2020 – Castle of Calthaer

Posts from 2020

Embers of the Last War: Warming Up (Session Zero)

December the 2nd, 2020 Anno Domini

Before this plague shuttered us all in our respective homes, I used to play Dungeons & Dragons with a group of people up at a friend’s house. He was the dungeon master, and I played a humble elven druid trying to make his way in Mystara after having been kicked out of his homeland in the forests near the Rugalov river in Karameikos. To be honest, the character was an expression of myself: someone trying to forge a new path in their career after having been laid off in the middle of last decade. I met “CP”, the dungeon master, at my first job after that layoff.

I really enjoyed playing D&D. It involves creative problem solving with socializing in a group, all wrapped up with a fantastic world and exciting adventures. When the pandemic hit, I missed it – so I eventually decided I would become the dungeon master so that I could still have fun. Different fun, but I find it a great creative outlet to run the game.

So I went to the DM’s Guild, a website where you can purchase Dungeons & Dragons adventures pre-made, and bought the “Embers of the Last War” campaign. It’s designed to be used with the Adventurer’s League, but it works just fine for a home game. After firing up Roll20.net for our virtual tabletop, we started off with Session “Zero”, titled “What’s Past is Prologue.”

From here on out, I’ll describe how each of these sessions went – consider this a “spoiler alert” in case you’re planning on playing the “Embers of the Last War” mini-campaign.

Set in the world of Eberron, the first session sees the players (students at Morgrave University in Sharn) hired by a shady professor-turned-wandslinger to assault and hijack an experimental airship. The players pick out pre-generated characters and become unwitting accomplishes to piracy in the sky. My players were suspicious from the get-go when I couldn’t figure out a good lie about where the “artifacts” they were supposedly retrieving were located.

Nevertheless, they fought bravely against some enemy sailors, and then realized when the dust cleared that they and the shady professor were the only ones left alive. The prof-turned-thief goes into the cabin, when suddenly the airship they arrived on lists to the side and begins to fall. The players hop on the new, captured ship as they watch the professor begin to fall with the ship.

The next segment entails the party exploring the ship to discover what it’s about and how to operate it. This was my favorite part of the adventure, as the players discover the enclosed “cockpit” and figure out a way to open it. The players eventually figured that the thing had an “autopilot” feature that would return it to Sharn. The players are on rails and they clearly realize it at this point, but they gamely play along.

The (real-life) hour grew late at this point, so I had them wrap things up. Upon returning to Sharn, the professor meets them in the shipyard as they try to find someone willing to repair their ship so that they can skip town. The professor is slated to die at the hands of thugs in the Boromar clan (a halfling gangster outfit), but my players decided to kill him off anyways. They do so handily, and make off into the sunset in their new experimental airship. Thus ends the “session zero” story.

We were mostly getting used to how Roll20.net worked at this point, warming up to the process of gaming online. I liked it a lot – the system has a lot of tools for dungeon masters to easily run the show. With a good Excel spreadsheet where I tracked everyone’s HP and basic stats, combat went quickly and efficiently. We’ve since gotten better at using the system and, so far, it’s been a great way to continue doing D&D during the pandemic. Next time I’ll describe how the “session one” went, where the players solve a murder.

The Game Goes On – Quick Update

November the 12th, 2020 Anno Domini

Haven’t even thought about the blog for a few months, and have been pretty busy with a few things:

I’ve started a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign with a few friends. I’ve really missed getting together with folks to play since the pandemic hit, and so I decided to do something about it. I fired up my Roll20.net account, purchased some of the D&D material, and became the dungeon master of a new campaign with five of my friends. We’re running through the Embers of the Last War campaign set in the Eberron universe. Been a lot of fun so far. I haven’t run a “paper-and-pencil” role-playing game since high school, and I think my skills have grown considerably since then. I hope to keep doing this into the foreseeable future. This runs every other week.

Tuesday nights are board games; Friday nights are video games. Both nights have been consumed by Among Us lately. Friends’ kids have gotten in to playing, and we’ve all enjoyed lying to one another and killing each other and trying to find the killer. We’ve almost entirely moved on from Civilization VI, but I hope we return to it.

