I've been playing through Pool of Radiance and its sequels (currently in the middle of Curse of the Azure Bonds). The games are, unfortunately, a bit buggy. Here's a list of the bugs I've run into (which are by no means exhaustive). I'm not expecting a fix for them or anything, given the games' age, although if anybody knows any workarounds I'd appreciate it.

Note: I'm playing on Mac, in case it makes a difference, although with DOSBox I doubt there are any differences in the games themselves across platforms.

Note: I'm mostly using imported characters from Pool of Radiance in Curse of the Azure Bonds (and possibly moving forwards when I get there). I've heard that some bugs are specifically to do with imported characters.

Pool of Radiance:
- High Constitution acts strangely in some cases.
- A human fighter going to 19 Con (using the Manual of Bodily Health) gets 1 extra hit point regardless of level, rather than the expected +1 hp/level over an 18 Constitution. (HP/level should be 6-15, is actually 5-14.)
- A multiclassed character with Fighter on one side sometimes gets fewer than expected hit points on level up of the Fighter side, and more than expected on the non-Fighter side(s). For example, with a 19 Constitution, a dwarf Fighter/Thief should get 1-4 hp when levelling up as Thief (1d6+2, halved for 2 classes), but sometimes gets 5 hp instead.
- Having more than 65536 of a single currency type may cause some of it to be lost when buying or selling.
- Not a clue how, but I somehow managed to get the game to add ~60000 pieces of jewellery to my party's pool while shopping when I had a character whose weight was in excess of their normal maximum carrying capacity (due to an Enlarge spell that wore off) manually drop several platinum pieces at a shop.
- Valuable items in stacks (ex: potions, magic arrows, etc.) sell for a dramatically reduced price (approximately 1/20 of individual sale price). If split into individual items (ex: 1 Arrow +1), they sell for a lot more. For example, a stack of 2 healing potions sells for 20 gold, while individually they sell for 100 gold.

Curse of the Azure Bonds:
- Characters exported from Pool of Radiance can keep their ability score modifiers from equipment and spells indefinitely. Edit: According to some searches online, this is true between almost all of the different games.
- The permanent +1 Constitution from the Manual of Bodily Health is sometimes lost when exporting a character from Pool of Radiance and importing it into Curse.
- An Elf Fighter 7/Mage 6 exported from Pool of Radiance gets no additional hit points for training to Mage 7.
- The smithy in the starting town (Tilverton) charges 3 platinum (15 gold) for most, if not all items, regardless of their listed price.
- Leaving the training hall in Tilverton causes a visual glitch where the interface does not properly switch back to the normal adventure mode interface. Encamping and unencamping fixes this.
- Valuable items in stacks (ex: potions, magic arrows, etc.) sell for a dramatically reduced price (approximately 1/20 of individual sale price). If split into individual items (ex: 1 Arrow +1), they sell for a lot more. For example, you can buy a stack of 10 Arrows +1 in Zhentil Keep for 480 gold, but individual you can sell them back for 60 gold apiece.
- The Girdle of Dwarvenkind (+1 Con, -1 Cha) can permanently remove all bonus hit points from a high Constitution score if equipped. Maximum hp is permanently reduced, and does not return even after the item is removed. Edit: Only problematic for characters imported from Pool. Works fine for characters created in Curse.
- Removing a Girdle of Dwarvenkind sometimes heals the character for 1 hp. This also causes a visual glitch where the party summary gets redrawn over the inventory interface.
- The Enlarge spell has no effect on characters with 18 or higher Strength ("CHARACTER is unaffected"), even at levels where it would normally boost Strength to 19 or better. Edit: Only problematic for characters imported from Pool. Works fine for characters created in Curse.
- The Strength spell and the Pale Blue Ioun Stone don't work correctly with characters at 18 Strength. They incorrectly set the character's Strength score to their racial/gender percentile Strength maximum (ex: a male human gets Str 100, a male elf gets Str 75, a female human gets Str 50, etc.). These absurdly high Strength scores don't go away when the spell/item are removed. Edit: Only problematic for characters imported from Pool. Works fine for characters created in Curse.
- The magic shop in Zhentil Keep shows a Wand of Magic Missiles for sale for 14464 gold (65536 gold less than the expected 80000 gold).
- The Drow with Owlbears fight on the 3rd level of Dracandros's tower says "Pic not found" when the monsters advance on you in the adventure view just before the fight starts.
- When multiple characters are immobilized by owlbears at once, killing an owlbear sometimes frees the wrong one.

