#was mostly a combat session but it was very close.. couple of our characters almost died.... someone else's character had A Moment

[therealraeweber]

🍂Fall Journal Entry🍂

Just a little bit about what I've been up to this fall (if you can call it that...)

Well... it's November now. My favourite month of the year is officially over, and my favourite season is coming to a close.

Fall is my favourite season for a few reasons... The main one being Halloween, of course (which I had an amazing Halloween), but the other reasons are the beautiful fall colours and the foggy weather... both of which are a photographer's best friend.

Fall is by far the most fun season to photograph, and I missed out on all the pretty colours last year because school was super overwhelming, so I was determined to get lots of fall pictures this year... only we didn't have a fall.

The weather went straight from being hot, summer heat, to winter. Absolutely no in between stages. Until a couple weeks ago it was still shorts weather, and now they are calling for snow this week? I doubt it will actually happen, but still... where was fall?

Because of this weird weather there has been next to no fog, and almost no fall colours. This has been a huge bummer for me, and I've spent quite a bit of time searching to see if I could find any trees with nice colours. (I actually spotted a couple today on campus, so I might bring my camera to class tomorrow)

Last weekend on the 22nd, I went out to capture the "fall colours" and was pretty disappointed. I got a couple cool pictures, but nothing too spectacular. It was a bit strange. All the trees were already completely empty, all the leaves having fallen, or were still completely green. No reds, no yellows, not even browns... just green or nothing. And everything that was green wasn't even a nice green, but rather a dusty grey-green. There were the odd yellow or red tree here and there, but the overwhelming majority was already finished with the fall cycle, or hadn't even started.

I'm planning on sharing more photos from my excursion soon, but you can see here what I mean about everything being mostly green, or even a dusty grey.

It was definitely a bit disappointing to have my favourite season just... not happen, but I didn't let that stop me from having a great spooky season.

In October I got to do all kinds of fun things like hang out with the cosplay club and have a lightsaber duel, go to a pumpkin patch with the cosplay club, see Rocky Horror in theatres with my friends, go to a costume party at the university pub, have a spooky dnd session where we cosplayed our characters, and hang out with my friends on Halloween to ghost hunt and play an intense game of Mario Party. It has been an absolutely jam-packed month, and I've enjoyed every second of it.

In case any of you were curious what my Halloween costume was this year, I did Eddie! I technically wore 3 costumes this year for the different events I went to (Eddie, my OC, and Beetlejuice).

Here's some stuff from our Halloween weekend dnd session! I really love how my cosplay turned out!

Also this month I ran my first ever session of dnd as a DM! That was crazy! It is something I've always wanted to do, but never thought I would ever have the time or knowledge to pull off. I had an opportunity to fill in for our usual DM and decided to run a one shot that I created. Sure it was a bit rough, and I needed a bit of help when it came to the combat side of things, but I had a ridiculously fun time and the players all loved it! It was a super meta one shot, where I took all of our pre-existing characters from our usual campaign and threw them into our world. I got to play myself as an NPC which was very fun, and got to play all of our group members as the enemies, so they had to fight themselves. It was such a cool experience and I'm so glad they all enjoyed it. It's pretty cool that I can now cross that off my bucket list! Here are the minis I made of everyone for the combat!

Anyways, I haven't been posting much this month because A) I've been super busy, as you can tell from this needlessly long journal entry and B) because I am SO FAR BEHIND ON DRACULA DAILY. I can't use Tumblr without seeing all of the Dracula content, and I really don't want spoilers (Yes... I know the book is more than 100 years old. I still don't want spoilers). I think the last entry I read was the October 2nd one, so I'm a month behind at this point. It's been killing me! I need to know if Mina is ok!!! But alas, I simply have not had time to read. I'm hoping to catch up soon now that life is calming down, but who knows.

So... that is a little bit about what I've been up to. Not that anyone cares. I just like writing these little journal posts so I can look back on all the fun stuff I got up to... and oh boy was there lots of fun this month.

[sepiadice]

DiceJar Campaign 0.3: Holes, Doors, and Blood (2020/03/13)

Finally killed my first PC as a GM!

Yup… Wasn’t intentional but… well, dice made things interesting, so I have to work with it.

We also didn’t have our rogue, which is unfortunate as she’s an enjoyable member, and also there were a lot of traps and locks this time.

The content went through almost the remainder of what was prepared for the previous session. I’d like to get through the content a little faster so the group can move on to actual role-play opportunities, instead of dungeon crawling. It’s an unfortunate result of my experimental Game Mastering a Module, and I’ll likely try and stick to homebrew in the future.

Or, at least, look for modules with more emphasis on socializing.

I did a medium job preparing this session. I got complacent and let the session slip far to the back of my mind leading up. I found my sweet spot session 2, so I need to keep that standard.

Cast

Mogui (IndigoDie): Druid. Does what he’s told by his employer. Indigo has played this module before. Yot (LimeDie): Cleric. Looking to redeem himself for past failures. Lime will commit to bits. Bernard 'Bean' Dipp (NavyDie): Ranger. Trying his best despite being so young. Navy doodles when he’s bored. Delilah Dunford (VermilionDie): Rogue. Searching for an identity beyond her family. Vermilion could not make this session. Game Master (SepiaDie/me): The world (a dusty, dusty world). The walls probably have stories to tell. I’m desperately trying to keep ahead with drawing the map.

