Month: November 2021

D&D Diary – The Wild Beyond the Witchlight – Session 5

Game Night Blog

The Witchlight Misfits explore the Feywild, collecting birdcages and keys, making friends and creating enemies. And one of us dies.

Witchlight cover titleWhen last we left our heroes, we finally made it into the Feywild. So as not to incriminate myself, we will not discuss how we got into the Feywild. Snitches get Stitches! Once in the Fey, we were overwhelmed by the dramatic vibrancy of the land, designed to inundate and assault the senses. And then we were almost overwhelmed by the dramatic nature of the land, designed to confuse, harass, and annoy one’s sensibilities. We were nearly drowned by capriciously rising swamp water, waylaid by bunny bandits who wanted to steal our most precious memories, and plagued by nightmares that left us exhausted in the morning.

After our first dismal day, a new day dawns (or not, it’s kinda always twilight here in the Fey), but not all of…

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Game Report: Dragon’s Bend Session 10

Grumpy Wizard

Dufin, Atticus, Ozric their four draug mercenaries, their henchman and laborers set out from the burial mound of the Night King to find Farhat the dogman wizard. Arpad the frogman ascetic told them that he would be able to tune the music of the redstone in Cullen’s sword.

  • Party avoids a hunting ankheg
  • As they camp a group of Aglent’s hunters approach on horseback. Their bows are strung and knocked.
  • Aglent’s hunters want to know if the PCs are sworn to Oktar and what they are doing out here. The PCs say they are sworn to no one and they are on their way to see Farhat the dogman.
  • Aglent’s men relax and say the dogman has been driven from his warren east of Zeleska’s Hypogeum. Monsters that have emerged from the dungeon have driven him out.
  • The party thanks the hunters for the information and they leave.
  • The party…

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Microsoft Adds 37 Games to Frame Rate Boost Program

The Boss Rush Network

In February of 2021, Microsoft announced that the Backwards Compatibility Program would be adding frame rate boosts to certain games. For the uninitiated, Frame Rate Boost is a feature on Xbox Series X|S that allows older games to run at double or sometimes quadruple the frame rate of the original release. It has been a wonderful feature that is breathing new life into and even fixing some old titles.

During their 20th Anniversary Event, Xbox announced that 37 games would be receiving frame rate improvements including the original Assassin’s Creed, Dead Space 2, the entire Gears of War saga, Mirror’s Edge, Sonic Generations, and more, bringing the total of frame rate boosted games to 134 games across Xbox One, Xbox 360, and the original Xbox.

With that said, there are no more plans to bring frame rate boosts to anymore titles. Xbox Director of Project Management…

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Is there a tiny shred of hope for RIFT after all?

Bio Break

The last time I wrote about RIFT, it was to say a mental goodbye to a game that I figured was on its very last legs, being run by a company that was no longer promoting it or developing for it. But since then, two things of note have happened:

First, the game didn’t shut down as a lot of us were expecting. I mean, it still may. But after the layoffs this past spring and Gamigo shuttering Defiance, we all figured that was it. Yet it didn’t happen — it’s still running.

Second, in a recent investor report by Gamigo parent company MGI, an announcement was made about RIFT having “a first great update” in the first quarter of 2022. This raised ALL the eyebrows, not just because no further details were given, but because RIFT was mentioned at all and in a positive way. So now…

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Black Friday Haul 2021

VIDEO GAME BOOK CLUB

Black Friday is now a weeklong event (possibly a month-long event). Also, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have now merged into one hybrid online/in-person super shopping event. In the past two years, Black Friday has become more online focused due to the pandemic (at least that’s the case for me). This year, I did most of my shopping from the couch (online) with some in-store pickup.

Purchase #1 • Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy (PS5)

Last weekend, November 20th, I received an email from Best Buy letting me know that the Black Friday deals had arrived a week early. I first had to check which games were on sale. I knew the latest releases like Call of Duty: Vanguard and Battlefield 2042 wouldn’t be on sale, or if they were it wouldn’t be much of a sale.

