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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Demetrios1453" data-source="post: 9383331" data-attributes="member: 6801060">Curse of the Azure Bonds (Part 1): Introduction.Welcome back! After a bit more prolonged of a delay than expected (I was just too busy having fun on my vacation to actually play and post is much of the reason it's been so long), we're back, and starting up the second game in the Pools series: Curse of the Azure Bonds.[ATTACH=full]368770[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368771[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368772[/ATTACH]Shown here, and on the cover art, are Alias and Dragonbait, two of the main characters of the novel Azure Bonds, which was released as a sister product to this game. As a result, unlike Pool of Radiance, there will be a lot of novel tie-ins (including Alias and Dragonbait themselves) and Easter eggs appearing in the game. Dragonbait has since appeared in 5e, in Tomb of Annihilation, but Alias has not, even though [SPOILER]she's a construct[/SPOILER] and is likely effectively immortal.(Amusingly, we just had a conversation about Alias' completely ridiculous armor - you can't see it here, due to the name and logo blocking it, but she has a huge cleavage-revealing window in the middle of her chainmail totally in line with '80s cheesecake fantasy art - in one of the 2024 rule book discussion threads).Well, we have the game loaded up, time to get our characters and... whoops, we forgot to follow the correct procedure so we can move everyone over. And to that, well, time to fire up the final save of PoR...To do this, we head up to the training hall, which we had completely ignored for the entirety of the game.[ATTACH=full]368797[/ATTACH]We choose "Remove Character From Party", which will remove them from the screen but store them in the game's file. We do not choose "Drop Character", which will wipe them completely.That done, we return to CotAB.[ATTACH=full]368798[/ATTACH]We choose "Add Character To Party", and then choose that we want to import them from PoR...[ATTACH=full]368799[/ATTACH]Everyone appears who I created in PoR, including extra and example characters. We choose our faithful six, and, with that, they are moved to CotAB![ATTACH=full]368800[/ATTACH]Although certainly not in the condition they were in when they left PoR! They still have their hit points, but all of their items are now gone. This will be explained in game, although any DM who did what the game does would have a player rebellion on their hands! Conversely, PoR hands out ridiculously powerful items for the party's level by the end of the game, so in the name of balance and not making this game a walk-over, a lot if it did admittedly need to go.Beyond that, we've lost any stat adjustments made, either legally or illegally. The big one is that Baroness Bella loses her point of CON from reading the manual, which is completely unfair. Beyond that, all the other adjustments I made to counteract unbalanced 1e rules are also gone.But before any of that, we have to fix Baroness Bella and Brother Baltor's classes. If you remember, PoR didn't have paladins or rangers, so we had to do a fix from the makers of GBC to allow them to have those classes in that game. CotAB (and all the remaining games) do have those classes, so in order for my characters to work correctly, I need to do a second fix here or they won't have their correct powers. Note in the following screenshot that they are missing them (and that I have a lot of characters in need of leveling up!)[ATTACH=full]368801[/ATTACH]So I use the same fix from GBC I used at the start of the first game:[ATTACH=full]368802[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368803[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368804[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368805[/ATTACH](I failed to get a screenshot the first time, so this shows they already have the powers when I did it to get the screenshot. The last three characters are pre-generated characters for CotAB)Now that that's done, I'll get everyone back to their old stats. To do that, I'll use the editor tool you can get from the GBC website (more details back in the early PoR posts).[ATTACH=full]368806[/ATTACH](Note the "Editor" button, which does not exist in the vanilla GBC in the Steam versions of the games)Let's get Baroness Bella's correct CON back:[ATTACH=full]368807[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368808[/ATTACH]And back to 19 it is!I did this for any of the characters that reverted back to their original stats from the start of PoR. I did, however, miss a stat for a character, which I'll get back to at the time I noticed (and then re-edited) it!Now that everyone has been (mostly) edited correctly, here's Bant's character sheet for this game as an example. Note that there is no longer a character portrait in the upper right.[ATTACH=full]368809[/ATTACH]As I said before, there's a lot of leveling up to do! CotAB's level limits are notably higher than in PoR, with most classes being able to reach level 11 or 12 (clerics are stuck at 10 for some reason), so now that the previous limits have been lifted, there are a lot of characters itching to become more powerful![ATTACH=full]368810[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368811[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368812[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368813[/ATTACH]I choose ice storm for Bragir's first level 4 spell.[ATTACH=full]368814[/ATTACH]And fire shield for the second. Brin will choose them as well.[ATTACH=full]368815[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]368816[/ATTACH]And with that, everyone is ready to go! Let's take a quick look at the party as they start the new game:[ATTACH=full]368817[/ATTACH]We'll start with the beginning of the game itself in the next post!</blockquote>

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