I lost myself in the black hole of Dragon Age: Origins yesterday.  And while I’m feeding my Castle addiction tonight, I’m sharing my initial impressions before diving back in.

Character Generation

I opted for the Dalish Elf Rogue.  Then I went through the personalization options.  I have to admit, I was a little overwhelmed with all the personalization options.  Eye color, eye distance, eye shape, hair color, hair style, eye brow shape, eye brow color, etc, etc.  But I eventually managed to find a combination of all elements that looked okay to me, and then I was off.

Spoiler-Free Game Conversation

I promise not to ruin it for anyone, so this will be completely spoiler-free.  The game play is exceptional.  While some of the twists were a bit predictable, there were still moments where I sat flabbergasted at the turn of events.  So far, it’s been fun, it’s graphically beautiful, it’s entrancing, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

There were a few little things that took me a bit to adjust to.  First, I was surprised that there wasn’t an option to adjust to amount of blood/gore.  It’s not overwhelming, but I was surprised that there wasn’t an option for it.

Second, it took me a bit to become accustomed to the camera angle.  I think part of this was because I’d been playing Fable 2, and I expected a certain level of camera control.  There really isn’t camera control available beyond the thumb stick control.  I adapted quickly, and it hasn’t been an issue for my experience.

I’m heading back in to the game now.  If you haven’t started playing it yourself, I recommend you get moving.

That’s right. Nobody wants to hear about your character. Don’t regale people with stories of his exploits. And for the love of Pelor, don’t blog about those exploits. When we first started Stupid Ranger, I used to hear this quite a bit. I’d try to make points and back them up based on things that happened in our campaign. Occasionally, I’d just tell a funny story. Usually the reader response to this was mostly positive. But more often than not, somebody would come along and complain that nobody wants to hear about my character.

I offer the following response to anyone who ever told me that.

Who is this fine fellow with a hot chick and a devil baby at his side, you might ask? I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that because that would be talking about my character.

Long-time readers of Stupid Ranger may remember a post way back in January of ’08 in which I detailed the exploits of my rock-n’-roll bard Bat Loaf and his attempt to conceive a child atop the legendary Tarrasque.  This post exploded a few minds and then lay dormant for over a year, when someone emailed me out of the blue and asked if they could draw my character. As it turned out, this person happened to be an artist by the name of Adam Black. I hadn’t seen his work before, but it was plain to me pretty much immediately that this dude was really good at his craft and he deeply understood what Bat Loaf was about. Adam runs a site called Monsters & Nekkid Ladies (NSFW, duh), the contents of which are pretty self-explanatory. Lots of demons and boobs and swords and monsters. And demon boobs. Adam also draws a really excellent webcomic called Locus (NSFW again) and he created the (now sadly defunct) KISS 4K webcomic. Yes, for that KISS. Basically, I’m not sure I could have asked for a better person to draw Bat Loaf had I done an exhaustive search of the planet to find one, and here he was offering to draw him.

A couple days ago, Adam got me the finished piece. As you may have guessed, I am about to vibrate into tiny little pieces due to the criminal levels of excellence applied to this picture of my bard.  In all seriousness, I have to thank Adam from the bottom of my heart for doing this for me. I’m just happy to have written something that made people laugh, and to have someone so skilled magically appear and bring one of my favorite creations to life in such detail was one of the most excellent things that’s ever happened to me. Please go to his site and show the man some love. It’s the metal thing to do.

Just think — this never would have happened if I hadn’t blogged about my character. (And, as you can see, the mission my character set out to accomplish atop the Tarrasque was a resounding success!)

I recently read the first two books in R.A. & Geno Salvatore’s Stone of Tymora series.  This fairly new series is written for a young adult audience, telling a coming of age story and including cameos of Salvatore’s beloved Forgotten Realms characters.

A Brief Introduction

The first book, The Stowaway, begins in medias res, with Maimun imprisoned in a cave somewhere.  He begins telling his story to one of the pirates, which lets us as readers catch up on his story.  In The Shadowmask, the second book in the series, Maimun continues telling his story.

Maimun is a young man is suddenly caught up in a series of crazy, confusing events.  He finds himself alone in the world, trying to avoid a powerful enemy he never knew existed and trying to figure out the mystery of the stone that’s been his from birth.  As readers, we follow along with Maimun’s story, waiting to see how Maimun ended up in that cave in the first place and how the whole story ends.

Thoughts on The Stowaway

The Stowaway is an intriguing book, and I very much enjoyed stepping into Maimun’s story.  The structure was a bit difficult to follow at times, though; there’s a little bit of back-tracking to fill in Maimun’s history, and the back-and-forth nature of the story-telling was a little confusing at times, but all the confusing wrinkles were ironed out by the end of the book.  The book ends with the introduction of another antagonist, who leaves Maimun with a difficult situation to address in the next book.

Thoughts on The Shadowmask

The Shadowmask picks up immediately where The Stowaway ended.  We learn more of Maimun’s story as he continues telling his tale to the pirate.  We see a little bit more character growth in this book, especially as Maimun tries to unravel the mystery introduced at the conclusion of the previous book.  The Shadowmask ends fairly abruptly, leaving readers waiting for the next book in the series to find out what happens to bring about Maimun’s imprisonment and if he can escape.

