Thalen

Blaugust Strikes Again #Blaugust2016

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Another year has passed and Blaugust has come around again. Another opportunity to try and get in a habit of regular blogging. I made it a good few months keeping at least a weekly schedule after Blaugust ended last year; perhaps I'll be able to keep it going longer this time around. I would like to pick up the ongoing D&D and book review features I was doing and get them going again. I haven't decided yet if I want to go back and review books I've read in the interim, or just start fresh. The latter is more in keeping with the spirit of the thing, but a couple of those books are ones I'd really like to talk about. Maybe I'll just catch up on them by doing additional reviews during the week.

Part of the reason I started posting less is that I fell out of playing MMOs and stopped having those as a source of content. For whatever reason most of us who play Final Fantasy XIV together stopped logging in altogether and went to do other things either singly or in groups. Warframe served as the primary group game for a few of us for a while but ultimately it got repetitive and stopped being a daily thing. We tried out Archeage and Blade & Soul, at Tamrielo and Belghast's urging respectively, but neither really grabbed me beyond the early levels.

Within the past month or so, though, pretty much all of the Aggrochat group have jumped back into FFXIV and been getting caught up on it. We played up through the end of the current expansion and defeated the final boss, Nidhogg, and have made Monday a regular raid night to work on the other raid content that either we didn't make it through before we left (Extreme Ravana, mostly) or has been added in the meantime (More floors of Alexander, Sephirot, and so on). It was pretty cool how quickly we all got back in the swing of it and were able to take on new (to us) content. We don't know yet how long it'll be before the next Expansion hits, but I feel like there's enough to do to hold us most if not all of the way to it.

Not Sephiroth. This is a different guy. He lives in a tree.

When not raiding, I've been working on getting additional combat and crafting jobs leveled up using the Beast Tribe quests that were added since last we played. Just like with the Ixal quests in 2.0, Moogle crafting quests are a quick way to level otherwise grindy crafting jobs, and the Vath and Vanu Vanu quests scale to the level of the class you do them as and award a good chunk of XP. I finally got Paladin to level 60 and can theoretically tank now, though I don't have the necessary item level to run current content with it. That's easily fixed with tomestones though, I just need to collect enough. Next up is Summoner / Scholar so that I have a healing job available if needed.

I R Blogger

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Gosh, where to begin? Between holidays and going into quasi-hermit mode for a little bit, I haven't posted in a while. Let's remedy that, shall we? What have I been up to?

Gaming-wise, I've mostly been playing Warframe for the past couple months; the game of being a space-ninja in space. It continues to entertain, mostly when enough of us are on together to do group content. There are daily sorties that consist of three missions of escalating difficulty which are decidedly tuned for a full group, and we've been having fun with those occasionally. They can get pretty rough at times, particularly since the missions have additional modifiers applied to them, such as being limited to a single weapon type, or all the enemies having improved armor or added elemental damage, etc.

I R Blogger
We're ninjas on the moon, we carry a harpoon.

I've also been playing Stardew Valley a good bit. It's a very entertaining Harvest Moon / Animal Crossing style game where you farm, fish, fight monsters in an abandoned mine, befriend townsfolk and so forth. It's got that 'one more turn' aspect that can keep you playing far longer than you ever intended to. My first spring has just ended and summer has begun, and I've spent about half of what I've earned so far on summer crops. The rest is earmarked for a chicken coop once I can catch the carpenter lady at home to hire her.

I R Blogger
It's simple yet, but it's mine.

I haven't been devoting as much time to reading recently as I should, but currently I'm working on Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh (who will be named a Grandmaster by the SFWA in May). She's an author I've been aware of for quite some time, and have always intended to read, but this is only the second book of hers I've read. I'm enjoying it so far. I've read a few other books over the past few months; I haven't decided yet if I'm going to post about them, or skip to the current book. Once I finish this book, I've got a copy of REAMDE waiting for me. Getting through that in a week's time might be a bit difficult, so having some previous books to talk about could be useful.

Finally, I've been re-inventorying my comic book collection and getting it recorded at a site that I started using recently, League of Comic Geeks. I discovered it initially via their app, which is excellent for organizing my weekly pull list, and have decided it's an easier site to record new comics than the one I was using. Also it's free, which is a big plus. I've recorded just over 5000 comics in it so far, which is about a third of my collection. This is one of a few things that I've been needing to do as part of the overall 'clean up my office so it doesn't look like a hoarder lives in it' plan. So far it's going well.

Mystara Monday: AC2 – Combat Shield and Mini-adventure

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This week will likely be a short one, like the item we're taking a look at. AC2 is a DM's screen for the Basic and Expert rules and includes a short (8 page) booklet containing a short adventure that can be dropped in pretty much wherever the DM likes.

Mystara Monday: AC2 - Combat Shield and Mini-adventure
None of these monsters appear in the adventure.
Not even cut-rate Man-Thing

The combat shield is a pretty standard example, though a little boring for the players. Where later screens typically have art across the entire screen, this one only has the cover art. The middle part is the back of the item and has the typical back-cover blurb, and the final third has experience tables for all the character classes.

