This was a group of players who (with one exception) had never played Call of Cthulhu before and in fact had only started role-playing in the past few months (Pathfinder, which had been run by the one experienced player). They had played Arkham Horror and so had at least a grasp of the general concept but that was it. With the one exception I don’t think any of them had even read Lovecraft. I had planned to run Crack’d and Crook’d Manse from Mansions of Madness but the group suddenly decided they wanted to run a modern-day campaign. Literally the only modern thing I had with me that the experienced player hadn’t played was a tournament scenario I had run a couple of years previously. I didn’t consider it to be a good introduction to the game but, despite being warned of that, they decided they wanted to go for it. And so, a playthru of… Light of Darkness A Scenario for Cthulhu: Now Introduction: It is late at night. A group of travellers are proceeding north on I-95 from Jacksonville to Savannah and passing through southern Georgia when they encounter a detour. Road construction. They need to detour along a back road for about 25 miles before it intersects the Interstate again. They quickly leave the Interstate behind and find themselves driving through dark, empty countryside; alternating pine forests and stretches of swamp (the Okefenokee swamp occupies this part of Georgia) with an occasional abandoned and overgrown farmhouse. The
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After Action Report – Cthulhu: Now – Light of Darkness (Part 1)
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Welcome to The Secret World
For the past few weekends I’ve been playing in the open beta for The Secret World, a new MMO coming out in a month or so from FunCom. The Secret World is different from most MMOs we have seen so far. It isn’t set in some fantasy world or on a distant planet. Instead, it is set here on Earth in the present day. But this is not the Earth most of us are familiar with. This is a world of secrets that have been hidden from the general population. A world of vast conspiracies and creeping evil. A secret world in which all of the myths and legends, all of the stories and tales you hear, everything is true. You become involved in The Secret World when you swallow a bee. No, really. The bees are representations of Gaia and they are returning because “dark days are coming”. They are finding individuals that they can imbue with “anima”, magical energy, that those individuals can then use to fight the growing darkness. You are one of the individuals that have been chosen. But you have no sooner become aware of and begun to control your newfound powers when you are contacted by one of the three organizations which secretly rule the world. The Templar, The Illuminati and The Dragon have been struggling behind the scenes for control of the Earth for centuries but now the “Filth”, an evil from beyond the world as we know it, has broken through. The
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Fallen London – Walking the Polythreme Streets
After being away for about six months I have returned to Fallen London. Actually, I can’t say I’m in Fallen London. I’ve taken my Zee Clipper across the Underzee and have made my way to the city of Polythreme, the home of the Clay Men. I’ve been wandering the streets here while trying to make sense of the strange place in which I find myself. A place almost as strange as Fallen London has become. As you may have noticed I played quite a bit of Echo Bazaar (as they called it at the time) last year. I managed to hit the level cap in most of my attributes and had managed to complete most of the storylines. There were a few outstanding, but breeding a beast in the Labyrinth of Tigers or getting further involved in the machinations of Mahogany Hall didn’t interest me that much and the storylines I was still interested in seemed to have stalled. So I left the game for a while, waiting for it to advance. Then a couple of weeks ago I saw in passing that things had been updated and so logged back in to see what was up. And things had changed, but some of them in ways to make clear that you can’t always go home again. The game is now called Fallen London instead of Echo Bazaar. The developer’s explanation is that everyone called it Fallen London anyway, but I find it a less interesting name. Hearing someone talk
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Shalalm Baskur
Shalalm Baskur, my friends. Shalalm Baskur.
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The More Things (Don’t) Change…
I had finished Skyrim for the third time and was trying to figure out what to do next. I thought about loading up a bunch of mods and starting a fourth playthrough, maybe taking the Nords side in the Civil War this time, then I thought maybe I would play through Morrowind and Oblivion again first. And that made me start thinking about how much things have or haven’t changed from those games. Now I’m not talking about the game systems themselves. Obviously the graphics are better, the gameplay has been streamlined and the user interface is improved. I’m talking about the game world itself. In Skyrim it has been over 200 years since Martin Septim sacrificed himself at the end of Oblivion but things in Tamriel are remarkably the same. Yes, parts of the Empire have fallen away. Yes, there was a war with the Aldmeri Dominion and the Altmer are now the enemies of the Cyrodillic Empire. But, overall, the world is pretty much the same as it was. You would have thought that something would have changed beyond a few broad strokes of politics, but that seems to be all there is. As someone living in the early 21st century we are used to the relentless advance of progress. Science, technology, society… all these things have improved or otherwise changed even in our lifetimes. The idea of complete stagnation, which seems to be what is happening in Tamriel, seems out-of-place. True, there have been periods of stagnation
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Stories and Worlds
