#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning

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Many years ago, when I was but a lad, my best friend came into possession of the newly published Second Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. We were fascinated by the system and the concept, and I wanted my own copies. At Waldenbooks an employee suggested I might want to start with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which would be an easier introduction to the game. I bought it, and the rest was history. It's because of that choice that instead of Faerun, Oerth or Krynn my favored game world, the one that I return to time and again, is Mystara.

#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning
Mystara in its earliest form, from the D&D Expert Set

Over the years, I played and ran a lot of games of Dungeons & Dragons set in Mystara (originally just called The Known World) and I built up a large collection of adventure modules and supplements. I had come in at the perfect time, as TSR had recently begun to actively detail the setting through a series of Gazetteers that detailed each of the major nations of Mystara in turn. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor setting was incorporated as the distant past of Mystara, prior to a great nuclear apocalypse. The world was revealed as hollow, with ancient extinct civilization preserved within. The great airship Princess Ark crossed the world and even reached the moon (which is populated by samurai cat people). A worldwide calamity stripped Mystara of magic for a full week.

Eventually TSR decided to retire the Dungeons & Dragons rule set and only support Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. For a short period, Mystara continued to be supported and new AD&D supplements were released for it. After only a few however, Mystara was retired as well. It's mentioned every so often in newer editions, most recently in the 5th edition books as one of many campaign worlds that exist, but there hasn't been an official Mystara supplement published since 1995.

Every Monday I plan to bring out an item from my collection and show it off a bit. I'll talk about what it is, where it fits into the setting as a whole, and maybe tell a few stories about games past. Next week I'll be starting with the very first Dungeons & Dragons books I ever owned, the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules.

Herald of Andraste

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Endless Faffing

Herald of Andraste

It is funny how a conversation can set someone down a path.  During the Saturday night recording of AggroChat 70, we got onto the topic of Ashgar playing Mass Effect again, which not surprisingly lead to some discussions of Dragon Age as well.  For whatever reason I have struggled to play Dragon Age Inquisition, and in truth I had the same issue getting started in Dragon Age 2.  It was a good year and a half after the release of that game before I finally managed to play my way through it, and I was beginning to wonder if the same would be true for Inquisition.  At face value the game seems like the perfect mix of Dragon Age storytelling with Skyrim-esc open world exploration.  The problem is the mixture together seems to be a confusing mess for me personally.  Even though every single person I have talked to says to leave the Hinterlands…  I struggle bringing myself to do this.  The Elder Scrolls player in me wants to wander about seeing what all I can find in this nook or that cranny.  Which means I have spent twelve hours so far playing the game and have not really accomplished much.  Yesterday however I started trying to force myself to knock things off my quest list rather than wandering around and seemingly gathering up an endless number of them.

Not surprisingly as you can see above I am playing a Dwarven Two-Handed Warrior.  That pretty much means I will always be grouped with Cassandra, because of the two tanky options I have encountered she is preferable to Blackwall.  I don’t mind the character of Blackwall at all, in fact I kinda like it… but compared to Cassandra…  well there just is no comparison.  For most of last night I ended up playing with Vivienne as my mage, and quite frankly…  I think I am switching back to Solas.  Vivi apparently disapproves of my whole wanting to help the Mages thing, which is something that happens while I am playing Dragon Age.  Normally I am more than happy to see Mages slaughtered by the dozens…  but this game mythos actually makes them into characters I can sympathize with.  It feels like they have simply drawn an unlucky lot in life, and are oppressed for it.  Those Tevinter however… I am still more than happy to slaughter them by the handfuls.  I guess ultimately last night I turned some sort of a corner and managed to get into the game just enough to make me want to keep playing it.  Previously it was a pretty if not slightly awkwardly controlling Skyrim clone…  but last night it finally became a Dragon Age game for me.

Herald of Andraste

Herald of Andraste

I did not mention my favorite party member yet I guess.  You can see in the background Sera, the awesome elvish archer you pick up in Orlais.  She is sassy, irreverent…  randomly shakes her ass at Vivi…  and is having absolutely none of my shit.  Grouping with her reminds me of the many nights Tarantella has hung out with us on voice chat, and I mean that in the best possible way.  I’ve reached the point finally where I just want to play more of the game, and I had to pull myself away from the screen last night in the middle of a big action sequence because otherwise I would be non-functional this morning.  The only negative is that the next few nights are largely spoken for.  Tonight I have my original Final Fantasy XIV raid team, and Wednesday I have a second Static…  with Tuesday sandwiched in between which I have been attempting to devote to some Wildstar play.  My fear is that if I wait too long I will lose the momentum that I have going right now.  I am not sure why this game in particular has been such a struggle for me to get into.  I think part of it honestly has been that generally speaking I play single player games on my laptop downstairs.  Dragon Age Inquisition will functionally run on said laptop, but it looks like shit and suffers from the shiny hair syndrome that occurs when you attempt to play the game on crappy hardware.

