Endless Bag of Games

Our Forgotten Realms campaign kicked of this Saturday with classic action in the realms. It has been over four months since I have had opportunity to have some fun around the table. Teaching new players to play forced me to check from the books few times, but other than that, the players learned fast and the game mechanics became familiar quite quickly. This marks the beginning of our Threads of Sanity -campaign. (Details about the characters can be found here):

It began when our heroes were summoned to the chambers of master Harran in the Crystal Academy. Crystal Academy was an academy specializing in Magic and Planes and it hired “initiates”, in other terms, mercenaries and adventurers to do tasks with somewhat dangerous nature. Master Harran told the heroes that recently he had received a letter from Garo Darkmoor, old mercenary spending his days in village Tameron. In his letter Garo had written about a mist that arrives and brings the dead with it. While the situation may indeed have been dire, the letter reveals that Mr. Darkmoor wishes that the situation would be handled with delicacy and academy would not be mentioned at all due the recent evets.

With this knowledge, our heroes prepare for the journey to come. They took some time to familiarize themselves with the knowledge that they have and Jonas tries to find more information from the libraries of the academy without any major results. Once the preparations are complete, our heroes set on their journey on daybreak. Our heroes hitch a lift from farmers and arrive to Teziir, a trade city run like a business by a council of merchants, in hopes of finding academy’s contact person Griffin Lamech from the temple district. Unfortunately, Torm’s paladin is not to be found and our heroes don’t gain any more information about the village Tameron. Rhadec however, uses the time he has, and overheards two dwarves arguing about the location where their merchant friend lost his cargo to the raiding orcs. Rhadec takes notion about the information to later use [INSERT SIDEQUEST HERE].

Soon Teziir is left behind and our heroes are on the road again when it starts to rain. Trudging slowly onwards in the muddy soil they soon find themselves ambushed by bandits lead by bandit Chevko: “You have the priviledge of being robbed by the one and only, Chevko” the bandit states boldly. Knowing that messing in such situation would be deadly, a fight emerges and quickly dozens of crossbow bolts fill the air. Battle went quickly considering that this was, in fact, a fight with one purpose: Getting the players familiarized with the fourth edition rules. The bandits are soon defeated, but spared with one condition. Suddenly the bandits find themselves free from everything they’ve gathered before encountering the heroes.

Nights along the road pass nicely as heroes slowly approach their destination. Before reaching Westgate, Alukain suggests that the heroes take a small shortcut risking the dangers of the wilds, but saving at least a day of travel. They take the risk, but are unfortunate enough to find themselves agains an angry Cave Bear. As the heroes try to calmly withdraw from the situation, their nature checks go awry and the bear goes mad. Few more battlemarks in their skin, our heroes continue onwards.

Tameron was a village with a long history. Quiet, small village in the outskirts of lake Long Arm has stood there hundreds of years, its people known for their skills of survival. When our heroes arrived they saw that Tameron, was intact a small and humble village main building being the inn. The structures were made from strong and dark wood, though most of the buildings were covered in moss. Our heroes were greeted with mild neglect, polite smiles like an unwelcomed quests. What came to our heroes as a small surprise was that everything seemed somewhat outplaced and big in the village. Not the people themselves, but their food, cattle and such things. Meeting the old hero inside the inn, Garo Darkmoor, revealed that Tameron’s blessings were the reason why Tameronians never really asked for help and it was important that the heroes themselves were introduced as personal acquintaces of Garo, who had rich history outside the village. Garo told that when the mist arises, the dead come and they have to lock themselves to the inn until the morning comes. So far they’ve managed barely, but the times of change were at hand.

Jonas made way to the ponds only to learn that things were as they had suspected. There was threads of magic lingering in the water, which most likely had caused the unnatural size of the animals in the water. As the research continued our heroes awakened to a dark notion. A mist was rising. Quickly, Jonas, Rhadec and Alukain made way to the inn’s roof, deciding it would be best to pepper the undead with bolts and spells from the above while the villagers were safe inside. What they didn’t expect that even the undead… sometimes are capable of ranged attacks. A fierce fight against the emerging dead began and they fought and fought until finally, the attack had been repelled and the last threads of the mist were vanishing…

It has been four months since I was able to sit down to play some pen & paper roleplaying games. Being father to a small child of course reduces my time to play much, but nevertheless, I was able to pull together a group of new gamers who are willing to join the dark si… who are willing to have fun around the table. So now it is time for a new campaign, set in Forgotten Realms and it is called: Threads of Sanity.

