blogging forgotten realms

This One Goes Out to Jason L

2009-05-04T12:57:00.003-06:00

We all fell into a giant Otyugh pit. It was freaking huge. I can't begin to speak of what we had to do to survive. Mostly it was pretty boring.

Actually, a bigger factor was probably the strange life recently of our user. Have you ever seen Tron? You know how there's like a god/subject relationship between the programs and the users? Well, our "god" has a lot of weird things going on right now. Lots of ridiculous things. Lots of things that may even be more ridiculous than this blog. Ever see that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where that guy from The A-team spends way too much time on the holodeck with his "hollow pursuits?" It's also a little like that.

Jason L, since you helped us get out of our pit, I'm willing to thank you... personally. Check out my hot outfit.

Oh, and P.S. yeah, there is another entry coming. Also on the horizon: actually beating the game. SO on the horizon!

CotAB: Entry 17 (the challenge of nothing)

2009-02-03T00:09:00.003-07:00

So once again, apologies are in order. Since our last apology, we've again been negligent in or blogging. My excuse is that I'm far far too old to be blogging. The young folks in the party have no such excuse. Their excuse is probably something like "we're too cool to blog" or something to that effect that kids say nowdays to get out of doing work.

We have carried on though. We still have several cursed bonds to get rid of -- although the temptation is obviously there to not bother getting rid of them. They only seem to affect us when we actively pursue whomever put them on us. If we just retire in the country (and we could too -- we have so much gold it's difficult to carry) the bonds wouldn't have any effect at all. BUT, if we seek out who put them on us, we wind up killing them. Makes me wonder what the point of someone putting the bonds on us in the first place when all that comes of that is their own demise.

We had the bright idea of heading off to Hillsfar. The theory was that since a future adventure that we're hoping to take place in is actually called "Hillsfar" then it would be a rollicking wonderland full of adventure and plot direction.

Not so. Turns out there isn't anything of incredible importance there. Perhaps because a future adventure is so likely in Hillsfar, current adventure is right out. And like everywhere else we go it takes a very long amount of time to actually find our bearings and get the map cartographied.

Here is the map of Hillsfar. Now you don't have to go what we went through. One of the rooms looked like either an IT server farm or a metallic morgue. Not sure with my 8-bit eyes.

We happened upon some pirates. They talked very stereotypically, but they were pretty clean cut and had the most fabulous blue satin tunics. They actually buried a treasure. They also had the nerve to attempt to keelhaul us. Yeah! We're in the middle of the ruins of a city and they actually bothered to spot us and say let's keel haul these guys! So instead of just going up to us and stabbing us, their big plan (I assume since we discovered their treasure) was to 1) incapacitate us without killing us, 2) somehow transport us a few miles to wherever their ship was docked and 3) set sail with the sole purpose of dragging us behind the ship. And all of that plan would have had to take place without us escaping or killing them at any point. They must really love keel hauling. Maybe they do it for fun. Maybe they get enough speed that the person being keel hauled can stand on a plank in the wake. Rexbasior guessed that such an activity would be called wakeplanking.

So we destroyed the pirates as well as some other interesting monsters. What are margoyles? Did they not get approval from the official Gargoyle Naming Society?

So we got the requisite buried treasure. At this point money is worthless, but we still have the compulsion to carry the loot around. How can we just let money go to waste? It's probably illegal.

Where We've Been

2008-12-16T15:49:00.004-07:00

The gang nominated me to make the official announcement that once again, we're not dead.

I think it's because I have no qualms about awkward confrontation. It's one of the liberating things about being evil. Of course one of the burdens of being lawful is that I'm required to follow protocol such as this.

You're probably wondering what we've been up to. Besides forgetting the enchanted DOSBox commands to get us back into the adventure, we've led some very varied lives in the interim.

Rexbasior fell for a tall, lovely enchantress he met on a magic conversation log. They exchanged incredible missives on that log, but when they finally met face-to-face they had nothing at all to talk to each other about. Plus, I think she was hoping for someone far taller.

Derfindor decided to hit an ancient clerical temple whose patrons claimed to hold the secrets of youthful rejuvenation. Since Derf has such an advanced case of Old, he plunked down a few hundred gold to youthify himself by 100 days. The process actually took 103 days, though.

Disposo was sick of not having a physical fighting edge, so he joined a men's club of casual fighters. He didn't seem to learn anything. From what I can tell he just got a lot of manly oil rubdowns.

Silver the Enchantress attempted magical wenching. She crafted all sorts of amorous spells, but still couldn't increase her bust. Apparently it's more important than forbidden pheromones.

Pilgrim got severe beard infection. After shaving, he retired to a beholder cave to grow the beard back properly and have a few extra sets of eyes to make sure it was sculpted right.

I, in the meantime, considered changing religions again, but got too much entertainment out of my fellow adventurers. The need for a new religion, was therefore quenched.

I won't apologize. You may want to know, though, that we are continuing our adventure. Stay patient and stay posted.

Even though I'm evil, I and we must say thanks thanks thanks for the posts urging us on!

CotAB: Entry 16 (knackered knickers)

2008-09-29T14:13:00.011-06:00

Before I begin recounting our journeys of late, let me just say that I think we're due for a HUGE vacation! I'm like, wicked frazzled. Not sure about my companions, but I need a treatment. So, in perhaps a rash distracting move, I decided to do a little research on where we should go on vacation rather than look over our journeynotes.

Here's something interesting! According to Google Analytics, we're HUGE in France! Well actually, we had someone visit our blog from Puyricard. I imagine that's the town where Jean-Luc Picard was born. Now that we have a connection there, maybe we can crash. I'd love to see the Picard Monument. Just throwin' that out there...

We also got a few mighty hits in Hoorn, Netherlands... or is it Hoorn, The Netherlands? Maybe it's just Netherland since we're talking about only one town here. I just have to ask, is Hoorn closer to the Native American village or to where Captain Hook usually docks? I've always wanted to ask someone from Nether Netherland.

Ahhh, scenic Finland! I'm so happy that we have support in Finland, 'cuz I'd love to hang out there for a day or a month or however long Finland would have us on its couch. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a decent karjalanpiirakka in the Dalelands? Also, I'm ashamed to admit this, but I've never seen Hanoi Rocks live. I know, I know. As an excuse I must admit that I'm in the anachronistic profession of medieval adventuring. It's actually kind of weird, what with all the dragons I fight and oldschool scrolls I read and all the mead I drink, that I've never actually been to Europe. Let us stay with you in Finland, though! Once we've recharged we'll totally lick these cursed bonds! We'll give 'em Helsinki!

Anyway, on to our most recent adventures:

Ugh! Gross.

What in the world is a "psuedopod?" Is it, like, a pod made out of fine leather?

Whoops!

All I remember at this point is that Rex and Pilgrim both looked at each other and were mad at first and totally started shaking, but then they were both crying by the time Alias was ten feet away.

Okay... to sum up... what the heck all just happened up in there?

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CotAB: Entry 15 (Alias, Dragonbait and bread)

2008-08-20T13:44:00.005-06:00

As mentioned before, we decided to leave Yulash before heading into the pit to free up some inventory. We figured this would be a great time to hit up our old stomping grounds: Phlan!

Disappointingly, what once was a huge city full of prestige and culture has become just a couple of stone shacks with some chickens or ducks or something. The housing development company that developed the city designs of Shadowdale, Essembra, Voonlar and Teshwave must've gotten their paws on Phlan, razed the town and put up the same track housing they've put up in the rest of the Dalelands.

We established our cromulence in the Moonsea. After killing our first batch of pirates on the way to Phlan, the second batch heard of us and turned tail and ran. Ha!

Still, on the way back to Yulash we were followed by some green-robed religious weirdos. They said they were "following the 'chosen ones' to Yulash." It may have been a good idea to kill them right then and there. Looking back it seems pretty obvious that the "chosen ones" they were following were actually us and that they hoped to take part in our "sacrifice" later (i.e. "kill" us later).

The Pit of Moander has thus far been filled with a lot more dialogue than I thought it would have. Excellent bonus. It's like the most social cave we've ever been in.

There were smells all over the place. Not necessarily bad smells.

I could not figure this out. Often the smell of bread would accompany the company of giant slugs. I'm no baker. Do slugs have anything to do with bread? If so, I'm only eating meat from now on. Does bread have anything to do with death? Did you ever see that episode of M*A*S*H
where Winchester has a near death experience so he puts himself around patients who are about to die so that he can ask them what they're going through? He gets no results until he finally finds a guy about to die at the Battalion Aide Station and just before the soldier dies he says "I smell bread." Maybe it's like that and we were smelling the bread of the slugs' minds before we squished them.

We also smelled tar just before we met the chick. Can't explain that.

Around the corner we met this pretty bird named Alias and her pet lizard. She's the official image of Curse of the Azure Bonds. She's the girl. Although in the promo picture her hair looks like she just stepped out of a salon, but now, in the middle of the Pit of Moander, her hair is pretty agitated. She does wear some armor that totally exposes her HEART, but I totally don't mind. As soon as she appeared, Rex and I glanced at each other. This wasn't a "hey, check her out" glance. This was a grimacing "alright, it's on pretty boy" glance. He actually thinks he has a chance over me? Ha! The simple fighter doesn't know that there's a distinct advantage to being a fighter/cleric/magic-user. I can be whatever the ladies want me to be.

Her lizard is from some other dimension.

Okay. Follow that? I don't get it either. If she's already gotten rid of her Moander bond, what's she doing here now? Since when do bards have enough power to build giant golems? Why would anybody be named Dragonbait? Isn't that just asking for trouble?

Alias finally spoke something that I understand. She mentioned the matter of treasure behind the main altar.

Thankfully the hallways thus far have been surprisingly empty. We really had an easy time exploring around. Alias mentioned that it gave her the creeps since just a short time sooner, the place was "crawling with monsters."

It's stuff like this Zhentil letter that makes me think that our job would be a lot easier if we just waited for all the bad guys to kill each other.

Looks like Alias is also part of the Swanmays. Probably even more original than that dark elf who tattooed Chlorine. Alias was like "So the dark elf has taken the name of the organization I supposedly belonged to. That's something I'll have to investigate." Hmm. An organization composed entirely of hot tattooed chicks? Now that's something I'll have to investigate!

The major battle on level 2 took place right in the middle of some crossroads. It took a lot out of us. The slugs have this 60 hp erasing acid spit thing going on.

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CotAB: Entry 14 (us: 1, Yulash: 0)

2008-08-13T13:28:00.005-06:00

I'm pleased to announce the completion of the map of Yulash. It came with much hard work. There were robed weirdos, green moundy things, bad guys, good guys and beggars that we totally had to mow down with our killer fighting moves in order to map this place once and for all for the good of humanity. It's not like we like mowing people down, but society should have thought of that before they thought the crappy map they gave us was good enough.

I don't like slum life. Everybody hated us there! It's not our fault we eat well and have nicer clothes than they do. I pity them. I pity them for their ignorance, not their extreme poverty. Some of them shared a little bit of information that would have been useful if we weren't anal about mapping every inch of town for ourselves anyway.

Ok, maybe I'm young and I'm not "getting it," but what's up with the "checkpoints?" The looters and the pink plumes went out of their way to explain where the checkpoints were, but once we got there we couldn't rest or anything. The plumes would rouse us and tell us to move along. What? Are the checkpoints just to rub it in our faces that they can take a nap in the city, but we can't?

Speaking of the plumes, not all of them are very nice. At least they'd rather fight us than whatever is in the pit. I'm incredibly brave and everything, but while fighting and killing the plumes that were deserting their duty, I considered something pretty disturbing. These guys actually felt that they had a better chance of beating us in a fight than whatever is in that hole. It's simple mathematics, really. We might be screwed.

Near the entrance to Moander's Pit, some shambling mounds were arguing over some kind of clerical wand. No idea what this is about. I didn't even know clerics used wands. It's called a wand of defoliation. That either means it melts plants or it's good for your face pores. Why do I care? That's why I became a fighter -- a lot less schooling.

So here's the pit.

Demesne: land attached to manor and retained for the owner's own use.

Seeing the pit itself, I'm not so scared anymore. I mean, it's just a hole, right? He could have at least put the pit in the mouth of a giant skull entrance or something. This, this is just weak.

I'm pretty sure we're going to head back into town to sell some of our loot, and uh, rest up a bit first though.

The video this time around has a sneak peak on what we may be up against next time. We sort of unofficially goofed around after we officially finished with this blog post's session. Looks like our next entry ought to be pretty exciting.

CotAB: Entry 13 (Yulash miserables)

2008-08-04T01:49:00.005-06:00

One thing I think we forgot to mention about the annoyance of not being able to let Disposo die: his very name means expendable. Somehow he's now the least disposable out of all of us. That's irony, right?

We made our way to Yulash and were amazed to find it NOT inhabited by the same two huts with a brown fence and chickens in the road that look like ducks. Rather, we found an interesting city at war with the Zhentil gang. I don't know very much about Zhentil Keep, but I think one of our bonds is a Zhentil bond. Zhentil is beating up on the Yulashers, so it only made sense to approach Yulash in a friendly way.

Ha!

I can only assume that the girl who literally trod on Rexbasior's heart is the wonderful Princess Nacacia that saved our bacons back in Tilverton. Did she actually get kidnapped again I wonder? Every time she gets kidnapped she seems to have everything under control. Most other kidnap victims aren't actually able to apologize to bystanders. Maybe she had to flee the city in a hurry because she's not in good with them. Perhaps Yulash isn't a good place just because they're enemies to our enemies. Maybe there's something more sinister about her than we realize.

The coolness of the Yulash uniforms sealed the deal. We decided to be friendly with them.

Yeah. It was fun fighting the Zhentil crowd, but they were more difficult than some of the fights we've been doling out lately. Disposo could totally die soon.

After our battle and a few high-fives, we met up with the commander of Yulash. Friendly enough chap. Dresses well. He seemed to know our whole life story.

I'll be honest, when he said there was a swanmay with us, I just smiled and nodded. I HAD ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT. Later, I did a little research and back perusing of some of our previous adventures and I realized that way back in Entry 5, Amanda Overmyer bestowed such a title on one of us. I think it was Chlorine and I think she still has no idea. Turns out swanmays can turn into swans like lycanthropes can turn into dogs. No idea why the men of Yulash find such favor in this. Maybe it's because only chicks can be swanmays and there's an obvious amount of wet nudity inbetween swan and human.

Anyway, he goes on:
For the most part he was right, but there was at least one group of Red Plumes attacked us. Maybe he was being really literal when he said they wouldn't molest us. I dunno, though. Chlorine's virtue as a swanmay may have been challenged if they beat us in a fight. OMG! That was so funny that I actually implied that Chlorine has any virtue!

Here's the map he gave us. Obviously the Yulash magic copy machine is made by the same people who made the Tilverton magic copy machine. We couldn't read the map very well, but it does imply that Yulash leads to Moander. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the writing on the northeast exit says "To the Pit." The Pit of Moander is undoubtedly our next bond removal.

Here, of course, is our map, which is incomplete at the moment, but is gonna be way better than that pedestrian map they gave us.
Here are a couple of things we heard in the mess hall that the commander graciously gave us access to:

The dragons appearing in the waterfalls of the new age river is pretty interesting, but the gossip that Zhentil Keep terror teams are in the area seemed a little useless. I mean, aren't these guys in the mess hall already fighting the Zhentils every day?

It didn't take us long to find some Zhentils in town. Looks like good old fashioned urban warfare. I anticipate we'll finish cleaning up the city next week before hitting the pit. Tragically, the cities populace is most hurt by the warfare:

Tragic.Aw. This brings tears to my eyes.
Ha! In your face Silver! You know better than to keep your wallet off a chain around these no-good bums!

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CotAB: Entry 12 (this one's quick ('cuz we died))

2008-07-28T01:29:00.004-06:00

Voonlar...er wider than a mile -- I'm crossing you in style some day.

Voonlar: romantic name -- same exact city as every single other city west of Moonsea.

On the way in we were stopped by the forboding Zhentil Guard. They let us go because of our "cursed sigils." I think one of us has said this before (maybe it was me), but these cursed bonds may be a good idea to keep. Sure, sometimes they make us lose control of our bodies, but at the same time, the bad guys leave us alone because they think we're one of them.

Actually are the Zhentil guys bad? I keep losing track. I swear I'll keep up with the politics on the next campaign.

Hmm. We couldn't determine if they were speaking figuratively when they said that "Moander once crawled..." If they were literal, we figured that that would be good, because if we faced him we'd know that he was a cripple. Of course maybe they meant that he had a bunch of centipede legs, then I guess that would also qualify as a crawling action. Brrr. Freaky.

So after hearing about Moander and his swaths, we discovered the "war blasted" section of the city. Apparently Voonlar traveled into the future of artillery.

Voonlar Map!

Here's our first attempt at cartography with our new mapping spell collaboration. Like it? Yeah, the walls are a lot more straight looking. Plus, from what we could find, this is the only Voonlar map on record on record on the magical web!

Too bad the war-torn remains of Voonlar are vast, but dull. Look how much emptiness there is with the rooms! Best we can tell, this Moander guy or creature or whatever started some kind of environmentalist cult here. Guess it's hard to find true environmentalists willing to actually BECOME roaming plants. He got a couple. Looks like he cut them into several littler monsters after they converted. I'm just guessing. I can only imagine that they had something less gross in mind when they decided to become environmentalists.