Instead I need the firepower of my full gaming machine upstairs to do the game justice.  I am just not used to playing 50 to 100 hour games on my desktop.  I guess in the grand scheme of things I am going to have to get used to it, because Witcher 3 suffers from pretty much the same issue.  My laptop while more gaming oriented than a lot of them, is just dated at this point.  It will run most of the MMOs I want to play decently, but the GTX 660m card in it just cannot handle the PS4/Xbox One era of gaming.  At some point I will upgrade it and everything will be fine, but for as little as I have actually used my laptop of late… I just can’t see that as a sensible expense.  I have a fairly checkered past when it comes to laptops.  I’ve owned several “gaming” laptops over the years and each one dies a fairly spectacular death after a year or two of use.  As such I pretty much have resigned myself to picking up cheap second hand laptops, because each time we have spent full price on one…  it has lasted just long enough to get out of warranty before suffering some catastrophic and largely un-repairable error.  The laptop I have now has been a trooper and in spite of it having a dated video card runs most everything that I want to play.  It will run FFXIV in DX11 at around 40 fps which has made up the bulk of my recent game time.

Blame Origin

Herald of Andraste

I am honestly not really sure why it has taken me this long to boot up Dragon Age Inquisition, and why it required the AggroChat show to remind me of its existence.  I think part of it is the fact that it is on Origin, a client that unlike Steam I never actually have running.  When I have a game on steam, I see it sitting there in the list mocking me…  so I end up booting it up periodically.  Origin however is in a completely different client that only really has Bioware games for me.  I have been going through this down cycle lately where I am largely keeping to myself.  Inquisition would have been the perfect game for this sort of activity, but out of sight out of mind.  Honestly Origin works perfectly fine from what I can see, but as a testament to how little I use it…  I had not actually added a single person to my friends list until last night when I imported my PSN network.  I only did this because at some point we are going to try both some Mass Effect 3 multiplayer and some Dragon Age Inquisition Multiplayer.  In spite of Origin doing a fair job, it still annoys me that I have to use it at all.  Steam for me is a value add, because it gives me quick access to all of the games I want to play and represents a generally cheap and ubiquitous portal for purchasing them.  Origin however falls in the same category as UPlay… as that piece of software that I am required to use but constantly frustrated by.

Last night I actually took some time and poked around the Origin store, and I came to the stark realization that honestly… the only EA games that I care about are the Bioware games.  For the most part everything else is either a franchise I have grown out of like Battlefield, or one I have never quite gotten into like Sims…  or a string of sports games that I have never had any interest in.  EA largely produces games that I don’t care about, and I guess that is why having my beloved Bioware games blockaded behind the service feels so wrong.  The funny thing about it is that the supposed core reason behind EA pulling out of Steam, was that they did not like having to discount their games on a regular basis.  It seems that EA is having to discount their games even further than Steam generally did to get people to nibble.  I noticed last night that Titanfall, the game that was supposed to herald in a new era of Xbox One supremacy…  is down to $10 for the Deluxe digital collectors edition that once sold for $100.  The only real positive however is that Origin also has cloud sync, so when I installed Mass Effect 3 it synchronized all of my save game data from the Bioware servers and it remembered everything that I had unlocked.  All of this Origin ranting aside… I expect my solo gaming to continue on for a bit longer as I get some more Dragon Age Inquistion gameplay in.  In truth I have reached a good pausing point in Final Fantasy XIV as I have essentially finished getting gear on my Warrior from Alex normal (minus the chest piece) and have upgraded every slot on my Dragoon to 180, giving me two viable characters for endgame shenanigans.

 

 

#Blaugust Day 16: Can You Go Back?

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Yesterday my wife and I watched Mallrats, which she had never seen before. She's not seen any of Kevin Smith's stuff apart from Jersey Girl, in fact. We watched Clerks a while back, and she didn't hate it. She liked the salsa shark.


Watching Mallrats I felt like the seams were more visible than I remembered. The dialogue was more stilted than in my mind, and while it's still a pretty funny movie, it wasn't quite up to the memories I had of it. I find myself wondering how Chasing Amy holds up, particularly since I know it's often criticized for taking a very stereotypical view of lesbianism. Views on sexuality in our society have shifted a hell of a lot in 20 years time, and I suspect a lot of what was edgy in 1997 will seem almost quaint.