“Those who had sought to claim the lands destroyed it.
Those who had wisdom chose to abandon it.
What was a memory falls to darkness,
the brightest flame shall flicker for men have become monsters.”
– Iannos Maraver, Keybearer —

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I know that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to create a good game. That is why we tend to see games copying each other’s ideas resulting in a flop or a success. But when a game combines different game genress together, it is risky business, but sometimes the risk is worth it; such is the case with Gearbox’s Borderlands.

Following a story of four treasure hunters set in a wasteland called Pandora, Borderlands is a loot-driven first-person shooter with role-playing game hooks throughout the game. The game has different zones to roam in and the in-game mechanics include a working log where you can track your quest and side-quests easily. This and a mixture of leveling up, skill-trees and gazillion guns (loot) winds up in a experience that will captivate most of the players for hours. It offers a lot of different ways to eliminate everything that stands in your way. The main theme song summarizes it well: There ain’t no rest for the wicked.

If you’re enjoying the story elements of a roleplaying game, I have bad news for you. Borderland’s story is shallow since all the good bits are more or less focused on the action bits, rather than in the story development. Personally I like good story within a game, but playing a game such as Borderlands, you don’t waste tears on the story cause everything else seems to be superb. Borderlands is about action and action shall it be, with a mild addiction to the game of course. We could say that in the case of Borderlands, the story is satisfying enough.

A good action game requires both; a solid sound presentation and great visuals. Borderlands has both. The visuals of the game are very nice, the cel-shaded graphics work especially well supporting the wasteland atmosphere the game has and I bet you won’t be complaining when you punch someone’s head in to a pulp for the first time. The sound presentation is exactly what to expect. There is a good amount of dark humor in the game with all of the crude jokes and entertaining one-liners. So tell your wife to go and see her friends and pump up the volume and enjoy some Borderlands action.

Now that we have covered the story and the visuals, it is time to move to the nice stuff: The actual gameplay. The character creation is a simple process. You have four characters to choose, each with unique style. You have Roland (Soldier/Medic/All-around-style), Lilith (Magic&Weapons-style), Mordecai (Sniper/Hunter-style) and of course Brick (Brute/Explosions/Melee-style). Luckily however, it really doesn’t matter what kind of weapons you’re going to prefer since you gain experience also in guns according the amount you use them. So you can create this brute huge melee smasher Brick with excellent skills on sniper rifle, if you wish to. And when it comes to weapons, Borderlands provides endless amounts of random generated weapons which all differentiate from other. With more than 17,000,000+ weapon choices, I sure do believe that you need more than a few playthroughs to see the same gun.

There are many ways to enjoy Borderlands. You can just run through the game if you wish to with all of the action packed charm of the game or spend hours running the side-missions which are quite numerous. There are about 30 main missions and 130 side-missions to go through + you can refight the bosses again and again if you wish to. Numerous side-missions are a nice addition, since it allows players such as myself, to properly level up my character. The missions itself are somewhat simple; you either kill someone, activate something, find something or do a combination between those three. Still, these missions are enjoyable (sometimes little boring if you play alone), helping players to prolong the game, find some serious loot while scouring through the wastelands of Pandora.

While the game doesn’t have a good story, it covers it with the actual game play and that is: Action. You will find yourself numerous times in the middle of the action, even if you were planning to snipe out each monster you face because there are always few monsters who manage to get through even with sniper style of play. One option is to embrace the action and play as Brick hurling melee punches to colossal monsters and brutes of the wasteland. Each style has its advantages and disadvantages, but there really is no “golden way” to play the game. So don’t worry about which character you’re going to play or are some weapons better than others because you will do fine anyway. With the handy new-u stations, you can even redistribute your skill points if for some reason, you choose poorly. The game has been built so, that you can easily find your own style of playing the game.

The best way to play Borderlands is nevertheless, to go online. If your friend is thinking about buying a new game, buy Borderlands together and it surely does the trick. With each character having their own specialties, having support from different character helps a lot. The best thing in online co-op is, that even the “dull missions” turn out to be more interesting, since you have a lot more options and tougher enemies to face. Tougher enemies also provides better loot! Driving a car with your friend sitting in the gunner turret is a real pleasure. While many multiplayer games offer somewhat different amounts of experience points to each player, Borderlands divides the experience equally. If you get 300xp, your friend gets 300xp. If they find 50$ you find 50$. The only difference is the guns, but so far there has not been no arguments since by playing together, you survive better if both players have good equipment. The difficulty level is always determined from the level of the players and of course, the host of the game. While the online is well balanced you must remember, that joining a lvl 50 game with lvl 1 character is still going the get your ass beat. All in all, the multiplayer aspect of Borderlands is impressive and entertaining despite it has few bugs. Occasionally the voice of the other player dropped or the online mode just simply argued to start. With good amount of patches underway, these problems are a disappearing slowly.