So we dealt with these tree huggers in the form of shambling mounds and vegepygmies. The few cultists we found that were still human, collapsed to form a giant green mound of monster. It's tragic because the cult leader was a pretty hot woman. Check out her picture on the map. The big mound called itself "bit o' Moander." No idea what that means. Does that mean Moander is a collective or does that mean that a small part of him is able to possess a large group of people? Doesn't matter. The living mound is simply a dead mound now.

I guess this slash in the forest is related to the tavern tale we heard. Hmm. what could be at the end of this evil swath?

Hmm. Turns out it's a simple encounter with displacer beasts. Yeah. That's it. Nothing even remotely earthy. Environmentalists are just like rainforests. You just ignore them and they go away.

There's a lot more to talk about, but we're going to cast our "restore game" spell to put us before our little adventure in Yulash. Pilgrim and Disposo were totally killed in the battle. That's a bummer because Disposo is an elf and even though elves are like immortal or some crap like that, they're the only race that can't be raised from the dead.

Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but if elves are the only race that can't be raised from the dead, doesn't that mean that every race is immortal EXCEPT elves?

Elves, man!

Freaking useless.

Here's our video:

You may notice that the video is even a bit more boring than normal. This is because we're doing the map at the same time rather than touching the map up after the adventure. Sorry. We know the video is nearly unwatchable, but at least it's not edited or censored by the man! Yeah, the man totally doesn't even acknowledge us.

CotAB: Entry 11 (tesh pains)

2008-07-16T00:39:00.006-06:00

We journeyed to the town of Teshwave.

If I understand my pop music history, Tesh Wave was less important than the New Wave movement, but still plenty important in progressive new age circles.

We decided to take a river cruise to the city. The last thing I expected was for the ship to be taken by pirates. I was sorta hoping that The Tesh would make a concert appearance on deck. After dispatching the pirates, the captain gave us his own personal thumbs up, which is nice just in case The Tesh shows up on the way back downriver and dazzles us with some wicked piano.

Teshwave had its own share of boring tales.

Fortunately Teshwave also had its share of unexplained ruins just outside of town. Here is our map of Teshwave:

You'll notice from our map that the only real interesting stuff in the ruins happen near the beginning. We got into a skirmish with a wacko priest (lots of those guys around -- business must be good), some fighters and some hellbeasts. They were chasing around a map like a bunch of keystone cops. The map was described to us as a "cryptic map marked with an X." How cryptic is that? Everyone knows that a map marked with an X is not cryptic. The X is always treasure (unless it's porn). Maybe we should have just called it a cliche'd map.

Notice the question marked area in the middle of the map. That area led to a weird other area that we mapped out over to the left side. I don't know if the ruins are cursed or something, but we found ourselves infinitely going through doors to the south. We could get out by searching north, but we didn't find anything in the area besides the heartache of infinite trapping.

After nailing the treasure we bumped into beastie encounters right out of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

These cat things were at least part Connery.
These phase spiders actually didn't appear in battle, which was totally unfair. They get phasing powers and cloaking powers? It's just like that one episode of Next Generation where they come across an experimental Romulan ship that was trying to achieve just that. In this case, however, I think it was a bug in the bugs' programming.
Here is a margoyle. He's thinking.

So yeah. That's it. We still have bonds that control us. Or do they? They haven't done anything to us at all since we're "off the path." We could live out the rest of our lives as adventurers and the bonds wouldn't affect us at all as long as we stay in the right dive towns.

Anyway, Rexbasior carried a few sets of splint mail with him all through the ruins because he thought they were magical. They were only worth 40 gp. Ha!

In some exciting cartography news, we've hit upon an exciting new development. What has happened in the past is that Silver would use her magic quill of cartography, then Disposo would take the parchment and use his scanner of fortitude, then I would retrace the map into another mapbook, then Chlorine would add the calligraphy, then Pilgrim would cast a publishment spell into the blog. The process building the maps has just had too many steps. Well, just a couple of minutes ago, I found a really simple feature in my Book of Photoshop that makes the quilling of Silver and the scanning of Disposo obsolete. We also came across the Quill of Wacom that makes us all able to quill directly into our book of maps. We also overlapped the mapbook with the Book of Photoshop so that we have some serious grid going.

To sum up: a Wacom Tablet and actually bothering to flip the grid option on in Photoshop, should make mapmaking much much easier.

Here's the vid:

Voteth!

2008-07-09T00:00:00.004-06:00

Hey y'all. This may be bad timing considering how inconsiderate we've been with the lack of questing and posts and all that, but we could use your help right now. Someone nominated our magical blog for some Blogger's Choice Awards and even though we have absolutely no chance of winning, we'd still like it if you would vote for us and our humble series of quests. Hopefully this will be a wonderful tool for us to grow the Blogging Forgotten Realms community. The work we do in the East Moonsea/Dalelands region does not need to be so niche! We nearly die (we often really do die, actually) for the work we're doing! Is it so crazy that we'd feel some kind of need to be recognized? Is it?

Anyway, here are some links. Clicketh away!

Vote for Blogging Forgotten Realms!
Best Geek Blog
Best Blog About Stuff
Best Hobby Blog
Best Pop Culture Blog

And we know we don't fit into the "pop culture" category of blogs that much. Plus I don't even know what "Best Blog About Stuff" even means. Fact is, we could be nominated in four categories, so whoever did it (obviously a very intelligent and handsome man) probably just picked the four categories that he felt best fit.

P.S. -- Also notice we put some voting buttons over on the sidebar for now.

CotAB: Entry 10 (tower records)

2008-07-08T01:54:00.008-06:00

Aaaaaaaaackkkkk!

I'm so sorry! I know we've slacked off before, but not like this! Please, tell your friends that we're back to the adventure! Well actually, I'm about to talk about stuff we did several weeks ago, so I guess we're not really back in the thick of things. We're just back in the thick of talking about things.

Anyway, we had a couple of questions asked to us from the last post. One query asked us how many bonds we have left. Well, we've gotten rid of two. So however many left from that, I suppose. How many did we start with again? Let me hurry and check Wikipedia... Ah yes. We started with five, so I guess we're down to three.

The other question simply said that this blog is awesome. It's not really a question, but I do agree. I especially like our maps. Speaking of, here's the current map for our latest session:

Notice that I've taken great care in marking the new Tower of Oxam area we covered. The new stuff is in blue. This map is quite important because we ran into several rooms with beholders in them. If you happen to be in The Tower of Oxam, try to steer clear of beholders. They are exceedingly difficult to put down. On the plus side, if you flee in terror before you even engage them in combat, they tend to leave you alone.

We did bump into a few living things we didn't have trouble wiping out of existence. I'm not exactly sure why the beholders invited all these pansy villains. Are they just going to kill them after they take over everything? It's kind of like when Germany invited Italy to that whole world war thing. This Drow Lord, for example was someone we were able to bully around (to death, actually).

He left behind an invitation, but the conference of beholders still wouldn't let us hang out with them. We flashed the card, but they still came after us. Here's a funny candid:

Yeah, that's right. I just posted a picture of me running like the sissy I am. It's okay, though. Look how many floating heads of death there are!

This was all at the base of the tower, but at the top there is an underwhelming view and some ridiculously cramped space. Here's a half-assed map of the action:

On level 7 we did come to this interesting room full of people we killed. It was kind of funny since there wasn't much room to fight. We kept bumping into each other. It was pretty hilarious, but yeah, like I said, then we killed them.

So then we fled. Will we ever conquer the tower? I dunno. I'm thinking it's about time to head somewhere else, don't you think? We might come back later.

Isn't it great that I'm a level 11 now? I got to a point that I'm actually going to try the "friends" spell even though it's a sure bet that it's useless.

Here's our video log of this entry's adventure:

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Well, that's that. Let us know where you want us to head next!

We're still here!

2008-06-17T01:15:00.003-06:00

Shoot. Is it time to update the blog again? OhcrapohcrapohcrapohcrapOHCRAP!

Okay, there was a serious miscommunication on our part. Don't worry. We're all okay -- no need to come looking for us. About a month ago we were all pumped for the next entry, but we got totally loaded on some wicked mead and passed out for a week or so in the local tavern. Then we just sort of awkwardly sat around for a month or so.

Anyway, to state again -- THE BLOG IS NOT DEAD, so keep reading.

A new entry is coming shortly.

CotAB: Entry 9 (girl's underpants)

2008-05-01T14:08:00.008-06:00

Now that I've achieved the 5th level "raise dead" spell, I think I'm going to be taken far less for granted in our little party. We've been shilling out over 5000 gp every time one of us dies, but now I can take care of that -- at a reduced price. 'Tis a shame that I'm constantly the first one to die.

It's not only expensive, but tedious to raise the dead commercially. I'm not there for it, but to re-animate my corpse at a temple, I need to actually have the gold on my person. Often my dilapidated corpse can't handle the extra weight, so we have to trade armors or whatever and then the party has to (I guess) set the gold on top of my body when they slide it across the temple counter.

Mapped out a little bit more of the Shadowdale dungeons.

The change in wall scenery from earthy to castle wall-ish struck us as a bit odd. I mean, we are underground right? Is this some kind of freaky underground castle? Plus there are like, really hard monsters down there. Black dragons and dracoliches. I thought there was only one dracolich, and we got rid of him. These, though, attack a bunch at a time and DON'T get entangled in trees.

I was unconscious at the time, but I guess the rest of the crew met up with this guy named Tarsus. Tarsus? Is that a religious name? It is a religious place. I suspect he's some kind of religious scam artist. Fortunately for him, our one really religious person was conked out cold. Yeah, I know I'm evil, but I'm still religious. Had they known how much a "tithe" is, they probably wouldn't have taken him up on his offer. I woke up and I seriously was like, you guys gave away 10% of our money?

Actually, we didn't even bother counting our money. We are so freaking loaded.

We decided to bail on mapping the rest of level three. There's gotta be some serious awesomeness down there, but we didn't even know why we were there in the first place and we were getting pummeled. Rex wanted us to set a timetable for pulling out, but we decided to just cut and run immediately. Even if we eventually would have found oil in those caverns, I'm pretty confident we made the right decision.

Just like that weird guy said, we journeyed northwest. Bumped into a farmer who had some ettin problems. After killing the giants, he gave us "the first home cooked meal in many days." After that we wound up in a town called either Dagger Falls or Daggerdale. We saw it spelled both ways.

We had to stay in the barn because the inn "doesn't think much of Zhentil Keepers." No idea what that's about. The bå® (Whoa! What form of typing enchantment made "bar" appear that way? Mental note: ask someone about magic typing.) also gave us trouble, but the farming community stood up for us and our ettin-killing ways.

Dagger****(s) did NOT have a notable cave nearby. Instead it had a wonderful magic shop! Finally there's a place for high rollers like us!

After the magic shop, we were ushered to a tower. Yes, it is a maze-y type place, but it's a tower! It's not caverns! It's the Tower of Oxam. Yeah. Never heard of it 'til now. We began mapping it, but didn't quite finish. There's a big chunk missing from the very middle of this map because of our strategy to "always turn left" to avoid getting lost.

Besides the curious "Zhentil squad," we bumped into some other nifty monsters here. Ogres are big, but soft and this particular medusa wouldn't be much without her assortment of griffins. She looks like a more presentable version of the medusa we encountered in Phlan.

Yet another gasping character let us know what was in store for us: beholders.

And not just a couple of beholders, apparently we're talking about a corps of beholders, possibly with their own freaky floating-eye barracks. Now, up until that point in my life, I had heard of beholders. I had heard that they were very frightening and difficult, but a part of me was just like, yes! Let's be rotten to the corps! Soon we encountered the emissary.

Only 75 hp? An ac of 0? Yeah. We got this overgrown sclera covered.

Um. That beholder freaking wailed on us.

We'll have to get the thing next time. Or maybe go back to that cavern with all the dracoliches.

Oooh! Almost forgot. Don't believe me about all this stuff I've talked about? Well we got proof. We recorded the whole thing. Stupidly, Disposo set the continuous video image to show an obnoxious text of the word "mapping" to spin in the foreground the entire time, but you get the gist. To sort of witness everything I've talked about, check this video out:

Feel free to dupe it a thousand times until I see it on late night cable. Yeah. We'll work on better quality.

CotAB: Entry 8 (a fighter's fall from the faith)

2008-04-26T01:52:00.009-06:00

So I'm in charge of letting the public know about the BIG news! If you'd direct your attention to the left side of our blog layout, you'll notice that through some sort of wizardry I don't understand, we've added a live Ustream link! What this means is that at specialized times throughout the week, you -- the blog reader, can actually watch us as we conquer the Curse of the Azure Bonds (and whatever adventures come after that). Simply click on the viewscreen underneath where it says "watch us play live!" Or, if you'd rather, direct your browser to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/blogging-forgotten-realms. Of course, we do need to be playing, I mean adventuring, at the exact time you attempt to view us. We actually rest a lot during the week. I'd say we really only "adventure" for maybe a couple of hours a week. Anyway, good luck.

Moving on!

Whilst backtracking, the weirdo at the Standing Stones mentioned something about something green in the northwest.

This led us right back into Shadowdale. Something we didn't know about the town until now is that it has a weird set of caverns similar (pretty much identical) to the ones at Essembra. What gives with these Dalelands towns? What made these people decide to build all their towns right next to a series of caverns crawling with dark elves? I would think that an adequate water source would be a better priority.

Anyway, even more weird is that we met up with that same party of adventurers from the last set of caves! At first we were intimidated, but I think we now realize that they're simply incompetent. They keep rushing from town cavern to town cavern, but they never seem to clean them out! It's like they just want to beat us to the destination and not the objective. They must have delusions of The Amazing Race.

Here's the non-interesting first level. Note that in this convenient version I jotted down the directions and number of steps that lead directly to the second level.

The more interesting second level had a whiny guy complaining about some captured chick.

Here's another awesomely crafted map. Notice my directions directly to the chick in trouble. I also provided supplementary directions to the next level and to guy who told us about the chick. It's actually weird, now that I look at the map. We must have walked right past the captured girl and her captors to go the the long way 'round to where the dude was. The guy who told us about the girl was far more out of the way than the girl herself.

A lovely maiden is being menaced by dragons? And you need to ask me if I want to save her? That's the exact scenario I envisioned when I first decided I wanted to become an adventurer! The question, really, is quite rhetorical.

I don't usually get pumped about the magical stuff, but we did pretty awesome magic work on the dragons. Disposo cast a "hold monster' spell on the dragon in the front. Since it was so big, the other dragon couldn't get out from behind it and then us fighters took potshots until it died. Then we mercy killed the one in front. Dragons are majestic creatures. They deserve mercy killings (and potshot killings too, I guess).

Demurely? I just looked that one up. It's not nearly as sexual a word as I was hoping it might be.

The fact that we simply teleported back to town really takes for granted all the hard work I put into map making.

What's the deal with this guy who gave us the reward? Is he the same guy who "expired" in the cavern, because it's more than a spitting image. Anyway, he (Father? Handsy uncle, maybe?) gave us 4000 platinum pieces for bringing the chick back. A very tidy sum. He probably assumed that we'd say "our reward is that justice is done!" and then be off. The money's nice, though. We took it. It's enough to resurrect three people. It sure came in handy when we took it to the temple to revive the three of us who actually did die down there.

Why were we carrying around a robe of powerlessness for so long? That's just trouble waiting to happen. Of course a better question would be what type of person would be willing to pay 500 gold pieces for a robe of powerlessness?

I really don't know if this elfin chain mail is that important. All I know is that I'm pretty sure most of us wear medium or large sized tunics. I doubt any of us can fit into "elfin."

After our little break back in the town we opted to head back into the caverns. We're like totally addicted! It would probably be a good idea to continue getting rid of our bonds, but the caverns just need to be spelunked! Anyways, on the third level we found a couple more "burly" dark elves. They're tough (108HP, -7AC!), but once again our magic-users simply disabled them with hold spells. Maybe I should've studied magic.

CotAB: Entry 7 (Pilgrim's progress)

2008-04-23T02:12:00.006-06:00

I traded my blogging spot with Silver this week. I told her my blogging hand was mildly cursed and I wasn't able to pass the proper initiative.

In truth I just knew that there would be less to write about this entry. I couldn't be bothered with all that crap that went down last time.

After spending some time in Essembra going over all our extra scrolls, we left town, not really knowing where to go next. While backtracking back to the Standing Stones we happened upon a cave. That's it. Just a freakin' cave.

Strangely we passed another group of adventurers on the way out. I really wanted to talk to them more. Who were they? Did they have cursed bonds to get rid of too? If so, are they one step ahead of us? Will they give us advice on our next quest?

Anyway, the cave. We went in. There were dark elves and even some black dragons in there. We killed them.

It was also a good time for those 10th level show-offs, Silver and Disposo to try their new "cloud kill" spell. As you can see, it did a fine job of knocking out Rex and Chlorine.

Here's a wonderful map. I thought I'd make it fun for all the colorblind people out there. The red dots represent fake doors while the green dots represent exits.

Pretty good map, eh? We got an impression from that other group that there were more than two levels, but we didn't find them. That first level was plenty big anyway.

