The Curse of the Azure Bonds longform walkthrough is finally up!
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564786-curse-of-the-azure-bonds/faqs/78365

I forgot that GameFAQs can take many days to approve something this long, if it's new. For the record, it's about 50% longer than the actual Azure Bonds novel, which is about 450,000 bytes.

There is a section corresponding to anything that was in the Pool of Radiance walkthrough, plus additional text on plot background (including a novel summary), a brief strategic rundown of every location in the game, and a formalized list of bugs (which didn't quite hit triple digits). I also didn't just skip over scripted mechanics as lightly as I did in Pool of Radiance.

Anything different in Curse of the Azure Bonds should be updated. As normal for the Gold Box games, lots of completely random things don't behave the same and I re-verified everything I could think of. Elves no longer get a bonus with crossbows, for instance (that's the one I always remember offhand, somehow). A few things I thought were different actually do behave the same; for instance, Sleep specifically has logic that prevents it from ever working on 5-hit-dice creatures that are PC races, but can still work on 5-hit-dice ogres (4+4 HD in the tabletop game, but the Gold Box games don't have fractional hit dice).

I expect that I'll soon be making minor factual adjustments before it stabilizes. I'm quite confident this is still far more accurate than the original Pool of Radiance walkthrough I submitted, though.

Pool of Radiance longform walkthrough also updated to v1.31:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564785-pool-of-radiance/faqs/73869
I moved references and acknowledgments to the end because it was starting to take up too much space at the beginning, and there is a new version history (retroactive; multiple people asked), but the only change in the actual gameplay writeup is that you can make the hostile magic-user in the Valhingen Graveyard friendly (if you really want to).

I'm planning to eventually either write up Secret of the Silver Blades next, or create unofficial patches for Pool/Curse, but I'm going to take a break from Gold Box for a while -- I'll look at the original Phantasie next.

Sat down and read the whole thing in 2 hours. What a delightful remembrance of things past! (And I never did manage to beat the Beholder Corps without losing my dust.)

This is *extremely* impressive! I always wondered how those encounter frequencies were generated, and why my chaotic evil fighter/mage/thief could never make the Commander happy. There are special rakshasa with longbows--who knew? (Similar to the orc leaders with magic flails and chain mail in Pool, I guess...) I wasn't ever really sure if Curse adjusted the encounters to party strength...and now I know!

This may help Joonas get a few of the bytes left in Curse that aren't in the hack notes.

Yeah, this is where most Goldbox superfandom ends, because nobody wants to play Secret that many times. Thanks anyway!

It requires a few dozen tries or so to win with no losses (you'll usually lose someone in the first few rounds), assuming you're well-prepared.

If you didn't thoroughly maximize your party, it can be worse than that. The extensive maximize-everything I recommend is really only useful for this and for Pools of Darkness. Yeah, the party strength adjustments in Curse are on the verge of not existing, and I don't think they're present at all in the seven other games. Man, Secret.

I do actually have a greater appreciation for it now, because it's now clear that SSI took the opportunity to fix a lot of bugs present in the earlier games. They just sort of forgot to build a good game atop that stronger foundation.

I'm half tempted to just go straight to the concentrated awesome of Pools of Darkness.

I doubt anyone would really criticize you, and Pools of Darkness is a lot closer to FRUA, much of which was extensively documented by the hackers in that community.

Secret made heavy use of the trick where they used teleports to make the dungeons bigger. Unfortunately, this used up space for the actual events, meaning you had giant dungeons with nothing in them (or, in the case of the eastern ice caves, way too many identical combats in them!)

Things people have figured out that may or may not be useful:

I think somewhere on the FRUA boards (ua.reonis.com) I posted a textfile with the monster counts in most of the encounters; this could be useful as a cross-check. (Or not; I understand the ECL is pretty well decoded by now.)

Also, in the big battle in the Chancellor's hall, there are some Dark Lords with the Master Thief icon. This could help you disentangle the monster data from the monster icons (if this is still an issue).

I'm also fairly sure all the mini adventures in the Web Realm use the same map (the square one with the spider-shaped walls) and use a quest item keeping track of location to put different things in.

There's a bug in the beholder-hit village near Mulmaster where you can get the treasure over and over again.

Also, as far as I know, there is no way to fight Manshoon. (Maybe after Fzoul got killed TSR got upset?)

