This Forgotten Classic D&D RPG Was Revived Without Source Code or Tools

After nearly 25 years of limited availability, the long-lost D&D RPG Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor is now available on Steam and GOG. The restoration brings Stormfront Studios’ divisive but ambitious Dungeons & Dragons RPG to modern PCs with widescreen support up to 4K, controller compatibility, a reworked camera, a faster interface, numerous bug fixes, and an optional Legacy mode.

Actually recovering the game was considerably more complicated than updating a few assets. SNEG had no original source code, development tools, or documentation. Its team began with the international retail editions and whatever remained on those discs, eventually reverse-engineering enough of the game to modify its original engine. Dear ImGui became the foundation for the new interface, while AMD FSR 1.0 helped produce sharper output without altering the original artwork.

In the following interview, SNEG Co-Founder Artem Shchuiko explains why the studio believed a game with such a troubled reputation deserved another opportunity. Check out the game for yourself if you want to see more.

Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor

Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor originally launched in 2001 and has been difficult to access on modern systems for years. What made this particular Dungeons & Dragons title worth restoring, and what were the first steps in bringing it back?

Artem Shchuiko: The game has a bad reputation. But if you look past its weak points, what you find is a flawed yet thoroughly enjoyable RPG that never reached enough players and clearly suffered from a compressed development cycle. It’s also the latest entry in the Phlan saga, and it was the first video game to implement what was then the brand-new D&D ruleset. And there’s another angle that makes this one special: it was a homecoming to D&D for Don Daglow and his team, a decade after their Gold Box and Neverwinter Nights days, not to mention it being Stormfront’s last RPG.

Restoring a game that is nearly 25 years old can present some unusual technical challenges. What original source code, development tools, documentation, and assets were available to the team, and how did their condition affect the restoration process?

Artem Shchuiko: None of it, unfortunately. No source code, no tools, no documentation. The only thing we had to work from was the retail editions released around the world and whatever was on those discs. That obviously shaped our starting point and limited how much we could change, especially early on.

The re-release supports widescreen resolutions up to 4K and features upscaled background assets. Can you walk us through the visual restoration pipeline, including how you approached upscaling original artwork, maintaining visual consistency, and preserving the atmosphere of the 2001 release?

Artem Shchuiko: First, a correction: the re-release doesn’t feature upscaled background or terrain assets. That’s something we’re exploring for later.

Our overall approach was simple: whatever we touch or introduce has to stay true to the legacy look. Take the Action Bar. It’s a new UI element, and it also meant creating icons for every spell and action in the game. We could easily have made them look modern, but that would be out of touch with the rest of the game. At the same time, we didn’t want to draw them at the original low resolution either. So we settled on a rule for these new assets: 2x the original. That gives enough pixels to not look bad while keeping the dated look and feel, as a feature. It’s easy nowadays to just scale everything up, but that breaks the immersion, and we didn’t want that.

The one exception was the game’s main font. That’s the one thing we knew had to be as crisp as possible. We reconstructed the original font as a proper TTF and added the missing glyphs, which gave us the best readability we could get without losing the original character.

The game includes a reworked camera, improved UI, new action bar, and additional tooltips. How did you approach redesigning these elements for modern displays and controls while retaining the look and feel of a classic Dungeons & Dragons CRPG?

Artem Shchuiko: Our top priorities were the actual moment-to-moment gameplay: fixes, the information you’re given to make decisions, and the pace of the game, which suffers a lot in the 2001 edition. We also had to balance that against what players are used to today, so we were careful not to go against established modern conventions. But largely, step one was listing every action and pattern in the game that either takes too many unnecessary steps or doesn’t show you enough to make a decision.

Retaining the original look and feel was actually the easy part. We decided early on that the visuals would only get a minor boost, because reworking them properly means redrawing from scratch, and that’s remake territory from how we see it. Our goal was never to remake the game. We wanted to re-release it properly this time - keep what made the original special, but make it much easier for people to actually play it today.

The original game was designed for mouse-and-keyboard PC gameplay, but the restoration introduces full controller support and Steam Deck compatibility. What were the biggest design and engineering challenges involved in adapting its interface, navigation, party management, and turn-based combat for those devices?

Artem Shchuiko: Controller support is simply expected today, so on this project it couldn’t be ignored. We didn’t want the UI to stray too far from the original, but that UI was never designed with a controller in mind. On top of that, it was essentially a hardcoded set of images, because back then there were no off-the-shelf UI engines to build on.