That's it for now, except for something that troubles me so. Actually it's three things. I'm a cleric/fighter/magic-user and I'm very good at all three. So why come I got such variance in my levels? I'm a 5th level cleric, an 8th level fighter and a 6th level magic-user. Most people aren't renaissance men like I am, so you probably don't understand. It's a very strange feeling to have the three aspects of my manliness split in three unequal ways like that. I think it's starting to make me walk funny.

CotAB: Entry 6 (Silver the Enchantress hates Akabar Bel Akas)

2008-04-11T15:19:00.011-06:00

It's unfortunate that Haptooth didn't really have a decent inn. By the time we got there, I needed a shower pretty bad. I thought I earned one after going through the caves, but we still had the "Red Wizard's Tower" to traverse. Weird how we went from the caves immediately to the top of the tower. It would have made a whole lot more sense if we started at the bottom and worked our way up. Alas.

Even more unfortunate that Haptooth didn't have any form of weapons shop. Somehow, I dropped my dagger way back before Essembra. Didn't realize it was gone until it was too late. In the meantime, I had to free Hap, traverse the caves and then the tower -- three major campaigns -- without a weapon. Couple that with no armour and the monsters have a sitting duck on their hands. Surviving this part of the adventure has been an adventure in itself.

So anyway, we started making our way down the tower and the first guy we run into is some "burly dark elf lord." I had no idea dark elves could even be "burly." Good thing he was at the bottom of the stairs, because it still took our combined momentum to get past him -- no thanks to that douche Akabar. We kept calling him "Admiral Akabar" and he didn't even get it. He kept thinking we were complimenting him. If only he were as pretty as the real thing. Anyway, the guy has this REALLY annoying habit of staying back and casting fireball spells after we've already engaged the enemy in melee fighting. Dark elves are usually immune to fire, but we aren't. Usually all Akabar succeeds in doing is lighting us all on fire. It's hard to fight when you're wearing a cloth robe, you're on fire and you don't have a weapon.

Once we finally hit level 4 of the tower we were able to play the fun "trial of the sphere" game. Some red wizard played it with us. We didn't get a good look at him, but he wasn't Dracandros. I'm not sure if it's Dracandros's tower, or if it's this guy's. All I know is that according to Journal Entry 18 from blog entry 4, we're simply looking for the "red wizard," so I don't know. Anyway, the wiz told us that we needed to will this sphere toward him and he'd try to will it toward one of us. Whoever willed it to the other person first would win! He also said that only mages could control the sphere. For some reason Rex jumped ahead of me to play. Reddy must've been lying about the whole mage thing because Rex (with his weak, boyish mind) somehow willed that sphere right into the wizard's face. The wizard and the sphere exploded, so I didn't even get a chance to play.
On the way down to the next level, some other dark elf lord demanded some dinero before he'd let us pass. We refused, but he disappeared as an illusion before we had a chance to fight him or turn him into the authorities for bribery.

On level 3 we had a wonderfully cuddly time with the dark elves' pet owl bears. During combat they even tried to hug us! I'd think it adorable were I not a hardened adventurer. They also made fabulous shields against the dark elves.

Speaking of fighting dark elves, we must have killed like 30 or 40 dark elf magic-users. Why come none of them, not a single one, was carrying a dagger. They had all sorts of mystical elfy weapons that Rex, Derf and Pil couldn't get enough of, but I still wound up with no weapon. About this time I just took Disposo's dagger, claiming seniority. He didn't complain and he had no right to, because he got the armour bracers.

The description to our next battle was downright terrifying.

Much of what was done next was getting the map up to date. I'm using a new cartography spell, so I'm pretty proud of the map results. It's way better than Rex's last map anyway.

Notice the place where we found the exploding paper, the weird veggie lab and the bedroom.
We took something out of the pool in the lab. Derfindor grabbed it. He said it felt like a head. Then he brought it out of the water and put it immediately in his pouch. He nor we didn't get a good look at it. I wonder why not.

Wyverns. They use the "poison" spell, which is cheap. If a spellcaster pulls it off it means instant death. That doesn't make any sense at all. One of the traditional attributes of poison is that it takes time to work through the system. HP shouldn't go down immediately, it should be slow and agonizing. Akabar never had a chance to be poisoned. I swear to you I never even saw the guy move his feet in battle once. His battle strategy is to just stand there and wait for something. Sometimes, sometimes he'll throw down a stinking cloud, but it's usually in our faces. Anyway, Chlorine learned from the wyverns. Poison is a great quick, efficient spell.

Rushing outside the tower, we finally found Dracandros. Can you believe this guy? He brands us, forces us to do things against our wills, frames us and then has the gall to say crap like "You have dogged my steps for too long..." Time to die Dracandros.

The guy was surrounded by dark elf fighters and efreeti. I never dreamed there were so many genies in existence. Maybe now there are none in existence. I threw a bunch of confusion spells at them. It made things easier, because after the dust had settled, all the efreeti were gone and two of the dark elves were so confused they were fighting for us. It gave us a chance to surround Dracandros. Akabar was a waste, though. He cast an invisibility spell on himself and then did what he always does -- stand there. He could have used the spell to slip past people and do some damage, but he wound up completely wasting it. I swear I'd have a lot more respect for him if he'd just run away or not bother casting any spells at all than waste them like that.

So I guess I could've spent time detailing how we wailed on Dracandros, but my annoyance with Dracandros just weighed too much on my mind.

We wailed on Dracandros.

We could've then gone straight back into Hap, but detoured back through the caves to make sure we didn't miss anything. The salamanders let us take some of their stuff, which was nice. We literally had to dip our hands in lava to get it, so there was some give and take.

We went back to Haptooth and unfortunately, they still don't have a weapons shop, so we decided to backtrack back to Essembra when:

Good freaking riddance! The guy stabbed me more than he hit any monster.

Right as we left Hap, all the dark elf weapons dissolved in the sunlight. No big whoop. We were only a day away from Essembra, but just outside of town, we hit a nightmarish snag that I wasn't hoping to hit. Remember that Crimdrac dracolich who gave us a free ride to the tower roof in the last entry? Well, for some reason he found us and for some reason he didn't give us a chance to surrender this time. Strangely, he was mad at us for killing his "tutor." What's up with that? Dracandros the wuss was the mentor of Crimdrac the badass dragon skeleton? Must've put an inferiority complex spell on the beast.

We hid from him for like a half hour before we realized that he was impeded by the trees. Disposo and I simply hurled about six fireballs at him and the skeletal softie went down like a cat.

I'm gonna miss that guy.

Essembra was so wonderful! I bathed at the classy inn before we all went to get leveled up. That was another thing that was missed about civilization. We racked up a shload of XP we weren't even getting credit for. I am now a level 9 magic-user, or more officially, a sorcerer. A sorcerer sounds way better than the level 8 designation of "warlock" which I hated because I'm not male. Here's hoping our newfound "cloudkill" and "hold monsters" spells come in handy.

When we went to have our found stuff identified we discovered that half of our weapons and armour was good stuff we weren't even using! Plate mail +3, shield +2, glaive +1, ring of protection + 3, bracers AC 2, ring of wizardry (I don't know what that is, but it sounds awesome), wand of fireballs, wand of ice storm, broad sword +2 and a short sword +1, gauntlets of dexterity, etc. See, we were afraid of using any of that stuff for fear that some of it may be cursed and would stick to us (it's happened to us before). Turns out just about everything was clean except for the "robe of powerlessness" (why would anyone name something that?). Oh and also, Disposo claimed the +2 staff of Dracandros. And I still have the 2 gold piece dagger that I took from him.

Just when most of the fun of our trip to Essembra had deflated, I heard this in the tavern:

CotAB: Entry 5: (overmyer dead body!)

2008-04-07T00:45:00.012-06:00

So... is it, like, my turn to blog? Sorry. I guess it's been my turn for a few weeks now. Sorry! I had no idea it was my turn. My bad.

Well, when we last left our awesome pumped-up heroes (us), they (we) were about to kill a freakin' genie (it).

Sorry. That third person thing isn't working well. I'm new at this! Everyone else in the party is older than I am. They all had this sissy training to do whatever they do. That's why I'm the only one without a saggy bottom. So I got no schoolin' and as a fighter, I'm doin' most of the work. Cheap.

Tangent. My bad. Sorry.

As I was saying, we had a barn full of genie to wail on. We did. Hard and totally. After cruising through the town knocking off some dark elf goons, we discovered (actually the internet told us) that the genie has less protection if we take it to the streets first. Genies usually give out three wishes. It's a travesty that we don't get any wishes at all when we actually kill one.

The town we saved seemed to give off a lot of the same vibe as Santo Poco.

Haptooth wasn't finished with los banditos oscuros just yet. The dark tower we think was mentioned by (I think) the old man from scene 24 (Derfindor briefly mentioned him in the last entry) still teemed full of treacherous villainy. We were set to head straight off to the tower, but for some reason Admiral Akabar led us through disposing of the treacherous villainy of a nearby cave first.

The way was guarded by another old man from scene 24. Or maybe he was the same guy. I really have no idea. All I know is that we totally made that Holy Grail reference in our last entry before any of us came to the following exchange:

Did we mention these elves are dark? I always thought dark elves were actually orcs. Maybe I'm getting real-life mixed up with what I see in the movies.

Some cave inhabitants were nice enough to warn us of the inherent dangers of a cave full of all manner of treachery. At this point we really didn't know who Crimdrac was. All we knew was we needed to get to the tower to find some hotshot red mage. Other variables were extremely unwelcome at this point.

Eventually we bumped into Amanda Overmyer and she was totally nice enough to help out.

After speaking with Amanda, many of the dark elves and salamanders left us alone. We also knew exactly who we were headed to: Dracandros. So Crimdrac took us completely by surprise.

You know what? We were freaking tired by this point, so (actually I'm pretty sure it was Pilgrim's idea) we totally surrendered. I'll tell you what, even though this freaking dracolich is the stuff of my direst nightmares, he's a pretty cool guy. Pretty much he just nudged us up the stairs to the wizard's tower. No questions asked! See kids? Sometimes it pays to take the path of the sissy.

I worked really hard on this Haptooth and Cave map so don't mock it!

I could go into detail about the events that happened next, but I may as well simply copy the literal version of what happened. No reason to fudge the details.

Tyranthraxus? Feh. Can't believe his name is in writing and everything. We already killed the guy. Why we gotta deal with that bugger twice? Perhaps I should've waited around in Tilverton instead of doing that whole Phlan adventure. Whole thing may have been a complete waste of time. Better yet, maybe Silver and Chlorine should have taken my advice and torched the whole castle in Phlan. Maybe it would've prevented Tyr from making another appearance. Hopefully we don't have to deal with this Mistinarperadnacles guy. It took me long enough to figure out how to say "Tyranthraxus."

Attack the dragons? We may be brave, but we got no death wish! Except for maybe Chlorine.

So that's my entry! Hope you enjoyed it! As you can see, we're right in the middle of some life and death shiz right now, so maybe I'll have a chance to blog again, if we're lucky.

CotAB entry 4 (unhappy trails)

2008-03-12T02:03:00.008-06:00

Getting kicked out of town does have its perks. It enabled us the freedom to choose which town we would get kicked out of next. We figured Shadowdale sounded like the coolest place to visit so we bushwhacked over there. Some displacer beasts got in our way, so we couldn't have the relaxation of a brand new town without taking care of them. I could do without those suckers. They're not terribly lethal, but they're pretty creepy. After disposing them from crawling all over the inn we stayed at, the innkeeper gave us some information taken from the dark elf that apparently summoned the beasts. I guess since we saved the place he owed us a tip.

Shadowdale wasn't incredibly fabulous looking, but it was nice to actually be in a town again.

Of course before we could party, we had to unload some of the crap we've been picking up. Rex scored big with a couple of swords. One is called "frost brand" and the other is called "flame tongue." Of course he's keeping both of them. He probably thinks he's going to discover a new temperature with them or something. On the downside, most of our appraisals were dismal. We didn't know what we were carrying with us. Just about all our stuff we kept was junk while there's probably stuff sitting in the Tilverton sewer right now that's as good as platinum.

After all that business, we got royally pissed. Tavern tales were told and overheard and fought over. Honestly, I got so wasted I have no idea if I heard these right (or even what day or towns I heard them in).

One wizard guy specifically came up to us and at least helped us find a new direction.

Although, I don't know why a wonderful famous wizard like Elminster wouldn't want to take credit for such incredible bondwork! Maybe he's retired.

So the map we were provided doesn't have city names on it! It's about as useful as a fork with no prongs. As best we can tell, the following is the local town situation.

So, it was off to Ashabenford then. Yeah, not much improvement over the last town. Actually, a step down would have been less creepy. The place looked EXACTLY the same as Shadowdale. I'm talkin' down to the chickens. Weird. Totally.

After the creepy town, two events happened that seemed pretty important, but they weren't important enough for pictures.

First, we met this old guy at this place called Standing Stones. I really don't know what the place is. I think it's just a place with a couple of rocks in the middle of the forest. Anyway, this guy was like the old man in scene 24. We took a few shots at him, but he disappeared before our eyes. Before that though he said:

You presently serve four masters. Return to me when you have slain three more. Then you shall achieve your destiny. Seek Red to the south.

Next, we met some centaurs.

Finally, something happened heading south that warranted a pic: black dragons.

This picture shows pilgrim fighting one of them, but in the course of the battle (possibly because of some unknown thief attribute) I moved first with two turns in a row. This enabled me to get right up next to one of them and it threw up on me! I immediately passed out and everyone else was able to subdue the beasts (barely) and pull me from all the toxic fluid in the area.

After all that we finally made it in to Hap. It's different, but it's not as safe as those other towns. This Arab wanted to help us. His name is Akabar Bel Akas. Isn't Akabar a Calimarian name?

All the other villagers are scared to death and we didn't know why until we infiltrated the barn. Inside we found the Efreet genie. We were relieved because this genie helped us defeat Dracula a couple of times back in the Phlan graveyard. Before we could say hello, the genie pounded us silly.

We're pretty sure he's not helping us fight anymore. Tomorrow we're gonna get all Larry Hagman on his ass.

CotAB: Entry 3 (what an interesting smell we've discovered!)

2008-02-25T14:03:00.009-07:00

Have you ever been a part of something and you have no idea what's going on? That's how I've felt lately. We haven't had a chance to just hang out in a city in a long long time. First we get enslaved to bonds and try to kill a guy, then we have to maneuver around a bunch of sissy thieves and then we get dumped into some sewers. In the meantime, i have to carry around all these weapons I'm not supposed to use because we can't take them to a shop to get them appraised. Ever since we started this silly adventure our non-linear freedom has gone out the window. We're constantly getting scooted all over the place and we can't keep track of what's going on. We are doing all the dirty work though. I guess that's our role.

Currently our role specifically is to eliminate these Fire Knives. They're a bunch of poseurs. So far none of them have even had any fire or knives. I sure don't know why Tilverton didn't just take care of them themselves. I mean their big hideout is right on the other side of the wall of the city.

Following the Knives into the sewers only led us to something infinitely worse.

I hate making friends with things I don't like to smell. Here's a better view of an otyugh that I was able to research:

We could've skipped that whole wretched ordeal. I don't know why we had to search the sewers in their entirety. Why didn't we just head as far south in the city as we could and then just lift up a manhole?

The trolls in this part of the land have meaner poses. I wonder why they're down here? They're tough enough to live wherever they want.

We found a training hall down here. I still can't believe it cost 1000 gp to train. I mean, a school in the sewers couldn't possibly have that kind of accreditation. Disposo and I both leveled up again which means we were able to pick up some fourth level spells. We went with "confusion" and "ice storm." Ice storm seems like it's exactly like fireball, but it's fourth level, so it's gotta be better, right? Confusion might get us out of some tedious fighting. I can't believe I'm saying that. Most people would probably find my job exciting, but lemme tell you, when you're snuffing life 24/7 it just sort of loses its excitement after a while.

This buff guy didn't join us. Shame, it seems he not only has our same goals, but he also has a friend where we're going who hasn't been back in a while. Well, I guess we can keep an eye out. We'll have to find a cleric with a hammer (is there any other kind of cleric?).

So our crazy hammer friend blazed the trail for us, I guess. Yeah, if he did a better job, though we wouldn't need to fight as much as we are. Also, there are a couple of really cryptic clues about who the new "big boss" is. Some guy who can possess people and things and is all fiery. Crappit, if only the note that said his name wasn't cut off! I haven't been this frustrated since our epic battle with Tyranthraxus!

So we went hiking around the sewers some more. Here's a map we put together:

We found this one guy in this room with... a hammer. But he didn't join up with us either! Isn't it obvious who's on whose side? Give a little love NPCs!

Alright, so anyway -- end of the sewers: big battle. These S.O.B.s sucked. It's not that they were all that tough, but there were so many of them that every turn all of us in the party seemed to take damage. The loss of hit points was secondary to the inability to cast spells due to getting hit. Extremely frustrating when it shouldn't have been so. We saved some chick and some guy we, I guess, tried to kill earlier. So I guess karmicly speaking, we broke even. That chick, though, Princess Nacacia, is pretty cool for a chick. She leveled the leader before the fight started, got rid of one of our cursed tattoos and then vouched for us later. It would have been cool if she had joined us, but I guess she's too good for us.

Sheesh! What a long, long day though! I really miss the days where we could just head back to the inn whenever we wanted.

Had some weird freaky dream. I love interpreting dreams! I think dreams are vague on purpose so that our minds can figure them out and interpret this one. I think this dream represents some sort of transition, a change. Change is good. Sometimes we need to force ourselves to tell ourselves that every so often.