There have also been some commitments at church that have heated up. We’re looking for a new pastor and I’m on the “search committee”. It takes a decent amount of time and thought.

Not sure when I’m going to get back into blogging. I might try to set up a series of posts describing how our ongoing D&D campaign has been going. Stay tuned.

Mental Health and Gaming in the Pandemic

August the 14th, 2020 Anno Domini

A shot of my recent games on Steam. The Witcher ones I purchased during the sale; haven’t played.

Most of us are probably feeling a bit of a strain on the psyche with the current pandemic. An unseen plague walks the land, those who do have work (and they’re lucky to have it) are stuck at home, and both the media and the people they report on seem to delight in whipping up the populace into ever higher peaks of frothing rage – no doubt in service of furthering one’s own agenda rather than any sense of civic responsibility. It’s just depressing.

Sitting down at the end of a day and playing video games is a huge stress relief. I know it’s a crutch, and that I might be better served with an equal amount of time praying, keeping a thought journal, or otherwise working on my mental health. Even writing this blog entry seems like difficult work and is a big reason why I’m updating it so sporadically. It’s far easier to just sit down and chill out to video games.

Over the past few months, I’ve typically latched on to a single game and then played it until I’ve won it or I get tired of it. The major games over the past few months have been:

Civilization VI – Some folks I used to work with started up a weekly multiplayer game of this on Friday nights. Been really fun.
Skyrim – I played this one to the end. Best computer RPG I’ve ever played.
Crysis 2 – Finished it…it was OK.
Shadowrun: Hong Kong – I was playing this before the pandemic, but I finished it early on.
Into The Breach – I loved FTL, and this one was equally as excellent. Difficult, but once you hit your groove it’s manageable. Just completed for the first time recently.
Invisible, Inc. – great tactical strategy game. Not too long.
Tabletop Simulator – been playing the “Pathfinder Adventure Card Game” pretty regularly with folks I used to game with in-person.

Each one of those could probably be its own post. I just don’t always feel like writing. Oh, I’ve been doing creative things – just not on the blog. I had started to write this blog post on 7/22, and here it is 8/14 and I’m just getting it out. I’ve been…busy? Distracted? Had a lot of other things on my mind? I suppose I’ve also just started being the Dungeon Master of an “Embers of the Last War” campaign with some friends on Roll20.net. Maybe I should write about that, too – a session-by-session breakdown. I just don’t always feel like writing it…sorry folks. Let me set a goal of writing out what happens in each session of my D&D campaign. That might help alleviate my malaise, get me writing more regularly.

Great Games: System Shock 2

June the 6th, 2020 Anno Domini

“You are nothing…a wretched bag of flesh. What are you, compared to my magnificence?” -SHODAN, System Shock 2

I purchased System Shock 2 while I was in college – probably the original release. The game was in a silvery-blue box that I wish now I had kept. At this point I can’t recall what prompted me to purchase it, but I believe I came to it via the Ultima Underworld series – I knew that the folks who had worked on that game, which I had really enjoyed, had moved on and were at Looking Glass Studios. So I picked up the game at Electronics Boutique, brought it back to the house that my friends and I were renting, and fired it up.

Horror movies had never really been my thing, but I had played Doom, so some of the tricks they used in the game such as the dark lighting and the surprise of having an enemy jump out of a doorway weren’t new. Resources in the game were tight, though – this was Doom without the near-limitless ammo and where your combat effectiveness was constrained by a system of RPG-like upgrades. You’re kept on the edge of survival, many times, until you figure out how to harbor your resources and make headway in clearing out areas of the game where you can access medical tables, purchase supplies, and upgrade your skills using the resources at hand.

Not only do you have a compelling, edge-of-your-seat resource management component added to a first-person shooter, you also have a unique and compelling story. You’re thrown into a crisis situation in medias res, and the characters and dialogue play out primarily in the form of comm logs you discover. The game teases the possibility of interacting with other survivors, but doesn’t really deliver – the only person you can interact with, early in the game, dies just as you reach him.