For Pool of Radiance, the "workaround" for high Constitution is to not raise it above 22. 22 is well-behaved; 23+ goes absolutely crazy.

The formula for gaining hit points is different for multi-classed characters than in the tabletop game rules. If I made a list of all known such differences we'd be here all day, and probably all night.

The game uses 16-bit unsigned integers to store money, so overflow there is pretty much expected.

Barkskin in Secret of the Silver Blades doesn't seem to do anything. I'm casting it with a 12th level Ranger (imported and leveled from Curse, in case that influences things like the Poll -> Curse import bugs), and all it does is say "CHARACTER is healed". No hp is gained, no buff appears in the Encamp/Magic/Display screen, and my Ranger's AC stays the same (the manual says it should improve AC by 1).

Most of the character bugs come from importing characters from Pool of Radiance.
I suggest using the Gold Box Companion to fix bugged characters.

Also, it's annoying that the rules change a bit from game to game, like how certain spells work, like Dispel Magic, and which classes can use Wands, and such.

I did a few full Pool series runs and I remember running into issues regarding strength like you did! I think if you equipped the girdle of giant strength, it would also cause the "STR 100" bug. Sadly STR 100 wraps to something way worse so this is no good.

Anyway, I just started Curse and couldn't get goldbox companion to work, so I hex edited the files to hopefully fix the Pool of Radiance "strength" bug.

Basically, after you "copy" the files using copycurse from pool to curse, you get .cha files. Then you "add" chars in curse from "pool" as .cha files. You immediately "remove" the chars before the game starts to get .guy files.

Use a hex editor to look at the .guy files. I'm not very good at describing hex locations, but I think it is around location 10? You will notice pairs of hexes though of your chars stats. The first byte though is set to "64" for males or "32" if you are female. This applies to ALL of the imported characters from pool of radiance into curse. You want to it to match the next pair.

For example if you have 18 strength, the hex value is '12'. You might see this line
64 12 0e 0e 0d 0d 0f 0f 0c 0c 11 11 64 64
This corresponds to a corrupted pool character with
18 strength, 14 int, 13 wis, 15 dex, 12 constitution, 17 charisma, 100 exceptional strength. Notice all pairs match, except the first pair.
The first 64 needs to be changed to 12. I'm guessing the first value is some temp value due to buff/debuffs, but somehow it never gets reset back to the same value as the "original" value during the transfer.

I did this and immediately learned enlarge and was able to get 19 strength as intended. I suspect everything will magically "work" after that regarding the girdle and ioun stones as well. I'll let you know if it doesn't work, as I'm still doing my Ironman playthrough (with the progress on youtube as well haha). Girdle is pretty late in the game, but I think the strength ioun stone is mid-way?

Why bother with an hex editor when you can use the Gold Box Companion???

Some possibilities:
1. You can't use Gold Box Companion (likely because you are using something other than Windows XP or newer)
2. You want to do a change that Gold Box Companion doesn't allow (does it allow you to put high values (>1) in the gender field?)
3. You want to practice hex editing, which is a useful skill because it can be applied to more than just the Gold Box games

(Speaking of gender, I remember setting a character's gender to 2 in one of the games, which displayed as "Copper" (where "Male" or "Female) would be, and allowing me to use Modify Character to raise the character's Strength to 100, though scores above 25 appeared to not give any bonuses or penalties (I would have expected garbage data to be used instead of just 0s).)

Never used it before. I tried it first, but I couldn't get gold box companion to work. The time it took for me to try to get it to work for me took way more time than me fixing it with a hex editor which is bizarrely odd.

However, if you already have goldbox companion working, then it is obviously easier to use goldbox companion. I already had a hex editor installed on my machines.

In Secret of the Silver Blades and in Pools of Darkness, if a character has a silver shield equipped and dual classes to Magic-User, thus being rendered unable to use the silver shield and having it automatically be unreadied, they keep the shield's gaze-mirroring property indefinitely. Haven't checked what sorts of things might actually remove it, yet, though.