CotAB: Entry 2

2008-02-13T00:53:00.005-07:00

Hi there! My name is Disposo and I've been assigned this part of our little story. Lots and lots has happened. It actually happened like a week and a bit ago, but this writing thing is new and intimidating to me.

Anyway one great thing about our new adventure is that like half of us (including me) moved up a level right off the bat! I'm now a level-7 magic-user. That's like this close to a black belt. I even got to pick a new spell to learn. I really wish we could try out a few spells before we commit to them. I went ahead and learned the "charm monsters" spell, which I hope will come in handy. What if I accidentally picked "bestow curse"? That would verge on useless, I think.

The chicks in this town sure are ugly. I wonder if the guys will look any better.

The town temple didn't do much in removing our hideous tattoos. He sure seemed cock-sure. I wonder if the priest knows he totally mispronounces "god."

The sage was at least half-useful. She got some sources on some of these markings. Still don't have a motive, though. Honestly, I don't know how all these separate bands could possibly organize themselves enough to get all these working markings on us. If they have that kind of power over time and space they probably wouldn't still be five different groups and they'd also be the complete rulers of time and space.

Okay, so what happened next is kind of understandably blurry. Some hoidy-toidy carriage came through town and we all attacked it for no reason. Hey, can't blame us though! The bonds made us do it! Like I said, whoever's responsible must be in complete command of time and space.

For some reason the thieves came and led us to their hideout. I guess that's why Derfindor is on the employ. He certainly has no other specific job qualifications besides his "thief ID card." Whilst cavorting with the thieves we got into some fights with that weird group called "Fire Hand" i think. Weirdos.

The "Fire Hand" killed our kind benefactor, the guildmaster. Fortunately on his body we found a map of (we think) where they're coming from. Unfortunately it looks like the guildmaster didn't know how to work the settings on the thieves' office copy machine.

Well, hopefully we can read it well enough before we enter the door to the sewers, 'cuz that's where we are right now.

Will report again if we survive the sewers (and after we all shower up).

Curse of the Azure Bonds: Entry 1 (first impressions)

2008-02-06T01:46:00.000-07:00

Hey, it's Chlorine here. I'm that religious chick from all those previous Phlan-related adventure nonsense. Before I get into our adventures in Tilverton, I just have to say really quick what we did before arriving here. Just for fun, we went back to the big castle in Phlan and guess what? Tyranthraxus was still there, just kinda hanging out. What's up with that? We killed him again.

Apparently after slaying the world's most malevolent creature we simply got mugged on the way here. It was dark. I have an excuse. I don't know what excuses Derfindor, Disposo and Pilgrim have. They supposedly have "infravision" -- some kind of weird ability to see in the dark. If you ask me, it's just something those other races made up so they wouldn't feel so bad about not being human.

We had a lot of really awesome stuff! How many months did we lug around all those restoration scrolls that we couldn't cast, because we couldn't level up enough? A lot. The sweet rings alone could've fed us for years.

Now we're here. We all have these freaky moving tattoos on our sword arms. Already this is way more riveting than our last adventure, but I already have a really big protest. These tattoos are on our sword arms? I'm a freaking cleric! That means I don't have a sword arm. I don't believe in sword arms. Why is my sword arm affected when it doesn't even exist? And, yes, I know that in my picture I'm holding a sword, but that was just posing for for the picture!

So this is the first vision we woke up to:

Looks like the women in this part of the land are slightly looser than they are in good 'ol Phlan. I may need to up the ante on my own loose behavior if I want to keep my rep.

The guy next to us in our inn room seems to have a few problems. Perhaps he's already adventured through half of this "azure bonds" mumbo-jumbo already.

After seeing my first man in these parts, I'm suddenly not too worried about being promiscuous enough. No doubt it won't take much to impress this sloppy ilk.

Sooo... do all the guys look like this then? After seeing my second man, I think I'm considering switching to girls. That one back at the inn seems nice...

PoR/CotAB interlude

2008-02-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

Hello. We're in the process of making some changes here at Blogging Forgotten Realms. Some of you may notice that the title bar and description module are changed from first-person singular to first-people plural (if that's the way to say it). Also, notice that the list of contributors consists of the ending player characters from Pool of Radiance. Now, the player characters will be writing the majority of posts. Feel free to treat them as the individuals that they are.

So, we're now on the verge of beginning Curse of the Azure Bonds. I'm super excited since this is specifically the game that I remember my friends playing when I was younger. It took a good while, but thanks to Simeon, I was able to immediately get a working copy. I downloaded a mediocre version of the manual and Adventurer's Journal. It's from the-underdogs.info. It's data-entried instead of scanned so reading some of the maps may be a problem. It took forever but transferring characters from Pool is finally working. Turns out I needed to remove all my characters from all the other Pool savegames in order to allow Azure to accept them.

Here we go.

PoR: entry 24 (fin.)

2008-01-28T01:12:00.000-07:00

Here is the completed hedge maze map that we pieced together from the journal entries as well as our own mapping. There was some kind of mistake in the southeast corner in the journal entry, so we just sort of fixed it in red. The "T" represents a teleporter (as well as the "12" (yeah, we're not that organized, it's not like we studied cartography at Phlan University!)) and the "R" is where we guessed the "T" transported us to. The "S" in the inner part of the northwest corner represents the secret stairs behind a farcical wall (confusingly displayed in the same red we used to fix the real walls in the southeast corner) that lead to the castle's inner sanctum.

We had heard rumors of Medusa. Turns out it wasn't Medusa we faced, but "a medusa." There is only one medusa in all of Moonsea, but Medusa isn't actually her name, it's just what she's one of. Even though we all know our Greek mythology quite well, and know that there is only one Medusa and Medusa is a name and she's a gorgon. Maybe her name is Medusa, but then she'd have to go by "Medusa the medusa."

We really shouldn't have bothered her anyway. Tyranthraxus keeps her at the bottom of a trapdoor that didn't need to be fallen into. On our attempt Rex turned immediately to stone. Really should have seen that coming.

Medusa should be the name of a major health insurance company in the United States. Med.- U.S.A. It's patriotic and everything.

So this scribe in the inner sanctum supposedly doesn't like Tyranthraxus and wanted to help us get rid of him. We were very very suspicious of his motives since he lives 20 feet away from our arch-nemesis, but we figured we'd give him a shot. The guy's name is Genheeris. His parents probably used a random naming spell when he was born. He made some pretty intense promises to us if we were successful in bringing the big guy down. What are the odds that he actually delivers? 20-1 maybe?

So back down the stairs we went and there, in all his 16 color EGA majesty, was the bronze dragon Tyranthraxus. Annoyingly his immense size obscured the Pool of Radiance which we've been waiting to see for several months. We weren't able to get a really respectable screenshot of the pool.

The monster sicked two obligatory pre-climactic henchmen on us before he took us on himself. Inexplicably and unfairly the guards multiplied themselves by five and a half times. This obligatory pre-battle turned out to be rather difficult for us. They were too close for too many fireballs and they didn't drop dead from the fire anyway. Pretty much we did it the old-fashioned way -- paralyzation. Chlorine, Pilgrim and Silver pretty much ran every "hold person" spell they had while Disposo charmed a couple of 'em. Some of the spells missed, but after four turns, all of them were held or charmed. After that we watched the charmed guards cap their former buddies execution style! We're the good guys. These were all eighth-level fighters so xp went through the roof (the first time we got through the battle only Silver was left and she wound up with 46,145 points!).

So was Genheeris, the final NPC of the game, helpful during all this with his assortment of spells and his lightning wand? No. When the guards were held he insisted on using his wand rather than his attack. The wand charge didn't take them down immediately when a straightforward attack would've and the lightning had the possibility of ricocheting and hitting us. This was especially evident when we finally fought Tyranthraxus. Wands and spells had no effect on the dragon, so when Rexbasior circled around to catch the beast from behind Genheeris zapped through the dragon, doing no damage whatsoever, and hit Rex right in the face. It almost killed him. At least Genheeris was fodder.

And speaking of help, where in bloody forgotten realms is Diogenes? He totally should have swooped in for the rescue. Wouldn't that have been awesome? A wicked dragon battle!
Before the big battle, we wound up in an interesting position. Tyranthraxus actually asked us if we'd like to fight on his side. It would have been unique if all the evil members of the party immediately went to his side, but that didn't happen. Actually, it would have been 5% unique and 95% super-annoying. We discussed it and decided that we would actually go ahead and fight against him like we've been planning all freaking along.

Tyr was no pushover. As mentioned before wands and spells (and possibly arrows) had no effect on him. We had to rely on the advice of our corner-man Duke: "So, what we'll be calling on is good ol’ fashion blunt force trauma. Horsepower. Heavy-duty, cast-iron, piledriving punches that will have to hurt so much they'll rattle his ancestors." So fortunately when the dragon decided to unceremoniously execute two of us, he chose the two girls. After Chlorine and Silver went down, Rexbasior went two rounds in a row with a triple-hit takedown. The beast keeled over and only the guys were left to witness it.

(btw, the above screenshot was from a previous (unsuccessful) savegame)

After the battle sequence he went off about possession or something. That never works anymore. We thought we heard him plead something to Bane before disappearing completely but we missed the screenshot. Oh well. Could never follow that religious stuff anyway.

The walk back home was a total Oscar moment.

Somehow, after six months we were hoping to get a better congratulatory screen than this:

So... that's it we suppose. Did we even become generals like we were promised? No. Never trust the NPCs.

Yay.

We may just look around a little more just to see if we missed anything.

I (Jon) still need to find a working copy of Curse of the Azure Bonds. I also would like to make a small adjustment to the blog's entry format that I think will be a lot more fun and interesting.

Sweet! We'll be back on the path soon enough!

PoR: entry 23 (oh, the humanoidy!)

2008-01-23T00:18:00.000-07:00

We're almost done, but wtf? Quicklings? What the hell are these things and how come we haven't seen them before? We're guessing these things are series of Robin Goodfellow clones. Obnoxious and hard to kill, but deeply satisfying when we got a throttling in.

Ok, now back to normalcy.

Minotaurs? Wtf? Why haven't we seen these things before? Are they a series of donkey-headed Nick Bottom clones conjured up by the quickling Puck clones? It's not that we're coming onto quicklings and minotaurs at new points in story. These monsters are hitting us in the wilderness we thought we were used to.

(Perhaps a subconscious explanation for all these A Midsummer Night's Dream references is because, at the time of this entry, it is now 8 degrees Fahrenheit (that's -13 for all the Kiwis reading this). Nothing is more fantastic right now than the middle of summer).

In further deep exploring of the east side of the castle we startled a few scribblers and captured a few notes of our own. We are simply so sick of the research. We fight. That's it. No more paperwork. Here are a couple of stupid doozies:

So Cordana's a bad guy then? Hey, thanks paper! We found that out long ago! Also, the one about Tynranthraxus' big goal? His whole goal is to take over everything south of Moonsea? What's the trouble then? We don't even live in what he wants to conquer! Let him have the south! Must be a lot of oil there or something.

Here's something that might be useful if we could read Elvish:

Finished mapping out the entire outskirts of the castle. Here it is, although it's not really too mazey:

So we did some massive cheating and sorta glanced on the GameBanshee wilderness map and sorta noticed where the lost castle of the lizardmen is. We're not sure how we could have possibly found out that info. We even went so far as to sweeping the whole wilderness, but we still somehow kept missing it.

Inside we found an old lizard guy who was simply having trouble holding onto his incumbent seat. His followers were starting to get caught up in this new, hip go-getter lizard named Drythh who promised new hope for lizardkind if elected. Simply put, old lizard guy needed a new campaign team. So we stepped in and did what we do best. We killed Drythh. Problem solved. Call it a diplomatic mission. Now civilization can simply eradicate the lizardman population rather than let them flourish with the help of Tyranthraxus. Problem solved.

We could have just left it at that, but for some reason we just had to explore the lizardman catacombs. Even though we did our job in keeping an unpopular incumbent in office, for some reason the lizardmen in the caves still kept attacking us for some reason. There were pools there. Pools. Again. Lately we've been hitting up lots of pools. Perhaps it's foreshadowing.

Besides the pretty pools, there was nothing else we could find down there. We're not too annoyed with it, but it was a total pain to map, which we give to the world here:

PoR: entry 22.5 ("anyong" for the ride)

2008-01-18T00:07:00.000-07:00

So instead of just stormin' up the castle stairs to quite possibly win the game, we're circlin' around just a little just to make sure we give ourselves plenty of opportunities to get horribly killed.
This week it was the southwest hedge maze and the southeast outskirts. The particular hedge maze we traversed was the only one we couldn't find in the Adventurer's Journal, so here's the map for the world (not that it isn't found all over the internet):

Not much to say about our excursion. Lots of dumb giants. They keep asking for passwords and stuff. Nothin' gets by them though. Oh, and yeah, we killed Tyranthraxus. He's dead. Somehow the boss of the game was very mysteriously easy to defeat. Even more intriguing is that he and his goons only gave us 1701 experience points.

The Southeast outskirts had a couple of other notable locales.

One was a very interesting pool. Hmm. The Pool of Radiance perhaps? If so, it's just as underwhelming as "Tyranthraxus." Plus, if "radiance" indeed is the word to describe it, we think it ought to display more than its shade of 6666FF. Yeah, it's probably not the pool we're looking for. Maybe after we get out of the castle we'll have to find it in the wilderness somewhere. Anyway, there's some kind of weird sword at the bottom. Something to do with fire. Lately a lot of stuff has had to do with fire.

So right next door to that is that Cadorna guy that tried to set us up that one time. He's all chained up and everything. I suppose everybody in the land was lookin' to capture him -- the good guys, the bad guys, the guys who don't know whether they're good or bad, etc. Somehow I thought he'd have more hair and be more emaciated. The bad guys really must feed their prisoners well. So we think he must be tagging along now. He asked to come along, but he doesn't appear as a member of our party. He gave us some info about getting out of the hedge that we really don't understand.

And who's Chantua again? We really need to start takin' notes. We were all under the impression that there wouldn't be that much homework in this job.

tagged!

2008-01-17T00:02:00.000-07:00

This blog has been recently tagged with the instructions to identify seven things about ourselves that nobody else knows. Since there are seven of us, we'll spread the responses out between us.

1. Chlorine:
I'm pretty sure that Rexbasior totally has the hots for me. I'll totally give in if he goes for it. What he doesn't know is that for religious reasons, I'm planning to mace him in the back of the head after we take care of this whole "pool of radiance" thing. I'm not talkin' about the spicy kind of mace. I'm talkin' about the mace that collapses bones. I'm an evil cleric. It's just what we do.

2. Derfindor:
I know I'm a thief, but so far on our quest I haven't stolen one thing. Also, I guess I have some sort of special "from-behind" attack. I have no idea what that is. I think I had the plague that day in stealing school. I'm a level 7 thief. I feel very ashamed about it.

3. Disposo:
I'm hoping that this weekend will be the time I'll finally be able to try out the "anti-gaying" potion I've been working on for the last 20 years.

4. Pilgrim:
I've been carrying around eight "restoration" scrolls for nearly a year now. None of us has any idea what the spell does. I want to use them to start fires, but Silver doesn't want to burn any bridges, so to speak. That's probably the same reason she won't let me make out with her.

5. Silver the Enchantress:
Pilgrim doesn't know this, but his beard totally smells like eggs. I don't want to tell him because 1) it would be really awkward anyway, 2) he'd know that we all know that he has eggs when he doesn't want us to know and 3) he'd know that we all know that not only does he have eggs, but he carries a LIVE CHICKEN with him in the bottom of his pack. How can he possibly think that he's fooling us?

6. Rexbasior:
I forgot which god I'm supposed to be praying to. I know I'm "good," but so far I haven't found any lick of difference between good and evil. I'm pretty sure the clerics have it figured out, but I have no idea and I'm to embarrassed to ask. Also, I think I'm gonna ask Chlorine to go steady after all this is over.

7. Jon:
I really don't know where I'm going to find a copy of Curse of the Azure Bonds after all this is over.

PoR: entry 21 (happy new year!)

2008-01-12T02:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, with the hustle and bustle of pagan holidays turned corporate, we've neglected some very important questing. We'll quickly share what little we have.

Excellent progress in mapping the entire west side of the castle. Normally a scanned picture of our map would be here, but maybe we'll wait until the whole thing is done. We're really only mapping out the outskirts of the wall, since the inner hedge maze has pretty much already been provided with journal entries.

Once again we're shaken up by Forgotten Realm ethics. This particular character is pretty harmless and if we let him go he gives us information. On the other hand, if we collect the information he gives us and then restore the game and take whatever goodies he has, we can have the best of both worlds. It's pretty cheap, though, doncha think? That's where we are now. We have the info. Now it's a debate about whether we should pretend we're in a good-to-be-alive Jimmy Stewart movie or a standard Tarantino criminal movie.

More coming soon.
Hey! Aren't there still some lizard men somewhere that we forgot about?

PoR: entry 20 (have fun stormin' the castle!)

