gristmill
@gristmill

FREE NEW PHLAN!

The New Phlan City Council is leading the fight to free their captive city. Heroes are retaking the city block by block from the evil hordes.

SSI Presents: An Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Computer Product

RICHES AND FAME!

The council is looking for soldiers and rogues, mages and clerics, heroes of all kinds, to come to New Phlan. The wealth and land of an ancient city await those willing to reach out and take it.

Pool of Radiance, a Forgotten Realms™ Fantasy Role-Playing Epic, Vol. 1

GLORY!

Legends will be written about the heroic struggle to free New Phlan! Ships to New Phlan depart twice monthly. When you arrive, see the New Phlan City Council for the latest news and information.

Credits for Pool of Radiance.

Thus reads the cover page of Pool of Radiance's Adventurers' Journal, a physical book that comes with the game and "includes fliers, maps, and information that your adventurers would know before beginning their quest. It also includes information that your adventurers will discover during their quest". Right after telling you what's up, the Journal launches into A History of Phlan and the Moonsea Reaches, apparently written by one Jeff Grubb. It takes exactly one sentence to remind you that this is an 80s AD&D product (not sure if it's 1st or 2nd edition) as the history describes Moonsea as "the border between civilization and barbarism". There's 8 pages of backstory on the region and on Phlan, a once-prosperous trading hub that has been in a rollercoaster of decline for like 1000 years or something.

You can find the Journal on the Internet Archive if you want to read through the history in detail. If you don't, the gist of it is - we're a band of adventurers who got hooked in by the promise of riches and glory, and we've sailed to New Phlan, the only part of the city controlled by the forces of "good" (humans) and we're going to reclaim it from "the bad guys" (kobolds, goblins, orcs, any other fantasy race you think is cool). There's also a bit about the Pool of Radiance, a mythical source of power somewhere within the region. It's impossible to find and, depending on particular myth, drinking it/bathing in it/throwing a coin into it will grant great power to the worthy and frag the unworthy. The only real reason this pool is of note to us right now is a) the name of the game, which is metagaming, and b) a lot of baddies throughout history have wanted to find the pool for themselves.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. I said we're a band of adventurers, but that's not true. Right now, in the Forgotten Realms, we're a little wisp of divine will or whatever looking at the infinite possibility of this plane as represented by a menu.

The starting menu for PoR

I really love older DRPGs where you assemble your team entirely through a void-menu like this. For all the worldbuilding of the Journal, your portal into the actual game is extremely mechanical and barebones. If we wanted to quickstart we could just load a save with a premade party and while the premade is kinda decent, that is IMO no way to play one of these, so we're going to roll our characters.

The process is thus: selecting a race and gender, a class (which are race-limited because this is old D&D), and an alignment. I don't know if this game does the Wizardry thing of preventing opposite-aligned characters from partying together but it might. After that we get the character sheet:

An example PoR character sheet

Important to note is that Pool of Radiance works on rolling stats rather than point-buy, which is an old DRPG contrivance I'm mixed on. On one hand it's fun to get god rolls but on the other I'm not going to spend 6 hours making sure my entire party gets them.

After you roll a guy with a statline you find acceptable, it's on to customization - you get to mix and match faces/bodies for the character portrait and then design a colour scheme for their in-game sprite. Then you add them to your party until you have a team of 6.

Our adventurers' group for Pool of Radiance starts out as follows:

Albert Albert, the True Neutral Human Fighter (age 16)

Albert is a 16 year old with the face of an 8 year old and the body of a 48 year old. It's all powers-of-two with this guy. For his combat sprite I went with a sort of mix of He-Man and a denim barbarian. His most impressive stat is an 18(75) in STR. If you don't know what the (75) is, look up "adnd percentile strength" and go "huh wow, why?". Despite his looks he's not all brawn, also boasting a 16 in INT for no good reason.

Clara Clara, the Chaotic Good Human Cleric (age 19)

Clara has been blessed by whatever divinity presides over chaotic good beings in the Realms to have a really nice statline, averaging 16 in everything. Her highest stats are STR and INT which aren't the ideal Cleric stats but I won't complain. Clara the Cleric enters the field of battle clad in a crimson tabard.

Trevorbrimbor Trevorbrimbor, the Neutral Good Half-Elf Cleric/Fighter (age 48)

Life's been nothing but duality for young Trevorbrimbor, brought into this world and named by a Human Fighter and an Elf Cleric that just could not seem to get along even for the sake of their son. A life of constant strife and uncertainty has benefitted Trevorbrimbor, hardening him in his middle years - he's got a 18(59) in STR and a WIS of 16 which would be unremarkable if the rest of his statline wasn't also deece. Representing the two wolves inside him, Trevorbrimbor wears a red-teal suit of armour into battle.

Ondova Ondova, the True Neutral Elf Fighter/Magic-User (age 180)

Ondova's statline is as intimidating as the little gray-and-red combat icon I made for them. A fearsome warrior wielding dualie 18s in STR/INT, by age they are the de facto dad of the group, which is unfortunate considering their really low CHA and WIS.

Margot Margot, the Chaotic Neutral Half-Elf Magic-User (age 45)

The only reason I put her in as CN is because, again, I'm not sure if Evil and Good characters can get along. Margot veils herself in a cloak of shadows and mystery and will stop at nothing to attain her 45-year-life-long dream of learning Protection From Normal Missiles. Will she find success here in New Phlan? Only time may tell, traveller... Also her statline is really cracked too, maybe I shouldn't have complained about stat roll earlier.

Thrigli Thrigli, the Chaotic Neutral Dwarf Fighter/Thief (age 60)

Did you know dwarves can't be Good in this game? AD&D, man, I dunno. I'm headcanoning Thrigli as a duergar rather than a straight-up dwarf because those are way cooler. His CHA is really bad - way worse than Ondova's, in fact - but that doesn't really matter to a thief. Thieves, by the way, seem to be a really underwhelming class in this game, in a similar situation of something like. "there is a dedicated ship sailing skill but only one sailing sequence in the entire game".

Our adventuring party probably isn't hyper-optimized for this particular game but we've got a lot of bases covered. There's a surprising amount of discussion (for example on the GOG forums for this series) about what 'optimal' looks like for this game but I prefer variety over powergaming for DRPGs whenever possible.

With that... I'm stopping for now! Writing this up and rolling those characters took an entire afternoon (which is honestly fine since I'm sick right now and not really productive in any other way). Next week we will finally sail out to New Phlan and, who knows, maybe get a taste of those riches, fame and glory the advertisement promised!


Let's Play Pool of Radiance

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lp index


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