August 2015 – Page 10

Shiphand Buddy: The Gauntlet

August 25, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 25

We made it! This is the 7th and final shiphand mission. Get ready to be a reality tv star!

So many telegraphs, so little health.

What: Compete in a deadly reality show against your will and escape to tell the tale!

When: Available at level 40

Where: Malgrave

Gold Timers: Normal: None ; Vet: 20:00

Gracie’s Run Time: Normal: 11:59 ; Vet: 11:55

Shiphand Buddy Says: I hope you like dodging things, because this shiphand has an excess of dodging things! Once you speak to Pilot Taboro and start the mission you will be teleported to the chamber pictured in the screen shot above. There are a large number of telegraphs, but only the round ones move. You should be able to find safe spots and dodge them. If you are hit they only do modest damage, so you should be able to recover if you’re careful.

Through this whole mission you will need to be on the lookout for 10 golden skulls. There’s often one inside or on top of the shipping containers directly behind you when the mission begins. Skulls can spawn in any room in the instance, even the connecting hallways. They are frequently located in somewhat hidden places, such as inside containers, behind banners, or under the bleachers in the last room. Sometimes they are on the floor, but often they are floating in mid-air and require a little jumping to collect. Keep your eyes peeled!

To progress to the next section you’ll need to activate 3 control panels in order. From your starting position head to the room on your left first, then the right, and after that you’ll be able to activate the third panel in front of the exit. While you’re in the side rooms make sure to check for golden skulls along the walls, and on top of or behind the large pipes at the back of the rooms.

The gold skulls like to hide in front of these yellow lights above the doors. Tricky.

The next room has a swarm of angry bees, and three waves of small adds. Finish them quickly to minimize the damage you take. Be sure to look for skulls along the walls before you head out to the Chamber of Choices.

This, friends, is how you lose a gold medal.

The splorg gauntlet, how I hate thee. This room is where gold medals go to die. You will have to survive a swarm of explosive splorg for 2:00, and collect 20 plushies for “bonus points” while you do it. Getting too few plushies or dying to the splorg will cost you your gold medal. I try to run through the splorg to activate them away from the plushies. Once they start to detonate they stop moving and you should be able to dodge them. For me this objective is probably the most difficult in any of the shiphands. Movement abilities can help you escape the explosions, but if you are really struggling you can bring a friend to make things much easier. When you finish you can endorse a product and wave to your fans. After all that running around I feel like I could use a Protostar Fortified Whim-Beer myself.

Once you’ve survived the splorg, you can choose which challenge to tackle next, either the Charnel Chamber (east) or Faction Friction (west). Both small arenas have a single round of challengers for you to defeat. After completing the Faction Friction arena, make sure to continue through to check the small hallway behind it for skulls. On the eastern side, you can choose to participate in the dance off competition. It doesn’t affect your gold medal, but it is pretty fun! The eastern side also has some extra mobs that you need to kill to save other contestants from the Darkspur. Once all of that is completed you can progress to the final room.

“Brick” Braggor, the dude responsible for bringing you to this awful place. Punch him once for me.

Before you enter the circle in the final room, check if you are still missing any skulls. If you still need some, look around and underneath the bleachers. If you start the event before you get your skulls you will fail that objective. The Main Event consists of 4 waves in total, with a short break between each that should allow you to heal up if you need it. The first two waves are random teams of 2-3 enemies, the third wave will be a single mini-boss. After defeating all of them, “Brick” Braggor himself will challenge you. As you fight him, the other traps of the Gauntlet like electrical telegraphs and exploding splorg start appearing. Save your cooldowns for this guy, because the faster you can kill him the less time you will have to deal with these extra headaches. Once he’s dead you can finally escape this deathtrap!

Differences between normal and vet: On normal mode you don’t have to collect the plushies in the Chamber of Choices. You still have to survive exploding splorg for the same amount of time though. The other difference is that you don’t get to fight “Brick” Braggor at the end, there are just 3 rounds to the Main Event.