Session Three

We reopen in the loot room we ended in the last session. Navy is given his rewards and I expound on the uses of the various items they received.

Now given the opportunity to read his letter, Navy delays long enough to wonder if he’s chosen to make Bean illiterate, but eventually he takes to giving the description: his mother wrote it, opening with a joke, and giving random updates about life in town despite the letter needing to have been placed before the arrival of the party, but it’s an opportunity for the players to expound on their families, so maybe his mother is a little airheaded?

The letter canonizes a High School which has a football team and a glee club. Will anything come of it? Probably not. Did I say with a sigh ‘Guess that’s canon now…’? You bet I did! Always say yes! Improv!

The party headed back into the room with the pool, tested the other door to find it locked, and moved towards the wailing.

The chamber to the East of the entrance contained several walls crisscrossing. A door stood locked to the south. The puzzle of this room is walking around various hidden pit traps while finding three switches that must be held down at the same time to unlock the exit. I originally ruled the switches take a few minutes to reset so the party can run to get to the door, but then I remembered Delilah is technically still there, so I reverted it to operate as written.

Bean and Yot both took turns falling in holes as Mogui moved around cautiously and managed to jump clear of the one pit he did accidentally trigger.

The three maneuvered around the chamber until they found the necessary switches, activated them, and Delilah held open the door so they could get through.

Walking through the next hallway, they finally reached the door for the room from whence the wailing was emitting.

They all decide to ignore it.

Which means they’ve skipped some plot exposition. Oh well, keep rolling and adapt.

Instead, they go down a fork and into an empty room, which formerly held a giant beetle, but I cut that combat as being wholly unnecessary. Instead, our party continues through into the next chamber, which has a fight I did not cut, as I thought it would have narrative value.

A fire pit smolders in the center of the room, a charred corpse within. Upon the arrival of our party, a dark apparition arises and squares up to fight our heroes.

Bean had acquired an Oil of Magic Weapon, granting his bow Plus-One Status, and rendering it a magic attack, so he’s able to harm the shadow.

Yot, meanwhile, uses Holy Flame. Fun fact about our apparition: it was born because a pyrophobic man burned alive in a structure already pretty rife with necromantic energies. That terror and agony was all it took to create the shadow.

So the enemy is real mad at being set on fire, sending out psionic screams for flavor.

Mogui just watches the fight.

After a few rounds of Magic Bow and holy flames, the Shadow perishes. Victory music for everybody!

The party leaves the room, continues to ignore the terrified wails, and enters the last available door.

Within is a round, domed room, with a wooden pillar, standing on an outcrop over a pit at the center of the room, that fires blunted arrows. This is felt to be rather unpleasant, and the party discusses how to deal with it.

Eventually, they check out the door, and find a mechanism built into it.[1] The party attempts to break the mechanism.

Bean then enters, and is pelted by blunt arrows. He walks around and tries to open a southern exit, finding it to be locked, so Bean attempts to approach the trap. Unfortunately, he takes enough nonlethal damage to get knocked out. Whoops.

After waiting for the mechanical whirring to stop, the other two call after Bean, receiving no response. So they cautiously enter.

The trap is now docile. And the southern door is unlocked.

So, what happened here, by the text of the module, is that the trap keeps running for ten rounds, at which time it’ll be exhausted of arrows, and the south exit will automatically unlock. The hope was the party would take the tower shields from the wood golem of last session to block the arrows.

Because of how they broke the activating mechanism (as they snapped off the metal arm in the door hinge that turned the machine off and on), I decided that now once it turned on, it couldn’t turn off. So after Bean was knocked out, the trap kept running until it ran out of rounds.

Don’t ask how the trap’s supposed to keep pelting adventurers inside the chamber after the door closes. Magic I guess.

Stop asking how traps work.

Mogui investigated the south exit while Yot checked on Bean. The door was, of course, unlocked, to the annoyance of Navy, and Yot was taking his sweet time healing Bean, but soon the party was on their feet again and ready for whatever came next.

The final room of the floor widened as it went, the ceiling supported by four columns. Stairs to the south lead to the… basement? Second basement? The crypt’s already underground, so what terminology applies here, I’m not…

Also, there’s two statues in recesses of the south wall. The Module text doesn’t call any attention to them, but they’re probably Kassen.

Our heroes enter this room, get to approximately the middle of the room, and four skeletons, with talon-like clawed fingers and blood dripping from their bones, step out from behind the columns, and menace the heroes.

Combat begins.

As does a series of horrible rolls from both parties. Just a lot of do-nothing turns. Yot tries to bash the skeletons and misses, Bean fires arrows and the closest he got sent the arrow through the ribcage of one skeleton. The skeletons weren’t faring much better, three of them crit fumbling at some point, which I interpreted them as falling prone for a turn.

The rolls were so bad I gently reminded my party that I set up a dice-roll bot in the Discord channel, if they wanted to put Roll20’s die-roller into dice prison. They didn’t go for it.

Back and forth the combat went, the skeletons getting a couple lucky hits on Bean. Eventually, and tragically, those lucky hits added up and Bean hit zero. Navy started making Death Saves, a realm where the exhaustingly low rolls followed and brought him to his death.

