Editing Dungeons & Dragons Gold Box Series (section)

==Pool of Radiance==

The original Gold Box games begin with the player rolling up a party of level 1 characters using AD&D rules with a number of caveats, namely Half-Orcs and a number of classes are missing. Still, it's fairly accurate right down to just flat out replacing your stats with ones you want. The very first game also had you make character portraits by matching a series of heads to a series of bodies [[Skub|leading to the obvious results]].

The beginning game's (''Pool of Radiance'') story is that the party made by the player arrive in the city of Phlan in the northern areas of [[Forgotten Realms|Faerun]] and have to slowly retake the city from monsters while learning of the mysterious "[[BBEG|Boss]]". After slaughtering your way through much of the city you then go on a bit of a wilderness exploration run where you deal with slavers, kidnappers, lizardmen and a keep full of undead before dealing with a graveyard full of undead. Around this time you learn one of the questgivers is secretly working with the "Boss" and that said boss is a dragon. Needless to say it ends with an epic dungeon and fight against a dragon. The dragon is revealed to be possessed by some demonic entity but the party saves said dragon and make it back to town with enough loot to build several castles and have enough left over for many rounds of ale and lots of wenches.

The series continues through three more games (technically four but one of them is literally just a short game meant to level up your characters for the actual second entry). And yes, you read that right - ''you get to take your characters through every single game''. You do this by copying some of your game data (specifically relating to your characters) and pasting it into the game folder for the next game. And with all four games played you could end the game with a party full of up to level 40. Most likely you won't get to 40 though especially if you roll any demihumans who are not thieves since, again, this uses AD&D 1e rules and that means level caps!

The second game, ''Curse of the Azure Bonds'', is a mix of a pointcrawl and dungeoncrawl as the players try to get rid of some terrible tattoos that compel them to murder certain people. It's a bit of a railroad due to this but not as bad as the later games.

The third game, ''Secret of the Silver Blades'', goes all in on dungeoncrawling. Despite this it's also technically the largest game in the whole lineup mapsize-wise. The characters have to beat up "the Dreadlord".

The fourth and final game, ''Pools of Darkness'', is more dungeoncrawling but you do team up with Elminster at one point. The party has to slaughter some lieutenants of Bane to prevent him from taking over the world or some shit. Has some delicious drow cheesecake on the cover as well. Also includes an optional "ultra mega death final dungeon" after you complete the final quest. It was designed by one of the creators and named "Dave's Dungeon." Shit is a slog to get through but it's a badge of honor to get through it all since so very few people have.

A spinoff from this line, ''Unlimited Adventures'', was kinda like TSR's and SSI's take on RPG Maker.

The first two games also got written down as actual adventures for 1e called ''FRC1 Ruins of Adventure'' and ''FRC2 Curse of the Azure Bonds'' respectively.