That line of thinking quickly led us to an action bar. It was the single most valuable UI improvement for the game: it works equally well with either input method, and it also solved a number of pacing issues. Once it was in, along with new icons for skills and spells, we started testing layouts situation by situation and iterated as much as we could. Combat early in the game and near the end, inventory management, moving around outside combat: every one of these interactions went through multiple passes, and each pass gave us a clearer sense of what works and what doesn’t.

For abstract questions like “what feels right” or “what would a player expect,” we relied on our own experience as players. We challenged each other internally, ran every major milestone past external QA, and finally put the game in front of players as a demo. That gave us a reality check from outside our own bubble.

The Steam Deck, and the handheld experience in general, was at the core of development from the start. The whole project was tested on it first. I’d be lying if I said the experience is flawless, but I personally prefer playing Pool of Radiance Ruins of Myth Drannor on a handheld.

How did you approach making changes to the original game's systems without unintentionally affecting combat balance, pacing, or the rules that define the experience?

Artem Shchuiko: That’s a good question. Normally I’d worry about a lot more, but with Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor the problems were vivid and right in your face, so the scope of critical changes was clear from the start. The open question was how far to go, and that’s where iteration helped us regulate ourselves on what to touch and what to leave alone.

For example, we could easily have drifted toward letting players choose their feats, adding missing classes like the mage, or nerfing the pre-made characters, which have more points than the default character creation allows. All of these are reasonable expectations. But we quickly realised that touching them without going further would actually make things worse. Suddenly we’d be working on a remaster, which by nature intrudes on the systems, where one change inevitably demands the next. In that paradigm, the old UI has to be thrown away and rebuilt. Add redrawn graphics and a move to the latest D&D ruleset, and you’re already looking at a remake of sorts.

So we very consciously, to our own regret as gamers, set a rule: no changes to the core game systems unless something is clearly a bug. That rule became our guiding principle for this re-release.

What software, engines, tools, or custom technologies did the team use throughout the restoration process? Were there any particularly difficult problems involving compatibility, rendering, animation, asset formats, or other legacy systems that required creative technical solutions?

Artem Shchuiko: After a substantial reverse-engineering effort, we decided to stay on the original engine and make our changes inside the legacy build. Part of the reason was speed, and part was staying true to the game’s look and feel. With that as our foundation, we tried replacing the UI with various modern frameworks, but quickly realised that Dear ImGui, of all things, let us iterate fastest on this particular game. The hardest part wasn’t the UI itself. It was building an internal API to expose the data the new UI needed, much of which was buried deep inside the original code.

For image sharpness, we built on a process we’d already established on other titles, using AMD’s FSR 1.0 to deliver sharper visuals without modifying the original assets. Stability and low system requirements matter a lot to us, so we also use several of our own in-house libraries to stay compatible with the widest possible range of hardware without inflating resource usage.

Classic CRPGs have experienced renewed interest in recent years, particularly following the success of modern Dungeons & Dragons games. What do you think contemporary players can learn or appreciate from Ruins of Myth Drannor's approach to party building, tactical combat, exploration, and RPG design?

Artem Shchuiko: Let’s be honest: Ruins of Myth Drannor didn’t sweep any Game of the Year awards when it came out. But it isn’t half as bad as people remember. Its development was far from easy, and it arrived at a tough moment in gaming history, surrounded by true masterpieces like Baldur’s Gate II and its expansion, Icewind Dale, Arcanum, and, soon after, the tectonic Morrowind.

What contemporary players can appreciate most is perspective. If you play Baldur’s Gate 3 and then jump back to Ruins of Myth Drannor, or to the earlier games in the series or the Icewind Dale titles, you can see how design philosophy evolved across studios and designers. That’s why it was important to us to preserve the original experience in what we call “legacy mode.” There you can feel the barebones mouse input, the missing UI systems and the general choppiness by modern standards, while everyone else can play through the same content with modern conveniences at hand.

SNEG specializes in preserving and reintroducing older games. What have you learned from restoring titles like Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor, and what do you see as the biggest challenges facing long-term video game preservation, especially for games whose original technology or development materials may no longer be readily available?

Artem Shchuiko: Back in the day, games were built on custom, homegrown technology. That means each one has its own approach, its own problems and, more often than not, no source code. Untangling all that and investing the time to understand the technology behind each game is one of the big challenges.

The other is scoping the updates. It’s a delicate balance between authenticity and the changes needed for these games to be playable today. Lean too far into legacy and the game stays outdated. Go too far the other way and suddenly you’re violating the core of what it was. One thing is certain: it’s almost never about graphics or the size of the textures.

Artem Shchuiko, SNEG Co-Founder