NavyDie then spent the rest of the combat doodling an increasingly elaborate death scene, with grave stone, candles, what was either a pentagram or an alchemy circle,[2] and death himself. Whatever self-amusement was needed.

As a narrative-first GM, Player Characters dying in combat is not something I enjoy. I am now in an awkward position of needing to figure out how to proceed and keep Navy involved. If he still wishes to play, of course. A couple options immediately spring to mind: bringing in a new character will be narratively awkward at this point, as we need to justify why the ignorant town would send back up, or why a kid is running so late; there’s an available NPC I could give Navy, but he’d be an odd (but doable) add; or, and this is an idea I like most, I can bring Bean back for a price…[3]

But I need to talk it through with NavyDie first.

Back to those still alive.

Mogui maneuvers to keep a safe distance, eventually coaxing one of the four skeletons back to the previous room, running a circle and returning to the main combat room, closing the door behind him. I rolled a die to determine the nature of the skeletons, and concluded they’re running on animalistic instinct, and thus can’t operate a door.

Also, this cuts down on enemies to delay the fight and rewards IndigoDie for clever problem solving.

Yot, growing tired of not hitting with his Mace, starts using Holy Flame again, forcing the Skeletons to use the horrible dice rolls to avoid damage instead of Yot using the same rolls to cause damage. Progress starts to get made.

Mogui turns into a tiger and starts running about and attempting to hit the skeletons, but still no luck.

There’s also some talk about how the skeletons aren’t taking attacks of opportunity, which had a very elegant explanation: I totally forgot about that mechanic, and I also just plain hate attacks of opportunity. They feel cheap and punish players for not carefully considering every minutiae of their actions.[4]

Eventually, the skeletons are finally either redead, or trapped in another room.

With one dead, the remaining three party members stare towards the stairs to the next floor. As the only escape is to fight the skeleton in the previous room, they mostly consider what difficulty they’re prepared to face.

Of the three sessions played thus far, this one felt of middle quality. I forgot to read my opening crawl text, and I waited until the last minute to write notes for the remainder of the floor (after copying over the leftovers from session two). Neither the combat with the Shadow (where I forgot to implement the smoke in the eyes mechanic the module wanted me to) or the Bloody Skeletons (with horrible dice rolls)[5] felt particularly fun or worthwhile. I’ll probably look to cut more superfluous fights going forward.

I’m also looking forward to moving out of the dungeon. I am learning a lot, as was my goal with running this module, but I’m missing being able to Role-Play as GM.[6] I’m certainly learning to answer questions the text didn’t bother to address, and also how annoying module formatting can be with where it explains things.

When I find time, I should sit down and design a dungeon of my own. That would also be a good learning experience, and also let me feel more at ease with making world-based rulings on the fly and implement elements I like and minimize those I don’t.

There’s just so much combat and map-based traps written in this thing. Makes it too difficult to abstract out the traps and rely on theater of the mind.

Most important take away: Attacks of Opportunity are dumb, and I hereby houserule them away.

I’ve already set things in motion for fun plot developments after this session’s events and feedback received, and hopefully the next write-up will come in about two weeks.

Until next time, may your dice make things interesting.[8]

-

[1] The party is really interested in the actual mechanics of these traps, which the module doesn’t explain, forcing their poor GM to try and reverse engineer it, and maybe I need to start shrugging and saying ‘I dunno, magic I guess.’ [2] Which is a good way to lose a sibling. [3] Just sent Navy a text asking if he’d like a level of Warlock. This could be fun. [4] Also, my experience with another player exploiting the mechanic to attempt to kill me. [5] Though based on his recap, IndigoDie enjoyed the combat for the bad rolls? Interesting guy. It felt like a bad joke that kept repeating to me, and I failed to improvise an Out for those involved. [6] Especially since Indigo sidestepped the opportunity I did have![7] [7] Whatever. Gives me time to give the man a less stupid name. [8] Despite working it into the opening, this sign off still doesn’t sit right. Feels too long… Magazines have little icons to mark the end. Maybe I should do the same?

[wordflurries]

Campaign report

Attention conservation notice: 1500+ words on my D&D campaign.  If you're reading this, there’s a decent chance you’re interested, but it's only fair to let you know what you're getting into.

So, we finished a D&D campaign last month.  72 sessions over almost seven years, probably 300-400 hours of play.  I played for the first half-dozen sessions, then took over DM duties for the rest of it.  If I stack my notes up, it's a stack of paper about three inches high.  The after-action session notes take up more than 200 printed pages.

We've had the same group for quite a while, with approximately monthly sessions with five to seven players.  We played in person for four to six hours a session for most of that time, with more and shorter Zoom sessions for more than a year during the pre-vaccination Covid Time.  We played 5th edition, with a fairly old-school feel -- we're all old enough that most of us grew up on Basic or AD&D.  We roll dice, drink beers, tell lots of dumb jokes in poor taste, and catch up with each other.

Once I grabbed the DM reins, I ran most of the campaign in an archipelago set in a version of noism's Fixed World, where the world is laid out on light/dark and hot/cold axes, and there is no day/night cycle.  I figured this would let me put lots of different microenvironments on different islands, from cold gray matriarchal seal people to bright warm mile-high trees.  For added fish out of water points, most of the party came from another world across a dimensional bridge.  The Fixed World setup let me play with a lot of ideas, but the problems of biology and (pseudo)human society without a diurnal cycle were a constant annoyance.  (Most of those problems were resolved by ignoring them.)

