A new and very thorough FAQ for Pool of Radiance by Stephen S. Lee:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/564785-pool-of-radiance/faqs/73869

Mail him if you have anything to add.

I'm currently updating this before starting work in earnest on Curse of the Azure Bonds. (I've now got both the time and inclination.)

I'm finding lots of little mistakes everywhere, of course.

Version 1.10 now up, at the same link in the first post.

The most important change is adding instructions (in what is now section 4.7) for fixing your characters after transfer to Curse of the Azure Bonds. There's a fix to make Enlarge work on transferred characters. (... you know, I didn't check to see if Gold Box Companion already does that.)

Lots of other minor changes and fixes. Some off the top of my head:

* The Sleep spell actually affects monsters with 5 hit dice, which doesn't happen in the tabletop game. I investigated because I realized ogres have 5 hit dice (rounded up from the 4 + 1 of the tabletop ... no, 4 + 1 is not 5 in this context).
* You are required to either do Ohlo's quest or kill him to clear the Slums. (You get +1 for this, +1 for each of 15 random combats, and +1 for each of 9 set combats, for a required total of 25.)
* The thief kill counter to clear Kovel Mansion must reach 21, not 20.
* It is possible to prove Cadorna is a traitor before the Zhentil Keep Outpost quest, and the game actually handles that possibility.

The Curse of the Azure Bonds guide is now underway. It'll be slow, since I'm writing it with the same ludicrous level of detail.

I'm now looking into which year Pool of Radiance takes place in.

If you look this up in Google, it will give you the year for 2nd Edition and later: it's 1340 DR there.

Almost all 1st Edition Forgotten Realms adventures take place in 1357 or early 1358, however. And the Curse of the Azure Bonds tabletop version explicitly says, on page 3, that Pool of Radiance happens in Mirtul/Kythorn (late spring) 1357. (Curse starts ~4 months after that.)

I think I'm just going to roll with all Gold Box games taking place in an alternate reality. The plot goes off the rails in Curse of the Azure Bonds, even by 1st Edition standards, in the Gold Box game only.

It gets worse -- the standard 2nd/3rd Edition history says Pools of Darkness takes place in 1350 DR. Pretty much all plot elements in Secret of the Silver Blades are completely made up for the game, alone of the Gold Box games. (I can already hear everyone thinking "no wonder that game was the worst of the nine".) The argument that the powerful spell cast at the beginning of Silver Blades carried your heroes back in time doesn't work, because other characters remember what you did in Curse.

The books Azure Bonds (which happens at about the same time as Pool of Radiance) and Pools of Darkness both "actually" do take place. So does the Curse of the Azure Bonds tabletop version, which among other things, goes out of its way to prevent you from killing Fzoul Chembryl.

Okay, that can't quite be right either. The Adventurer's Journal explicitly says that the Year of the Worm, 1356 DR, was two years ago. That's the same year as the Flight of the Dragons that wrecked things all around the Moonsea. So it's now 1358 DR, not 1357 DR.

Pushing the Gold Box Curse of the Azure Bonds to later in 1358 DR makes the most sense.

Pretty much anything happening in 1358 DR or later in 2nd Edition or later sources can't actually happen in the Gold Box timeline. Most events revolve around the Time of Troubles, which can't happen in the Gold Box games.

My take on this: The Gold Box writers mostly just winged it when they were dating events and didn't focus on adhering to the official calender.

Also, it does seem like Curse should take place during the events of ToT given the timeline of the books and how things are presented. The Fire Knives would have needed time to recover as would Moander's cultists while the new players in the alliance would have needed to learn things, so 4 months after PoR feels like it's too short a timeframe.

And Secrets definitely feels like it just ignores whatever else may have happened in the FR setting as a whole, while focusing just on the events in Old/New Verdigris.

Yeah, part of the problem is that the official calendar mostly didn't exist that long ago. Player adventuring is assumed to take place in 1358 in 1st Edition.

What hits the Moander cultists and the Fire Knives in the Azure Bonds book probably shouldn't be recoverable from even in a decade, but then again the Forgotten Realms have a lot of "where did they get all of THAT from?" even by AD&D standards.

The ToT prevents normal clerical spellcasting, and then kills Bane and Moander (among other gods). Is it ever mentioned anywhere in the games?

Almost everything new in Secret of the Silver Blades doesn't exist in the printed materials: the town of (New) Verdigris, the Well of Knowledge, the Black Circle, the brothers Eldamar and Oswulf ... Marcus is the only new plot element I can think of that isn't.

Pools of Darkness explicitly takes ten years after Pool of Radiance, in both the books and the games.

(Though really, I'd rather have a good implementation of the game rules than of the plot. You can only fit so much onto a few floppy disks.)

Bane is used extensively in Pools of Darkness (being the main antagonist) and the party explores the corpse of Moander during one section of that game as well.

Moander was killed post-ToT, so there's definitely a bit of a continuity hiccup there if the Gold Box games are supposed to be FR canon. The sequel to "Azure Bonds" (the novel), "The Wyvern's Spur" is pre-ToT, but "Song of the Saurials" (the final book in the trilogy) is post-ToT* and Moander is killed in SotS. That event even gives rise to a new minor deity.

*Olive mentions to Nameless that she was staying with friends living in Immersea (almost certainly the Wyvernspur family) during ToT.

Stephen, thank you VERY much for that Walkthrough.
I use it currently for my playthrough of Pool of Radiance, so Progress is a little faster.

The GUI of the first two FR games is SO horrible (hotkeys instead of arrow-cursor-control)
Yet i do not want to miss anything. ("suffering" from the Completionists Curse)

Thinking back, playing this on my Commodore C-64,flipping half a dozen Floppy Discs,
I really shouldn't complain though, less so even because we now have The Gold-Box Companion.

