The exp chart says I need 26,500 exp to level up but I have 27,500 and it wont' let me

Have you reached the racial level cap? (In the Pool of Radiance series, that cap is 5 for half-elf clerics.) If so, you can't without hacking your save.

Aw fuck, might as well start the game over, characters starting randomly having 65,000 jewelry and removing and adding characters to the party turned them invisible, then characters went missing

Honestly, in Pool of Radiance, being capped at 5 isn't much worse than the global cap of 6 for clerics; all you lose is the ability to destroy Skeletons and Zombies, and you only really need one character with that ability.

In fact, I don't think Clerics gain anything else of note past level 3, as the 3rd level spells don't look interesting (why couldn't they have put a stronger healing spell at this spell level?). I actually don't see Clerics as becoming good until level 11, which can't be reached until the third game in the series, anyway. (By contrast, fighters get good at level 7 and magic-users at 5.)

Yeah, Dispel Magic is really the only particularly noticeably useful 3rd level Cleric spell, and it depends heavily on the game you're playing because of the frequent alterations in game rules between the Gold Box titles. For instance, it is extremely useful in Champions of Krynn, because there are a few fights with Clerics where it is essentially impossible to prevent the enemy from casting, so you're probably going to eat a Hold Person; also the Kapak poison (something completely up to chance in every fight with Kapaks) apparently counts the same as a Hold spell so Dispel Magic interestingly does work on it, and Aurak draconians like to cast Fire Shield which can also be got rid of with a Dispel. On the other hand in say Treasures of the Savage Frontier it's virtually useless, because for some reason Dispel doesn't work on Hold, and few if any other debuffs are worth taking the trouble to cast it on, while as far as I can recall I've never seen an enemy buff themselves in that game.

Prayer is generally useful, as in a wholly positive effect for you but it's hard to tell exactly how often it actually makes a significant difference to the outcome of a battle.

Bestow Curse, Cause Blindness, and Cause Disease would have been more useful if the games had emphasised single powerful enemies more, but they rarely do; most Gold Box fights focus on groups of similar opponents making single target performance impairing spells like these of poor value.

Cure Blindness is, AFAICT, only useful in Death Knights of Krynn, when fighting Nightmares. I can't think of any other enemies in the whole Gold Box series that use Blind at all.

Cure Disease is useless because disease acts too fast and the effects are permanent (and most devastating on the very first round, because it usually results in you being docked the equivalent of several points of STR at once due to the drop being straight from 18/xx all the way to 17) - I can't think of a single time in Gateway where I've gotten the mummy disease and not had to reload, even with a cleric prepared with the spell, because the STR drain kicked in during the time it takes to cast the spell :(

This leaves Remove Curse, which is useful if you play without walkthroughs and don't ID items before you equip them, but otherwise it's not useful at all (and it's also of no use in Death Knights of Krynn, Secret of the Silver Blades, or the Savage Frontier games, as these games lack cursed items) except to counter Bestow Curse. I can recall seeing at least one Gold Box enemy use this spell, but so vanishingly rarely that I cannot even recall who did so.


As for the 65,000 jewelry glitch, that's probably a consequence of the use of the Enlarge spell and it happens this way:
* Cast Enlarge on a character.
* While Enlarged, have that character pick up loot that they need to be Enlarged to carry (in other words, they could not carry this much without the strength buff).
* After the spell wears off, the character will still be carrying their stuff, even though they normally would not be able to bear this load (their movement rate will be 3, as there is no contingency in the code for this case).
* At this point, attempt to Share any monetary loot. You will end up with the glitch. It occurs for sure in Curse and it sounds like it does in Pool as well. I have not tested if it happens in the other titles.
I'm slightly foggy on the exact reason this occurs but it's clearly to do with unsigned integer underflow (it's clear that character wallets and encumbrance counters use 16-bit unsigned integers); my guess is that the Share routine performs a simple subtraction to check how much money each character can carry, and if they're overloaded as in this case, the number comes back negative which then results in incorrect math in the rest of the procedure. (Every time I've observed the glitch occur, after an affected Share, the character is shown as exactly at their proper encumbrance limit - in other words, the jewelry OVERFLOWS the encumbrance counter to bring the character to their proper capacity.)

One thing I have been wondering since I played the original Wizardry (which had a similar handling of healing magic) is "why isn't Cure Serious Wounds 3rd level?". It would make more sense to have that spell there instead of having a 2 level gap with no healing spells, and in the case of Pool of Radiance, would give Clerics something to look forward to in that game.

I am not the only one to have this thought, as some games that borrow from AD&D have made the change:

In the ASCII Entertainment arrangement of the Knight of Diamonds Wizardry scenario (Wizardry 2 NES), DIAL (equiv. to CSW) is 3rd level, not 4th as in Sir-Tech Wizardry 1-5. The GBC versions of Wizardry 1-3 are the same.

Final Fantasy has CUR2/Cura as a 3rd level spell, not 4th. (It's worth noting that the Heal equivalent, CUR4/Curaja, is 7th level in that game.) Final Fantasy 3 is the same, as is 5 (though 5 has only 6 spell levels, and the series diverges more from AD&D as early as FF2).

The Elminage series (including Elminage Gothic) has its second healing spell at 3rd level as well as multi-target heals (something the Gold Box games lack) at 4th and 7th levels.

By the way, while playing Dungeon Hack, I have also had a similar issue with 3rd level cleric spells; there are a few that are actually useful, but (except when there are level draining enemies around) none that I need multiple copies of. As a result, at high levels I have nothing good to memorize in the remaining 3rd level slots.

Also, anyone notice that the situation is reversed when it comes to mage spells? There are so many good 3rd level spells which are often much more useful when it comes to those of higher spell levels.

Edit: Are there any FRUA hacks that make Cure Serious Wounds 3rd level or that otherwise tweak healing magic?

Go to the FRUA Magic Mirror. There is a program called HackCKIT that will let you edit spell levels, making Cure Serious Wounds into a 3rd level spell. There is also a program with a DOS-era interface called SPELLED that will allow you to do the same thing.

The file CKITFORM.TXT has more information on the byte addresses of many of the pieces of data in the game, acquired during the golden era of FRUA hacking 10-20 years ago. This should give you more than enough to play with.

You can also post questions on the Reonis FRUA board, people there are friendly and will be willing to help you out.

Good luck!