Month: December 2016

Shadowhunters

Even Now

We Flower Sniffers really don’t ever NEED an excuse to run Tower of Despair. But if we’re offered one, we’ll gladly take it.

Slvr wanted to try shadow tanking on his bard, so we grabbed Comic and Abs and headed out to Amrath to rescue Harry from his hellish prison. Sadie happened along while we were in process and hopped into party to pike a completion.

Of course, once Horoth and Sully were down and everybody’d looted and picked up their underwhelming end rewards, the question was, “What next?” It seemed like a good night to run around in the Subterrane, leading us to Vision of Destruction and heroic Hound of Xoriat.

Prior to last night, Even had either the tanky bracers or the tanky shield, but not both. I couldn’t remember which one she had and which she lacked, but they both dropped and no one else wanted them…

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Try It Tuesday: Gone Home

Bio Break

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You come home after a long European vacation to your family’s new house… but it’s empty and there’s a scared voice on the answering machine. What’s going on? What’s happened? That’s up to you to find out in Gone Home.

A month or so ago, this interactive narrative game was being given away for free, so I picked it up. It didn’t seem like the kind of game that I would buy, but I had heard some good things, so it at least warranted a playthrough. And considering that it took about an hour from start to finish, it wasn’t like Gone Home was going to suck up an entire evening.

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At the onset, Gone Home really seems like a horror game, what with a giant empty mansion in the middle of a thunderstorm at night that you can’t escape. Yet once I got used to the creaks and thunderclaps…

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LE/EE raids week 10

Micki's Delirium

Week 10 of LE/EE raids was on Christmas Eve. In Finland, and I guess Sweden too, we celebrate Christmas on the eve, usually with dinner and presents. I stopped celebrating a few years ago, mostly as a protest to consumerism, and Darth isn’t really a big fan of this holiday either, so we basically just spent the day at home. I was on call for work til 4pm and did a bunch of chores before sitting down in front of the computer for LE/EE raids.

I figured it would be hard to get a group together for LE Shroud, all of my regulars were away.. so I posted for “LE Shroud. Need self-sufficient dps and a hurler. LH if poor dps”. There wasn’t a lack of interest, but after I had let a few people join who were level 26-28 (I normally only want lvl 30s.. except for the hurler…

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Local Multiplayer Games I’ll Be Enjoying Tomorrow!

mrluvvaluvva

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Christmas is a ridiculously busy time for everyone, you have to make time for your family, your significant other’s family and of course yourself! There is a very simple way of achieving these three aims though and it requires little planning and even less effort – plus it sneaks in some extra gaming time!

That is, of course, playing local multiplayer games with those around you! REcently though the local multiplayer game has been in decline, but there is still a wide range of titles out there for you and yours to enjoy!

In what has become a Luvva Christmas Eve tradition (seriously check out last years post and the year before too!) here’s what I’ll be playing with my ones this Christmas day; along with some expert tips in how to maximise the craic, get everybody into the spirit and having the time of their lives!

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The post-Christmas lull

Bio Break

Merry Christmas and Bashful Boxing Day to you all!

We had a very nice Christmas in the Syp household. With four little ones running around, Christmas is just about the most exciting time of the year, and we had fun indulging in all sorts of traditions from our advent calendar to cookie baking to decorating the patio door with crafts projects to listening to our North Pole radio that gave us sporadic updates from the elves. We worked in a couple of days with the extended family in Indiana, a Christmas morning service at church, a first-time-ever viewing of A Christmas Story with the kids (first for them, not me), and some quiet time just to be together and play.

My wife felt bad she couldn’t get me an NES Classic, but seriously, who could this season? And it wasn’t like I was going to go sulking in a corner…

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Making memorable D&D characters

The Long Shot

i’ve rolled up many, many more D&D and other RPG characters than i’ve ever used, as either a DM or player. Whether inspired by films, like Navarre from the classic “Ladyhawke” with his double crossbow, who translated into a 1st edition AD&D ranger…

…or knights both shining and fallen, a la “Excalibur,” to video games, like the “Final Fantasy” style lancer/dragoon that’s informed several character across multiple editions (personal favorite: 3.5 edition 9th level fighter).

dragoon

The current game i’m DMing evolved from a one-shot session to a maybe-we’ll-try-to-get-together-again group, to an ongoing quest, to what is now a sandbox game set amidst the stars and crystal spheres of a Spelljammer universe. To this end, i’m letting the players basically tell me what they’d like their characters to do, and sprinkling in people, places, things, events and scenarios for them to interact with (or not).

The running spreadsheet i created already has…

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A Visit From Sir Picks-A-Lot

Even Now

was the night before Festivult, and high o’er the realm

The airship cruised onward, NPC at its helm.
Our Cannith boots lay on the floor, all in pairs
So jumbled, but we were too tired to care.
From the legacy buffs on up to the top deck
Not one single gift had been opened, not yet.
And the bards with their songs, and the air sorc who zapped
Settled in while the barb dreamed of things that go splat.
When out through the porthole we spied something flashing
That couldn’t be good – we didn’t want to be crashing.
Up, up to the helm I, the paladin, did dash
“If there’s trouble,” I thought, “that’s why I’ve got shield bash.”
The deck was quite slippery, and rightfully so
For the sky had just opened and started to snow.
I rubbed at my eyes – through the flakes did I peer
At…

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A Mighty Love: “Neverwinter Nights”

The Order of Syncletica

By luck on Facebook, there was an ad that mentioned a free download of a game for 48 hours. The site, GOG (used to be known as “Good Old Games”) hosts that and many other PC games from relative antiquity.

neverwinter-nights One of the desktop promo shots, showing the lovely, poised and eventually traitorous Aribeth de Tylmarande. 

This game, however, I could not resist downloading. It was “Neverwinter Nights,” the original 2002 Bioware game. This was the “Diamond” release, which included the original campaign, the first expansion, “Shadows of Undrentide,” and the last major expansion, “Hordes of the Underdark.” It also included three smaller modules I could not play on my Mac as they were released for the Windows code base only.

Lord knows how many times I’ve actually purchased the game for both platforms. So I saw this free opportunity to download it for Windows play as a blessing. Too…

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MMO gaming isn’t so mobile

GamingSF

All week I’ve been away from home visiting relative’s. We’ve been busy doing non-MMO activities (including some Magic The Gathering!), so I’ve barely set foot in a virtual world all week. That absence from gaming has been deepened by just how unwieldy these games are in 2016.

One computer had an up to date version of WoW installed (I’m not subbed at the moment due to all this travel). Copying that to a second computer was a mission – 50GB copied over wi-fi would take most of a day.

The LOTRO install on one computer was so old it wouldn’t connect to the patching servers anymore and I couldn’t find any useful answers online to fix it. Another computer also had LOTRO installed but it was so out of date that it took over six hours to patch it up to a playable state.

Finally I went with the streaming…

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