IF YOU STAT IT, THEY WILL KILL IT




Manshoon is a villain in the Pools of Darkness game which you never get to fight.

TSI-Games (started by former SSI employees) has a forum where there's a topic answering Gold Box related questions.


Q: *Why didn't we get to fight Manshoon?"

A: The questions you ask deal with issues where SSI is using TSR's properties. Both Manshoon and Lolth were tightly controlled by TSR, and they did not want anything done to them in Pools of Darkness. Same with any named TSR character. Without doing an original IP, you do what the owner's say.


However, if you decrypt the MON1CHA.DAX monster datafile, stats for Manshoon exist. Here are the stats browsed with Monster Modder (included with Gold Box Companion).




There's also a combat icon in CPIC1.DAX that is not used in the game.



Now we just have to put him somewhere into the game.



Remember the boss fight against Kalistes? There are distant monsters on three sides of the characters. This is a good scenario to test a spellcasting villain.



The monster count for this encounter is: 1 x Kalistes (monster record 13 = $0D), 7 x Drow Champion (37 = $25), 8 x Drow Wizard (40 = $28), 5 x Pet of Kalistes (7 = $07). Monster record numbers can be seen with Monster Modder.

Gold Box game map triggers and encounters are stored in ECL-files.

Here is some ECL analysis done at the FRUA hacking forum.

After decrypting ECL1.DAX and searching for some related strings (I used "HOW DARE YOU" from the screenshot above), this encounter can be traced to record 82 of the file.

At offset $1AAE there are following "load monster" commands:

1AAE   0B 00 0D 00 01 00 0D   (1 x Kalistes, monster record $0D)
1AB5   0B 00 25 00 07 00 25   (7 x Drow Champion, $25)
1ABC   0B 00 28 00 08 00 28   (8 x Drow Wizard, $28)
1AC3   0B 00 07 00 05 00 07   (5 x Pet of Kalistes, $07)

Now if we change those to:

1AAE   0B 00 55 00 01 00 55
1AB5   0B 00 55 00 01 00 55
1ABC   0B 00 55 00 02 00 55
1AC3   0B 00 55 00 02 00 55

Should result in total 6 x Manshoons (well, he likes to clone himself), replacing all previous monsters. Manshoon's monster record is 85 = $55.

At $1A65 there's a "setup monster" command which displays the picture at the the "HOW DARE YOU?" screenshot. We'll change the $0D (Kalistes' monster record) to $55 (Manshoon's).

1A65   0C 00 FF 00 00 00 0D 00 07 11 80     ->     0C 00 FF 00 00 00 55 00 07 11 80

And after rebuilding the ECL1.DAX file we get...








If you want to try your luck against 6 Manshoons, download manshoon.zip. Remember to backup your own datafiles / saves!

Do not expect anything extraordinary as it still uses the Gold Box AI and is mostly spamming Delayed Blast Fireballs. You can try changing some of his spells with the Monster Modder.

For the mod I used Gold Box Explorer, some of my own Gold Box related tools, a hex editor and lots of information from the FRUA hacking forum.