Version 1.3 of the Pool of Radiance walkthrough is now up:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/564785-pool-of-radiance/faqs/73869

Changes:
* I overhauled the script that generates monster statistics. There is more information, and most of the mistakes from the days when I added statistics by hand should be gone. The AI I wrote was a little bit too intelligent -- the real Pool of Radiance AI favors studded leather armor over Bracers AC 6 for ... reasons.
* There is more accurate information on how much XP money and items give. That's also now part of the monster statistics script.
* All placed magically charged treasure now mentions how many charges it starts with.
* The spellcasting delay adjustment is actually division by 3, not 2. That makes spellcasting significantly more powerful than it is in the tabletop game. (So even though Stinking Cloud has a tabletop game delay of 2 ... that gets divided by 3, then rounded down to 0, so it actually has no delay in the Gold Box games.)
* There are now instructions on how to modify spellcasting delay.
* I've added how AI spellcasting priority works.
* With both spellcasting delay and AI priority not obvious and not in the manual, I've added a table.
* Clarification of area of effect spells: it wasn't clear before what "diameter 3/5/7" meant.
* You can raise the dead by casting Cause Light Wounds in combat. This bug is gone in most later games.
* The Stinking Cloud AC penalty is larger than I thought
* Mirror Image is not as effective as it should be, or as in later games. (That's fixed in Secret of the Silver Blades.)
* Haste and Slow do not actually affect initiative.
* Strength: for Open Doors, easy vs. hard is in fact implemented, so I put that in the table.
* Dexterity: actual adjustments to thief skills. There are a couple wrong numbers in the game's table. (Also, for those looking forward to Curse of the Azure Bonds, Dexterity 20 is not actually supported in this regard -- equipping Gauntlets of Dexterity to get to 20 will at best not help.)
* For avoiding attacks, being third-from-the-bottom is better than being #5 in the order.
* A "small/medium" target for a weapon is only so if it BOTH has that size in the game files AND has a 1-tile icon.
* The actual THAC0 table used by the game is now there. It's a hybrid of 1st/2nd edition rules (as you might expect), and it also changes by specific Gold Box game.
* More information on binary format.
* Added Computer Gaming World references.
* Added Acknowledgements.

The Curse of the Azure Bonds longform walkthrough is now almost done. If there's anything in particular you want added, now is a good time to mention it.

Excellent job on the FAQ, it's a very interesting read even for PoR veterans :).

I do have one minor quibble though, in section 7.4 you state: This is actually not true, at least for D&D. In the original D&D rules (1974) experience was gained from both treasure and monsters. (It was originally 100XP per HD of monster defeated, and 1XP per gp of treasure. This was later modified in the Greyhawk supplement (1975) where a table was introduced for calculating monster XP, and monster XP was significantly reduced for low-level monsters). The majority of XP was earned from treasure, but it was not the only source.

Thank you!

It's also a little distressing to keep finding mistakes every time, but every time it's fewer and fewer. At this point, it's getting pretty glaring that I didn't bother to provide lair maps. (At the time I first wrote this I had lower standards.)

I'm planning one of these days to write and release an unofficial game version 1.4 to fix known bugs. (That'll be a fair bit of work, though; it won't start soon.) Oh! Thanks for the correction.

Well, that's what I get for mostly relying on secondary sources. I'll fix that for 1.31 (yeah, every major revision has a bunch of corrections soon after). It's hard enough just trying to keep track of 1e/2e/3e/3.5e/5e rules ...

This is still kind of true even in Gold Box. If you ever hunt dracoliches in Curse of the Azure Bonds (a dangerous sport, even if you are super buff), they're ~14850 XP of actual monster and ~36600 XP of treasure.

First of all, amazing job on that FAQ! Lots of questions I wondered 30 years ago when playing the game for the first time that have now been answered!

My one quibble is with the party for all four games; I would go Fighter, Fighter, Fighter, Fighter/Magic-User/Thief, Cleric, Magic-User, changing the front two fighters to Paladin and Ranger through hacking for Curse if desired. (One fighter gets changed to Magic-User in Secret, and I changed a second one to Cleric in Pools.)

I always figured the games had their own continuity. The Curse of the Azure Bonds tabletop module appears to be set up for 2nd ed, which means it can't happen before Pools of Darkness which follows 1st ed conventions, what with Bane being around. As others have said, ten years have passed according to the game between Pool and Pools, and that doesn't fit with the Time of Troubles.

As an aside, they seem to have gotten a call from the IP lawyers sometime between Death Knights and Pools of Darkness, as Death Knights lets you banish two IP characters and Pools of Darkness lets fairly minor villains get away.

I'm assuming that most people aren't that attached to actually staying with the same characters throughout a series of transfers. Most people threw away characters to get paladins and rangers in Curse back in the day ... so that's my standard advice now as well, keeping only a human cleric and an elven F/MU/T throughout.

If you're actually keeping the exact same characters, yeah, what you recommend is pretty much best. As you have to actually hack characters, I shy away from recommending it though; too many people don't want to touch that.

Though you don't really get punished for suboptimal party composition until Pools of Darkness, anyway.

I thought they started to get itchy soon after the Gold Box Curse was published, actually.

Not sure if the Curse FAQ is done yet, but some of the bugs around characters transferred from Pool of Radiance are worth discussing--the Girdle of the Dwarves apparently doesn't work, they don't gain HP when levelling up, etc.

Also, trying to play the game with one character creates bugs with the dungeons where the events are in the wrong places, but this is probably of little concern to most people.