On the FRUA boards, there are instructions for getting to a playtester dungeon (also the case for Dark Queen of Krynn BTW). This allows you to set variables and the like.

Some comments:

- It's not clear whether a dwarf imported from PoR will get his con reduced from 19 to 18.

- I created a dualclass Paladin 9 / Ranger X which didn't get the second attack in SotSB and PoD, a warning might save other players some frustration.

- Thief level 17 grants the same thac0 as fighter 9 so relativizing the usefulness of base thac0 with "by the later games most of your accuracy will come from items, magic ..." in section 4.1 looks pointless. In later games the elf F/M/T will even have a better better thac0 than the dwarf F/T on the long run because of the elf sword/bow bonus.

It should be significantly easier to do Secret first, though, if for no other reason than it's easier to see how the game engine evolves that way. That takes up space, true, but they could still have done a much better job. Adding more scripts takes little disk space (they could have easily accommodated even people playing off of floppy drives), and that trick to make the dungeons bigger takes a lot of development time to do right. The scripting language works differently in later games, but it's not hard to get a handle on how most of it works.

Buck Rogers is more of a challenge, but knowing how that skill system works under the hood goes a long way. They deliberately did that in the Abyss in Dark Queen of Krynn, too. Yes, it does. There's also a repeatable treasure Death Knights of Krynn, in Cerberus (it's the one with the Mace of Disruption). I'd like to write my own programming language to de-compile and re-compile the game scripts.

I'd rather do a full write up on Secret/Pools first, personally, so I can make sure it'll work for all four. Fixed. (I don't recommend it, though a lot of guides do, so it's good to support that.) Did you do the class change in Curse or Secret? And which of the two games did you reach ranger level 10 in? That might make a difference; it shouldn't be too hard to test once I get around to writing up Secret. It takes quite a long time for an elven F/M/T to reach level 17, but yeah, that's pretty much true otherwise -- I'll reduce the strength of that wording.

A dwarf will get also get you some extra messages. And some gems in Secret, but you shouldn't be hurting for gems there.

I did the class change in Curse where he also reached level 10 as ranger. He had only 1.5 attacks per round both in Secret and Darkness so I recreated a new one at the end of Secret and had him grind to paladin15/ranger15 and level up to 15/17 at the start of Darkness.

Oh, one more bit of historical inaccuracy: would medieval shops have had signs outside them? Most people couldn't read.

Well, if you were a weapons shop, you could hang out a picture of a sword.

It does seem strange that people would know how to read before the printing press was invented and spread (which didn't happen until several decades after the AD&D era). But literacy was still relatively high even before that, something like 15-20%. That's enough to make lettered signage worthwhile.

That's especially true for the sort of people who can afford to buy decent weapons and armor. Signs make the most sense for inns and taverns, which were then only just starting to become widespread.

I also didn't even know anyone read that section! I only put it there for my own amusement, and no one had ever commented on it until now.

Curse of the Azure Bonds longform walkthrough updated to version 1.01: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564786-curse-of-the-azure-bonds/faqs/78365

Pool of Radiance longform walkthrough updated to version 1.32: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564785-pool-of-radiance/faqs/73869

This mostly adds information on transfer to/from Hillsfar, which can circumvent some of the limits on a direct transfer even if it's only momentary.

Good point. Death Knights actually had descriptions of pics outside the shops.

As for the section...I kind of wondered why be concerned about historical accuracy in a game with wizards and dragons, but hey, you put so much work into the rest of the FAQ it seemed churlish not to at least skim it.

Is the thac0 table until level 21 implemented in the game ?

It doesn't actually that go high in either game. It starts at level 0 and goes to 10 in Pool of Radiance and 12 in Curse, even though that's mostly above the level caps.

It shows the trend the game uses, and it's convenient to know for transfer to later games. (It's also good to know right now that Pools of Darkness caps warriors at level 17.)

The problem is that after reading you only know that you don't know and cannot reliably plan ahead since it's unclear to which game if any from the series the numbers apply. The level 18+fighter thac0 numbers look just like fantasy numbers since they don't apply to any game, in combination with "This table varies by specific Gold Box games" the reader can't rely on anything.
It looks a bit like a "I know it but I won't tell you" mockery, doesn't fit to the depth of detail in other parts of your FAQ.