5th edition D&D worked pretty well for us.  It's easy enough to pick up for new players, doesn't require aggressive minmaxing to play, but has enough tactical options to avoid the "I hit it. I hit it again." that some early editions can fall into.  It's carefully crafted for balance, and the craft shows.  It fits a certain style well, but it can be bent to other styles, and that's a tribute to its design.  I wanted a fairly old school feel, but didn't want to cut off the options that 5th edition offers.  (It helps that our group aren't powergamers.)  We ran very abstract combat, keeping everything moving, houseruling out the initiative ladder and a few other complexities.  We did not use battle maps or a VTT, except some finger-paint sketches over Zoom for a while.  Several players liked the VTT aspect (mostly the spell-flingers), but it adds to the DM prep time.  We greatly preferred playing in person.

Things that worked

People had fun.  First and foremost, for seven years, we got together about once a month for several hours and had a good time.  That in itself was enough.

5th edition does a good enough old-school imitation, as long as you don't look too closely.  A dedicated grognard isn't going to get what they want, but you can run a "poke monsters and take their stuff" campaign light on the bookkeeping without too much effort.

I got to indulge my imagination and walk people through it.  There were a dozen plot points and set pieces that translated well from my head to memorable game play.  A couple of the monsters from the campaign ended up published in professional publications.  The interdimensional goblin merchants added a huge dose of chaos and crude humor.  

My players got to play the kind of characters they wanted to play -- crossbow-sniping swashbucklers, loincloth barbarians, flamboyant bards, bodybuilders, insane sorcerers, and plenty of others.

My group was tolerant of my DMing idiosyncrasies, although I was told that my NPCs all had names that were hard to remember, that it didn't help when every noble was a duke, and that nobody wanted to see any more severed-head monsters or bears of any sort.

We strung a series of adventures through an overarching plot that ended up resolving things set into motion in the first session.

Things that could have been better

The turn sequence and action economy never quite made sense to me -- action, reaction, bonus action, lair action, legendary action, and so on.  Similarly, I never really took advantage of the skills system, which probably ended up short-changing the party rogue more than anyone.  I ended up just making rulings in a lot of cases, which worked, but mostly because the group was OK with it.

Over seven years, I ran into some imaginative ruts.  I had no problems coming up with new societies, new monsters, new NPCs.  Worldbuilding is fun.  However, players don't play for worldbuilding.  They want to have an adventure.  I bogged down in session prep, either moving plot pieces around or just keying out dungeons.  By the end, I struggled to get the the fundamentals down on a page.  (Some of this was me trying to impose some overarching plot, which went against the kind of campaign I thought I wanted to run and set myself up for more work than I wanted.  Some of this was also my unwillingness to walk into a session without extensive prep, which means that I overthought everything and lots of stuff never got used.)

I made the rookie DM mistake of having too many NPCs and not making them properly distinct from each other.  There are parties and campaigns where having a dozen different nobles maneuver around each other to expose the inner workings of the court makes for exciting gaming.  This was not that party.  I kept trying to strip it down to a few archetypes -- the big bad, the helpful fixer, the knowledgeable sage, etc. -- but in the end, I got a lot of "wait, who's this dude again?"  I tried naming NPCs by some useful linguistic rules, but ended up with a bunch of names that were long and all sounded a little bit too alike.  Playing once a month and including lots of beer probably didn't help.

Things I didn't like

5th edition characters are damn near indestructible after 6th-8th level.  You have to crank the opposition up to ludicrous levels to pose a decent fight.  High-level opponents come with their own complex stat blocks and tactics, which become too much to handle.  I reskinned a lot of bulk basher monsters -- high HP, big damage attack, simple tactics.  Monsters with lots of options usually got simplified on the fly.

On the "5th edition characters are indestructible" point, there isn't a lot of peril once characters get past about 6th level.  The idea that a long rest heals all damage is just ludicrous.  (Put another way, it doesn't work with a campaign where you want there to be some amount of peril.)  You almost died?  Take a nap, you're all better!  This means that you either have multiple combat encounters per day (which is hard to pull off outside of a dungeon environment), or you aim towards big spectacular set pieces, or you spend a bunch of effort being a dick about players' sleep habits.  Once the party gets the Tiny Hut, they're always a good night's sleep from full strength.  (I *hate* Tiny Hut.  I resist the urge to nerf it out of existence, or at least utility, but it goes from a "we won't freeze camping outside" to "entire party healed, once per day".)  On a related note, there has to be a happy medium between AD&D-style "die on a failed save" and 5e-style "save every round, first success clears the condition".

(All that said, we did have some characters die.  A ranger died at 3rd level to a large cat-creature with a savage bite.  The class barbarian took a stone giant rock to the chest.  Several characters died in a TPK when they tried to barricade themselves in a room without an exit, against an intelligent foe.  One  character died fighting shadows, whose Strength drain is surprisingly dangerous.  One had his brain eaten by a mind flayer.)

In general, 5th edition works well up to about 12th level, and then the power level of PCs goes nuclear and it's really hard to plan around them without nerfing them with anti magic fields and crap like that.  This is a Known Problem.  The Teleport spell does more to break DM plans than anything else in the book.  (That's not the players' fault -- at that level, they've earned it -- but the ability to jump from site to site makes plotting or session prep almost impossible without player cooperation.)