2007-12-17T00:25:00.000-07:00

Hmm. Cadorna didn't seemed to concerned about our welfare. Perhaps what the clerk told us immediately next sheds some light on that.
So now it's Lord Urslingen in place of the apparently evil Cadorna. We're out exploring mazes and killing monsters, but it looks like all the really fun stuff is taking place within the walls of the city council. Urslingen wasted no time in setting us off to work, though. Even though we still have one commission left to turn the tide of the lizardmen, Urslingen sent us off to capture the front gate of the big Phlan castle. It's kind of funny how we traversed the length and breadth of the land and the place we have to conclusively storm is the castle in our very home town. We probably should have phoned in all the long-distance stuff. Fortunately, Urslingen considers us to be the "best and bravest" so we are to secure the front gate. Who knows how many other bands of adventurers he's saving that "best and bravest" speech for though.

This guy outside the castle offered us his wheelbarrow. We didn't have a holocaust cloak, but we made it through the front gate anyway. Actually, did the wheelbarrow even do anything? Maybe the guy was betting that we'd just seen The Princess Bride. It came out in '87 too (I think).

Here we go with the crazy religious zealots at a new temple of Bane again. Chlorine and Pilgrim don't go all psycho like this. It just goes to show that there's a difference between living your religion and letting your religion live you (if that even makes sense).

Alright, we gonna complain a bit about the commerce in Phlan. First we need some money-back guarantees up in here! We stole the decorative long swords from the castle courtyard's temple of Bane, brought them back to our favorite shop in Phlan and paid 200 gold to have the shopkeeper tell us they were normal +2 long swords. Figuring Rexbasior didn't need his +1 long sword, he sold it to use the new ones. Mistake, apparently. The swords are cursed. They can't be readied. Every time Rex tries, he gets zapped. The point of the 200 gold identification payment is to find out stuff like that. Now we can't even buy the +1 sword back, Rex is out his favorite weapon and we can't even get or money back from the incomplete identification. Bollocks! Curse of the Azure Bonds better have more friendly customer service for stolen goods!

We secured the front gate. We told the city council. They told us to go ahead and take the rest of the castle. Suck. When do we get to give the orders? At least we got help from the laundresses. Maybe they gave us some fire cloaks. That'd be great, because behind the castle gates are a lot of these fire guys:

PoR: entry 19 (oh! we were supposed to raze THIS town!)

2007-12-05T00:04:00.000-07:00

So it turns out that we were envoys to the settlement a couple of miles west of the buccaneer base. One good slaughter deserves another, sort of like that classic part in Holy Grail where Lancelot just goes on this total killing spree.

The commandant reminds me a lot of the leader of the military school in the first season of Malcolm in the Middle. He's also a little too late nineteenth century German to be in a sword and sorcery type game. Hey, better to paint with broad strokes than with a single fiber (I just made that expression up -- did it make any sense?

Upon entrance into Zhentil Keep, our tour guide gave us a few bits of trivia. First, they've got six barracks of 100 men each. Hmm. That means it's either a stash of playable NPCs, or we're gonna be in a huge fight soon. The second bit of trivia our guide bragged about was that they've even survived a dragon attack. Hey, didn't the only dragon in the game so far actually turn out to be good?

The most open-ended part of the game happened with our dinner conversation with the commandant. We were able to talk about Phlan, magic and politics with changing points in the dialogue based on our responses. Personally, it stressed me out quite a bit, because he adjourns the dinner after too much talking and we weren't able to get every combination of dialogue in. Every last piece of information probably isn't that important, but the knowledge that we may be missing some is plenty annoying. Much of the conversation was just about the Phlan politics we're having a hard time following (who's more corrupt, Eberhard or Braccio?) The whole point of the conversation, though appears to be journal entry 46.

There were a couple of other things worth noting. He mentioned Tyran-somebody again. The name's popped up a few times as a villain. I'm aware that He's a pivotal bad guy, but is Tyr (as in temple of Tyr) a short name for the villain? Is Phlan worshiping the wrong god? Maybe we shouldn't have overturned that temple.

So, after escorting us back to our quarters the game gave us the option to "sleep with a watch." Yeah, all the hundreds of other times we camped out in dungeons and in the wilderness, and now suddenly we get the bright idea to have someone stand guard in the middle of a welcome city? Thanks for the foreshadowing programmers.

Omigosh, we got attacked in the middle of the night! Didn't see that one coming. The fights were sort of frustrating because we thought we had to go to a specific place to "clean house," but the house in the middle of town wouldn't even give us the option to attempt to break the door down. Turns out we had to face the commandant in the eastern outer wall. Chances are, the location was meaningless. We just faced him and his dwarf companion after facing four or five waves of other fighters. As usual, the 'hold person' spell worked swimmingly.

Why in the world did they attack us? Couldn't we get a little bit of exposition? We may be awesome fighters, but we don't know why everybody we meet needs to attack us. Where's the MO? Did the city council try to have us whacked by sending us on this envoy commission?

And why do I always forget to screengrab from all the good battles?

PoR: entry 18 (proclamations, emancipations)

2007-11-29T00:07:00.000-07:00

Hi. It's been a little while.

Lately I've been looking forward to Curse of the Azure Bonds, because I thought of a totally new way to go about blogging it. It should be pretty cool, I'll just tell you that right now. I'm not going to start it up or explain any more until I get to that point, so hopefully we're really hitting our stride in Pool of Radiance.

So where were we? Oh yeah. Supposedly there were a bunch of thieves in that on mansion on the north side of town. Yeah. No longer. We're still frustrated because we're so rich that we have difficulty picking up items without dropping stuff. Fortunately, there is more information to be had.
We're wondering if we need to be paying attention to all these Phlan politics. Is there an election coming or something? Why do we need to know all this dirt?
We got to meet Cadorna again. That was real neato. He sent us on some kind of diplomatic mission. Usually when someone gets sent on a "diplomatic mission" you can totally bet that eventually most of the "talking" will be done by "fists."

We thought we came to Zhentil Keep (our mission destination) in the west, but it may just be some kind of buccaneer weigh station. Whatever it is, we assessed the sitch, found out that this place practices some serious human slavery and then we got ready to seriously represent... with our swords... hard.

The end boss is surrounded by 4th level fighters and has about 120 hit points. Thankfully one of the clerics was able to get a 'hold person' spell in (usually it was uneffective, but we got lucky) and we were able to put him away with a cheap shot.

Yeah, we're feelin' a whole lot like Team America right now.

PoR: entry 17 (how about some bigger pics?)

2007-11-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

There was much rejoicing (yay)!
Our biggest bane in the game so far has finally fallen. The horrendous kobold cave is no longer an obstacle.It was a meticulous process enough without making any mistakes or being subjected to fluke lucky shots, but often around the time of the second and third waves we'd get a sort of otherworldly "game error."
Even after the third wave (including a beautiful "charming" of one of the magic-wielding envoy guards pictured below) we were annoyed to find it still wasn't over. We left Fatima in the cave and went back to Phlan to recover before our one final battle.
On the way back we bumped into some hippogriffs. I'm embarrassed to say that here's one more creature that I'm only familiar with through Harry Potter. Everyone thinks Rowling created an entire universe. Most people aren't aware that the wizardry universe has been around for quite some time, in more than Forgotten Realms form (like the proper Wizardry).
The demise of the kobold king was extremely anti-climactic.
Some of the kobold treasure was even less fulfilling. We're pretty sure it was all junk, considering the extra pluralization of "bootss." We tried to pick some of it up anyway, but we're still either too burdened to do so or we weren't meant to pick up the junk anyway. The most eye-candy of it all was the 50,000 copper pieces. Getting out our abaci, however, we discovered with the exchange rate that it was only 250 gold pieces.The last reward we expected to find in the cave was a freaking genie in a bottle. I had no idea that genies hated vampires. Is that sort of like pirates and ninjas or something? Man this Forgotten Realms stuff is all over the place. It's not just sword and sorcery fantasy. It's also kiddie matinee from the 50s with Dracula, the Mummy and Aladdin. Kind of funny in a madhouse sort of way that the hardest battle we've fought is to earn something to help us with the second hardest battle -- which we've already fought. Thanks a lot -- um, programmers.
The genie reminds me of my favorite joke, which I'll go ahead and repeat here. I don't usually tell jokes like these. My mom wouldn't approve. Anyway, a young married couple is golfing on a ritzy golf course with mansions lining both sides of the fairway. The wife slices heavily and they hear the ball crash through a mansion window and then a smaller crash inside. They make their way up to the house, knock and eventually walk into the open door when nobody answers. In the living room, they find a man sitting on the couch with a broken vase sitting next to him on the floor. "Thank you," he says. "I'm a genie. I've been trapped in that container for 5000 years. As thanks, I'll grant you three wishes." The couple huddles together and the husband says, "We'd like a billion dollars, we'd like to live forever and we want no pain in our lives from now on." "Granted!" the genie says. "Your check's in the mail and from now on you'll live forever and won't experience pain." After the couple says thanks the genie hesitates for a moment. "Um, I've done you a great favor, I'm just wondering if you'll do just one last thing for me. I've been cooped up in there for 5000 years and it's been a long time since I've been with a woman. I'm just wondering after all I've done for you, if you wouldn't mind my borrowing your wife for about an hour." Again the couple huddled together and figured that their payment was enough to forgive this one marital impasse. So the wife and the genie went upstairs to the mansion's bedroom. An hour later, they're lying there and the genie says, "Hey, how old is your husband anyway?" The woman answers, "Oh, he's about 30." Then the genie starts laughing and laughing before he says, "Your husband is 30 years old and he still believes in genies?"

Anyway, on the way home we went to the cave of Diogenes the dragon, which was very exciting because we hadn't been back since he gave us the kobold cave quest back in entry 5. After all that, the dragon did a lot of nothing. Must be a shut-in and unwilling to do anything terribly interesting. Maybe it's losing its mind. The thing actually spelled "congratulate" wrong. What's with the horrible spelling in the land? Are we hitting the dark ages or what?
Diogenes specifically mentioned using the efreet bottle (genie) against the vampire in Phlan. Fortunately on a return to the graveyard we came across a weakend Dracula inside a cross-shaped tomb. It's true. Genies hate vampires. Hard.
Our new commission is vague enough. Names? Places? Last seen? Direction? Accomplices? This is why bureaucracies do not make good police forces.In boredom, we hung out at the thieves' mansion in North Phlan. A couple of interesting journal entries were found there including some dirt on our old accomplice Bishop Braccio and a map of "NW castle." Perhaps the castle in the north west area of Phlan?

PoR: entry 16 (better get yourself a garlic tunic, buddy!)

2007-11-11T21:04:00.000-07:00

So, suddenly the end of the graveyard sequence was like we stepped into a Hammer horror production.

First it's mummies. I never really thought mummies were all that scary, but I guess the members of my party do. Every time I fought them, some our adventurers were "paralyzed by fear" right from the outset of the battle. That's pretty cheap. You can't just tell us we're scared by a powdery corpse in toilet paper.

Next up, we met up with a guy who told us where the head vampire is. He can join the party, but his name should have been a red flag for us. What is it -- MU Lvl 6 I think? I just checked GameBanshee to find his name, but they've never actually come across him. Sweet. Finally something that GameBanshee doesn't know that I've come across. Too bad I didn't get a screenshot with his name. Anyway, we noticed that once he takes us to the vampire -- ok, who are we kidding? It doesn't say the vampire's name, but we all know this is just straight-up Dracula. It's freakin' Dracula! Anyway, as I was saying, once the magic-user takes us to Dracula, he immediately turns on us and begins a fight with our party. If, when we meet the magic-user, we decide not to let him in the party, he spits at us and attacks us right there. Getting him out of the way doesn't make things that much easier when fighting Dracula because 'ol Vlad just pulls out another wolf if his magic-user minion is absent.

Dracula was a total pain to stake. We went back to town to stock up on mirrors that we readied with our free hands. I'm not totally certain that this did anything, but we finally defeated him by doing so. Dracula, like so many other undead, has an amazing ability to remove experience points. I haven't complained about too much with Pool of Radiance. I've come to terms with paying for level-ups just because we're getting so rich nowdays, but this immediate loss of XP sickens me. There's no way I'm continuing on with a game after a month's worth of experience is sucked away in a second. Therefore, it wasn't just about killing Dracula, it was about killing Dracula without him pulling that sissy move on any member of the party.
We discovered that a couple of lightening spells in a closed area really puts the smack down on Bela Lugosi.

Back in town, we leveled up again. Chlorine seems to have hit her max. Do clerics go past level 6? It doesn't have a level 7 in the manual. Disposo went up and we had a horrible time determining his bonus spell. We almost went with lightning so that he and Silver would have it. We also considered blink since we hate it so bad when monsters do it and we can't touch them. Finally settled on haste. May as well snag a spell that where it's several more attacks a turn instead of the single spell attack.

After the graveyard, we went ahead and decided that Dirten was expendable. We went ahead and cleared the Phlan Temple of Bane, thus providing the guy with fulfilling his original mission. Clearing the temple was really just one giant room filled to the brim with orcs that I neglected to get a screenshot for. It was a lot. Trust me. Perfect conditions for a well-placed fireball. We got banged up, but we all came out of it ok. The reward for our troubles was to just keep whatever we found in the temple, but we didn't bother searching for anything. Every one of us is filled to capacity with money and items. We can't even sell any of our items because we don't even have room for the money. Perhaps now is a good time to head back to the kobold cave. While there we can use up all the potions and scrolls filling up our inventory.

We did come across a curious journal entry and wall message whilst hanging out in the north of Phlan near the thieves' mansion and Bane Temple.

Por entry 15 (weighty matters)

2007-11-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so the words "lux," "samosud" and "shestni" proved to be quite fruitful. Fortunately we live in the age of the internet. If I played the game ten years ago and didn't have the copy protection, it would be a lame time trying to "crack" the words we're supposed to say to the undead at Sokal Keep.

So it turns out that the undead of the keep are actually departed spirits of the honorable ones why tried to defend it from the bad guys! Saw it comin'. As part of this physical seance we were able to meet the fabled Ferran Martinez! I was hoping he'd be wearing a sombrero. The Pool of Radiance came into the conversation again and he name-dropped some villains associated with it -- Tyranthraxus, Edranka and Torath. As thanks for the conversation, Ferran seemed to give us the ok to graverob from his own body.

Back in town, they finally let us enter the Temple of Tyr. I thought for sure that we'd have to fight our way through that place. Bishop Braccio gave us an assignment to cleanse the temple on the north side of town. I think it's sort of like that part in the bible where the money-changers were selling animals or something in the temple and Jesus had to "clean house." This time, though, the animals in the temple are selling and/or killing the humans. Apparently they do so in the name of their god, Bane. Wasn't Bane that guy from the animated Batman who had the Mexican wrestler mask on? Anyway, Braccio went ahead and gave us Dirten, priest of Ilmar. Once again, who would name their kid Dirten? If he got the slightest speck on himself, everyone else would instantly think of his name and how appropriate it is. So Dirten is nice to have. He's like a missionary -- who kills! No, seriously though. It's always nice to have more cannon fodder.

So with the temple commission in mind we almost went straight there, but then realized that the graveyard was probably more pressing AND it's likely that Dirten would leave us after freeing the temple so we thought it would be useful to get rid of as many undead as possible with him as an extra cleric. Now that Sokal Keep is under control we have a much easier time getting to the graveyard. Instead of trudging our way through all the slums to merely exit the city and then come back in from the north, we can just take a boat out straight from the civilized area. Praise public transportation. This means that we easily can go to the graveyard, use all our energy on one fight, come back into town and then ship immediately out again after recharging.

Now the undead in the graveyard whine about being the "spirits who fought the dragons" and to leave them alone. Hey, not our problem. At the top of one tower was a pretty mean-looking wraith, but it was surprisingly easy to defeat. After the wraith, we continued our growing habit of defiling dead bodies.

Now, our biggest problem is weight. We're rollin' in the dough and have stone's worth of potions, scrolls and +weapons. Wonder if it's a good time to hire a Sherpa?

PoR entry 14 (a very convenient truth)

2007-11-08T13:47:00.001-07:00

So, we're not NEARLY as thorough as we thought.

First of all, it turns out that there was an unturned stone in the Kuto's Well area of Phlan. It's merely in the form of another old woman with foreboding tales. Interestingly, though, it appears the actual Pool of Radiance is making headlines, or soundbites I guess. "An evil spirit from an unholy pool guides your enemies. It hides behind a fair countenance. Be not deceived." Hmmm. Evil hiding behind a fair countenance, eh? I had a feeling waaaay back at the beginning that the good government of Phlan isn't all that good. We'll see.

Oh, and there was a weird journal entry discovered around that part of town too.

But the really important thing is that near the old woman we found another set of bracers. Now Disposo isn't guaranteed to be killed every battle.

So, as tough as we are, we felt it was about time to take care of that kobold cave again. I think we probably tried about six or seven times using various methods of fireball strategy. It's hard enough to fight everyone, but it's even harder to knock everybody over before the trolls start picking themselves back up again. Anyway, when we finally defeated the trolls and kobolds, the evil guy in the cave sent another wave of enemies on us. This one had warthogs. Nevertheless, we didn't succeed.

Dejected, we thought we'd hang out in the pyramid again for old time's sake. If anybody is reading this who has actually beaten the game, they probably laughed out loud at the last entry when I wrote that I thought I had the whole place mapped out. Obviously not. Either I missed a teleporter the first time around, or the game variables changed which enabled me to investigate further. I must admit that when the town clerk informed us that our next mission would be to clear up the pollution of the river, it was pretty obvious that it had to do with the pyramid in some way. The river is fine before the pyramid, but everything downstream of the pyramid is all gross and salty. The overhead view of the land shows that quite obviously.

