Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is a completely different game from the original Pool of Radiance. It has all but disappeared from the face of the earth, but it is one of the games I have THOUSANDS of hours of play time on. The game needs to be made available on GOG and it needs to be made playable on modern systems.

Downloads for Pool of Radiance

Video

Additional info

Input: keyboard

Distributed on: 3,5 floppy disk, 5,25 floppy disk

Graphics: CGA, EGA, Tandy

Sound cards supported: Adlib, PC speaker, Sound Blaster, Tandy

Abandonware DOS views: 14062

Comments

• Hi Salvatore! Try now.
• Of all the old SSI 'goldbox' D&D clone games, this was probably the best. Note however, that the game makes reference to 'journal entries' that only existed in the paper manual. If you want to understand what's going on in the story, you'll need to download the manual from somewhere.
• I played this game on my Tandy 1000HX computer. It had 640k ram, 1200 baud internal modem, 2 - 3 1/2' floppy drives, external 5 ¼ ' floppy drive and a cm11 monitor with 16 colors. It also had a 9 wire dmp133 dot matrix printer. It ran on dos v2.11 with a program called deskview Tandy's version of windows like interface. When I played the game I would put in the first and second disk and open a program called pool.exe I think it was to play the game and it seemed like 10 minutes before the game started and once it did the fight scenes took forever to get through but, it had good sound and colors. It was a great game at that time.

Abandoned games similar to Pool of Radiance

Volume one of SSI’s Forgotten Realms series in which your party sets out on a journey to save the city of Phlan from the evil Tyranthraxus.

• Game developer

  • Strategic Simulations, Inc.
• Game publisher

  • Strategic Simulations, Inc.
• Game published

  • 1988
• Game perspective

  • 1st-person
• Game theme

  • D&D / AD&D
  • Dungeon Crawler
  • Fantasy
  • Licensed Title
  • Turn-based

23 votes

Pool of Radiance is a role-playing video game developed and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc (SSI) in 1988. It was the first adaptation of TSR’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) fantasy role-playing game for home computers, becoming the first episode in a four-part series of D&D computer adventure games. Play Pool of Radiance online!

Pool of Radiance game description

Located on the northern shore of the Moonsea in Forgotten Realms, Phlan was once a flourishing trade city. However, lately monsters began settling in it, gradually turning whole districts into ruins. Only New Phlan remained under human control, but its inhabitants are afraid to venture into the monster-infested areas. In order to clean the nearby Barren River and rebuild Phlan, local authorities spread rumors about alleged riches hidden somewhere in the city. A party of adventurers, attracted by these news, sails towards Phlan and accepts the quest.

Pool of Radiance is the first adaptation of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing system in a computer game format. In the beginning of the game the player can use a pre-made party of six characters or create each of them from scratch. Six races (human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfling, and half-elf) and four classes (fighter, cleric, wizard, and thief) are available. The player can tweak the attributes of the characters and assign a moral alignment to each one.

Exploration of the town and hostile areas (dungeons) is viewed from a first-person perspective in a pseudo-3D world. Enemy encounters are random and take place on separate isometric combat screens, where player-controlled party and enemies take turns fighting each other. Experience points are awarded for defeating enemies, and characters level up after having accumulated set amounts. Fighters gain more attacks, thieves become proficient in backstabbing, while clerics and wizards can memorize more spells to cast before they need to rest. Non-human characters can also “multi-class” (learn the abilities of another class) when leveling up.

The NES version was substantially different from other versions. It removed references to the Adventure’s Journal and some of the more complex features of the computer versions, like different currency units. Battles were significantly reduced in size, the graphics were overhauled and redesigned so that the game could be controlled with a control pad, and music was written for it. A randomly generated dungeon feature was also removed.

Play Pool of Radiance online

You can play Pool of Radiance online here, in web browser for free!