Things I will do differently for the next one

Yeah, there’s going to be a next one.  One of our players is going to step up and DM for a while, which will both be a great change in styles and a good break for me.  I’m already rolling around the next campaign in my head.

Less plot.  Less plot equals less planning.  I like world building.  I'm OK with plot.  I can only do encounter design in small bursts.  I want to set up a setting and let the players decide what to do, and build from there.  My goal is to get to a "campaign that runs itself".

More danger.  I'm going to nerf the healing rules and force characters to think about where they're sleeping.

Resource management.  I want some basic encumbrance rules, maybe something like the Lamentations "stone" system.  No more hauling around several hundred pounds of crap.  It wouldn't hurt to pay closer attention to the attunement rules.  I don't want anyone keeping track of arrows and food, but maybe some sort of ablation dice might work.

No high level.  I'm thinking of going in with the expectation that the next campaign will go to 10th-12th level.  

[ciathyzareposts]

Abandoned Places: Turnabout

In this session, I saw the “full party death” screen for the first time.

            I tried hard to finish Abandoned Places for this entry, pouring almost 16 hours into it over the last six days, but I’m not quite there. It’s been very frustrating, and I wish I’d just wrapped it up when I was toying with it last time.

       The frustration has come more from length and size than difficulty. If a game isn’t giving you what you want, the last thing you want it to do is persist, but Abandoned Places has unearned dreams to be epic. It started in the Hall of Light, which was about as big as a single regular dungeon level. The “proving grounds” at Souls Abbey was another level, then another at the library of Kal Kalon. The Steps dungeon had two levels, and that’s where I learned that I would need to find three Ruling Symbols–sword, orb, and staff–each broken into three pieces and secreted in three different dungeons. Each was only one level, but that was still another nine dungeons. Then, each Symbol required a fourth dungeon where I’d find an altar to assemble them, so that was another three. Once I had all three Symbols, Bronakh appeared and challenged me to get through a dungeon called the Halls of Rage.             

The Ruling Symbols came together on their respective altars.

          All told, I’ve been through 18 dungeon levels. That’s five more than Dungeon Master already. If you’re going to make a game in this style, you’ve got to supply something to keep it interesting. Options could be:

             Challenging combat. Make the player really fight for every inch. Make every foe memorable. Require the player to explore the full range of spell capabilities. Improve enemy AI and tactics on each new level.

Challenging puzzles. Really work the player’s mind with the mechanical puzzles. Force him to take a lot of notes and maps and make leaps of logic.

Interesting environment. Make the dungeon immersive. Blow the player’s mind with scenes and vistas that he’s never seen before.

Interesting stories. Give each level a backstory and character. Populate it with lore and encounters that fill in an ongoing narrative.

             Dungeon Master made itself famous with the first two options, particularly the second. Ultima Underworld went largely with the latter two but also had some interesting puzzles. Abandoned Places, at least for most of its run, does none of them. For 14 of the 18 levels I’ve experienced so far, the enemies have been staggeringly easy, and for 17 of the 18, the puzzles have been entirely of the rote mechanical kind. Push a switch here to open a door somewhere else. Dungeon Master had puzzles like that, too, but it kept you guessing. That switch might open one door but close another. Or you might need two switches to open the door. Or the switch might have multiple settings. Or it might only open the door for a limited period of time. I learned to play Dungeon Master and most of its lineage (e.g., Eye of the Beholder, Knightmare, Black Crypt) by carefully mapping without touching anything, then slowly testing things out. In Abandoned Places, you might as well pull a lever the moment you see it because there isn’t going to be any trick to it.           

The game has some interesting wall textures. Sometimes it’s tough to tell what’s interactive and what’s not.

           Some of the levels got highly annoying in their attempts to artificially stretch the length. A switch in the southwest corner opens a door in the northeast corner, for instance. Going through that door leads you to a lever that opens a door back in the southwest corner. Solving most of Abandoned Places‘ levels means making multiple “loops” through the dungeon, checking for what changed since the last time you were there. In that sense, the dungeons have been relatively linear and I’ve only been mapping spottily, mostly during those times when I ran out of options and I needed to make sure I hit every square and studied every wall again. Some of the buttons and switches are awfully hard to see.

Pressure plates on floors tripped me up a couple of times. You can’t see them; you have to listen for them. There are times I unthinkingly started playing without my headphones on and thus didn’t note when I walked over a floor plate. This isn’t a big deal if you only walk over it once–it probably just opens some door that you needed open anyway. But if you walk over it a second time, it closes the same door. Only if I wasn’t wearing my headphones the first time and was the second time, I might think I just walked over it for the first time and thus avoid it in the future, unknowingly locking myself out of an area until I get the whole thing sorted out.            

The game is fond of occasional messages, most of which have no relevance to the level.

           I said “for 14 of the 18 levels” above. Things changed a little after I recovered all of the Ruling Symbols. The next three levels required me to find the altars to unite the pieces of each symbol. The location of each dungeon was revealed to me as I exited the dungeon where I found the third piece. The game had a bug where it told me the Tower of Scions twice when it really meant to give me Draken Tor for one of the two, but I sorted that out with an online walkthrough. Anyway, the enemies in the three “altar” dungeons were much harder than those I’d encountered previously. They weren’t hard compared to Dungeon Master or any other game of this subgenre, but they were harder than before. I had to be a little more careful in combat and a couple of times rest between battles.          