Anyway, after a series of transportation stuff happening, we came across a door with a password on it that we needed to translate. Obviously this is some kind of copy protection that didn't come with the abandonia doxbox copy of the game I play. So, I consulted GameBanshee for the appropriate answer. Cheap, I know, but I suppose it's the price I pay for piracy of out-of-print DOS-based computer games from 20 years ago.

So behind the door, we found a big polluting machine that we disabled. Once again, the game gives us the option. It's sort of surprising that the game doesn't just do these obvious sorts of things for us.

After that, we dealt with the feared wizard Yaresh! Actually, I'm not sure we even knew his name before reading the sign above his room. Silver still had her fireball spell available, so defeating him was no problem at all. He was accompanied by five or six lizardmen, which is a surprisingly small entourage for this part of the game. I'm guessing that the pain of finding our way around the pyramid is the challenge here, and not the caliber of end boss. Yaresh left behind quite a bit of paperwork:
It's kind of nice to see that there are politics in the criminal world. It's not like there's just one enemy controlling everything. Good thing, there are politics. I imagine if the entire criminal element got along and was organized, then we'd already be enslaved to them.

Past Yaresh was just one more room with some lizardmen in there. They mentioned something about saying something to other lizards. Looks like we'll be doing a little more cheating to figure it out. Hey, you know what? That skeleton back on Sokal Keep! Oh, man! I just realized as I'm typing right this very minute. That thing didn't have something I'd figure out; that thing had something written on itself that's part of the copy protection! Whatever it is, it's what I'm supposed to say to the ghosts! Oh, craptacular. Well, we'll be talking about that next time. We'll also probably be talking more lizardmen in the future, because when we got back into town, the clerk said something about preventing them from joining the enemy.

So, yeah. They gave us a bundle for clearing up the pollution problem. This was bigger than the Pelican Brief. The environment is so hot right now. The experience achieved pretty much raised everybody up a level except for Chlorine -- who's at level 7 right now, so she's got a lot more XP between classes now. Unfortunately, we're out of money, so we can't buy our diplomas, at least not with cash. We'll finally need to trade in our gems and jewelry.

Not a moment too soon either. The clerk gave us a pretty cool +3 two-handed sword to use specifically on the undead. Apparently, the ghostly situation is so catastrophic, that the FEMA-equivalent on Phlan is actually distributing means to combat it.

Next up: Sokal Keep and Valhingen Graveyard... again.

PoR: entry 13 (learneding!)

2007-11-07T02:49:00.000-07:00

I'm getting this feeling that everything involving the dead or undead or whatever is just going to fall into place one day.

We enjoyed a nice little jaunt back into the graveyard. It was a fun old time, what with two clerics and a mage with fireballs. Bones just go flyin' everywhere! After dispensing with one army, we ransacked the tower they were coming from and found a spectre creating skeletons. So, I guess these skeletons don't actually come from the remains of the living, but they come from a guy incredibly adept at not following the Law of Conservation of Mass. Not only that, but this ectoplasmic vapor does something else that I think should be against scientific law. He actually has a "lower player class" attack. That means that even if we're able to kill him, I'm still forced to restore because if he even touches us, we lose weeks' worth of XP.

We bypassed that guy. We settled on the southeast corner of the graveyard. It had a nice, friendly juju zombie instead -- relatively speaking.

So we didn't clear the graveyard, but after all this Pilgrim and Derfindor raised to level three fighters and Derfindor also classed up his thief status to level four.

Aching for some more quick experience, we decided to continue mapping out the pyramid. Every once in a while we met some driders that would kill us, but soldiered on. The thieves we met were pretty good fighers but they didn't have any holding spells like we did. Cake.

We mapped out the pyramid as much as possible. We may have missed something, but as far as I know it's all here:
After the pyramid adventure we found ourselves leveling up again. The ball's a rollin' now! Pilgrim became a level three magic user and Disposo a level four.

The leveling up of our magic-users finally enabled us to learn the "knock" spell. That, in turn, finally enabled us to enter the gates of the closed-up Phlan library. I never thought that I'd get to a place in my life where doing research would be a welcome change from killing mythical monsters in medieval combat.

At the library we found exactly what we expected to find, which was books and tomes about the history of Phlan. We did find some healing potions and stuff, but what we were really looking forward to finding were some magic-user scrolls so we could copy them and have the spells without spending weeks leveling up to get them.

Fascinating research in the form of journal entries though. Finally, a few mentions of the game's title character. Too bad I can't make heads or tail of what this is all talking about.

It's also good to know that the map I've been using in the Adventurer's Journal really is a part of the game and not just put in there to throw me off.Besides books and things to find, the library wasn't too exciting on the fighting front. One of the rooms had this weird, leggy lizard thing and a spectre attacked us on the way out. I don't know if we were just lucky or what, but this spectre didn't pose a problem nearly as bad as the skeleton-creator in the graveyard. We met up with a crazy guy. He muttered lots of stuff, but we couldn't make any sense of it. We were nice, though and didn't kill him.

Oh, yeah! And there were also some surrender-monkey kobolds who gave us what appears to be a map of useless information.

Going home after an intense collegiate cram session was pretty sweet. The clerk was like, "amused by our descriptions." Nice to see him/her crack a smile. The clerk's a she, right? Also humorous that she said one of our bits of research had "small value." She then dispensed a single gold coin for us to fight over.

The new commission we received sure is a weird one -- end the river's pollution. Hmm. I guess we're going to have to hit the books again and come up with some kind of desalinization contraption. Maybe we could kidnap some Peace Corps volunteers.

Pilgrim went up to level four. Watch that guy! He's goin' places!

PoR: entry 12 (computer glitches in medieval times)

2007-10-28T20:08:00.000-06:00

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)

2007-10-16T01:30:00.000-06:00

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)

2007-10-11T19:08:00.001-06:00

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?

welcome extra life/final score listeners!

2007-09-29T18:31:00.000-06:00

Hey, if you just listened to The Final Score Podcast, welcome welcome welcome!

That is, welcome if Scott Johnson actually did a Final Score the week I'm in Hawaii AND he put on my review capsule of Pool of Radiance. If he did, it should be October 6th or so right now and I won't have a chance to welcome you as it happens. There is a chance it will air on October 13th, in which case I'll probably write a similar welcome entry then. If you didn't hear about this blog from Final Score, then how in the world are you reading this right now? That's strange and mystical, man.

Anyway, I'm probably on vacation right now, so if you're just stumbling onto this, please check out the quest so far. Get engrossed, if possible. Most of all, let me know you've been here.

PoR: entry 9 (kobold sweat)

2007-09-28T01:17:00.001-06:00

We decided to stick around with the nomads for a few days. Maybe our lives will turn out better for doing so. Maybe we'll all meet special nomads and turn away from a life of violence.

But whether or not kobolds are evil, there are a lot of them in the wilderness, or at least a lot of them hanging around the outskirts of the nomad camp. Will violence never cease? Alas.

Strange that I'd yearn for a stoppage of violence in a video game, but these battles are taking a lot out of me.

So anyway, the kobolds came and we and the nomadic villagers fought them off. Kobolds are easycakes, but the sheer volume still knocked out half the party. Eventually, we picked up on a really great strategy: simply hide behind the nomadic villagers. Use them as human shields. It's almost like a hostage situation.

The reward was pretty nice for getting rid of the kobold scourge. Maybe we'll have to go on a shopping spree. On our last adventure we had to stop picking things up because we were so strapped with money. Maybe a nice crossbow is in order.

So, being too rich for the nomad town, we went off into the wilderness once more. We may have actually found the kobold complex spoken of by the dragon in the form of a cave, or rather, a series of caves hidden in the hills directly east of the forbidden pyramid. The caves are guarded by what I think I remember is called a "kobold horde." The horde can be dispatched, but is voluminous enough to weaken the party extremely before entrance into the caves.

We decided to enter the "small cave."

That's pretty much how the story ends right now. Not much has happened, I know, but the flood of kobolds in the front gate tears us to shreds, disabling us from handling the horrors within. We've actually adventured deep into the cave and found some pretty sweet shiz, but because of certain losses, I might just play those parts over again, correctly. Specifically, there's a trap in the beginning of the cave that I step into every time. I know of no way around and I can't avoid it by searching for it, even though I "know" it's there (but I suppose nobody in the party would know unless they themselves possess the special "save" and "load" spells. I'll probably have to prepare myself with a stupid "detect trap" spell. Do I even have one of those? Blast!

Anyway, as a preview of what may be coming in the future, my extracurricular activities in the cave included a new hot NPC, bribery, twisted set-ups, winged creatures, giants, prisons and most of all, death (I'm hoping that next time it doesn't come to that). Here's what I mapped out of the cave:
I'm also messing with photoshop a little for this scan to make it look like I drew it right on the blog itself. I can't preview it properly before I publish, so we'll see how it goes.

I'm going to Hawaii to work a little on my zen next week, so it may be a little while before I post again. When I'm all relaxed and zenned out, we'll be just focused enough to kill a bunch more living beings that probably don't deserve it. Happy hunting all!

PoR: entry 8 (roll the bones)

2007-09-21T02:01:00.000-06:00

So I'm in an interesting blogging situation now. It's been so long since I've written (and played for that matter), that I can't be certain about the facts from these screen grabs. We'll make do. Or maybe make up.

So in my Phlan travels I happened to walk into a buccaneer's den of some sort. It just had a bunch of bad guys chillin' and drinkin.' Great place to pick a fight, which I did when I opened the door into some guy's face. After I dueled him (and won, yay!) I had the curious option of actually hanging out with the "monsters." I'm still finding it weird that instead of going off to some other country to fight a war with a distinctive enemy, I'm actually beating up on my neighbors who are either a) another race b) of a poorer class or c) a and b. It just doesn't sit right. I seriously swear sometimes I think I was put on this earth just to make the people close to me miserable.

Okay, so I decided to hit the graveyard for some serious skeletal experience points. I decided it might be a good idea to bring along another cleric just for this purpose. Since I was going to be using this character in the short term I figured I may as well split his/her class to make him/her more rounded. He/she would probably never level up since it takes so much longer for split classes to earn the necessary experience for all the classes. Apparently you can't create more than six characters when you have a party of six organized. It automatically deletes the new character. Very frustrating. So after much tribulation in the character creating department I finally created a new temporary cleric/figher/magic-user. In these dark times, I needed him/her to be a guiding light to my party. For this reason I decided to name him "Pilgrim." Not only is he a religious trailblazer, but I also named him after Simeon Pilgrim, who has been a terrific guide to me thusfar through succinct, spoiler-free comments to this very blog. I guess Simeon celebrated a birthday this month. Happy birthday Simeon!

On to the graveyard. We encountered a couple of armies of skeletons and even though skeletons seem to be slightly tougher than standard orcs and goblins, they were easier to dispatch thanks to Chlorine and Pilgrim's one-two punch of turning the undead.

The really big battle came with the slaying of the giant skeleton. So far the giant skeleton is the coolest of all the iconed monsters. The giant icon looks like a malnourished stormtrooper from Star Wars. The first time we encountered this thing, it dispatched most of the party, but this time we really slugged it out. Pilgrim is really showing his stuff in battle. He may be stuck with lower experience, but he can already perform nearly any task any other member of the party performs. How cool is it to fight a giant skeleton? How come this is the first time in any medium that I've come across such a thing? So is it like Goliath's ancient re-animated corpse or something?

Although Dead Goliath was a pretty tough stale cookie, I'm amazed at how much experience we all received. I'm guessing this is a point in the game where the programmers' kind of decided to throw us a really huge bone. Quite literally. I swear as I typed that first sentence I didn't realize there would be such a perfect groan-inducing pun.

In the crypt we also found a unique marble chest. The prompt came up on the screen asking whether or not to open the box. It's like, hell yeah, like any box will ever hurt us! I'm sure I'll be eating those words when in the future some box eats one of the party members. Anyway, this sucker was packed with 10 gems and 12 pieces of jewelry. I sold much of it, but am keeping the rest close to me for emergencies and for when I better figure out how to get swell appraisals for my goods.

After getting back to town we also yielded incredible level-ups! Chlorine is now a level five! ("Take it to level five." "Level five?" "Level five!" Name that movie!) Silver the Enchantress and Rexbasior are level fours. Disposo raised up as well. Tragically, Disposa missed out on the fun in order to make room for Pilgrim. Even Derfindor finally upped both his fighter and thief class. Hey, even Pilgrim raised levels on two of his classes.

So really quickly, we hit the countryside again looking for the mysterious "kobolds far to the east." I've said it before: the east is pretty big. Presently we are holed up in a strange nomad camp in the middle of the countryside. The chief has been pretty darn friendly. They've already made us the guests of honor at the village feast! We may hold out for him to offer up his daughters as well. He's also been warning us of kobolds in the area. Ha! Kobolds! When have they ever bothered us (besides a month ago or so)? We've freaking killed Goliath again! Bring it.

Tomorrow, we wander aimlessly toward Koboldtown!

a brief explanation

2007-09-19T16:14:00.001-06:00

I know it's been a while since my last post, but rest assured, a new one is coming very quickly. I've had images from my latest Forgotten Realms foray ready to go for a good four or five days now, but haven't been able to get a free moment at the computer this entire time. Let me rephrase that. I haven't gotten a free moment at my computer at home (I'm at work now). Actually, more accurately, I haven't gotten a free moment at my computer at home where I wasn't just idly browsing youtube.

A new post is coming, but I probably should reveal that my girlfriend, with her infinite heart, bought me Metroid Prime 3 for the Wii yesterday. I fear that much of my video game-playing time will consist of that game. Don't worry. I will still update Blogging Forgotten Realms as regularly as possible. However, many of the posts may inexplicably reference Metroid.

So keep reading... both of you.

PoR: entry 7 (at what cost, victory?)

2007-09-09T14:39:00.001-06:00

So I didn't decide to do the dragon thing. So what? I thought I'd at least check out the textile district. Funny. Didn't see any textiles at all.

Derfindor finally came in pretty handy as a thief/fighter. Just in time, too. After beginning the game with so much promise, the guy has been pretty darn lax lately. He's been missing easy shots, going unconscious all the time and as a result, he still has yet to level up once. Anyway, he came in handy because we came across a thieves' guild under a well that was only accessible to thieves themselves. Some of the other members of the party tried climbing down, but they merely fell to their deaths. Derfindor wasn't even 100% successful every time he tried. I still don't know what thieves are really for, but this was at least one reason to have one around.

Anyway, the thieves guild led me to a pretty hellish battle with some kind of witchy hobgoblin thing. It took several tries to eliminate her(/it?) and I had to do it with absolutely no random monster encounters. At this point in the game, the random monster encounters are ridiculously difficult. Behind locked doors after the witch battle, was the servant of Cadorna that we were able to free from shackles. We had access to the guy before the big battle, but we needed to win the key to his shackles through the battle. His name is, get this, "Skullcrusher." Of course the dude's not jokin' around. He was able to become a great NPC in the party and his 39 hit points were extremely helpful. We weren't finished after freeing him, however. Skullcrusher was bloodthirsty to eradicate the hobgoblins and he led us to conquer another room populated by a giant ogre and dozens more underlings. It took a little while to reign in his enthusiasm. I gave him our silver two-handed sword and he just rushed into battle, taking six or seven hobgoblins with him. Of course that meant that ten or so had enough time to surround him and beat him senseless by the end of the fight. As a result we had try again by giving him a long bow so he could easily pick off the guys the magic squad put to sleep. All of us felt pretty cheated that we did the work while he got the easy kills, but his stamina was really invaluable.

We were able to secure Cadorna's box after this other big battle. I decided not to open the box, but I did restore the game and peek inside without saving. Quite impressive. About 1000 gold, 8 gems, 4 jewels and then some weird stuff. The weird stuff consisted of a jeweled dragon statuette, a jewel-studded bowl, a gold wand and gauntlets of ogre power. I readied Skullcrusher with the gauntlets and he became much stronger. What a find! Alas, I made the decision to go with the path where I don't open the box. Maybe it doesn't matter so much, but I'm going to try to have integrity in this universe. I know it makes a huge difference in Ultima. Of course the more and more I play Pool of Radiance, the bigger the gap in similarity between the two franchises gets. Maybe playing with integrity in this game will make up for whatever integrity I lack in real life. I guess I'll need a million more hits on this blog for that to make any difference.

So after all was conquered, I realized several horrible things. First, was that Rexbasior and Disposa were dead! They had fallen in battle and couldn't get up. To make matters worse, I noticed Derfindor's armour class had gone down about five notches. I guess he readied a cursed necklace I found amongst the hobgoblins or somewhere. Cursed items can't be taken off, as is the case in many other popular games from this era, like Rogue (I'm putting the link to the popular ASCII version of Rogue, but the version I remember playing at my friend Pete's house as a kid was the Mac version that had mouse-interface and 8-bit graphics (why is there so little info about this version on the web?)). To make matters worse, Skullcrusher just up and left to go "serve his master" or some crap like that. And he took our silver bastard sword, silver two-handed sword and our long bow! Boo! Ultimately the reward for bringing the box back was 16 measely gems that we got lousy appraisals for. We were able to resurrect Rexbasior and Disposa with the money, but Derfindor's necklace remained cursed because of lack of funds.

