who roll boulders on anything that snuggles into a sleeping bag have taken up residence there. It just couldn't be that easy I guess.

I noticed that the two times I tried fetching the wyvern treasure, it actually changed. The first time I think there was a tw0-handed sword and something else, but this time (the time I actually saved the game) we got a composite long bow and a partisan. According to wikipedia, a partisan is a sort of spear with axe heads on it as well. Apparently, it didn't last long in history on account of being obsolete. We really should sell it. The composite bow came in pretty handy whilst fighting our way out, though.

There's an old kobold in the rocks that gives some meaningless information. I don't think the information is the reason it's in the game. I think he's in there as a sort of Milgram study to see if adventurers will kill it. I know that there are no consequences for poor ethics in Pool of Radiance, but I think that's just it. What are our actions when there are no consequences? Anyway, we killed it once and then restored and let it go just to see if it had any effect at all.

Upon leaving the cave to go rest at the weird pyramid, we came to another horrible conclusion. The screaming horde of kobolds that greeted my entrance into the cave also greet the exit out. The first time we exited the cave, the kobolds knocked everyone unconcious but Chlorine. She tried to flee the scene, but was informed that the "escape is blocked." After she was beaten to death I restored and we made a more valiant, triumphant stand and then crawled across the countryside to the safety of the weird pyramid that's totally evil and I have no idea why it's there.

Since we have no safe place to rest within the caves, we decided to cut our losses (although through a series of clever saving and restoring there really were no losses) and go home to the weird home association known as Phlan. Actually, a bigger part of that decision was my stumbling onto the Pool of Radiance page of Gamebanshee.com. I tried not to check out too many spoilers, but it did recommend not tackling the room in the cave with the trolls until we're able to cast a few fireballs about. Apparently, there are more beasts to worry about behind the trolls and 51 kobolds.

So, home was much nicer than usual! It was like a ticker-tape parade. They advanced Chlorine to a level 6 cleric, Rexbasior to a level 5 fighter, Derfindor to a level 3 thief and Pilgrim to a level three cleric. See Simeon? I never said you were disposable! What we really need is for our magic-users to level up so that we can clear bigger rooms of monsters. Rooms which are inevitable.

Anyway, the town hall totally gave us props for killing the big skeleton! One gem. At least we got the props. The town also rewarded us for chillin' with the nomads. Not bad. The most curious (and horrifying) news is that the undead are crossing the river and "killing or carrying off the settlers." At least we're calm enough about that to form some kind of committee.

We've decided to take a vacation from the cave. On the way out of town we took a boat to Sokal Keep (where we're assuming the undead are coming from) and unleashed some sweet clerical undead harmony. A level 6 cleric un-undeads in the blink of an eye! Pretty cool. Unfortunately, there seem to be some orcs and kobolds there as well. We'll try to pull this one off.

PoR: entry 10 (stuck in the griddle of nowhere)

I cannot stand getting stuck.

I'm pretty stuck. One thing I remember about these old video games is that in many ways, the reason they're so much funner than current video games is because they're so downright frustrating. The joy of actually making progress is galvanized by the ridiculous contrast from the grind and despair of being stuck in the game for so long.

We have managed to find one friendly face in the kobold cave. Her name is Princess Fatima. Fatima is a horrible name isn't it? I feel sorry for all women named Fatima. What woman would actually want the word "Fat" in their name? Not only is fat in Fatima, but it's the first syllable. That means, if you casually know a girl named Fatima and you want to get her attention, you automatically say "Hey, Fat!"

At least this chick is a fighter. We can take down like 50 kobolds especially with her in the ranks. The problem is the room we haven't conquered yet with 51 kobolds and four nearly invincible trolls. I would like to exit back to the city, get some more supplies, maybe level up a bit; but when we leave the cave, Fat decides to go her own way. I need her to get past all this stuff.

Turns out, before getting Fat, we shoulda just gone to the big cave instead of the small one (see last entry). I mapped out the whole cave situation and the two caves connect. There's a wyvern in the big cave. A wyvern is not a dragon, but the dang thing could've fooled me. Anyway, even though the creature resides in the big part of the cave, I can camp out in it and not get bugged by kobolds rolling boulders at me while I sleep. The only problem is the presence of this huge dragon-like thing in the same sleeping quarters.

But it is still possible. So here's the new plan. Go into the large cave and rest up after facing the obligatory "screaming horde of kobolds" at the entrance. Kill the wyvern. Go to small cave. Get Fat. Kill everything else. Then we can use the big cave to recoup.

We haven't had the best success at the times I've killed the wyvern in the past. Sometimes she kills me. Sometimes we kill her, but she takes two or three of us with her. That's just too expensive. That would mean we'd have to go back to Phlan and spend 8000-12,000 gp that we don't have to resurrect the fallen and then come all the way back to the cave to clean up. And that's after facing off with the screaming horde that greets us at the entrance every time we try.

One thing about the wyvern (and many other beasts I've come across actually) is its ability to poison. It seems that whenever it hits one of us and takes off only a few hit points, the person he hit gets poisoned and then immediately dies. May as well call "poisoned" "getting hit with the killing curse." There is a clerical spell called slow poison that staves off infection for one hour, but that's not nearly enough time to get to a sanctuary to halt death. Yep, I imagine it's gonna take a few tries to bring the beast down with no death involved. I've found that she's quite susceptible to arrows. That means she has to be distracted by a melee-wielding character for the time-being. This tends to fall on Miss-I'm-Too-Good-for-Ranged-Weapons Chlorine. Good thing she's tough.

What is the Wyvern carrying in the picture? Is it some freaky giant rat?