Mystara Monday: AC2 - Combat Shield and Mini-adventure
Okay, there is this little picture of a halfling running like mad.
The interior has all the typical tables; saving throws, to-hit rolls, rolls to turn undead, and so forth. Nothing special, but always useful to have at a glance. I'm not certain if this was released before or after the Companion rules set (which covers levels 15-25). Saving throw, hit roll, and thieves' skill tables go to level 25, so they must have had at least some of it ready. Other tables however, such as character levels, stop at 14. That may just have been for space reasons though.

The included adventure is titled The Treasure of the Hideous One and is a short wilderness adventure, written once again by David Cook, which leads the party into a swamp near the town of Luln in search of a treasure rumored to have been found there a century before. Luln is located in the westernmost part of the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, and mention is made of a 'Duke Stefan the Hermit' who was ruler 100 years ago. This gets retconned in later works, where it's established that the current Duke Stefan is the founder of the Duchy.

The way to the treasure takes the party through a few encounters including a vengeful ghost from a previous expedition and a group of bandits with a rather clever plan to ambush and rob the PCs. The treasure itself is found on an island inhabited by a vampire and a tribe of cay-men. Cay-men are a new monster in this adventure, one foot tall lizard men who live in a small village of dirt mounds. Much like the rakasta and aranea from The Isle of Dread, the cay-men show up again in later modules and are a uniquely Mystaran race. Eventually they even were given stats for use as PCs, although they were sized up to 2 foot tall by that point. I prefer the 1 foot tall version, as the idea of tiny lizard tribesmen with spears amuses me greatly. An adventuring party of nothing but cay-men would probably be very interesting to build a campaign around.

It's not a long adventure, but it is a well-written one with encounters that are more interesting than the typical "here's some monsters kill them" that we were used to at this point. There are a number of opportunities for player intelligence to factor in, and even if the DM doesn't want to run the overall treasure hunt the encounters would be pretty easy to drop in elsewhere with little modification.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 – Temple of Death

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This week we have part two of the Desert Nomads module series, adventure module X5: The Temple of Death. This adventure is a direct continuation of the previous one, picking up at the entrance to the Great Pass which leads from the Sind Desert into the land of Hule, where the Master reigns.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 - Temple of Death
Bright red crab-pincered elephant monsters absolutely
appear in this module.

Where the previous module's Sind was inspired by Hindu mythology, this module is a bit reminiscent of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle. Hule would not seem out of place in the Dreamlands, and a couple of the new monsters have a distinctly Lovecraftian feel to them. The hideous elephant-thing on the cover is a malfera, which is described as being native to 'The Dimension of Nightmares'. This module also introduces the Spectral Hound which is basically a Hound of Tindalos and hails from the 'Dimensional Vortex.' For now that just means they're extra creepy and unnatural, but the Immortals Set will eventually work the Dimension of Nightmares and the Vortex into a cosmology unique to Mystara.

Mystara Monday: Module X5 - Temple of Death
The bite of a spectral hound can cause a character to fade from reality entirely.

The first portion of the adventure covers the trip through the Great Pass. As with Master of the Desert Nomads there are encounters to be used no matter which way the adventurers travel, but there are also a number of placed encounters including a fake dragon head being used to guard the entrance to the pass, a tribe of geonids (small creature which look like boulders), and a mammoth that falls from the sky and has a chance to crush a character (a roc dropped it). Also there's the Well of the Moon. The Well has a number of powers, but the most fascinating is that on nights with a full moon a ladder of moonbeams appears and the characters can climb it to reach the Kingdom of the Moon. Said Kingdom is left to the DM to create and the module states "If you do not want the players to go to the moon, you may ignore this power." It seems to me that travelling to the moon might get the party a bit sidetracked, but what do I know?

Once through the Great Pass, the part reaches Hule which is rather dark and unpleasant. Hule is described as a hagiarchy, ruled by "holy men." The Master is the ultimate ruler, watching over things from the Temple of Death. A group of secret police called the Diviners search for criminals, both of the traditional sort and those guilty of having "wrong thoughts." It's portrayed as a fairly functional country on the whole, although one unwelcome to free thought.

As their mission is to seek out the Temple of Death, it's assumed the adventurers will do that and attempt to find and destroy the Master. If they investigate enough, they can piece together bits of information telling of a holy man named Hosadus who is connected to the Master and may even be able to determine that they are the same person. The Master is actually an avatar used by Hosadus to rule over Hule while his real, ancient and scarred, body lies in a casket in the Temple's mausoleum. To truly destroy the Master the party will have to find and destroy the body of Hosadus. It's possible, though unlikely, that the party could avoid having to face the Master entirely if they figure this out early enough.

Temple of Death is a solid module that presents a challenging foe as well as a new country that can be connected to the existing maps of the Known World (it hooks on west of the map from module X4), and adds a lot of fascinating elements to the cosmology of the world. Hule is also described in sufficient detail to give a good DM a base to work on to use it as a setting for more adventures. It's not surprising at all that Hule and the Master get revisited in a later module, as this one and its predecessor were very well received.