Pool of Radiance (Part 5): The Slums (Part 1)
We've now entered the Slums. The safety of New Phlan is behind us.
Our commission is to "clear the Slums". But what does that entail? Although the game doesn't tell you, to clear a block, you need to defeat all the set encounters in that block (with some exceptions) as well as a certain number of random encounters, which for the Slums is 15. That's higher than most other sections of the ruins, and it's especially rough given that we're baby adventurers at level 1. We have to proceed with caution until the random encounters are all defeated (at which point no new random encounters will spawn), since if we stray too far from the civilized area of the city, we may have to push back through a gauntlet of encounters to get back to the gate. And, trust me, I've been there as your resources dwindle, characters go down one by one, and finally, the dreaded "The monsters rejoice as the party has been destroyed" message appears on the screen. Luckily, there's a secret trick that helps out here that I'll go over shortly.
So, let's go forward and through that door on the left. As a side note, the geography of the Slums is a bit weird. There aren't any obvious extended "roads" - for the most part you travel in and out of buildings, down corridors, then out again into the open air in what seem to be plazas and short streets (you'll get blue or black sky above you, depending on if it's day or night, if you're outside; while you'll get a gray ceiling overhead if you're inside). I get that it's supposed to be a run-down slum, but I'd expect at least some roads, even if they may wind around and dead end and even feed back on themselves. The rest of the ruins of old Phlan are that way, with logical streets and buildings laid out like a normal city, but no, here in the Slums we'll be going in and out of buildings pretty much at random.
We go through that door, then turn west through an archway, turn back north, go through a door, continue north a bit and then go through a door on our right, to the east. (I'll have a map screenshot at the end of the post.)
Getting that far without any encounters is actually a bit surprising, but as soon as we go through that door...
Fleeing is an option of last resort. Waiting usually mean they just stare back at you, although they might advance (or actually flee themselves). You probably don't want to do combat at a distance, since it usually takes a turn or two for the melee sides to meet up, and any ranged attacks they have will pepper you in the meantime. Best to advance.
You
can parlay, and sometimes even persuade your foes to leave (although sometimes they will demand treasure for them to do so). But, unless you're in bad shape, it's best to choose combat, because you have to
defeat those random encounters to clear the block, and the Clerk won't count those you just let walk away (although it's unanswered how she would know).
Also, look at that 1e MM art. One of the cool things about the games is that they used the exact art from the MM as the base of their monster illustrations.
So it's time for combat!
We switch to the third person POV for combat. Your party will always be lined up in two groups of three (unless the terrain doesn't allow it; rarely you'll be lined up all in one row with backs against a wall) - so make sure your heavily armored melee are in the first three slots and your more squishy characters in the latter three. For some reason, the first and fourth characters are placed in the middle of their respective rows, so if you need to fine tune things due to ACs, you can adjust party order to reflect this. The party and foes are usually lined up in a pseudo-isometric way, as you can see here with all the diagonals.
Looking at the GBC map, we can see there are quite a few more goblins offscreen to the right (as I said before since I purposely buffed my stats, there are a lot of them; there would be just like 5 or 6 if you have characters with lower stats). The green goblins (goblin guards) have 4 hit points, while the yellow goblins (goblin leaders) have 7. Moving the cursor over them shows that they have AC 6 and AC 5 respectively.
Baroness Bella won initiative, so she hits and kills the goblin in front of her (you'll get a cool skull-and-crossbones effect when this happens - I'll post a screenshot of what this looks like in the next post since I was running at too quick a speed to catch it for a screenshot at this point). Being all nicely bunched like this just calls out for a
sleep spell, and when Bragir's turn comes up...
Sleep will affect creatures in a 3 x 3 area, depending on their hit dice. And because 1e wasn't as nice as later editions, yes, those "creatures" can include members of your own party, so be careful when aiming (you aim for the center of the nine squares you want to have affected). Since goblins have pretty minimal hit dice, any of them in that area will immediately fall asleep and become helpless for a few rounds.
On the GBC map, they are shown with an "X":
One extra point to bring up is that no one can move through a square with a helpless creature in it, so they're effectively a shield wall forcing the goblins to maneuver around them. So often it's best not to immediately start killing the sleeping ones right away, but instead concentrate on the still conscious goblins while they try to get around their snoring companions to get to the characters (but don't wait too long, since they will eventually wake up!)
Eventually, after a few go down (which takes a bit; 1e's mechanics meant that there are a lot of misses before you get a hit, but monster HP is lower to compensate for this), their morale breaks and they start to run away (even ones in melee range will try to run away, and any character next to them will get a free shot as they leave their square). You can see below where one has started to flee to the far side of the room...