So I finished Mass Effect 3 last week and I immediately went back to playing Skyrim again. I think it is telling that I am done with Mass Effect after what Raptr tells me is around 35 hours (for now anyway) while I am still engrossed by Skyrim even though I am closing in on 200. I think the difference is that Mass Effect told me a story while Skyrim invited me to come live in its world. There was a moment in my first playthrough of Skyrim when I was scrolling through my quest log trying to decide what to do next when I noticed a quest called “Diplomatic Immunity”. I read the description and had to struggle to remember who gave it to me and what it was about before finally remembering “Oh yeah, that’s the main quest!” Skyrim gives you so many things to do and so many opportunities to do them that it seems as if the various storylines have minimal importance. Don’t follow-up on a murder in the streets in Markarth and you will never find out about the secret of Cibala Mine and the history of the Forsworn. Don’t bother investigating a rumor you hear about a child performing the Dark Sacrament and you will never even get involved with the Dark Brotherhood. The world is out there for you to explore and it is up to you to do so. Want to spend all your time clearing out tombs and hunting for Nirnroot
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Steam Sale – Winter 2011
As regular as the changing of the seasons the Steam winter sale has started. As usual, there are a lot of games from independent producers marked down to ridiculously low prices as well as a handful of AAA titles to keep things interesting. The gimmick this time seems to be coupons. There are Steam Achievements associated with many of the games and completing them gives you either a coupon or a lump of “coal”. You can trade in coal for… more coupons. The coupons really aren’t that big of a draw. I have a couple so far but the “deals” on the coupons are worse than the sale prices on the same games right now, so they are kind of useless. Still, some of the deals are really good. I’ve cut way back on my video game spending (I only bought two full-price games this year (Dragon Age and Skyrim) so being able to pick up enough games to keep me occupied for the next few months is worth it. I’ll probably look at some of these in more detail later, but here’s the haul so far. Portal 2 – Yes, I’m probably the only one who hasn’t played it yet, but at $7.50 it finally fell into impulse buy range. Orcs Must Die! – Been lots of good buzz about this one. It seems to be a combination of tower defense and FPS. Psychonauts and Costume Quest – A pair of games from Double Fine. I started playing Psychonauts
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Review – The Breach
The Breach by Patrick Lee Ex-corrupt cop/ex-con Travis Chase, recently released from prison, is hiking through the Alaska wilderness and trying to figure out how to get his life back together when he stumbles across the crash of an unmarked 747. Inside the crash he discovers that everyone on board has been executed, including the First Lady of the United States. A note in her hand sends him in search of the two survivors of the crash, who are being brutally tortured to force them to reveal the location of an object that could lead to the destruction of everyone and everything on Earth. And thus begins Breach, the first novel in a new thriller series by Patrick Lee. While many thiller novels by such writers as James Rollins, Jeremy Robinson or Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child skirt the edges of science fiction in their novels, Patrick Lee embraces it wholeheartedly. While it is marketed as and starts out as standard thriller fare, make no mistake; this is a science-fiction thriller. Travis soon rescues Paige Campbell, the last survivor of the crash, and learns what is happening. (Warning: Minor spoiler for the first of the novel.) Paige works for an international government organization known as Tangent. Thirty years ago, an experiment beneath Wyoming opened the “Breach” of the title; an opening to… somewhere. Various artifacts (which they call “entities”) have been coming through the Breach at regular intervals since then. Some of these entities are benign, some are very dangerous
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Skyrim – First Thoughts
Skyrim, the latest game in the Elder Scrolls series, came out last Friday and I’ve spent most of the last few days playing it (to the detriment of my NaNoWriMo output). I feel like I’ve barely put a dent in the game world but already I can tell this game is going to solidly in my top games of all time and may even knock Morrowind off the top of the pile. In best Elder Scrolls tradition, you start Skyrim as a prisoner. It is 200 years after the Oblivion crisis (the plot of the previous game) and the Cryrodillic Empire is falling apart. The northern province of Skyrim has entered open rebellion against the Empire and the Imperial Legion has just captured the leader of the rebellion, one Ulfric Stormcloak. Unfortunately you were in the wrong place at the wrong time and were captured by the Legion. One Legionnaire realizes your innocence and protests but his commander orders that you be sent to the headsman along with the rest of the prisoners. Fortunately (for you anyway), just as you find yourself on the chopping block a dragon appears and attacks the town. You and the other prisoners escape as chaos breaks out. As you make your way through the burning village you can join up with either a fellow prisoner (one of the rebels known as the Stormcloaks) or the one Imperial Legionnaire who defended you. (Quick, who wants to tag along with the people who just tried to
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On the Level
So Skyrim, the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series, is coming out next week. I’m looking forward to it, mainly because Morrowind, the third game in the series, is one of my favorite games of all time, as are Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, both also done by Bethesda. You may notice that I didn’t mention Oblivion, the fourth Elder Scrolls game. That’s because I think Oblivion made a mistake, one that wasn’t in the Fallout and thus I am hoping that won’t show up in Skyrim. That mistake was having the world level along with the player. Everyone wants to feel as if they get better and more powerful as they go through a game. Whether this is an improvement in our skills as a player as we learn the game or the improvements in our character’s skills and equipment, we like our character at the end of the game to be better than they were at the beginning. This is especially true in fantasy games. This goes all the way back to Dungeons and Dragons, the first of the modern role-playing games. We want to see our weak, nearly helpless first-level characters developing into nearly-unstoppable demigods at level 20. This is something expected in fantasy. No one blinks when Aragorn single-handedly slays his way through an orcish army in The Lord of the Rings and it is just expected that Luke, Leia and Han can blast their way through dozens of Stormtroopers in Star Wars, but
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