Other Thoughts: This is the only mission I can’t reliably get solo gold. The timer in the exploding splorg room is super tight and it is very easy to either not get enough points or just accidentally die in there. I had to run this one four times to make sure I got a gold medal and an accurate run time. If you really want that gold it is much easier if you bring a friend or two. As a bonus the run time was about a minute faster with a buddy to help!

That’s the last shiphand available to date. I hope you enjoyed these guides, and had fun running these missions with me!

Go Team Blaugust

August 25, 2015 by Belghast

Words of Encouragement

Hang in there #Blaugust-ians! If @belghast can do it every. single. day. we can do it for a month. At this point surely reading = writing

— Ysharros (@ysharros) August 25, 2015

I woke up this morning to see the above tweet in my timeline… and it is absolutely true. There are days I still think I am the least likely herald of regular posting. Most of you only know me as the guy who posts every day, but in truth that only represents about half of my time blogging. Before that I was the most flaky and least prolific blogger out there. I would go through streaks of posting 10-20 posts in a given month… to having months where I only have one post at all. Between August 2012 and late April 2013 there was complete and total radio silence. It was by will alone that I set myself down the journey of posting something, no matter how stupid it is… every single day. Now several years later, there is part of me that still cannot fully comprehend the madness that I started, but I also have this strong drive to keep the ball from ever touching the ground.

While this might sound counter intuitive… for me at least regular posting is much easier than sporadic posting. Namely because of the pressure that I would put on myself. When I would go through a big lapse, I felt like I couldn’t just start writing again with a simple post. Instead I would have to write the most epic post ever to make up for the fact that I had been gone so long. I felt like I had to prove something to my readers, that I was somehow worthy of them leaving me in their RSS reader all this time. As time passed, the guilt that I felt grew and the measure of that “epic comeback post” kept growing as well ultimately leading me to wait longer before posting it. When I write something every day I am much more open with my readers. I talk about what is going on in my world, and how it is effecting me. I talk about what I am enjoying and what I am not enjoying, and the whole process ends up being much more fluid. So when I agree that if I can do it, you can to… because quite frankly all of you are far more talented than I am.

I started the Blaugust thing selfishly as a way of getting more content from the bloggers I care about. I never expect anyone to follow me in this “damned fool crusade”. Instead from the first year I had people coming out of the woodwork and signing up for the challenge. Even though I keep stats and assign awards… every single person who attempts this is a hero to me. They are actively doing something to keep pumping out more content into our community and that is huge. I can keep doing what I do because there are people like you out there sharing the journey with me. We are all in this together, and I know you can finish this month and get your name in the “winner” column. I believe in all of you fine Blaugustians, and even though the month is coming to an end… I will still be here in September and October to support you all. We are actively making this community we have stronger, and there is a certain magic in that. Now go write some kick ass posts!

Waltz of Doom

Last night we were able to pull together the raid without any real issue and set our sights on clearing Alexander Normal. It is amazing just how fast you can burn through all four wings when you have a team that works well together. Even though I am essentially done gearing out my Warrior with Alexander items, I am always down for helping a full guild group knock it out. It is extremely noticeable that our folks have been improving their gear because on turn one for example I think the bosses only actually made it up into the air twice. Similarly we pushed the living liquid boss into the final phase before the second hands phase. I know Kodra for example walked away with three pieces of gear that he had been building towards, and I think several others got pieces as well. I was pretty slackerly this past week and these were actually my first Alexander runs. I had every intention to work on getting the dragoon gear but this past week was just one where I was not in the mood to play any MMO at all. Instead I largely played single player experiences… or Diablo 3 AS a single player experience. I did not even cap Esoterics and for that I am feeling a little sorry. I could have easily had my chest piece this week, but I guess I will maybe wrap that up tonight.

After Alexander we put more attempts in on Ravana Extreme and I think we are getting to the point where we might be able to finish it up next week. We have now seen the entire fight and survived through the various phases, we just need to put the dance together and repeat it all successfully. The hard part is still the phase after the swords, which means we have to spread out so that only two people are in each corner. We didn’t quite do this and as a result we lost a handful of people. Luckily we had a healer limit break three available so we were able to essentially push the reset button and keep on trying. That is not exactly the way we want to beat it the first time, but if we have to I will take it. The fight is just so much more complicated than Bismarck Extreme was, and I am anxious to get it down and farmable so we can start clearing it and Bismarck in the same night. I want pretty weapons dammit! In all honesty I am pretty happy with my Esoterics axe for the time being, and my retainers are once again packed full of gear. However I will never turn down unique weapon graphics.