Exiting each dungeon after you find the third piece of the Ruling Symbols brings up a message that tells you the location of the altar to unite them.

            On the subject of resting, theoretically the hunger system ought to discourage you from doing it too often unless you bring a huge supply of food with you from town. But I discovered through experimentation that the characters’ health regenerates faster than hunger depletes it. The ratio is about 1.4 to 1. So as long as you don’t mind dealing with everyone saying “oof!” about once a minute as hunger pains drain a hit point, you might as well ignore the whole system. Spell points regenerate much slower than hit points, unfortunately, and there were a couple of times that I parked my party in a corner while I did something else for 20 or 30 minutes so their spell power would regenerate.           

A random shot of opening a treasure chest.

         Let me take a diversion to complain about spells. While warriors suffer a “cool down” period after physical attacks, there is no similar pause after spells. The mage’s ability to destroy every foe with whatever offensive spell she chooses to cast is limited only by her mana. Because a player with a normal index finger can double-click the mouse about five times a second, it really doesn’t matter whether the mage is casting “Electricity,” “Fireblast,” “Mage Bolt,” “Ice Strike,” or whatever. The spells that cost more points do more damage, but you can cast them so fast that it hardly matters whether you cast three “Fireblasts” at 8 points each or four “Electricities” at 6 points each (or, for that matter, twelve “Mage Bolts” at 2 points each; and yes, I really do need to standardize when I use digits and when I spell it out). There might as well have just been one generic “Blast” spell for mages.

     My cleric has lagged well behind the others in character development because he can’t swing a weapon to save his life, even though I bought an amulet and a ring meant to improve his abilities. He currently has 52,877 experience points compared to my primary warrior’s 269,512. He gets some offensive spells, but I needed to save most of his spell points for healing, particularly as the foes got more difficult. “Cure of Gods” came along just as I was getting sick of having to cast “Minor Cure” dozens of times, and then he got “Healing,” which restores all hit points for 10 spell points. Equally important are his exploration spells, including “Swimming,” “Walk on Fire,” and “Jump,” the last of which lets you jump over a square. That became vital in the Halls of Rage.                

How is walking on fire a spell, but general fire resistance isn’t?

            Before I get to the Halls, I’ll just talk a bit about the economy. It’s relatively generous as long as you save and sell extra weapons, gems, and jewelry. (Oddly, extra armor can’t be sold.) There’s nothing useful to buy in the armory, but jewelry stores sell Rings of Mighty Attack, Amulets of Strength, Amulets of Speed, and Rings of Protection, and I was able to give each character some new item every two or three dungeon levels. Now my inventory slots are full, so I only need to keep a little money to buy passage into towns and the occasional meal or room at an inn. I’m thinking about dumping most of it because it weighs you down, and I think slows you in combat.

I don’t want to suggest that none of the dungeon levels prior to the Halls of Rage had anything interesting. The Summer Vale had 12 small interconnected levels (all of them together still equaling the size of one standard level) which were a challenge to map. The dungeon near the Lake of Dreams had a maze of single squares in which three of the four walls had levers that activated teleporters. There was a way to find your way through using messages, but I mapped the whole thing by dropping items on the floors. Still, until the Halls of Rage, that’s about as exciting as it got.

Once I united the three Ruling Symbols, I got an image of a crown for some reason. The Symbols themselves disappeared from our inventories. Then the weirdest thing happened: the game said that I had “new powers”–specifically, we could all transform ourselves into bats and fly across the landscape, avoiding random encounters and no more relying on boats to get between islands. (For some reason, the option to transform into a bat is activated by a button that looks like a hot air balloon.) I mean, I guess I appreciate the ability, but it really came out of nowhere. Perhaps it has some root in the frequent representation of vampires in Hungarian folklore? If so, it’s the only Hungarian-influenced thing I’ve seen in the game so far.                

Maybe now that we have the “Ruling Symbols,” we’re now “rulers”?

Using my new power to cross the land.

              The Halls of Rage was the final dungeon I explored for this entry, and it completely changed all the rules. It showed that the developers were capable of extremely challenging environments; they just didn’t implement them for the 17 previous levels. It was one of the most hateful dungeon levels that I’ve ever experienced, full of things that the game hadn’t even hinted were possible before. Fireballs roar continually down the hallways. Plants suddenly come alive and eat you when you’re adjacent. There are perpetually spinning squares in which you have to fight enemies coming at you from all directions without being able to stop yourself spinning. There are teleporters that dump you into the middle of fire or water. If you try to outsmart them by having “Swimming” or “Walk on Fire” active, they up the ante by dumping you on squares that cancel magic and are on fire. There’s one long corridor full of fire with one square in the middle that cancels magic and another just after it that spins you around, so you go racing through it at a panic when you lose “Walk on Fire” only to find that you’ve just returned to where you started. One whole section of the level features a puzzle where you have to push or pull planters around to clear a path, but one wrong move can leave you in a “walking dead” scenario. Getting through this level took me about six times as long as any other level. It was like playing an entirely different game.            

The party walks into a fireball.

