Gaming, geeks, and utter randomness.
It’s been about a month since I started playing EVE Online, and I’ve learned a fair bit about the game,... Read more »
Guild Wars 2 was an MMO I was eyeing since it was originally announced. I had played the original and,... Read more »
So I’ve decided to take another little plunge into MMO-land and picked up a month of Eve Online. I’ve played... Read more »
Hello viewers. As the member of the group who was running Kingmaker, I figured I’d stop by and put a... Read more »
It’s been about a month since I started playing EVE Online, and I’ve learned a fair bit about the game, but throughout most of my time in game, I’ve spent it in the relative safety of high-security systems. There the CONCORD police force quickly and efficiently responds to anyone attempting to randomly attack other players, outside of sanctioned duels and declared corporation wars.
Guild Wars 2 was an MMO I was eyeing since it was originally announced. I had played the original and, while it had gorgeous graphics and impressive effects, I was put off by the short progression (only 20 levels) and how focused the game was on its PVP aspect. I’ve played a few MMOs in the last couple years (RIFT and World of Warcraft were the two I sunk the most time into), but PVP has always been one of those things that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with. That’s why I was thrilled to see that Guild Wars 2 moved somewhat away from the focus on PVP (though there is still a large world-vs-world PVP aspect of the game I’ve yet to delve into), and significantly expanded the PVE aspects of the game to make it a game for people like me, who play for a story.
So I’ve decided to take another little plunge into MMO-land and picked up a month of Eve Online. I’ve played for a few days now, and I figured I’d post my thoughts on the game so far.
Hello viewers. As the member of the group who was running Kingmaker, I figured I’d stop by and put a bit of an update here. Our Kingmaker campaign has come to an end. With 75% of the party killed off, and the last remaining survivor hiding away in a land he didn’t know, the logical and story-sound choice was to end it there. There appeared (mostly after the official end of the campaign) to be a number of issues multiple players had had during the year and a half run of the AP, so it seems the ending was actually bittersweet instead of simply tragic. I’ve removed the campaign, as well as it’s adventure logs, from the Obsidian Portal website. As soon as Nick makes his way back here, he’ll be cleaning up some of the dead links/posts throughout this site (or that’s what he tells me, anyway ;-P )
We have started up a new AP, Carrion Crown, and this time Nick is running and I’m playing, so there will probably be a bit more on that here as well, perhaps with a continuation of the Character Focus articles that were started. Only time will tell.
Until next time…
Here’s the first of a little idea I’ve been kicking around: A Character Focus area, where we’ll present a single character, their background, their motivations in the game they’re in, and a current stat sheet (as of the time of posting.) I’d like to try and do one of these a week or so, but that all depends on how many characters I have to present. So, to kick this off, I wanted to start with my (newest) personal character in our Kingmaker game, Vidain Vencourt. The character sheet at the bottom is generated by Hero Lab, a great little tool from Lone Wolf Development to generate and maintain characters for many systems.
Hey all, just a quick note here, I’ve added a link to our Kingmaker Pathfinder campaign’s adventure log archive currently hosted on Obsidian Portal. Hopefully we’ll start cross-posting them here as well, but for now you can use this link to go through and read up on everything that’s happened in our current Kingmaker campaign so far. You can find this link on the left navigation area, under ‘Game Links’. Eventually we’ll be using that area to put in links to other things relating to our games or to tools we like to use.
We’ve got one more session (roughly) before we finish Book 3 of the adventure path, then we’ll be taking a break from that to play some Shadowrun and possibly some other stuff. I’ll definitely be keeping this site updated with the Shadowrun logs, and I’ll work with our Pathfinder GM to see about cross-posting the Kingmaker logs here in the future as well.
Ciao, gamers!
As mentioned in the previous article I posted, I’ve been doing a lot of research into Shadowrun and I decided to try writing up my own run for our first-timers. I wanted to make something that would include all aspects of the specific characters they made, and make sure that each gets their little time in the light for something specific. This seems like it’ll not only help them get into the game but it’ll let them focus on learning the particular rules for what they’re doing (i.e. Matrix actions for the Technomancer.)
Holy crap, do some things take a while to prep. Matrix nodes in particular…
I’ve been spending quite some time these last couple of weeks poring over the Shadowrun 4th edition rulebook, mostly to prep for a few upcoming runs and partially because I love cyberpunk stuff like nobody’s business. Since we’ll be diving into this group’s first run outside of the test game (done with the pregen characters in the book), I’ve been trying to make sure I’m brushed up on all the rules for all the little sections that I need to be, like magic, Matrix actions and combat, Technomancer sprites and whatnot…I think the biggest thing I’m trying to wrap my head around at the moment is the Matrix stuff. The way networking works in Shadowrun is very similar to a free-association variant of Bluetooth (well, wireless communication, anyway), and I’ve been trying to write network maps up that have nodes in some sort of rational order to know how diving through a network works in case the Technomancer decides to do a hack job or something.
I found the Dumpshock forums, and I’m pulling little bits and pieces of understanding of how various things work from there, and it’s neat seeing all this stuff come together into a world of gritty, cyberpunk underworld awesomeness.
Now, the only problem is finding a suitable adventure to cut my newbie runners’ teeth on. Maybe I’ll just write up a run, since I’m not quite sure how long we’re going to be playing for and buying a module at this point would be kind of silly. Not to mention, I can kind of tailor the run to their strengths (and weaknesses) so that the maximum amount of fun is had by all.
We’ll see how this goes, and hopefully there’ll be some good stories for our runners to tell over synthahol in their favorite diner soon…
Well, the site’s been through a bit, but we’re back (sort-of…)
We’ll be tweaking and getting things set up for the next few weeks or so, but we hope to make this the central area for our personal expressions as well as keeping our game logs (and maybe even a roleplaying podcast, if we ever get around to doing anything with it…)
Stay tuned!