The Gold Box engine is quite bad in general when it comes to the forcible removal of gear that has magical effects, and has a tendency to cause abilities tied to gear to become permanent when items are stripped from a character or forcibly de-equipped. What happens tends to depend upon just how this occurs; there are as far as I can tell five ways in which it may happen and if an -

a) Item is stripped from character through Disintegrate
- I'm not 100% sure on this one but I'm pretty sure in at least some cases this results in persistent SpecAbs. It is made murkier by the fact that the Beholder disintegrate effect is not the same as the spell (the former usually makes a character Gone but doesn't destroy gear, while the latter destroys gear but merely makes the character Dead), and that things have a habit of changing between games. As I remember, in
* UA effects get left behind indefinitely
* DQoK I'm pretty sure they also do (rare to have a character rezzed in DQoK though since I tend to have a party of mostly Elves, so it's been a long long while since I've had the opportunity to test this)
* Pools I'm not sure offhand (I can't even remember if this version of Disintegrate destroys gear, as only a couple of enemies use it and they tend to die rather readily to DBFs before they have a chance)
* Secret, DKoK, and Treasures, I'm not sure, mainly because I've never seen any enemy Mages use Disintegrate at all in any of them, and as noted, the Beholder ray is different
* Curse only has Disintegrate via beholder ray, and Gateway, Champions, and Pool don't have the effect in play at all

b) Item is stripped from character through Drow Gear destruction
- This can only happen in UA, and only with hacked items. It always results in persistent SpecAbs, and my guess is the devs never took this possibility into account at all (since no default drow items in any GB engine game have any relevant effects attached).

c) Item is forcibly de-equipped (only occurs through dual classing to a class that can't use the item)
- This appears too to result in persistent SpecAbs, as you note. My guess is this one was overlooked as a corner case (there are not a lot of items that have SpecAbs attached and which also possess class restrictions, in fact, the only ones I can think of are vorpal swords, silver shields, and in some games Gauntlets of Ogre Power - however, effects type a and c don't seem to bug out on ability score alterations, so GoOP aren't generally an issue).

d) Item is stripped from character through importation into Curse, Secret, or in some cases Treasures (there are some Gateway items that aren't importable into the sequel)
- In Curse and Secret, SpecAbs get stripped (presumably the game just doesn't import the effects file at all when copying the character data over), but ability alterations become persistent (as effects that alter ability scores aren't checked for during the import process). I'm not sure about Treasures, as the only relevant item I can think of off the top of my head is the one Ioun Stone and that's an ability-altering item rather than a SpecAb granting one ...

e) Item is stripped from character through destruction via interplanar travel (only Pools of Darkness has this)
- The game always seems to do the right thing here; granted, it does get to cheat a little bit (most of the items with SpecAbs are rings, which, along with the vorpal sword, are exempt, so only a fairly small handful of magical items that can be destroyed are ones that have effects to cater for).

When effects become persistent -

* ability modifiers are essentially permanent, unless superseded by other magical effects (the ability will revert to normal once the new effect expires/is removed) or the Repair command is used in temple in one of the games where it is available (which always reverts all ability scores that are tagged as modified and lack an actively on file effect to go with them; indeed, this can actually reverse Constitution lost to Raise Dead and Strength lost to Disease, too)

* I'm not as sure about SpecAbs; I believe these are permanent unless an effect is incurred/item is equipped that grants the SAME SpecAb, at which point it will be removed when that new effect expires.

Champions of Krynn.

Two magical items I have just Detected have disappeared, leaving just a single line in the inventory with no name, see the attached picture.

Does anyone know what the reason could be? [And / or a workaround?]

Hello,
I´m nearly through with Pool of Radiance but it looks like I found a bug.
In Valjevo Castle I´m in front of the stairs that should lead to the final battle. Where you step through the illusionary wall in the south and then see the first set of stairs.
I go on and see a second set, but then nothing happens, I just bump into a wall.

Is this a bug or did I miss something important?

Regards
Frank

This is not normal, it sounds like a bug.

It looks like another person has encountered it before too:
https://www.gog.com/forum/forgotten_realms_collection/por_apparently_broken

Based on the post above, it looks like your best bet is to load an earlier save and try again from there.

Fortunately I had a savegame from not too long ago.
With that it worked.

Thanks!

I had the exact same issue. I managed to work around it by using the Gold Box Companion's map teleport feature. I can't recall for certain how it worked, but I know I repeatedly placed my party on either side of the illusionary wall and eventually I was able to use the stairs.