At this point in the game, not only was i annoyed by the hardship my party was experiencing, but I was seriously peeved at the lack of banks in the land. According to the exchange rates, 200 copper is worth one gold, 20 silver is one gold, 2 electrum is one gold and one platinum is worth 5 gold. That pretty much means that copper isn't worth picking up. It also means that you don't have access to how much money you have at-a-glance; instead you need to count several different types of coins. Also, you are actually encumbered by coins, so if you're carrying too many around, you can't pick up other things. Could we please get a checking or credit system of some sort in Phlan? Thank you. Apparently the templars were really awesome at a medieval system of credit. Saw it on The History Channel.

It was a good time to leave the city, so we took a stroll. Just north of Phlan we found a weird pyramid-type structure. We...isn't it weird how I'm using "we" so much? My characters are really becoming a part of me. Anyway, we decided to go in even though it had nothing to do with any quests we were on and had no idea what was inside. I gulped when I discovered that the overhead view was disabled inside the structure and I'd really have to do some serious mapping for this puppy. It's the works too: repeating coordinates, teleportations, tight corners, thin walls. Egad! A few entries ago I joked that I didn't want to bother mapping out the Old Rope Guild. No doubt that everyone familiar with the game who read my complaint, actually laughed out loud when they read it. Obviously this game will have a tonload of mapping "opportunities." Anyway, this is what I was able to get done of the pyramid:
Hopefully you can kind of tell what's going on here. The adventure begins in the long-running north-south hallway with two teleporters in the western doors. The circled symbols and letters designate where the teleportations are from while the normal letters and symbols designate where they teleport to. The single lines through walls are secret doors. I got really lost in the area south of the displacer beasts. Speaking of, those suckers are wicked hard. I didn't even knock one over. I can't really figure out what the purpose of the pyramid is, but my best guess is that it's the home of some crazy, reclusive mad wizard we're gonna have to take down. I totally expect the wizard, but what I don't understand are the random groups of high-level adventurers just wandering the hallways. Every so often, we meet up with a "group of level-5 fighters" or "level-7 thieves" or something like that. It gives me the impression that they're adventurers like us on some kind of quest, but despite the ability to parlay with them, it says they "smile at us" and begin attacking. Is there a reason for this or are they just competitive?

After getting lost, I nearly despaired myself to go way back to an earlier savegame, but I bumped into this old guy who was tunneling out. He gave me a heckuva lame conversation. I thought for sure I was supposed to kill him just like all the other weird people I met in there.

On the way home, I crossed the river and entered Phlan on the north side. There I was able to check the graveyard out as a sort of "exhibitionary tale" -- one that I'd check out, but wouldn't save. I was able to fight this really cool giant skeleton and I barely beat him with only Rexbasior remaining -- yeah, the guy who died first on our last big quest. Rex secured a wonderful treasure with thousands and thousands of XP. I was never able to make it out of there alive though. I restored the game. Hopefully I'll be able to pass the area again and it will be much easier with another cleric to take care of the undead.

Back in Phlan I finally scraped enough money (3500 gp) to remove that stupid cursed necklace of Derfindor's. It's not a total loss, though. I was able to make a little dinero selling it.
As you can see, a ton happened during this entry. Sorry if it was just an episodic re-capping. I'm hoping that future entries will have more room for commentary. It's starting to get really really good, and like I said, playing is funner than writing.

PoR: entry 6

2007-09-05T23:19:00.000-06:00

Ding dong the crazy drooling Norris the Gray is dead!

Since my posts have been getting so long, I'm going to try to post more frequently, so that I have less to update each time. Hopefully it will help. Last night's action was extremely fruitful though, so today's entry may not be as short as future posts. I'll be straight with you however... in the beginning the blog was the fun part. Now the game is the fun part.

Oh, and I'm also smallifying the images this time around. You may not be able to read them as well, but they screw with the text when they're that big and close together. Keep in mind that you can still click on the images and they should be brought up to full size.

Anyway, as mentioned, Norris the Gray is dead! He's that weirdo who lives under a well with a bunch of kobolds and lizard men and is wide-eyed and drooling in his picture (see entry 4 for his image). His defeat was all made possible by Chlorine's amazing "hold person" spell. It's pretty much a concentrated sleep spell. At one point everybody in Norris's gang was either asleep or in a magical hold, so we pretty much capped 'em all off execution style!

I sure hope I'm fighting for the right side.

The most significant thing about this sewer victory was the awarding of a journal entry! Just last entry I was wondering if they'll ever come into play, and just a few hours later I gleefully opened up The Adventurer's Journal to entry 50 (it was pretty dull, actually).

So, like, yeah, that's not all! I also went off to Podal Plaza and easily found the auctioning of the forbidden weapon mentioned in the last entry. I broke up the auction and had to fight... seven orcs. Yeah, I'm glad they didn't throw anything hard, but c'mon! If the weapon is really all that powerful, you'd think more than seven wussy orcs would be hanging around. I mean the next bid was to be 5000 gold pieces for cryin' out loud! After I dealt with the orcs I didn't collect anything close to that amount. Were these orcs just delinquents bidding for fun? It's a good thing I killed them, because if they had the winning bid, they wouldn't have been able to pay.

I need to get back there though. Somehow I need to save up my money and see if I can buy the weapon. I may have to forgo a few level ups. The weapon better compensate for that.

For now I've decided against cleaning up Sokol Keep. I built another cleric to help out and everything, but after one more sojourn there I figured that that's not where I'm supposed to be. I noticed that I can parlay with the undead there and the game actually allows me to speak a word to them. I have no idea what to say and I imagine I can avoid fighting altogether once I know what to talk about.

My next commission doesn't involve the town clerk. The clerk directed me to apparently an even higher-up bureaucrat by the name of Councilman Cadorna. He looks real smooth. I think he's got something up his sleeve. I think he's evil. The textile complex I think is overrun by some pretty vicious monsters -- scorpions and the like. I might want to avoid that place.

That leaves the dragon's quest mentioned in the last entry. I'm guessing that Diogenes is good, so I'll trust him for now. Dragons tend to be symbolic of that which must be overcome, but at the same time, most talking dragons are usually good. Examples include the dragon in Dragonheart, and the one in The NeverEnding Story.

Incidentally, has anybody actually read the book, The Neverending Story? Obsidian, from Commissioned Comic and Extralife Radio once claimed it to be just about the best book he has ever read. Could it be true? I do know the guy really LIVES his AD&D and as far as I know, he's the only person I've ever known to actually read the book.

Anyway, there's also Smaug from The Hobbit. J.R.R. Tolkien literally wrote the book on this stuff. That thing was a baddie. Maybe I will eventually eliminate Diogenes.

So yeah, in all the excitement, Disposo and Disposa both achieved enough XP to level up. Perhaps the names I gave them encouraged them to work extra hard. Now we might be committed despite their designations. I only upgraded Disposo just to be safe (and I'm poor).

PoR: entry 5 (new faces, new places)

2007-09-03T23:18:00.000-06:00

Meet the newest members of the crazy Phlan-venturing hodge-podge party from Hell and Heaven: Disposa and Disposo. As you may assume from their names, I'm not planning on keeping them around for the long haul. They're really only traveling spellbooks. As for their statistics, I just had to make sure that their intelligence was up to snuff for proper casting. To be honest, I haven't figured out how important intelligence actually is. The instructions say that intelligence affects how much a character can memorize, but magic-users seem to always start with four spells anyway. A nice little table on page 36 of The Adventurer's Journal also explicitly spells out the acquisition of new spells as experience levels progress. Perhaps when I created these two I should have kept rolling in hopes of getting their hit points better than 3 and 4.

Not that it matters, because they served their purpose quite well. My final two rooms in the Phlan slums, the guard rooms to the hemp market, are now completely cleared! Having the ability to cast four sleep spells which could potentially affect up to nine monsters each is quite an arsenal. One was filled entirely with Gobins, while the other was filled with Orcs.

I was slightly disappointed in what lay beyond the "end commission" rooms. Beyond the Orc room was another room of "monster leaders" having a conference. Unfortunately (actually thankfully, since I was so weak from the previous battle) they were anti-climacticly easy to exterminate. They left behind some gems and jewelry which I'll hold onto for now and hope to get a better price for them when I need them to level up later at the stupid "Phlan University" that tells me to go kill monsters and then tells me I need to PAY them for the honor and experience. Read the previous two entries for my whining about paying for level ups.

Anyway, thankfully I finally got the clerk to tell me a new mission, which I haven't looked at since I captured the image of it. Hmm. Podal Plaza, eh? According to entry #37 of The Adventurer's Journal, Podal Plaza is three large city blocks to the west of the civilized area of Phlan. I wasn't planning on peeking at the journal entries before it actually tells me to, but I'm a sucker for looking at maps. I'm also pretty miffed that I haven't had to bust out The Adventurer's Journal at all so far. What's up with that? I assumed that during gameplay I'd be referring to it quite a bit.

Have you ever played Wasteland? That question is sort of rhetorical because there really aren't that many people reading this to respond right now and also if you're reading this, you've probably played it. Remember the paragraphs book in that game? I thought The Adventurer's Journal would be a lot like that. That game referenced a new paragraph with just about every progression. Perhaps Wasteland just put more emphasis on having some kind of outside medium to better broaden the gameplay. Perhaps Pool of Radiance is just way way bigger and I haven't even gotten to the first real plot-point. Today a friend of mine familiar to PoR talked to me about the Blogging Forgotten Realms project and asked me, "Does that game even have an end?" I don't actually know the answer to that question. If the game doesn't have an end, at least this blog will have plenty of staying power.

So anyway, we've got to hit up Podal Plaza, the sewer gang in Kuto's Well and our other upstanding commission is to clean up Sokol Keep. All these areas are places I'm frankly not good enough to conquer. I've experimented with Sokol Keep a couple of times. I can "warp" there by a boat directly from the civilized area. It's populated by the undead. As a cleric, Chlorine can turn away some of the undead during battle. I'm wondering if I need to pull out clerical versions of Disposa and Disposo for the conquering of the Keep.

Another curious commission I'm supposedly working on is to find books about the history of Phlan before the fall. I imagine such information is available at Mendor's library if I could figure out how to get in. Once again, why is the dirty work that the powers-that-be want me to accomplish simply library-card related? I shouldn't have started that sentence with "Once again..." since I've never really mentioned library work before. I guess it just goes with my paranoid suspicion that the government of "civilized" Phlan really isn't that legit and they need me to trespass into a legit book source. Ever read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Once again, rhetorical. It's the book the movie Blade Runner was based on. There's a weird scene in the book that isn't in the movie where our hero cop ran afoot of another police station that he didn't even know existed and they didn't know his existed. It's pretty surreal. It's like they both had their universes and they thought they knew what was going on, and they thought society revolved a certain way; but one or both were deceived.

So with all this existential stuff going through my head, it was nice to actually leave the city. Turns out the whole game doesn't take place in Phlan! Ever see Dark City? Ok, moving on...

Anyway, life outside of Phlan is... kinda hard. One giant snake can ruin lots of lives. Those snakes are life-ruiners. It'd be real nice if I had a bigger overhead map view of the countryside. Mapping out the countryside will probably be just as annoying as mapping out the Rope Guild.

So I met this weird dragon in the mountains named (I think) Diogenes. A talking dragon? Now I've seen everything. I assumed that dragons have a strict tendency to be creatures for the slaying. The dragon gave me a quest. I foolishly saved right after i got the quest instead of right before. I was hoping that I could see what would happen if I handled the situation differently instead of just going right for the quest. Could this beast be more vague about where I'm supposed to find this den of kobolds? "Far to the East?" If this world is anything like Earth, "The Far East" is, like, half of the freaking world. It's doubtful I'll get all the way through the wilderness at this stage in the game.

On my second sojourn outside the walls of Phlan I actually royally pounded on quite a few monsters. Unfortunately, I realized too late that Chlorine didn't just get knocked unconscious by a giant snake; she freaking got killed. for the first time I sought out the healers for a resurrection. It was a bit pricey. Not quite worth the experience points from my bushwhacking adventure. Going back to an old savegame was quite in order.

After all this, I was able to still level up Silver the Enchantress. Level 2 spells seem to be way lamer than level 1. What's up with that? We've got detect invisibility, invisibility, knock, mirror image, ray of enfeeblement, stinking cloud and strength. The invisibility spells seem like they might be cool, but apparently you only stay invisible until you attack someone and I haven't come across anybody remotely invisible enough to want to use "detect invisibility" on them. Stinking cloud sounds kind of nice, but the sleep spell seems to be more effective. Ultimately I went with learning mirror image which I guess makes decoy characters for monsters to attack. Hopefully it will be worth what I ultimately paid for it.

I'm leaving you with a series of random images of my misadventures in the wilderness. I'll have plenty of time to explore them more fully later, but I am slightly nervous. Right now, my party is so weak, I can't fight off any of these things I'm dealing with right now. I might have to wander around for a few weeks getting enough experience to actually do some damage. We'll see.

Por: entry 4 (inaction)

2007-08-28T01:20:00.000-06:00

I haven't been able to play nearly as much as I've been hoping. Many apologies. The gameplay has slowed down quite a bit. Things aren't progressing quite as rapidly as I'd like. I was glancing through the manual again last night and I got a little nervous when it informed me that commissions get harder the longer I take to accomplish them. I certainly thought that I'd get past at least one commission by now!

Before I recap what I've been doing, I do want to talk about something I forgot to mention in the last entry. Remember that wizard who asked me to fetch a potion elsewhere in the slums? Well, I assumed that he asked me to do it because he didn't want to hit the streets alone. When I brought the potion back to him, I had the opportunity to engage him in combat. I did for fun, with the intention to see what would happen and just restore my savegame afterward. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that he had an entire army at his disposal! It totally reminds me of the Phlan city watch. What do these people need my pathetic band's services for when they have armies of thugs on their payroll? Hmm. A thought occurs to me right this minute. Perhaps the potion was an illegal substance and the wizard didn't want anyone in his organization in danger of getting hit up by narcs. Not bloody likely.

I also want to take a moment to briefly respond to this blog's sole commentor, Simeon Pilgrim, who has given me some invaluable pointers in the journey thus far (hopefully he keeps them up). Last entry I complained about having to actually pay to level up. Simeon implied that such a situation should be obvious. I still maintain that the situation is unfair. When we experience things, our skills and attributes raise naturally. We don't actually need a piece of paper from the state to actually do things better. We do things better because we practice. I know this is probably a D&D standard and everything, but the knowledge gleaned from firsthand experience should be the one thing in all of existence that I don't have to pay for. Oh and also Simeon, I always knew that it's possible to map out the Rope Guild, I just knew that it wouldn't be accomplished by me.

So I'm still working on clearing out the slums to the west of the civilized area of Phlan. I only have two rooms left. I'm considering creating a couple more magic-users for the sole purpose of being cannon fodder and incapacitating the hordes with some more sleep spells. After I clear the rooms, the new characters would just be disposable until I make more disposable players or find some NPCs to join the party (which I haven't found yet and that bugs me).

All's not completely well in the slums. I bumped into a gypsy who gave me a fairly cryptic reading. I suppose you get what you pay for and she was pretty cheap. The whole line about friends where you expect enemies and enemies where you expect allies is pretty poignant in the context of cleaning the slums of monsters. Some of the monsters, just before battle, have yelled stuff to the effect of, "How dare you attack our home?" Good point. What am I doing? Maybe if the immigration issue wasn't such a hot topic in real life right now, I wouldn't be getting such a guilty conscience. Sure these orcs and goblins are different than us and maybe they didn't sign all the right papers when they moved in next door, but is it really ethical to exterminate them just because they're not from around here? They're humanoids too! Maybe the establishment is really the true enemy, or "The Man." Perhaps I'll be liberating the orcs by the end of the game. Interestingly, I also had the option of attacking the gypsy. I restored the game really quick after catching a glimpse of the message the game gave after the murder.

I'm still confused about the weaponry I sell. One of my short bows is actually a +1, so the vendors are willing to pay more for it (1750 gold pieces). Surely a +1 bow is better than a normal bow, but is it really worth 1749 more? Same with Derfindor's +1 leather armor (shouldn't armor be -1?). It's now the same armor level as ring mail, but it's worth hundreds more for some reason. It is lighter, I guess. I think I'll hold onto them until something really good comes up or I'm broke.

In the course of my boredom, I did a little bit of wandering to the west of the slums -- the Kuto's Well region. The discovery of a dungeon beneath the well was an exciting one although I knew that I would have a difficult time handling the horrors beneath when it was still hard to handle the horrors above. Inevitably, I bumped into a guy with... sigh... another army at his disposal -- Norris the Gray. Never heard of him. Some of the chatterings in the hemp market mention a gang near the well, but I don't know if this is the same one. Doesn't matter though, cuz my party isn't tough enough yet to beat this guy. Derfindor's still far away from going up one level for Pete's sake. Norris is also immune to my patented sleep spell in battle, so by the time I take this guy down I'll need a new strategy. Here's hoping he'll have some interesting secrets. He certainly looks like he's got something on the mind. Or maybe he's simply nuts or constipated or something.