Eventually all the conscious ones go down, and we set to slitting the throats of the sleeping ones (you get a message about how you slay them "with one cruel blow" which I'll show in the next post after slowing the game down enough to get a screenshot of it):
And soon enough, we're victorious in our first combat! The goblins lay dead at our feet! We get the option to continue the battle (which you may want to say "yes" to for healing or various other reasons), and then it's XP and treasure time!
Yay. 49 XP. This is going to be a long grind.
Hitting "Share" automatically each time the treasure screen comes up is a good idea, as it splits any coins, gems, and jewelry from the treasure evenly between all the characters. We got a mind-boggling 49 silver here, and just auto-splitting by using "Share" is simpler than even going to the next screen and assigning the coins manually. After that, we choose "Take" to see what sort of non-coinage treasure they had.
Yeah, not much exciting. In fact, it's really not worthwhile to pick up most of it to drag back to the store to sell, given our limited inventory slots and strict adherence to encumbrance rules! The bows will sell for decent cash (although I'll keep three to arm my frontliners who I wasn't able to purchase bows for previously), and I'll take the arrows as well just to keep ammo topped off. The scale mail will sell sort of OK, and the rest is basically junk.
That done, and with the first of our 15 random encounters out of the way, there's another door just to the north in this room. So we go through it...
Oh no! Orcs! With their 1e pig snouts!
Oh, this is a set encounter, so there will only ever be four orcs here. They go down very quickly.
So, what were they arguing about?
Oh, nice! We'll give that to Brother Baltor...
And see what the spells are...
While not terribly exciting, cure spells are still quite handy!
With not much else exciting in this room, we go out the door and...
This one is going to be a bit tougher.
(The ones with bows are orc leaders with more hit points and ranged attacks. By sheer luck, they're all right in front in melee range and thus can't use their bows. Usually they'll be in the back firing away)
Luckily Brin still has her
sleep spell available...
..which affects the six orcs within one square of the target. Soon here, after the leaders have been brought down, the orcs' morale breaks and they start to flee as well.
They're soon taken out, but Brother Baltor has taken some hits (also note that the XP bar has begun to fill out, although there's still far to go here!):
At least they have slightly better treasure:
Most of those will sell decently, so we'll take those.
At this point, with one character pretty hurt and our magic-users out of spells, it would be a good time to rest. But, we're in the monster-infested ruins, so surely it will be hard to rest here, right? Well, remember I said there's a little secret about this I would mention later? It's this: you can rest with no chance of interruption in any room where you've defeated a set encounter. And we just defeated a set encounter with the 4 orcs in a room a few steps back. So let's head back there and rest.
We turn around, take one step and...
Well darn. At least it's kobolds, so this shouldn't be too tough, even without any
sleep spells, right?
(The blue kobolds are kobold leaders with a whopping 4 HP instead of 3)
And then...
Ugh, flanked. Buffy and Bragir won't be able to use their ranged weapons until we've cleared out the kobolds next to them within melee range. So, we have to choose "Use", go into their inventory, and change what weapons they have readied.
Eventually, the kobolds are defeated, but Brother Baltor has taken a further beating:
...as has Baroness Bella (she's only at 3 HP!) and Buffy (although much less seriously). Those kobolds put up quite the fight! Moreso than the goblins and orcs. Luckily, it's just one further step into the room where we defeated the four orcs, where it's safe to rest.
As I mentioned previously, in all the other Gold Box games, there's a "Fix" option here, where healing spells are automatically all cast (up to the point where no further healing is necessary), and then re-memorized. PoR doesn't have this option, but GBC thankfully does.
So everyone gets healed up, and my magic-users re-memorize their single
sleep spell each.
And we rest, then save the game. Trust me, saving often is definitely recommended! Unfortunately, there are only 10 save slots (A - J), so you have to be judicious in using those slots. I tend to use a slot until we get to a certain important point, and then start using the next one (or two, since it's useful to have two relatively recent saves which can be alternated between). "A" is actually a save before starting the game, and I've been using "B" and "C" since.
If you're wondering how far the party has gotten, here is what the GBC map looks like at this point:
We entered through the door on the right, went down, back up, and all the action has taken place in the two rooms in the upper right corner. By the way, inside areas have a slightly darker shade on this map, so the only interior areas explored so far are in those two rooms.
Next time, we go further into the Slums, kill lots more creatures, and meet a new quest-giver!