             Check out this particularly awful area. You come into here from the western corridor. The moment you step on the “T@” square, it teleports you to one of the spinners (“@”) on the north or south ends of the room. They spin continually, so you have to try to walk off of them while they’re spinning. If you’re lucky, you walk into one of the safe corners. If you’re unlucky, you walk into one of the “FB” squares and fireballs–the kind that kill your entire party in seconds–come roaring out of the opposite end of this north/south section. Meanwhile, the plants in the two “P” planters are alive and biting you while you stand adjacent to them.           

A particularly vexing section of the Halls of Rage.

            Your only hope moving forward is to get to one of the doors on the east end, but there are enemies behind the doors–ghosts–and if they step into the doorway and block the path, you have to try to fight them while getting slammed with fireballs. That doesn’t work. So you have to lure them out into one of the corner squares, deal with them, and then get to the end of the room.                

Plants attack you in this dungeon, and you can’t fight them back. They’ve always been non-hostile before.

            The middle room has a secret wall behind it with a treasure chest on the far side. This is the ostensible goal of the area. But the only way to get into this area is to step on three successive fireball squares, each one of which continually launches fireballs as long as you’re on the square. So somehow you have to quickly sidle to the door, press the lever to open it, and hope that the enemy on the other side stays back long enough for you to walk through the door and escape the fireballs. Oh, and the one right in front of the door (“FB!”) also cancels magic, so you’re doing this with no protection and in the dark. I don’t think “Mage Shield” and “Walk on Fire” and other spells really help in this situation, but it would have been nice to have some false hope.

     The treasure chest, by the way, is entirely optional. I mean, this is the sort of game where you have to check everything, but it turns out that you don’t even need to be in this area. The problem is that once you step on “T@” and get teleported to one of the edge squares, there’s no good way to escape. You can linger in one of the western corners forever, but you can’t get out by entering “T@” from the north or south because you immediately get teleported. You have to cast “Jump” to get across it from the square in between the two planters–which is a perpetually spinning square. Half the time, your “Jump” won’t work because it will try to send you in the direction of a planter, one quarter of the time it will put you back in the doorway to the east, and the final quarter it will actually get you out of the room. You only have to somehow survive three fireball squares to make it in the first place. I couldn’t do it with all my characters alive. Maybe if I’d grinded more. I had to reload from outside the dungeon.                 

The whole purpose of the Halls of Rage was simply to find the stairway out. Once I’d achieved that, Bronakh again appeared and said “now let me see what you can do in my lair” and automatically transported us to his lair in the middle of a volcano, with no option to return to town to level up or anything.            

Our intro to the final dungeon.

            Miscellaneous notes, many dealing with bugs:

         I am particularly grateful for the ability to fly as a bat because it was getting increasingly hard to get anywhere on the overworld. You can’t just move smoothly across the map. The party gets hung up on all kinds of obstacles that you can’t even see.

The game weirdly divorces the overland features from the dungeons you have to find. For instance, I had to find the dungeon beneath the Tower of Scions. The tower is a feature on the map, but if you walk directly to the tower, you just get the “town menu” but with no menu options. You have to root around in the scrub surrounding the tower before the game finally tells you that you’ve found the dungeon.

        The regular Tower of Scions menu offers no option to enter its dungeon.

Instead, you have to hunt around its periphery until you get this.

            The game deletes unused keys from the previous dungeon when you enter a new dungeon, thus saving you from bulking up your inventory with extra keys that you’re too afraid to throw away.

In an early entry I said that the “combat waltz” was impossible because “enemies are always facing you.” This turns out not to be true. You can approach enemies from the side and rear. The waltz still doesn’t work though, for reasons having to do with the fact that there are actually four “positions” in each square, and you can only hit enemies if they’re in the two positions adjacent to you, which do require them to be facing you.

The graphic depiction of the cool downs frequently glitches, often showing that the weapon is available even when it isn’t. 

There’s an occasional bug in shops where accidentally clicking off the menu takes you to a blank screen. At this point, you can’t do anything and have to kill the game.

            I hope I saved recently.

           I’ve been avoiding the “Terror” spell because I don’t see any purpose in sending enemies running off for other parts of the dungeon, where I’ll just have to fight them again. However, I accidentally cast it (I was going for “Toxic Cloud” below it) on a dwarf. It somehow turned him invincible. Once it wore off, I was unable to hurt or even hit him with melee attacks or spells. I had to reload an earlier save.

In treasure chests, I found several suits of robes that told me they were the “wrong armor for this class” no matter what character I tried to equip with them.

A couple of times in the Halls of Death, my lead two warriors froze and refused to do anything when I clicked on their weapons. Both times were fighting ghosts. I don’t know if the game glitched or if ghosts have some kind of paralysis or terror effect. There’s nothing in the character sheet that tells you what kinds of conditions you’re under, and up until then (other than hunger), there hadn’t been any conditions.

         I have mixed feelings as I move forward towards the end. One the one hand, I’m glad I played Abandoned Places long enough to find out that the creators were capable of some Ördög-level cruelty. On the other hand, that was a lot of boring sludge to make me wade through to get to the good stuff. I don’t know if I hope that Bronakh’s fortress continues in the vein of the Halls of Rage or if it offers a quicker wrap-up.