Wanting More Of The Same

August 24, 2015 by Tamrielo

Shadowrun: Hong Kong dropped on Thursday, and I beat it Sunday night. For anyone measuring games by hours played, I clocked 35 hours in it of which I was actively playing probably about 25-28. I definitely did not see everything the game had to offer, and I’m going to write more about it specifically a bit later, but if you liked the previous games, this is yet another improvement on the series.

I really love the Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun games; each new one focuses on improving the weaknesses of the previous one while still doing some new stuff. What I want when I get a new one is, essentially, more of the same, just a little fancier. It’s worth noting that I play more or less the same character when I jump into it, too, and I still find each one interesting and fun.

I’m trying to wrap my head around why I’m so happy with a new Shadowrun game that is, for all intents and purposes, more of the same, yet I got tired with the Assassin’s Creed series, despite it branching out a lot more. In a similar vein, I grew tired of Rock Band releases but I pick up each new Civilization game.

Assassin’s Creed 4 holds the answer for me. After the story arc of Desmond completed in AC3 (full disclosure: I never beat AC3 as I was kind of tired of the series), AC4 picks up with a new story and a new set of characters. It’s more self-contained and shows me a different slice of the world. Similarly, Shadowrun games reboot with each one, introducing me to a new piece of the setting and a new story and characters. Each new Civ game is a new set of mechanics with a new world to, well, civilize (and I especially liked Civ: Beyond Earth because it was sci-fi).

I want new stories and new characters once I’ve had the catharsis of finishing a story arc. My favorite book series is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, which jumps to new characters and new slices of the world constantly. I love the original Star wars trilogy, but for all that people raved over the Thrawn books, I never got into them, because I felt like the story of those characters was done. I didn’t need any more (and, indeed, the return of ‘classic’ characters in the upcoming Episode 7 is the least interesting thing about it for me).

I tend to lose interest when I have to wait for a show to release episodes– things aren’t moving quickly enough for me and I’d prefer to experience it all at once, or in big, super-immersive chunks. When I engage with a story, I dive deep, and I want the whole thing. It’s one of the reasons that I have trouble with games and stories that’re thin or very what-you-see-is-what-you-get. I want worlds that leave a lot to my imagination and let it run wild with the possibilities, and get frustrated when there isn’t enough for me to really sink my teeth into. I think it’s why I had so much fun with Transistor and was frustrated by the ending of There Came an Echo– I felt like the former left a really big world with a lot of weird cool stories that I only got to see hints of, whereas the latter opened the curtains a little too much and just told me everything, eliminating any space for my imagination to wander through.

I think a story is made up of both what it tells and what it doesn’t tell, and both are important. As Kodra likes to put it, those parts of the story that aren’t told are where fanfic lives, and I think he’s dead on. It’s a place for the imagination to run wild, and as a storyteller it’s important for me to leave some stories told and others untold– sometimes you want to leave some things to the imagination.

When something captures my attention and shows me a piece of a big world, I want more of that, and as long as I can get more bits without feeling like it’s gotten same-y, I’m hooked and want more of the same. I don’t think this is such a bad thing, though I understand when people get bored of the same sort of game. I also think I lean very heavily towards preferring untold stories that are merely hinted at. It’s how I get inspired for my own creative work, and I can’t be disappointed by a story that exists only in my imagination.

That is, I think, what I love about the Shadowrun series– it’s a simple story with lots of branches that are chock-full of suggested-but-untold stories, leaving my mind to fill in the rest. One of the best tabletop games I’ve ever run was built on setting up the potential untold stories that occur before you finish character creation in an MMO– how did you get to where you were when you started the game? I got to tell that story right up until the launch of SWTOR, at which point (most of) my players were able to go straight into the game with a character they felt strongly about, that was well-defined and interesting.