It makes me wonder just what it is that makes one thing seem dated and old, while something else from the same era remains fresh, or at least relatable. Clueless is just as much a product of the 90s as Mallrats, but I feel like Clueless holds up much better. Is it because it had higher production values? A better script? Maybe that it's so over the top in its 90s style that the aesthetic becomes almost fantastical?

Asimov's stories are decades old now, and often based on now-discredited science, but I can still reread them and enjoy them just as much if not more so than the first time. Preacher and Transmetropolitan both came out around the same time, and I loved them both back then, but now while Transmetropolitan still fires my imagination, Preacher makes me cringe a bit. Maybe it's simply that I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago. I've grown since then and my point of view is no longer the same.

#Blaugust Day 16: Can You Go Back?
That's entirely possible, Spider


Blaugust Halfway Check-In

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Tabulating Results

Blaugust Halfway Check-In

We are now at the halfway point of Blaugust, and I thought it would be cool today to take note of who has achieved their “Survivor” rank or not.  As a refresher I have changed the requirements slightly from last year, and you can find the entire rules post here.  Last year a significant portion of the contest was about not missing a single day, and quite honestly there were a bunch of people who got their 31 posts in… but had not done them contiguously so it felt dishonest to rule them out just because they missed a day.  Instead this year I am judging the contest based on number of posts, which allows people to play catch up if they need to.  At this point we are technically on day 16, and I had said I was going to classify anyone as a survivor who had managed to make 15 posts during the month.  There are a lot of folks on this list, and a lot more than are only one or two posts off from it.  That said I thought it would be awesome to celebrate those who have already reached the halfway point.

I am going to pick on SoulTamer a bit because she made this tweet yesterday.  When I see something like this is makes me exceptionally happy inside.  Blaugust is a strange ordeal, for some people it gives them strength and they reach the other side a more prolific blogger.  For others it defeats them and they go for month or more long lapses afterwards.  It was for that second group that I considered not actually doing it this year.  I didn’t want to be the cause of anyone dropping off the radar in our game blogging community.  However there were enough people constantly asking me if I was going to do it that I reluctantly said yes.  I am happy that I have and I am immensely proud of the progress everyone has been making towards the final goal.  Another note… just because your name does not currently appear on this list does not mean all is lost.  You can still reach 15 posts and you can still reach 31 for the month, and I think this is the aspect of the 2015 running that I like the most.  Instead of demoralizing someone for missing a day, there is always hope that you can catch up and cross the finish line as well.  So I challenge all of you folks who are not on the list to get there!

AggroChat 70 – Calibrating “Main Gun”

Blaugust Halfway Check-In

This week we are joined by Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tam and Thalen, with Kodra having to deal with some family stuff.  I was not certain how much we would have to talk about, but like always we managed to fill a show full of all sorts of games that we had been playing.  Thalen starts it off talking about his further adventures into the Magic Duels free to play game.  Similarly with the launch of Fallout Shelter for android he has started playing that as well.  Finally he talks about the recent Fantastic Four event in Marvel Heroes and how The Thing is the tankiest of tanks.  Tam spent the day at an Infinity Tournament and talks about just how awesome the Seattle minature gaming scene has been.

Grace talks about her recent swap to spending most of her time in Wildstar and the excitement surrounding the impending free to play drop that is now on the public test server.  Additionally she talks about her recent foray into the PVP system, and how generally cool the community seems to be surrounding it.  While board games are normally the territory of Kodra, Grace mentions the Exploding Kittens card game and how much fun she has had with it since receiving it.  Ashgar has followed in Tam’s footsteps and talks about his experiences playing Sword Art Online Hollow Fragment.  Ash has also started on a brand new playthrough of Mass Effect with the intent of carrying one save game from one all the way through three.  This of course spawns a conversation where we talk about our experiences with the Mass Effect series.

Finally I talk about my recent return to Rift, and my obsessions with Hellgate London.  Additionally we talk about next weeks show, where we plan on talking about the storyline of the Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward expansion.  We have purposefully kept discussion of plot points to a minimum, but we feel it is generally safe enough to start talking about where we think the game is going.  We are announcing this ahead of time for the purpose of letting our listeners and readers join in the fun.  Do you have any interesting theories or are there parts of the story that you didn’t quite grasp?  We are taking in questions via email for this coming show, and we will go over them on the air.  I should be a lot of fun and it is our first real attempt to do something like this.

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