I think it’s this compelling narrative that caused me to fire up System Shock 2 a week or two ago and plough through the entire game all over again. It had been a good 15+ years since I’d last traveled the corridors of the Von Braun, and I marveled again at the clever level-design, the resources hidden in little pockets or dark corners, the way the designer hooks players and encourages them to look one way while they’re bringing up a nasty surprise from a different direction. The ending of the game still felt epic – a death-march through formidable foes and a showdown with the villains who have taunted you all throughout your journey.

The games Looking Glass Studios released around the turn of the millenium (Thief, System Shock, and the original Deus Ex) are my favorite games – but I think System Shock 2 is the most compelling. The Bioshock series is a carbon copy of System Shock 2, with a few other faction names and characters cut and pasted over The Many and SHODAN. While the Bioshock series is good, I think it’s only Bioshock: Infinite that began to approach the level of genius that System Shock 2 began. There aren’t many games that I can turn on and enjoy just as much now as I did 20 years ago; the fact that I can do that with this one is unique. I think that, just maybe, System Shock 2 is my favorite game of all time.

Shadowrun: Preventing the SARS III Pandemic of 2056

May the 14th, 2020 Anno Domini

The secret underwater lab from Shadowrun: Hong Kong — The secret underwater lab where Namazu Corp. researchers are cooking up SARS III in the year 2056

I recently finished the main campaign of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Don’t want to give too much away – the story is great, as every entry in this trilogy has been. I was bummed it was over, though, and was happy to see that they had included a “bonus mission” at the end which you can play through with your characters.

Lo and behold, a side-job pops up that entails breaking in to an underwater research lab and stealing the cure for a virus. Some corporate bigwig in a rival corporation was deliberately infected by Namazu and is being blackmailed – we’ll keep you alive as long as you betray your current company. The bigwig hires you to stop it.

So I break in to the lab, and mow down the corporate stooges. Along the way, I read about all the illegal human experimentation they’re doing down there – mind control that can overwrite personalities and create the perfect sleeper agents. Oh…and they’re cooking up deadly diseases, the likes of which could wipe out humanity.

The particular virus that infected the bigwig? They called it “SARS III”. I grab the cure, of course…and in a twinge of conscience let the scientists who developed it live. I also grabbed a sample of the stuff for myself.

You get the option to sell the SARS III sample on the Shadowland BBS black market once you get back to your home base. I know it’s just a game, but I can’t bring myself to do it…not with a real virus from the eastern hemisphere creating a global pandemic out there beyond the property line.

Great Games: Starcraft II

April the 10th, 2020 Anno Domini

The love between Jim Raynor and Sarah Kerrigan is the central pivot of the Starcraft II storyline

I just finished the third episode of Starcraft II, Legacy of the Void. Despite being an avid Starcraft player back in the late 1990s when the game came out, I didn’t pick up the sequel. The plan to split up the story into three separate games didn’t interest me – Blizzard isn’t known for getting their games out quickly, and I (correctly) assumed that I’d be left hanging by a cliffhanger plot.

While Starcraft II does manage to tie up the story of each campaign into a neat package by the end, I’m glad I waited. The game’s story is excellent, comprising perhaps the greatest science fiction epic in the entire history of gaming. At its core is the relationship between two characters from the first game: Jim Raynor, a rough-and-tumble space sheriff, and Sarah Kerrigan, a erstwhile human who became queen of an alien brood. While the love story between the two in the first game wasn’t too deep, the second game used that relationship as the central pivot of the entire story.

I’m hesitant to say more, as the story is a real pleasure to explore as it unfolds. In some sense, much of it is self-driven – after each mission, you have the option of watching a brief dialogue scene with one or more “allies” who help your commander during the journey. Every faction has 5-10 characters that appear during the narrative, some as fast friends, others as uneasy allies or enemies. Each one has their own personality traits, quirks of speech, and apparent motivations, and watching these unfold over the course of 20+ missions in each campaign is a lot of fun.

Each campaign starts you out with the basic units for your faction and then has you unlock additional units as you accomplish more missions. In many cases, you have the option of which unit to unlock first. For each faction, you also have choices to make, as each unit comes in multiple “flavors”, each with unique benefits: your zerglings may evolve the ability to leap over cliffs; you may choose to give your Terran bunkers more durability or a turret to help take down foes. These options make each run-through of the campaign a slightly unique experience.

