Dungeons & Dragons Online

Varath the Unloved Team Spode isn’t an adventuring party with a lot of principles, but there’s one principle which we regard as iron-clad. And that is, never leave loot on the table. This simple rule has served us well over the years. Having finished for now with the Sands of Menechtarun (we have a raid to attempt at some point), we took our guild ship to the compound of The Twelve. There were reports of dragons in the area. We thought back to our (short) list of principles, noted that dragons were known for their hoards of treasure, and we volunteered for the job. ...

Partial map of the Chamber of Raiyun If the Chamber of Raiyun were a module for the tabletop version of Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast would be sending lawyers all over the country, the world even, explaining to judges and juries why the dead dungeon master found floating in the river, perhaps slowly colliding with even more dead dungeon masters, wasn’t a justifiable homicide. Or why it was, depending on which side brought in WotC. ...

Behold! So I knew this going in, there’s nobody that hates us Drow more than your average beholder. There could be two paladins bashing away on it, a favored soul doing whatever it is they do, a sorcerer baking it in magical flames, and me plinking away at it from fifty meters away, trying to get a good holy arrow or two in its mad, unblinking eye, when it roars, “I SMELL BLUESKIN!” and zaps me with a death beam, TOTALLY IGNORING all the mayhem at its feet. If it had feet. ...

Dragon Age Legends One thing you gotta say about Dragon Age Legends: like the single player games upon which its based, in Dragon Age Legends you Get. To. Kill. DRAGONS. (Warning: link goes to Facebook). Unlike, say, Dungeons and Dragons Online, where I have yet to kill a dragon. The one you see in the tutorial is little more than a tease. It’s fighting a mind flayer, though, and we HAVE started killing those in our static group, but the name of the game isn’t Mazes and Mind Flayers Online now, is it? ...

In Smuggler's Rest It’s Dungeons & Dragons Online’s fifth birthday, and Turbine just wants to give back by re-opening Smuggler’s Rest for a few short days. Before DDO acquired the Korthos Island adventure zone, new players would be sent to Smuggler’s Rest to learn the basics of the game before finding themselves in the mean streets of Stormreach. The newly renovated Smuggler’s Rest is a progression zone of sorts. Players run around the island attacking small groups of pirates, who drop treasure map pieces, rarer special treasure maps to hidden treasure caches, doubloons in three varieties, and very rarely, a Treasure Compass. ...

Don't you love villains who monologue? Still crunch time at work – ugh! Was working at home until 10PM last night. Gaming has taken a severe hit, as has writing, and most of the time when I DO game, it turns out to be something like a Facebook game. Right now I’m hooked on the EQ2-themed Fortune League. Fortune League fills my need for a game I can play with a spreadsheet, as I no longer have an EVE Online sub. There’s probably another article about FL in our future, now that I know more about how the game is played (with a spreadsheet). ...

I suck at predictions, but everyone else is doing them. Luckily, I have a Magic 8 Ball. I’m just gonna list some games, and ask the Magic 8 Ball what it thinks of them. Question to the 8 Ball for all of these games: Will this game have a good year in 2011? Age of Conan: “Outlook Not So Good”. AoC released its first expansion, “Ride of the Godslayer”, last summer, and that’s pretty much the last I’ve heard of the game. I don’t think the Magic 8 Ball is correct; I think Funcom is content to support their current player base without feeling the need to go F2P. Their massively hyped launch should have helped them recoup their development costs years ago. ...

Delera’s Tomb has some sort of unhealthy obsession with dead girls. You have the “Dead Girl’s Notebook” one-off. Then you have the whole Delera questline proper, where you free the spirit of the dead girl and then hunt down the evil necromancer what did it to her. It’s as if Turbine’s quest scripters had come off a weekend binge that included a half dozen Japanese horror movies, stumbled into work on a Monday with their brain cells still crackling, and wrote what they saw when they closed their eyes. ...

Yeah, that was the easiest trap to find EVER! We were running past and someone (I want to say Ulan, but it probably wasn’t) suggested taking a screenshot of us. I’m like, great! Look at all these bridges and ladders! Perfect spot! And then they pointed out the giant goat head behind us. First on the menu – getting Ulan, our Friend from the North, into the exclusive ranks of the Order of Cannith. You know, I’d like an order of toast, an order of iced tea, and an Order of Cannith. Anyway, not just anyone can be a member of the Order. There’s a long application that will take a few hours to fill out, and hitting the ‘submit’ button at the end gives you a PAGE NOT FOUND error. Then you’ll have to talk to our HR person about doing a personal interview over Skype. Dress nicely! ...

Shy, a hireling cleric, and I watch the pretty burning ship while Spode flees the scene The topic came up last week about maybe picking one of our myriad guilds as the one guild we all would join. Despite all the good times I had at GAMERZ, the nights we just spent describing our adventures over guild chat, banding together to defend Stormreach from its deadliest foes and… ah, forget it. I was a ninja invite, just a warm body to them. The only thing they ever wanted from me, as far as I know, was free guild renown at no cost to them. I left GAMERZ with nary a backward glance, and nobody noticed. ...