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gristmill
@gristmill

Valhingen Graveyard. Old Phlan's acncient resting place for the dead, abandoned for centuries, before getting turned into some kind of... unresting place... for the undead... by a wicked vampire,

It's time to see if we're able to rip and tear through this place until both the graveyard and New Phlan can rest safely. Going by the rest of the game it'll be either really easy or nearly impossible, so I'm excited to see!

We find some undead.

Skeletons are the first type of undead enemy we run into here. They are essentially the kobold of undead society except they have 5HP instead of 4 so our fighters can't cleave multiple at once.

A tower stands clearly above all crypts in the area. Huge piles of human bones are strewn about.

We head south through desecrated gravesites and find a large tower. The piles of human bones are a warning sign for less adventurous groups, so we pile in—

Noxious fumes pour from the tower doorway, making it impossible to see inside.

—uh, wait, maybe we don't pile in? Nah, fuck it. Trevorbrimbor takes 10 points of damage from a noxious cloud but is otherwise fine - I was worried about getting poisoned since the cluebook uses the word "poison" twice but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Inside the tower, we find a spectre creating skeletons.

Perhaps worse than just practicing necromancy, the vampire in charge of Valhingen is doing so through a managerial structure: the raising of each type of undead (we're only aware of skeletons right now) has been delegated to a spectre somewhere in the graveyard. Taking the spectres out stops production of their type for a while until the spectre rematerializes. I'm not quite sure how long that takes, but I assume it's at least one day.

The statblock for a spectre. Quite sturdy and immune to a lot of things, as well as able to drain 2 levels on hit.

We fought a spectral library guardian back in Mendor's Library, but here's their statblock as a reminder. The nasty thing here is them draining 2 levels per attack, but we can cure that back in town (I think) and with one of the ~12 Restoration scrolls we've accrued on our travels. On top of a hypothetical break in undead spawns, defeating even just the third-strongest spectre in the graveyard gets us a ton of experience, so it's very worth doing.

A zombie encoutner.

Further into the graveyard, we start encountering zombies. While definitely a bigger challenge than skeletons, they're still not much of a challenge, especially once I remember Clara is a high enough cleric level (6) that her Turn Undead has a chance to just explode these guys for free. Trevorbrimbor at a humble 5 can only make them run away, which is still pretty useful for an ability that we get once per encounter.

Next on the list: some mummies!

Wandering through mausoleums, we disturb some truly ancient undead. These mummies feel like another "fuck you" encounter - they have as much HP as our average party member, their melee attacks cause disease and, most importantly, they have a fear aura that has a chance to paralyze our party members. In my one attempt of the fight, only Margot is left standing after round 2, so I decide to not bother these guys.

We find another tower, this time surrounded with piles of hair and fur.

We find the tower of the third-strongest spectree in this graveyard. It is here that I realise Clara's Turn Undead is strong enough not just to destroy zombies on sight, but also to make spectres run, so we manage to end this fight without a single hit being taken, no levels drained. Very nice!

A wight, which kind of looks like an orc version of Heihachi from Tekken..

After the zombies, we start running into wights, the third and most troublesome "regular" undead in the graveyard. These guys are very fast and sort of like mini-spectres in that hey can drain 1 level on hit. They're also immune to non-magical/non-silver weapons which is bad news for Thrigli, since I didn't think to buy any silver arrows.

Another specter tower, filled with glass and fur objects of all types.

Thankfully, the tower of the wight-producing spectre is right around the corner from where we start running into the creatures. At this point fighting a single spectre isn't as scary as it was the first time, so I'd rank this one as third in terms of strength.

Past this point, we're in the vampire's territory. Before we can enter his lair, though, we have to dispatch the final spectres haunting the area. I wish the game signaled this with something like "two of five ghostly candles are still lit" or whatever, because I imagine this part is a little tedious to figure out without assistance.

The final two spectres are hanging out together outside of a crypt, not responsible for any undead of their own. Fighting two spectres at once is a completely different story - Clara's Turn fails, maybe because they were out of range or something, and both of them rush Albert, draining him of 6 levels and killing him in a manner that I can only imagine is like ""your heart is literally too weak physically to keep pumping blood into your brain". What otherwise felt somewhere in between the second and fourth spectres in terms of difficulty ended up becoming a really unforunate hamstring right before the vampire fight...