             Time so far: 25 hours

         source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/abandoned-places-turnabout/

[fictionreads]

Aurora 1

Warnings: None

Authors Note: It starts off a bit slow but if you can hang in there I have planned out a very exciting plot for these characters.

See  #Si Fi story: Aurora @fictionreads for character pictures and story description.

Summary: Skyler meets the team she will be joining for their mission and learned its details. She then goes into training and gets to know her teammates.

"Ma'am EU could use your skills." were the words that brought a huge change to my life. What do you do when an official look man walks up to your driveway and says to you that the United Earth needs your special skills to complete a mission. Well, I suppose one could say no but the thought of piloting some new spacecraft was my weakness. How could I say no to an exciting adventure? It’s a trick question. I can’t. That’s how I ended up standing in an EU hangar bay on some nameless base staring at the most beautiful piece of space engineering that I have ever laid my eyes on. It was sleek with a smooth black coat that I am sure served more than just to look beautiful.

 I didn’t have much time to drool over the ship before a man motioned for me to follow him. He guided me to a conference room with no windows, white walls and a big glass table in the middle. When I walked into the room I saw that there were people sitting around the glass table. The man I had followed nodded to one of the chairs next to a man who looked like he might be a soldier but I couldn’t quite tell. Without saying anything I took my set. My escort then left and shut the door behind him. I looked back to the people at the table. Next to the possible soldier was another man who was definitely a soldier, he had it written all over him. On the other side of him was a young woman who was more interested in the packed in front of her than any of us. I was about to introduce my self when the door to the room opened and two men walked through. One was an older gentleman with an EU uniform on and the other one was about 25 and was handsome. The older one motioned for the handsome man to take a seat.

“Thank you all for coming. I am General Werth. You are all here because you have accepted the mission to help the EU find the first planets for colonization.”

General Werth went over to the head of the table and picked up a stack of papers and started to pass them out. I gave him a small smile when he put the packet in front of me. The title read project Aurora. I flipped to the first page to find a full readout of sensor logs and navigation logs. The General takes a seat as he continues to brief us.

“The probe trial blazer sent back long-range sensor data that...” and before he could finish his sentence the woman next to the soldier spoke.

“You found a planet that could sustain life!” She said with excitement. She looked up from her packet to see a slightly annoyed General.

“Yes, Dr. Julia. In fact, we found two possible planets that we think might be suitable for colonization. Each of you in this room has been handpicked out of many possible candidates for your unique skills. You will be part of a team that explores these planets for colonization.”  This time it was the man next to me that spoke up.

“Where are these planets?”

“The are in the Theta Rohini System. It should take you about a month and a half to reach the system and then two days to reach the first planet in the system. The flight plan is laid out in the packet. You will be taking the ship Conquest whose Captain is Nathaniel Telc. When you reach the planet you will spend several days on the planet where you will conduct surveys and research of the planet's surface. You Major D'ivoire will be leading the expedition on the surface, Dr. Julia Spawn will be the leading scientist, Dr. Corbin will be your attending doctor” The General gestured to the handsome man who in turn gave a smile that could make you melt. “ Major you, of course, know your second, Lt. Jay White, and your pilot and engineering expert Skylar West.” The rooms eye fell on me and I gave them each a smile.

“So when do we leave Sir?” asked Lt. White.

“You will have to go through some mission training as well as team training here on base before we send you off to the space station odyssey in orbit where you will board the Conquest.”

The General glanced down at his watch and then stood. The men in the room stood as well.

“Your individual assignments and schedules are in your briefing packet. The Private outside will show you to your bunks and where you will be training.” And with that, the General left the room and the Private stepped in. She stood at attention as she spoke to the group.

“I am to take you to another part of the base.” She was talking mostly to the commanding officers in the room. I stood from my chair as did Dr. Julia.

“Lead the way Private,” I said gesturing for the women to lead on. With that, she turned and started to walk down the hall. It was a bit of a walk to another building that held our Barracks and training equipment. We would be spending several weeks in this building preparing for the mission. It was close quarters and did not take long for our little team to get to know each other.

Major D'ivoire easily slipped into the leadership role. He was Caucasian with light brown almost dirty blonde hair. He stood 6' tall with strength in every part of his body. He was a smooth talker and is charismatic in every way. He has a strategic mind and is an out of the box thinker which was clear by the way he leads our group training simulations. However, Major D’ivoire didn’t seem like a normal soldier in the sense of the word, not like his buddy Lt. White.

Lt. White was totally all soldier. Was a Native American that stood  6' tall with jet Black hair and a chiseled jaw. He didn’t talk much like Major D'ivoire did. The Lt. was very skilled at hand to hand and weaponry combat and was able to teach me many things in our group tactical training. He was also was an excellent tracker which made playing capture the flag difficult, to say the least.

Dr. Julia and Dr. Corbin didn’t take as many tactical training sessions as the rest of us but we still spent plenty of time together. Julia was my bunk mate and Dr. Corbin gave each of us extensive medical exams and test to clear us for duty. He also did a few medical training scenarios with the team.

Needless to say, there was a lot of training that went into preparing for the mission. I did many, many, many flying simulations as well as familiarizing myself with the engineering specs on all the new tech equipment. It was a long couple of week to be sure.

The story picks up when they only had a couple of days left before they shipped off into the unknown and all its mysteries and dangers.