I lose Duskfire at 03:40, which means neither she nor Lame Brain will get experience from this combat (more below).

The rest of the combat shows me slowly picking away at the trolls and ogre, and even watching it now, I'm not sure how I survived.

Lame Brain, as usual, goes down almost instantly (01:07), and I have to waste Zink's turn bandaging him so he won't die. I immediately have Octavianus slay him (01:04), because the more monsters you kill, the greater chance that the remainder will suddenly decide to flee. It starts with one of them, Koren, whose turn I decide to delay in case someone needs healing at the end of the round.Дuskfire attempts a 'sleep' spell-sometimes you get lucky-and it does put one ogre to sleep. Note how the narrowness of the corridor prevents my three rear characters from attacking in melee. If you know you're about to fight, the first thing you want to do is cast any buffing spells (making sure to turn off 'search' first, since having searching on causes 10 minutes to pass every time you take a step), so at 00:30, I cast my one buffing spell: 'Bless.' We wander in to combat, which starts at 00:53. I'm still not going to go into a lot about tactical combat just yet, but the recording should give you a sense of how it works. After a long fight in which both Duskfire and Lame Brain nearly died, we were victorious! Startled, they dropped the sack and then looked greedily to our heads as substitutes. When we rounded the corner, we found a group of trolls and ogres tossing a sack of grain around. I suggested to Karnov, our thief, that he might 'sneak' into that area to see what kinds of monsters awaited us, but he gave me a strange look and responded cryptically that he wouldn't be able to use his ability to hide in shadows for 'a few more years at least.' I reloaded, of course, although I was mildly curious to see if anything developed out of the gods noting my actions.ДЄfter a few more hours, it seemed we had explored every inch of the slums except the southwest corner, where we had heard ominous noises inside a section of the Old Rope Guild. Just as an aside, you can choose to attack the old woman, in which case this is what you get: Look for friends where you expect enemies and enemies where you expect allies.' We agreed that it was worthless but also harmless. In a trance, she informed us: 'Blood and violence are writ boldly in your future. Returning to the ruins, we cleared out a houseful of orcs before finding another strange encounter: an old fortune-teller living in a small hut in the middle of monster-infested ruins. The city council thinks of Old Phlan as an orc-infested ruin that needs to be reclaimed. A cleric would be a good idea because you can control hirelings outside of combat, when most of the cleric's spells are needed, but I already have two of those. Has anyone ever chosen a hireling who gets to take the magic loot?ДЄt first, I thought to hire a mage so I wouldn't have to dump one of my multi-classed mages for a 'pure' one, but I realized that without the ability to control when and where offensive spells were cast, the usefulness of the NPC was in question (I might still try it later). The swordsman made no secret that he was only with us for the money, and he declined even to tell us his name! A competent swordsman wanted a share of the treasure equivalent to three of us, and a decent cleric wanted four shares! Some of the potential hirelings wanted their pick of any magic items we found, which Octavianus called a 'dealbreaker.' Ultimately, we decided to hire a fighter to sit in the rear ranks with a bow. Mercenaries turned out to be relatively expensive. After that, he was willing to talk about the mercenaries. At first, he tried to interest one of us in a one-on-one duel, but we declined. We returned to the arena and met with the Arena Master, who could have been Octavianus's cousin.

I reluctantly agreed, but fortunately it didn't take a lot of persuasion on our part. 'If I suggest it to Octavianus, will you back me up?' 'And another share of the treasure,' I pointed out.

Imagine what we could do with a few more healing spells, or another sword in the front ranks.' 'There's a whole bunch of them-wizards, clerics, fighters-over at the guild, just waiting for a party to take them along. As we prepared to return to the ruins the next morning, Karnov took me aside and asked what I thought about supplementing our party of six with a hireling.

Pools of radiance