[Anthony Durrant]

In the Dungeons & Dragons POOL OF RADIANCE novel, the wizard Shal Bal grows to huge proportion after making a wish to be strong.

[Anthony Durrant]

For those of you who are confused, I was referring to the original POOL OF RADIANCE video game, not the more recent one, POOL OF RADIANCE II. This game has a cover that is also on the novel; it is from an old gamebook and shows a man with a two-handed sword in the process of slaying a copper dragon. He is blonde and blue-eyed and wears silver chain mail with brown leather gloves over the sleeves to protect his skin from the edges of the hilt of his sword.

[alex]

I thought you were referring to the book "The Pool of Radiance" from the Forgotten Realms/Heroes of Phlan Trilogy.

I read it long ago. It’s a bit childish for my tastes (like most D&D books), but I really enjoyed it, being that the character Shal turns herself into a huge muscular amazon and all.

Female muscle aside, if you enjoy reading fantasy (like I do) , there are two ways you should definately go. One is the ongoing series "Song of Ice and Fire", by George R.R. Martin, and the other is the also ongoing series "Malazan Book of the Fallen" by Steven Erikson. The latter has some female muscle in it, but that not the reason to read it. It’s just great. Both are. No predictable good-vs-evil-farmboy-finds-sword kind of thing. It’s all shades of grey with three dimensional characters.

[Anthony Durrant]

Aye, that’s the one – the first volume of the Heroes of Phlan trilogy. I have two copies of it – I bought one new after my second hand copy – which I got at a used book store – began to fall apart.

[Anthony Durrant]

Oddly enough, both the novelization and the video game also boast a cover taken from a gamebook called KNIGHT OF ILLUSION, which was part of the old ENDLESS QUEST series.

[Anthony Durrant]

The reason for Shal's Amazonian growth spurt may lie in the fact that in the original POOL OF RADIANCE computer game there were – as was typical of the TSR computer games of that period – slots for four player characters. (Other games had slots for up to SIX player characters, but that's another story).

Probably there were originally intended to be four player characters in the novel as well, but one of them didn't work well and had to be dropped.  Shal was given a scene intended for that original character near the end of the novel, where she summons a rainstorm and typhoon using her magic, and so she had to be given a major growth spurt so that her character would fit more properly into the scene.

[Anthony Durrant]

Shal Bal, apart from her appearances in the POOL OF RADIANCE novel and the sequel to the POOL OF RADIANCE game – which was called POOLS OF DARKNESS – appears in the AD&D HEROES' LOREBOOK that was put out by TSR before it was bought out by Wizards Of The Coast.  She looks like the model and actress, Anna Nicole Smith.

[Anthony Durrant]

The third POOL novel was not a novelization of an existing game, but a standalone novel, which I believe was called POOL OF UTTER BLACKNESS.

[Author]

Posts