It was a great experience, and one I’d love to do again given the opportunity. It would, of course, require that my players wanted more of the same as well. I’ve got some time to think about it– we’re still hip-deep in another game that’s yet to fully unfold.

#Blaugust Day 24: Mystara Monday: Basic Rules

September 14, 2015August 24, 2015 by Thalen

Today we take a look at where it all began, the first Dungeons & Dragons product I ever owned, Dungeons & Dragons Set 1: Basic Rules.

#Blaugust Day 24: Mystara Monday: Basic Rules

Adventure lies within

If you played Fourth Edition D&D you may recognize that art and cover design as being nearly identical to that of the Fourth Edition Starter Set. This was the third boxed set to be released as the Basic Rules. The first came out in 1977 and was intended to introduce players to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The second, often referred to as the Moldvay rules was a heavy revision done by Tom Moldvay in 1981. I was in this revision that the Dungeons & Dragons rules split from Advanced D&D. What I have here is the third Basic Rules set, revised by Frank Mentzer in 1983.

In this box, I got a 64 page Players Manual, a 48 page Dungeon Masters Rulebook, and a set of polyhedral dice. Sadly, the dice were stolen along with all my others nearly 20 years ago. I've bought plenty of dice since then, but I still miss that very first set I ever owned. The books have almost the exact same cover layout as the box cover.

The art on that box, by the way, is by the famed Larry Elmore, and the Players Handbook is full of more. Jeff Easley contributed a fair bit as well, but Elmore's art is what I always think of when I think of these books, and of D&D in general. The Dungeon Masters Guide mostly has art by Jim Holloway which is a bit rougher. Elmore's adventurers look like high fantasy characters, almost superheroes even; Holloway's look more like rough and ready mountain men.

And that is what elves, halflings, and dwarves should look like

Based on my internet research, the rules differences between the previous version and this are pretty minor. The big change is in how the information is presented. The box says for ages 10 and up, and the books are very well suited for just that. The writing is aimed young without being pedantic or insulting. The set was also clearly designed as an introduction for someone with no prior experience.

Rather than starting out with rules to create characters and so forth, the Players Manual first explains what 'role playing' is and then runs the character through a simple, linear solo adventure. Throughout the adventure concepts are introduced as they come up, so constitution and hit points are explained when you fight your first monster, a goblin. Saving throws are introduced in a fight with a poisonous snake, and so on. By the time you reach the rules for new character creation, 48 pages in, you've played two solo adventures and should have a pretty good concept of how the game works.

The Dungeon Masters Guide is set up in a similar way, starting out with a pretty straightforward castle adventure to run for your group. I recall playing this adventure with my best friend at the time, with each of us running two characters and me serving as DM. Eventually I put together a more typical gaming group in high school where I DMd for a group of friends every day at lunch, but in the beginning it was just the two of us.

That first adventure was a great introduction, even if it did contain more than one of the classic PC killers (a carrion crawler, yellow mold, and harpies). It also connected to the solo adventure from the Players Handbook through the character of Bargle the Infamous, an evil magic user who served as the main villain in each. In the solo adventure, Bargle kills a beautiful female cleric named Aleena whom you have befriended and now the town (and you) want him to pay. Bargle is a fantastic, and well-loved (hated) villain who reappears in later supplements and adventures and makes a perfect Big Bad for an ongoing campaign. When this mini-adventure was reworked for 3rd edition and published in the final issue of Dungeon, it was even titled 'Kill Bargle.'

Seriously, Bargle is the worst

This box was what kindled my love of tabletop role-playing games, and nearly 30 years later I still treasure it. I had played a few computer RPGs prior to this, notable Might & Magic, so I had a decent idea how the dungeon crawl part was supposed to go. I actually found the character sheets for the two PCs I played in that first campaign with my friend, and I had even reused the names of two of the default Might & Magic PCs for them. But this box was what made me realize we could create our own adventures, and that they could involve more than just killing monsters. It was the beginning of something wonderful.

Next week I'm going to take a look at the first adventure released specifically for the Basic Rules (although for an earlier revision); Adventure Module B1: In Search of the Unknown. Let's see how many ways to kill a player we can find in this one!