Borderlands has positively surprised me, since I somewhat missed the game when it was released. Every game has it small faults, but as a summary; Borderlands is a rock-solid gunplay experience with good amount of rpg elements in the game. It is a blast and I find myself going back to Pandora surprisingly often, especially if my friends are around to help me out. Considering how fun I’ve had so far with this game, you will be seeing reviews about the DLC in the near future. What I would also like to see is a pen & paper version of the Borderlands setting.

I heard so much good of this book from my friends and the reviews I’ve seen about the book has been almost nothing but praise. So I finally took my time to read the book and see how my expectations from book were fullfilled.

“The Thorn of Camorr is said to be an unbeatable swordsman, a master thief, a ghost that walks through walls. Half the city believes him to be a legendary champion of the poor. The other half believe him to be a foolish myth. Nobody has it quite right.”

The Lies of Locke Lamora is the book one of the Gentleman Bastard series by Scott Lynch. Many books start of with a bang, but The Lies of Locke Lamora isn’t one of those books. The story builds up gradually and includes interesting ‘interludes’ just enough for you to know what has previously happened to explain events in the present. This way, the game only becomes clear when the pieces are assembled at the end of the chapter. A neat way keeping up the readers in the dark when the protagonists have all the information, and is used thorhough the book. As you progress through the book and things get really interesting the pace becomes faster until all the various plot threads come together in a frantic finale.

The “hero” of the tale is no other than the Thorn of Camorr, Locke Lamora. Locke has his own style, perpetrating elaborate and lucrative scams on the nobility of his home city Camorr. All the accumulated wealth however does not go for the poor, they never see a penny, but instead the gains go to himself and his band of thieves: The Gentleman Bastards.

There are many small gangs in the somewhat ancient city of Camorr and the Gentleman Bastards eventually find themselves caught in a mystery: The Grey King is murdering thieves which almost tears underworld apart with a clandestine war. As you can imagine, Locke and the Gentleman Bastards are unfortunately caught in the middle of it and their wits are truly tested in their struggle to stay alive.

The whole book is like a witty gangster film set in fantasy equivalent of old Venice. The atmosphere is interesting, almost tingling, and the book holds the reader with a tight grip from the beginning pages until the end.Lynch succeeds admirably by delivering a cinematic experience with interesting and somewhat unusual characters who really have depth in them; Especially Locke himself.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy novels. The Lies of Locke Lamora was colorful, cunning, humorous and really possessive book. A true “page-turner”.

Every roleplayer sooner or later finds him/herself in a situation that he wants to create his own fantasy map. Some of us are talented with the pencil while others are not. Endless Bag Of Games shows you a simple way to create fantasy maps with Photoshop and brushes. This tutorial is for the ones who are not so very talented. Now then, there are some preparations before we start.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

I’ve seen many tutorials that begin with the creation of that old looking paper like we have used to see. I’ll say don’t bother, because there are huge amount of royalty free images to choose from if you just know where to look. Now http://www.sxc.hu is one such place, where you can easily find yourself a solid image for your map. We’ll be using the following image. You don’t have to pick the same, choose any you want. LINK FOR THE PICTURE

Now that you have the map, you are ready to go? No! Don’t start the software just yet because true slacker knows that there might be something useful yet to be found and that is: Brushes. There are many sites that are sharing useful brushes for your maps. So if you know that your drawing skills are not so awesome, I’ll tell you to go look for the brushes and you still might achieve the results that you want. So go i.e. to Devianart and search for some brushes. In this tutorial, were are using these brushes (nice Tolkien look). Thanks to cathyechild for these brushes.

http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&global=1&q=tolkien+style+map#/d2amw36
http://calthyechild.deviantart.com/art/I-Want-More-Mountains-brushes-138817735

Now that you are ready to go, form an image in your mind what are about to create. A simple pencil sketch is enough, or a clear image in your mind will do. Actually, you can just go with the flow and see what happens (but I don’t recommend that)

Step 1: Results

Step 1: Open the image and create a duplicate of it.
Photoshop is all about layers and blending modes and using them effectively to achieve good results. So first, select file->open to open your base image and since we want to make sure that the original image stays intact, select your image from the layers palette and press ctrl+J so we will have a duplicate of the image. Then rename that layer to base map. After that, if you’re using the same image as I am, select image->image rotation->90′ to the direction you want.

Step 2: Create some new layers.
Next what you want to do is to create new layers by clicking an image at the bottom of the layers palette and rename those layers accordingly. Create a new layer for: mountains, forests, cities and roads and finally colors.

The reason we’re making so many layers is that if we make mistakes, it is easier to make adjustments and corrections to the layer where the correction affects only the desired objects.

