Sorry if it's been posted earlier, but I haven't seen it mentioned.

I've found an exploit you can take advantage of when encountering caravans being attacked by robbers (provided you can handle the bandits without much trouble).
After choosing to help the caravan guards and winning the battle (and, of course, looting the corpses of the bandits), SAVE on the screen which tells you the caravan merchants are grateful for your support and give your gifts. If you load this save, you'll get the screen before the battle, so you can defeat the bandits again. HOWEVER, you'll get to keep everything you've looted from the bandits AND also the gifts given by the merchants previously! You can do this as many times as you wish, you only have to always save at the "thank you" screen and load the latest one.
In my experience, the 40+ quality item they give is always the same in this case, but it's still a good way to raise much money fast. Furthermore, I'm not sure about this, but I think it also means you have a chance to repeatedly get the occasional Virtue increase for helping the merchants since that happens after the battle, before the loot screen.

It'd be ironic if you, as a player were rewarded for it with a virtue increase :). But I see what you mean.
As for the game, I do enjoy it thoroughly, but you certainly have to enjoy being given no particular goals to achieve and just roam around gathering fame. Although there's a main quest, you can just ignore it altogether (it's only hinted at anyway, and is given very roughly) and you'll mostly just do side quests (to earn ever more fame). If someone likes sandbox-style games, they'll most probably enjoy Darklands.
Also, Darklands isn't an ARPG - fighting capabilities are important, but won't suffice (for example, no matter how good fighters you are, you won't get into a closed office at night to retrieve a document from there unless you have either a character with good Artifice skill and a set of lockpicks or some potent potion to eliminate the lock). There's also usually more than one way to solve a particular problem (for example, to get an ancient crown from an old crypt, you'll have to purify the site, which you can do either with the aid of certain saints or a Transformation potion).

The graphics are quite dated, but otherwise, I think the game holds up rather well. There are some things missing that would be standard today (such as the quest log), but all in all I've found the game to be enjoyable even today (granted, I mostly only play older games, so I'm not exactly an authority on today's standards). Since it's the latest version, it IS stable - I've found no CTDs and only one occasion of freezing in more than two weeks of intensive playing.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm very much on the fence about buying this one. May just have to bite the bullet and give it a whirl.

One more info you should know before deciding whether to buy Darklands or not: the game is hard, especially in the beginning. As your party improves and you can afford better-quality items, it gets easier, but be prepared to rest a lot in the beginning, as even common thugs in the town (which you'll have to hunt for some time before having a chance of surviving outside the city gates) will do quite some damage before going down.

I bought it waaaay back when, as it first came out. I do remember it being pretty tough compared to some of the contemporaries like the Gold Box RPGs. Between spiders, wolves, and thieves, I was getting my butt kicked on a regular basis. And then the bugs, at the time, made it virtually unplayable so I gave up on it. Would surely like to give it another try since it seemed to be really interesting -- just those darn crashes were so aggravating that I finally said "screw it" and moved on to something else. Sounds like that's a problem of the past.

I think this exploit works with all multi-stage events: saving seems to only record what event is happening, rather than how far through you are with it.

You can use this to backtrack if you fail with persuading rogue alchemists, wandering bishops, etc.

This exploit works in several places in this game. Besides the merchant caravan, another useful place to take advantage is when you encounter a Schrat fleeing from the wild hunt - increase your strength over and over again.