When I saw the newly released MarvelGuardians of the Galaxy game was…

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Shadows of the Ruinous Powers – Session 74

Dyson's Dodecahedron

(Being a series of quick game notes trying to account for the events of many sessions of playing through The Enemy Within using the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e rules.)

Session 74

The Empire in Flames

  • Larry [Templar] – I 68
  • Nate [Cleric 3] – I 64
  • Gottlieb [Templar] – I 63
  • Wilfried [Templar] – I 63
  • Scargetter [Assassin] – I 60

As winter finally breaks, the rivers begin to open up, allowing the Two Bawdy Countesses to finally return to the Empire – the Knights Panther finally having discharged all their duties but one.

Bogdanov summons them one last time to discharge them back to the Empire and to return to their liege, Graf Boris Todbringer. But their last duty to the Tsar will be the safe escorting of a young noblewoman, Anastasia Schelepin, to Talabheim where she is to be betrothed to a young Baronet, Rolf Kriglitz-Untermensch where a…

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Assumed D&D Lore

The Nerdd

As some of you know, I’m currently worldbuilding my own Dungeons & Dragons setting, that I’m building simultaneously Top Down (meta concepts and ideas) and Bottom Up (starting town and local area). Basically whenever I get an idea of inspiration, I find out how it fits into my new world.

Well, I’ve realized that there are a lot of assumptions that the very game system of D&D makes about your lore, and these are things you have to decide actively. Is your setting going to go along with these assumptions, or are these untrue, which could have ripple effects across mechanics and other assumptions.

Gods Oversee the Worlds

The first assumption, is that there are multiple gods, or deities, in your world, which each have their own portfolio of aspects of the world that they control. The idea starts with a very GrecoRoman pantheon, but it can be much more…

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Boss Rush Banter: In Which Video Game World Would You Most Want to Spend the Holidays?

The Boss Rush Network

With Thanksgiving officially in the books, the 2021 holiday season is in full swing. Folks from a variety of backgrounds and traditions celebrate during this time of the year; and while travelling is common as families come together, the pandemic has made that more challenging. So for today’s Boss Rush Banter, I thought it worth getting creative with the holiday travel ideas. If you could spend the holiday season in any video game world, which one would you choose?

Having been playing a lot of Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl, it’s hard not to imagine the fun of spending the holidays strolling through the forests, fields, and charming cities of the Sinnoh Region. One of the things I love about this time of year is the traditions, from decorating to gatherings with loved ones. A holiday season that involves Pokémon in the yearly traditions seems too good to…

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Six Sickly Sewermorphs!

Dyson's Dodecahedron

Twelve years ago I started posting Geomorphs to this blog. Twelve years. I posted the first geomorph to the blog at the end of October, 2009. Here we are in 2021 and I’m still posting new ones to add to the mix.

This time there’s a change to the design. The standard design is a 10 x 10 grid with entrances at squares 3 & 8 on each face. For these sewermorphs though, between 1 and 4 additional entrances have been added, in the central point of the face (straddling the line between squares 5 & 6). These are exclusively for the sewer lines and mean that these faces have to be linked to another sewermorph with an corresponding sewer entrance. The faces of a sewermorph that doesn’t include a sewer line can be linked to any standard geomorph instead of a sewermorph.

2021 Sewermorphs - Set 1
2021 Sewermorphs – Set 1 (1200 dpi)

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We Need to Move Past This One-Size-Fits-All Mentality with Game Design

The Game Campaign

Console wars have been a time-honored tradition going back to the second generation of consoles but made infamous by the Sega and Nintendo console race of the nineties. The battle between Mario and Sonic created allegiances to brands that bordered on the romantic. People would defend their choice in hardware to the bitter end, and these choices were often made because of the titles or the power of the machine. Which brand was going to deliver the most up-to-date experience for its users?

However, with the advent of the internet, the diversity of games, and the increasing complexity of video game development, it has not only become silly to criticize games based on some of our prior ideas but hurtful to developers and the industry at large. We have turned into a fanbase that treasures how real something looks rather than how well it plays. We base everything off of…

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