Hey, this guy looks a little...

We descend a ladder in a crypt. There, alone in a darkened room, we find the vampire lord of Valhingen. Let's see how this goes without Albert.

The efreeti joins us for this fight!

Oh yeah, the efreeti! Thankfully he pops out of his bottle automatically at the start of the fight. Less thankfully, his 55HP 3d8-per-turn-attack two-tile ass spawns behind Trevorbrimbor, so I expect his potential to be a little compromised.

As for the vampire, he's got an impressive list of abilities: 43HP, AC1, charming gaze, drain 2 levels, immunity to non-magical weapons, sleep, charm, paralysis, poison and 3HP/round regen.

The efreeti... joins the vampire for the fight

Somehow that charming gaze manages to affect not only Clara but also the efreeti, who was summoned for the explicit purpose of fighting vampires. Not just that but it happens on the same turn that the vampire is defeated, so we technically win and then the efreeti wipes the floor with what's rest of our party. Very funny.

Fortunately, my last save was before the double-spectre fight, which I manage to handle much better this time around. I still lose 6 levels total, but they're much more evenly spread out.

The second attempt against the vampire goes much better, but Clara still ends up getting charmed, which means the efreeti just fucking destroys her as a little gratis on top of the vampire. Very unfortunate, but at least we got the vampi—

After the fight, the vampire turns into a vapor cloud and floats away

Hey! You get back here, asshole!

We give chase. The vampire somehow ends up in a cross-shaped building right outside of his previous crypt, so I feel like we should get some kind of turf advantage. The rematch against the vampire has no efreeti, but on the other hand the vampire doesn't have wolf companions and is at 15HP. We knock him out, but not before he is able to charm Thrigli.

Even without the NPC efreeti, having a charmed party member means there is technically an enemy on the board and we cannot advance until it's dealt with. I try to wait the charm out but unfortunately Thrigli is really good at killing people that aren't fighting him, so we lose. I feel like these days most "charm person" type effects wear off when the charmer dies, right? This is a huge pain in the ass.

Ultimately, I have to redo this whole sequence a couple more times. Whether the spectres get turned or not seems to be mostly RNG, but thankfully on run #5 I get a fight where I don't lose any levels, so I checkpoint after it. Two more runs after that, we manage to defeat the vampire while only losing Clara to a charm.

As we step out of the repurposed church, I expect some kind of message about the graveyard returning to normal, but we don't get anything. No special text for the vampire actually dying either.

Our best friend, the clerk.

I'm honestly not even sure if I finished the quest until the Phlan clerk confirms it. We get 4500 exp for "defeating some undead" (technically Valhingen opened up much earlier and we could've dipped in and out to grind for a bit and get rewards based on number of frags, but we never really needed it) and also a prize for dealing with the menace for good - 9800 exp in cash. Unfortunately this is somehow not enough to level up any of our guys - I start wondering if some of my non-human party members are hitting their arbitrary level limits, but I'm too lazy to check.

Ondova is the last fighter in the group to buy a fine composite longbow for themselves, and with 80 silver arrows in everyone's quiver and a spare 750 platinum weighing down each party member's coinpurse, we have firmly entered the "leaving money on the ground" phase of the game. I kind of wish there was some kind of money sink like Morrowind trainers, but I can't blame SSI for not foreseeing this problem.

At this point, all that's left is the assault on Valjevo Castle. I have no idea how many updates that might take, but I expect it to be a bit longer than Valhingen was. Still, it's exciting to be so close to the end! See you next week, hopefully!

Let's Play Pool of Radiance

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in reply to @gristmill's post:

Having to re-do that section seven times sounds like a huge pain in the ass. Still, you made it! It really feels like this game is as stingy at giving cool magic items as old dnd expected DMs to be, I was expecting something cool from killing a vampire.

it didn’t feel as bad as the kobold caves, maybe because there were no filler enemies in these fights. i think there were some item stashes to find around the graveyard, but once you kill the vampire the entire zone is cleared of encounters so those are gone too.