Step 3: Create the continent.

Now what I want you to do is to select the base map layer, click Q (or choose from tool palette edit in Quick Mask) then hit B (or choose brush from the tool palette) and begin drawing the outlines of the continent you want to have. You should have something like the image below.

Now choose paintbucket and fill the drawn image until it is completely red. Now that you have the continent you want selected, press Q again to exit Quick Mask mode and you have made a selection that is going to be your landmass. Now you actually have now selected everything around the landmass so press Ctrl+Shift+I (or select->inverse). Now you simply copy the selected area so press Ctrl+C to copy the selected area and then Ctrl+V to paste it. As a result, you should have new layer which is your landmass. Rename this new layer as continent. Now right-click the continent layer and select blending modes->stroke and set size to 2px.

Step 4: Alter the base map to create sea.

Now make base map layer active again and hold down alt and click create new adjustment layer (in the layers palette) and selected Hue and Saturation. Remember put mark to use previous layer to create clipping mask. Now a slider should pop up and you just move the slider until you have the color what you want the sea to have. After that, rename the layer to sea.

Results so far

ETA for my firstborn is now 81 days away which means that “the real life” takes toll from all of my hobbies in general. That, and absence of players during the summer in mind, I unfortunately had to put our Shield of Ferelden campaign to a pause. This also means, that there won’t be weekly session logs at EBoG at least for a while now. Winter might be a different matter, but we’ll see. Roleplaying still kicks ass however.

Nevertheless, I still continue to write reviews. In fact, I’ve decided that I include reviews from the books that I read, especially from the Fantasy genre. Yesterday I posted a review about Best Served Cold and I plan to make reviews at least from The First Law trilogy and some of George R.R. Martin’s work in the near future. I also have more time for random board game sessions and to my miniatures what I’ve been collecting steadily in silence. So Endless Bag of Games will see bit less session logs, but more reviews and thoughts about miniatures perhaps.

Few weeks ago we tried real “DDM” game with my friend from work and I got really good impressions from it (since I kicked some ass). I know that official DDM line is cancelled, but DDMGuild lucklily continues the legacy of creating miniature stats for the future minis.

So this is how things are going at Endless Bag of Games. Books, board games, Video games and Roleplaying games through e-mail for now. Still hope to see you around and you’re always welcome to write quest posts or suggest ideas for articles.

P.S I’ve also started doing some photography which means I can take photos about rpg-related stuff more better. You can see some of my work here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/50523523@N03/

-MkaY-

I have not written book review in ages, but when I finished Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, I knew that I have to say a word or two, just to encourage people to familiarize themselves with Abercrombie’s work. Without further ado, here is my two cents.

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie has earned notions being fast paced, gritty and full of interesting characters. Honestly speaking, when I started reading the First Law Trilogy, it was the first time I felt that I am watching a fast paced movie instead of reading a book. Best Served Cold makes no exception to those notions. It is still tense experience which takes you to take dangerous environment where actions always has consequences and revenge is a dish Best Served Cold.

I try not to reveal too much from the actual plot, so I describe everything very generally. The storys focus is revenge and in the middle is Monzcarro Murcatto, a mercenary who along with her brother strive from victor to victor. Soon things go awry and Murcatto soon finds herself broken and having a good deal of revenge to deliver. So begins the bloody quest for revenge in a setting full of would-be despots, criminals, soldiers and treachery; Styria. Best Served Cold is a Fantasy novel with strong absence of magic.

As you can imagine, the road for revenge is long and rough ride. As Murcatto continues her quest, it leaves marks to her and her companions affecting to the relationships between the characters. In fact, during the journey the attitudes of the characters transform from hopeful to somewhat fatalistic as the characters learn that they might have become ones they used to despise. All is handled with smooth and delicate touch.

The setting itself is described very vividly, making the cities feel somewhat more like characters with personalities rather than just places to dwell. Canals full of cutpurses, courtesans and a quite amount of architecture to deliver a feeling that Styria is long from its golden age. While I was reading the book, I really felt that everywhere there were some signs of violence and war. In fact, the violence of Best Served Cold is one of the things to remember; swords collide in way that it is remembered, the battles can be exhausting and last a good while, until other delivers something devastating and it always leaves scars. Honestly, I haven’t seen so good usage of scars for a good while. The violence in the book is not for the faint-hearted. Some of the scenes were really.. something. Even for my taste.

Best Served Cold is another fantasy novel that is highly recommended. The tale is engaging and it challenges the reader. The mood is refreshing and somewhat similar which could be found from the First Law trilogy; dark, somewhat depressing and bleak with just the right amount of humor and killer one-liners.