In addition, Blizzard clearly made an effort to have each mission be very different. Some give you a base allow you a variety of choices about how to tackle a problem; others simply give you a few units (usually with a “hero” unit that sports unique abilities). The vast majority introduce some kind of time-sensitive limitation, asking you to achieve victory before a certain event happens or to hold out against waves of foes for a particular length of time. This is a distinct contrast to the first game, which generally gave you a base and let you have at it. The time limits do introduce a sense of urgency and difficulty to the missions, and on the Hard difficulty mode there were several that I had to try multiple times before succeeding.

The time limits notwithstanding, I loved the game – it was easily one of my favorite games of the last decade, just as the first Starcraft was one of my favorites of the 1990s. I’m not sure I’ll be too keen on diving in to the multiplayer option, except against friends – I’m sure there are a lot of excellent players out there whose skills would far surpass my own. Real-time strategy games tend to operate on an “actions-per-minute” economy requiring fast clicks and optimized builds…and although I’m an avid gamer, I’ve never cared much for the adrenaline rush that comes with competition. I’m far more interested in cooperative gaming, or – if it’s competitive – with someone who’s at least an acquaintance. That being said, I’d go back through Starcraft II’s campaign story for sure…although perhaps I’d revisit the first one and see how well it has fared in the intervening years. Guess I’d better go dig out the old CDs for the game and see if I can install them.

Working and Gaming Through the Quarantine

March the 22nd, 2020 Anno Domini

Work-from-home "office window" — A view out the window of my new “office”, at least for the next few weeks.

The coronavirus is in full force, instilling fear, wrecking the economy, and generally making a mess of things. I’ve been working from home for the past week – upper management issued increasingly-restrictive imperatives over the past weekend telling us first that we’d rotate in and out of the office, and now we’re not to come in at all. Working at home isn’t really my favorite, but we have to stay safe to stop the spread of this plague, so I understand why.

Like most folks, I’m trying to make the best of it indoors. The weather’s still a little cold outside, so although we’ve gone out for walks it’s still a bit chilly to do that regularly. Here are a few of the things I’ve been up to recently.

A little over a week ago, before the quarantine, the wife and I went to a friend’s house to play board games with a small number of friends. We played Pandemic, of course.
I’m finishing up Starcraft 2. Loved the first one, but wasn’t going to play the second one until the entire story had been released…then it took me a few years to get around to it. Great game – reminds me of Blizzard’s days of glory, now long gone.
My wife and I have been watching the BBS Documentary on YouTube. It’s a fascinating look into a niche hobby from a more innocent era of computing.
I’ve been re-reading the Dresden Files in preparation for the release of the new book in the series, Peace Talks. It’s been a long several years waiting for it and I can’t wait for it to start back up again. I just haven’t liked the rest of Jim Butcher’s fiction as much as I have the adventures of Harry Dresden.
If I’m honest, I haven’t prayed about this pandemic as much as I probably should. My goal this week is to devote more time to that. I do believe in a sovereign God, so I might as well act like it and ask Him for protection and to intervene to stop this virus.

That’s about it for now. Hopefully I’ll have more time to update things around here since I don’t have any travel time. Just have to get motivated to do it.

A Lament for the Lost Internet of the 1990s

January the 20th, 2020 Anno Domini

…using our integrated AIM clients, a throwback to a more innocent day before Google had integrated everything, back when using the internet was a challenge, reserved for those select nerds with the wherewithal to master it…
Anonymous, “Sing to me, O Muse, seductively sibilant strains, inspiring my spirit“, 10.8.2009

One of the reasons I wrote about EverQuest this past year was the fact that I miss the Internet of the 1990s. There are plenty of sites out there that try to summarize that time period, describing bland facts about how people used Netscape Navigator over dial-up modems, chatted with AOL Instant Messenger, or chronicling hallmark events (such as Al Gore’s High Performance Computing Act). None of them really capture the essence of the internet, though – how it felt to be part of that early masterpiece of computing technology.