So just before writing this post, I took a boat to Sokal Keep. Had a little battle with some skeletons and zombies. Got wasted (as usual), but it was fun to finally utilize a little clerical "turn undead" action. Worked like a charm (which I guess it was). Half of the monsters turned and ran; the other half killed us. Before that happened though I passed through some pretty interesting sites. One of which was a sad skeleton that provided me with the weird inscription pictured. Looks like I'll be needing to go back to school to figure this crap out.

Okay. It's time to get pumped. Next time 'round, my party is going to start busting heads. My characters are being way too wussy. The second wind of battle is on its way!

PoR: entry 3 (action!)

2007-08-19T17:19:00.000-06:00

I quickly discovered that the tavern tales are almost not worth writing down. Look at tavern tale 2. Funnily enough I don't know if it's describing the guy telling tale 2 or if he's actually telling me the story of a drunk bard talking to an unappreciative crowd in some other tavern.

After a little bit of battle experimenting, I finally went over to the town hall to grab a commission. I was pretty disappointed to discover that they pretty much just handed off a "go out and kill" mission. I suppose I wasn't expecting anything too detailed.

I headed over to the western slums area and started figuring out how this whole combat thing works. I quickly learned that magic-users can't throw daggers, so I wasted some money there. Also, there was no sense in Chlorine, my cleric, to have javelins. At least all this stuff was really really cheap. The most obnoxious thing about Chlorine is that as a cleric she can't wield a long-range weapon of any sort. As a result, I'm required to put her at the point. She's gotten totally clobbered in a few battles. Derfindor has been the party's savior, just like I predicted. He chills in the back with his sling and is pretty good with it. When the enemy gets close enough, he whips out his bastard sword and is even more consistent.

We've mostly hit parties of orcs, goblins and kobolds. Kobolds are my favorite. They're the weakest. I don't really know what a kobold is, but based on the picture, they look like some sort of canine theatre troupe. Hmm. according to wikipedia, kobolds are sort of like German leprechauns.

After getting used to the battle technique (which took a while actually -- I may have to go into detail about my complaints with the battle system later), the kobolds were no real problem. There are some specific set-piece battle rooms full of kobolds that proved to be more difficult. Even though the rooms contain like 20 of the cute and fuzzy things, I still don't like getting womped by them since wikipedia also informs me that kobolds are sort of considered a perennial loser running gag in RPGs.

For the big kobold rooms (and orc rooms and goblin rooms), my party developed an ingenious strategy. Silver the Enchantress would cast a sleep spell on the front two or so rows of monsters. The sleeping monsters would block the way of the rear advancing monsters and Rexbasior and Derfindor would sling the back ranks to death before putting killing blows on the sleeping foes. This strategem didn't actually work every time and it also only worked once per journey. I had to clean out a room, save the game, go back into civilized Phlan to recharge Silver's spell and then go back into the slums to attempt it again.

In the course of my slum wanderings I happened upon a somewhat more interesting quest. It involved running potion errands for a wizard smack in the middle monster-land. He pointed me toward the Old Rope Guild elsewhere in the slums. The mission was refreshing because I got into something of a story instead of the same old monster and battle screens.

Old Rope was worse than anticipated, however. For some reason (probably just to make the quest interesting) the overhead mapping mode ability is turned off in that area. Also the coordinates seem to fly all over the place. I eventually got to the back-alley potion shop by metaphorically touching my left hand to the left wall and following the same wall through the whole guild. Just for fun I saved the game and investigated the guild further. The monsters I found that killed me will haunt my dreams for several weeks.

In the course of potion-fetching and monster eviction by genocide, I came across not only money, but useful items. The most frustrating thing about finding short swords is that half the time when you try to sell them, the shopkeepers offer you "0 gold." I'm not the kind of person to throw things away so I wind up just being burdened with junk until the keeper gives me one lousy piece of gold for each dumb knife. I stressed out even more about a couple of gems I searched for and found in the slum stable. I sold one for 100 gold and the other for 500 gold then restored the game to see if I could swing a better deal at another shop. After pulling this cheap stunt and finding nothing better I discovered that the original shop wasn't even giving me original prices. In fact the buyback got marked down to something like 14. I had to restore a few more times before I got the right price back. Kind of makes me think that worrying about all the shop prices is pretty unnecessary. I'm also wondering if the items I find aren't worth anything unless I pay 200 gp for their identification. I identified a necklace of missiles (I'm really lost as to what it does) and a +1 ring of protection before restoring the game to just get my money back. Do I still get my missiles and protection? maybe I should just splurge.

Here's the most excellent map I made of the slum areas:

Excellent stuff. It appears there's more fun stuff even further west. Ruins and bigger and nastier monsters. As I was playing last night, my roommate walked by and asked: "How long is that game anyway?" I was like, uh... I really have no idea in the slightest. I've been playing quite a bit already and I'm not even out of the town yet. It looks like it could be a lot more since I haven't really stumbled upon a clear plotline. Sheesh. This could be a much bigger endeavor than I bargained for.

My final stress for the day was when I realized I had earned enough experience points to level up, but I hadn't. I was seriously worried that there was a bug associated with the version I had that disabled me from ever going up a level. Fortunately, before spending too much time online trying to figure it out (how do you google a problem like that?) I found the solution in the training center in civilized Phlan (even though it seems to unjustly cost me some dough). After leveling up, I clobbered Rolf, the guy who knocked Rexbasior unconscious on my first day of actually playing. Oh man, it felt so very sweet. The new spell I picked for Silver the Enchantress is the "charm person" spell. Hopefully I can get a few kobold NPCs to wander around with me. How fun! Pets!

PoR: entry 2 (tiny souls in a tiny city)

2007-08-16T23:56:00.000-06:00

Okay... finally. Well, I finally exist in the strange city of Phlan.

I sort of went ahead with my original line-up. First up, I built my fighter. This screenshot is before I named him, but his name is Rexbasior. The name comes from my website, which is named after some semi-flirty first semester Latin I picked up at college. I'm thinking this will be my go-to guy. I've always been way more of a fan of fighters in these kind of games. Magic always seems to take too much cost and patience to be consistently effective. Fighters always have the consistency. They're not limited by magic. It's like I've always said... hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a crossbow at your side.

I'm wondering if there's any advantage to having female party members. From what I can tell, there isn't, but whenever I play video games I love playing as a woman, so I didn't want to pass this opportunity up. Yeah, I know that sounds weird, and it's not like I want to be a woman or anything, it's just that role-playing games are a wonderful opportunity to... you know, play a different role. Anyway, I named my magic-user Silver the Enchantress. Ever since high school I've always told people that I'm going to name my first daughter Silver the Enchantress. Notice I accidentally gave her the portrait body of a thief. Whoops. That's fine, though. I love that teasy sort of pose.

I'm using my only non-human character as a combination fighter and thief dwarf. I named him after the first set of syllables that went through my head. Here's hoping that his freaky "infravision" will come in handy as well as his freakish old age. I'm wondering now if the fighter/thief combination was a good idea. I might should have done a combination of magic user and fighter. Something polarizing like that anyway.

Even though she's a cleric, I just had to give Chlorine the cleavagy portrait. How could I not. I figured that she's officially evil, so perhaps an evil priestess really would wear something slutty like that. Here's hoping having an evil cleric will be useful. Something tells me that a good one is more practical, but the thought of the undead joining the party rather than merely fleeing from it seems like a much cooler gig. You're probably laughing at some of the stats I wound up with. I really only looked at strength for my fighter, intelligence for my magic-user, dexterity for my figher/thief and wisdom for my cleric.

So after doing the creation thing, I sort of just wandered for a bit. Unfortunately, one of the first places I went to was the figher training area. I picked a fight in there before bothering to go to the armoury and the guy clubbed Rexbasior senseless. Suddenly my go-to man was put to wussy unconscious shame.

After a little more aimlessness, I got out the old graph paper to get some usable maps going. I'm a total girl when it comes to direction. I get really lost in 3-D games, so this'll be rough. Not to talk about Ultima all the time, but I'm really used to the top-view towns from those games. I must admit, however, I was pretty bummed when Ultima VI discontinued the first-person dungeon viewmode. It really took me out of the experience. So, although I am timid and I know I'll get all confused and lost, I'm really looking forward to absorbing the first-person experience.

I bought arms in the first arms shop I came to. I don't know there were other arms shops in town, so I may have been ripped off. Probably makes very little difference when we have so little gold anyway. It was hard to tell which weapons were all that great too. The damage chart in the manual kind of indicates that there isn't too much of a difference in any of the weapons. I went ahead and got a bastard sword for Rexbasior. The sword name is awesome and I needed something to change Rex's pretty-boy image. I loaded up Silver with a couple of quarterstaffs, some daggers and a quiver of darts. Can you throw the daggers? If not, I wasted a bunch of money and carrying space. Derfindor got a bunch of stuff: another bastard (actually Rexbasior's other bastard after I realized it was a two-handed weapon), a battle axe, a halberd, a sling, etc. He'll probably be pulling a lot of weight. Since Chlorine is limited by her clericalness, I at least splurged on some scale mail for her. I also provided a flail, some javelins, a mace and a shield for her. At least early in the game she'll be able to avoid getting hit too much. I can't say the same about Silver and her stupid magic-user non armor wearing ways.

So yeah, after finding the shops and going to my fifth one, I thought it might be a good idea to actually write down what was being offered in each shop. After only bothering to write down the compliment of one silver shop I gave up, realizing that I could just use my iMac's screen capture ability and put a folder on my desktop with pictures showing what each shop has. Pretty smart huh? Knowing me, though I'll be too lazy to check and compare prices (and knowing how little I know about the game, the prices probably fluctuate anyway).

Hitting up the temples is still on the agenda. I only entered one, but they told me the bishop isn't receiving visitors. Strangely, I was given the option to force my way into the temple. I didn't take that option since it's still so early in the game, but I'll bet it's something I'll eventually have to do. It's not like it gives me the option to force my way into the inn. Plus, look at this kid guarding the temple. With a face like that, he's just asking to get jacked up hard.

Speaking of inn, one of the very last things I did during this session was attempt to camp out in the middle of town in an effort to bring Rexbasior back into consciousness. Apparently, I'm not allowed to be a vagrant since the town watch rousted me in the middle of the night and told me to move along. This time, I actually did decide to fight. Shortest fight of my life too. This seven nation army is the freaking town watch? You'd think if the place had a town watch this strong, they wouldn't need to worry about needing to hire adventurers to clean up the town. Heck, they could send the town watch over the entire Moonsea region and have the entire land in order within a week! Yeah, the picture I have posted to the right shows just how big this town watch army was. I didn't even get a turn in battle before they kicked me off to the DOS prompt.

The last thing I did was check out the pub. I overheard one intriguing and possible plot-developing piece of rumor:

This is getting good.

Pool of Radiance: entry 1

2007-08-11T16:59:00.000-06:00

In my introductory entry I failed to mention which version of Pool of Radiance I'd be playing. I decided on the IBM-DOS version. That's the version my friend's cousin went on and on about back in the day. In this particular subject, I trust my friend's cousin. He wore black all the time. So step one was getting an old DOS emulator. As far as I know (I could very well be wrong) this program called DOSBOX is just about the only way to go to emulate on my Apple iMac. I got the emulator, but it took me a good long time of experimenting and googling to figure out how to run Pool on it. I still don't quite understand what I did. It had to do with mounting the proper drives and other Dossy stuff. It made me kind of wish I had done this on the Commodore 64 emulator. That's way easier to use. You don't even need to remember the C-64 commands if you want to play the games.

The readme.txt file that came with the download of the game casually explained that some tweaking was involved, but it hardly elaborated.

"*** If you get a message saying "INSERT DISK 3 IN DRIVE C", edit the file `pool.cfg', and add a backslash at the end of both path statements!!"

Needless to say, I was too retarded to do whatever this little message was talking about. The readme also mentioned the rulebook and Adventurers Journal files, but I couldn't find where they were.

Somehow, finally after an hour or so, I had everything I needed (I thought). I sighed and went ahead and began the game by heading right into "Create Characters." Then I hit this screen and realized I shouldn't begin just yet.

I immediately realized that I was now getting involved in some real AD&D here. I was used to beginning Ultima games where you just told the gypsy what you thought of certain ethical situations and she created your character for you. Now, I'm dealing with different races that have effects on different classes with different alignments. Not doing my homework in party creation meant that I could possibly build up a party of if impotent, incompetent RPG laughing stocks. I had no idea what the dwarves special abilities were and what class I should make them. Can dwarves do magic? I don't know. Why in the world would I want a halfling in my party if they're only half as good as a full-ling? Those are just the questions involved in race. For character class I need to consider the benefits of having a clerical magic user and for alignments I need to consider the possibility of having a chaotic evil character. I thought I was the good guys. I considered just messing around on the character creation just so I could get out and play around with the game a little, but I want to start out doing things right rather than starting over later.

I obviously had a lot of studying to do, so I flipped the game off and hit the books. Since I couldn't extract the instructions out of the downloaded game file, I had to rely on a pretty painless Google search. The good folks at replacementdocs.com provided me with the Adventurers Journal (shouldn't there be an apostrophe in there somewhere?), which I read first.

The journal begins with a quick overview of the geography of the Moonsea area. I considered drawing out a map as I read it, but I didn't want to embarrass myself with the final product. I knew it would be way off the actual final product. Maybe I'll hold out on the map until I'm actually in the wilderness. At first glance I couldn't tell if Moonsea is the actual ocean or if it's a big lake. It will be one swell map though. Three rivers are interestingly named Wyrmflow, Tesh and Evenflow. I know there's an Orson Scott Card book called Wyrms, but I don't know what the deal is with the spelling. I'm totally pleading my fantasy vocabulary ignorance. Are wyrms like worms, but weirder? Or are they like feminist worms, and they spell their names differently for the same reasons some chicks went by the term womyn a few decades ago? I assume the Tesh river is named after Entertainment Tonight co-host and new-age composer John Tesh. And Evenflow not only is the non-sensical title of a Pearl Jam song, but is a very popular brand of babies' high chairs.

Catching up on the history of Phlan was pretty difficult for me. I love reading historical synopses, but this was harder because it's all new with no context. I was surprised to find the mentioning very early on of the Pool of Radiance itself. It's far more of a tease than a giveaway since it also mentioned that the pool is more of a mystery than a piece of history. I was also intrigued by the casual mention of the three heroes from an earlier age: Milsor, Rimon, and Alonius. No doubt one or all of them will somehow come into the actual gameplay somehow. Another surprising historical revelation was that at one point a guy named Ferran Martinez held the final garrison to the city. It's just like Phlan to abandon the Mexican in an important battle. Wait! How did a Mexican get to Phlan?

I wonder how complete the book's bestiary is. There weren't entries for beholders, liches or dragons despite the fact that all three are mentioned elsewhere in the journal. Also, apparently minotaurs are often found in mazes. Now I know this is based on popular myth, but that was after all just one minotaur. Why in the world would any creature actually need or want to chill out in a freakin' maze?

After the bestiary I was treated to the numerous proclamations set up by the town council, which are sort of amusing. I guess it doesn't list every proclamation, but it lists a few between the Roman numerals of LIX and CCXIV. Just about every proclamation states something to the effect of "such and such area is infested with such and such monsters, so we need some adventurers to make that area safe for civilization." The town council could've saved a lot of time and paper on like 200 proclamations if they just said "Kill all the monsters you can." Also four or five specifically mention different weird stuff going down in the cemetary. Probably should've just said, "That Valhigen Graveyard is messed up! Do whatever shiz you can."

This proclamation I found particularly interesting:

Nice to know that even in the dark times of Phlan, when a duchess is abducted heroes don't immediately go out to reclaim her, but need to cut through a small series of bureaucratic red tape in order to get the job started.

After gourging on the Adventurers Journal I glimpsed over the game instructions. That's where most of the help came in. I discovered that dwarves and elves can see in the dark and that halflings are less likely to get hit by magical attacks. I also learned that although the thought of having a cleric along for the ride seemed about as boring as having a real-world clerical job, it would be very very helpful. At this point, though, my biggest concern is whether or not I should just have everyone in the party be a human. Apparently, humans have no cap to their class levels while every other race does. Does that mean that while a dwarf fighter can class up to only level 9, a human fighter could eventually class up to level 99? Is level 9 plenty, or will I eventually need the unlimited human class to go beyond single-digit levels?

I'll be sleeping on it. At this point, I'll probably stick in a couple of humans as a fighter and magic user, a half-elf as a cleric and then maybe a dwarf as a back-up fighter. That will give me a few slots left over for some throwaway characters and NPCs.

Tomorrow maybe I'll actually start playing.

so here's what it's about...

2007-08-11T16:23:00.000-06:00

I have never played Pool of Radiance. I'm a fool for video games, but for whatever reason, in the 80s I played through most of the Ultima series, but I never played one minute of the SSI Gold Box series even though many friends have told me it's totally the good stuff.

So... I've decided to play through the Gold Box series knowing little more than that they're supposed to be really great games. Hopefully I can make it through without any outside resources and hopefully, the journey will yield enough commentary to make an interesting blog out of it. That shouldn't be a problem, though. If I have an exceptionally lame time, my discouragement may make a wonderful read.

My plan is to go ahead and start with Pool of Radiance and, once finished, move on to Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades and Pools of Darkness. I'll detail the journey with commentary, my own questions, screen grabs, maps and notes. No doubt I'll be consulting online resources for context and history, but I hope to not use the internet for spoilers.

Please, whether or not you've ever played or even like games like this, I'd love to hear comments from you!