Hey all, My story begins back in July 2005. I suddenly got to reminiscing about the old pencil and paper days of D&D, which got me to thinking about the old SSI/TSR gold box "Pool of Radiance" series. Not (quite) being the geek that I was twenty years ago, I never got the chance to play those classic games on the old Commodore 64. But I was Jonesing for a taste of what old PnP D&D was like. So I went to http://www.the-underdogs.org/ and began to download those series. It was just great. It brought back memories of first edition pencil and paper AD&D. You could be paladins, rangers, and clerics. You could dual class and multi-class. How cool was that? And just as I was finishing up Pools of Darkness (the last in the series), the holidays hit and I found myself with a gift certificate to the local video game place. That's when I saw it. There in the bargan bin, for only $9.48-- the box said it was the only video game translation of the 3.5 edition rules. I had never played the new rules. I also had never heard of the title before. I'm not a serious gamer, see. My strategy is usually to wait twenty years until the game becomes abandonware and pick it up them. (Just getting caught up on 'Wasteland' now. Great game!) "How bad could it be?" I thought. So I bought the Temple of Elemental Evil. I remember seeing the module. Our DM had it, but never used it with us so many years ago. I took it home. And when I had some time off for the holidays, I opened up this saran-wrapped jewel box bargain bin package like it was the biggest gift under the tree on Christmas Day. I plugged it into my fantastically-fast state of the art laptop and installed it. My anticipation rose as I saw cgi images of the classic low-level monsters that are D&D staples. I got excited as I saw the word 'Hit Die' again. And more excited when I saw the quasi-algebraeic notations of 6d10 and 4d2. After what felt like an eternity, the game finished installing. At that moment, with the icon on the desktop and my mouse poised over it, ready to double-click and relive geekdom memories of two decades past, I paused for a moment. Was that a choir of angels singing climactically? Nah. Just Fiona Apple on the radio. I double clicked, ready to be taken away to a world of wizards and duplicitous monks. I saw the Atari logo. Great. PacMan was a good game. I saw the Troika logo. Looking good. I saw my desktop. The game had crashed, see. Wouldn't even load. What the? Now I'm not a technical guy, by any means, but I know the basics. Frowning, I rebooted the laptop. Tried again. Same problem. I uninstalled, then disabled every single memory-resident application I could think of with control panel and the services tab. Disabled virus protection. Re-read the readme. Reinstalled. Then I hit the Atari forums. My drivers were updated. I had a fast machine with excellent grahics! I couldn't believe that this game from 2003 was so sophisticated that technology from 2005 couldn't run it. That's when I did a search on the forums and found a reference to Circle of 8. Which directed me over to you folks and the 'common issues and problems' note. Within forty minutes, I was up and running. (I got the answer in the first ten. The other 30 minutes I spent reading through some of the archived posts on tips on dynamic and interesting party setups.) [POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH-- For those of you who haven't yet enjoyed the start of the game, consider skipping the one paragraph to follow.] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Which brings me to the end of my story. Today, my party of lawful evil adherents of the Earth Order are rising steadily through the ranks of the temple of evil. Oh, certainly this has caused them problems along the way. Otis left the group the moment it became fashionable to wear the robes of the Earth order. And it takes a charm or two to make Wat forget about the loss of his dear Dala in order to get a good drink these days. And Terjon refuses to speak to our rogue, who decided his father's sunburst pendant looks better on her than in his hands. But they remain good friends with Lareth. They have dinner once a week at the Wench, and debate the advantages of the staff of striking versus a good longspear trip. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [SPOILERS END] At any rate, I wanted to extend to you folks my sincerest thanks in troubleshooting, debuging, poking, tweaking, adding, modding, and fixing the original Temple of Elemental Evil. This game in its current fixed state blows Pool of Radiance out of the water, and we all have you to thank for making it playable and taking away some of the more serious bugs. Thanks very much for all the hard work, you guys!