The first thing to note, I suppose, is that the early Internet (and its precursor networks, ARPANet, FIDONet, etc.) were not for the masses. Computing itself was a niche hobby pursued by those with both the intellect and disposable income to invest in it. Computers – even supposedly “mass-market” models such as those released by Commodore in the 1980s – were elite instruments. Not only did they cost more than most high-end stereos and televisions, they were difficult to use. Even computer games were often abstruse affairs, with lengthy puzzle games or RPGs that made full use of the keyboard as an interface for typing commands or using numerous shortcuts. Those with a bent towards more pedestrian electronic gaming were fully served with those put out by Atari or Nintendo; for the others who wanted to do more than just run, jump, and shoot, computers held the key.

The internet, therefore, was only accessible in its early days by those intelligent or driven enough to master its gateway technology. Content on the internet reflected the interests of its user base. While there were jokes and silly pictures (dancing baby gif, anyone?), the general content tended to look more like that collected by a serious librarian than by the village idiot. Yahoo! ruled the online world of content discovery, along with its fellows Altavista and AOL. It provided quick links to high-brow subjects such as Architecture, Literature, College education, Software, Politics, and Law.

The Yahoo Website in 1996

Although there is a link for “Humor”, it includes priceless items of incalculable mirth such as (note: links removed; looks like spam infected Archive.org):

Crate Research & Application Project – utilize crates! More uses than you could possibly imagine – and they are your friends.
Zits – Dedicated to those pesky little friends of ours, Zits. After causing generations of anxiety in teens and adults, it’s time for a little fun at their expense.
HAND! – Have A Nice Day! – A monthly publication of clean jokes & quotes.
Antics: An Ant Thology – anteractive cartoons containing ants.
News of the Weird – Bizarre Insurance Claims & Lawsuits from the people who know insurance.
Mimes – page devoted to those silent performing artists, the mimes.

It’s the sort of rollicking barrel of laughs Wally Cleaver would have popped open in glorious shades of black and white. There are no cat videos, no poop or fart jokes, no interviews with urban dunces auto-tuned into catchy songs. It’s the kind of humor you’d find at a convention for nerds sporting thick glasses and pocket protectors.

And…you know what? The Internet was a better place for it. While Google may have automated content aggregation and sort-ranking, it has also fostered the dumbing-down of the internet. When “link popularity” is king, you get content that the average person finds interesting – and, let’s face it, the average person is of very average intelligence. If you type in “Vietnam War”, they’re not interested in a page filled with ten-cent SAT words that astutely discusses the war’s causes, social protest and dissent, and the difficulties that veterans faced trying to re-integrate into American life. They want a two-minute YouTube video that spoon-feeds them the basic gist while showing old-fashioned newsreels of men in fatigues boarding and taking off in an old Huey helicopter. They’ll consider their knowledge on the topic complete enough and move on with their shallow lives.

The other thing I miss about the Internet of old is the simplicity of it all. There were no pop-up ads, tracking cookies, or content personalization. When you browsed the web, you were more or less anonymous unless you chose to tip your hand. Now, your every click and scroll tracked – and the end result is that websites are even slower to load and use today than they were 20+ years ago. You can’t even visit a site to get a recipe without them throwing up a pop-up to sign up for their email newsletter and then automatically playing some video illustrating obscure food preparation techniques. Websites are filled with endless bloat, and the web is less usable because of it.

I miss the days when someone would put up a page about topics like butterfly collecting not because they aspired to become some rich and famous entomologist, but merely to express their enthusiasm and educate their fellow savants about a favorite hobby. It’s sad to me that so few sites today dive deep into a subject matter, but flit across the surface and wallow in the shallows like an infant that cannot swim. Being on the internet today makes you feel a little dirty, a little unwashed, like you’ve just stepped down into the gutter and spashed about in septic sewage. In the 1990s, it felt more like you’d entered into a secret clubhouse where all the smart, cool kids were having an incredible amount of witty, erudite fun. Not completely – there was pornography and other sordid content, for sure (usually on sites with black backgrounds) – but there was a whole lot more signal compared to the noise. We’ll never get back to these days – it’s too late, and I almost fear that we’ll forget that those days ever existed. I wanted to leave this brief lament in my own small and forsaken corner of the Internet to commemorate that time – to remember it and celebrate it for the golden era which we only now in retrospect can see that we had.