Thoughts on the Pair

The books share a similar structure: three sections, which are introduced by Maimun’s conversation with the pirate.  I like the conversations as a way to foreshadow the upcoming story, though, as I mentioned, it was a little difficult to follow in the early part of the first book.

There’s a good combination of light-heartedness and drama throughout both books, and the balance of action and story-telling moves the plot along without dragging.  I did find some of the story to be a bit predictable, but considering the young adult audience, it was not overly annoying; I would advise mature readers to be prepared for obvious plot devices and predictable behavior from Maimun.

Both books are set during the time of R.A. Salvatore’s The Pirate King, and there are cameo appearances by Drizzt, Bruenor, Wulfgar, Catti-Brie and Regis.  The cameos from are lightly handled and do not take over the story too much.  In The Stowaway, the encounters between Maimun and Drizzt feel more casual than they do in The Shadowmask, mostly due to the differences in plot surrounding those encounters.

Overall, I enjoyed both books as light, quick reads, and I am looking forward to the future release of the third.  The Stowaway is currently available, and The Shadowmask releases Tuesday, Nov 11.  For those who enjoy a good, young adult fantasy story with a bit of swashbuckling action thrown in, I recommend these books.

It’s rare that excellent D&D ideas get generated from Twitter, primarily because of the word count… but today I was pleasantly surprised!  Gabe over at Penny Arcade posted up this example of how their group does skill challenges in between sessions via email.  I think this is a great idea, especially if you can engineer a situation where a little outside-the-session intrigue is in order.

He claims that their group ends up doing something like this almost every week and I think it’s a GREAT idea.  In my old campaign, we would periodically do offline blog posts as our characters and I would provide a little roleplaying experience, but this takes the idea of online campaign content in a different way that I really think is cool.

Has anyone else tried doing this yet?  How did it go for you?  Let’s hear from you in the comments!

I was on vacation for most of last week. And by “vacation”, I mean I drove 900 miles to go see my SR compatriots in Colorado, and then my whole family got sick with the flu. My son, in particular, blasted curdled milk and hotdogs all over Dante’s lap. Then we drove home and my wife barfed in a truck stop and I HAVEN’T HAD A WHOLE LOT OF SLEEP LATELY OKAY!!!@ AAAHAHHAHA

Thusly, I have been woefully negligent of posting all the Dragon Age stuff I’ve been sent lately. So here is a big frickin’ megaflood of it. ENJOY!

There’s a Character Creator app out for the PC version of Dragon Age out now, in case you want to hit the ground running when the game comes out.

Character Creator (English) – http://files.bioware.com/dragonage_cc_dl/DragonAgeOriginsCharacterCreator_en.exe

And a social network, too. Think of it as Dragon Agebook. Or Broodmotherbook. That’s where every time you throw up in your mouth a little bit, and it automatically posts when you did it and what you had for lunch.

Dragon Age Origins Social Network – http://social.bioware.com/home.php

This is where some lucky bastard gets flown out to London, England and FORCED to play Dragon Age at gunpoint in the hopes of winning $50,000. Informative PSA at the following link FOR YOUR PROTECTION.

Warden’s Quest Gaming Event – https://rcpt.yousendit.com/757914063/31dc24f8288e2a311ca27d6d6f813dad

And now, some screenshots and trailers for your viewing pleasure. File sizes may be fairly large. However, their awesome-to-size ratio is favorable.

Dungeons

https://rcpt.yousendit.com/755168573/fd80a0df7d413fe995774017ea900888

Character Creator

https://rcpt.yousendit.com/753924043/1c9d6d0c3525ee7bbf9a8a0a12e01c2e

Villages

https://rcpt.yousendit.com/757078567/8add3b4ebb4d5b5443e603adbb6d0ebc

OHGREN!

https://rcpt.yousendit.com/760203187/f467c059e90261ea30f7f389e1452968

Thus ends my flood. I cannot wait for this game to come out. WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME WAIT, BIOWARE? WHY???

Tonight, I had an opportunity to talk about campaign building with e from Geek’s Dream Girl who was working on her own storyline.  This quickly got me thinking about how I put storylines together, and here we are.

Always know the motive

When you’re trying to put a storyline together, often you’ve got a vague idea of the characters or encounters that you want to have happen.  The best part to string seemingly disparate elements of a story together is to figure out a motive why these events would be occuring, or the motive of a character or entity that can make these events happen for you.  The best part about this pattern is that you can weave storylines together.

In my current campaign, I’ve got three storylines that intersect based on the actions that my characters take.  They’ve already had an opportunity to fundamentally change at least one storyline, which in turn would’ve changed elements of the other two.  The best part about this mode of story design is that you can choose to accentuate a certain storyline if you find that one such thread is working better for your group.

Motive only gets you so far… and you don’t have to share the reasons!

You don’t necessarily have to explain every last aspect of the motivation of your characters within a story.  Once you get things going, I strongly encourage roleplaying with my characters.  It may turn out that they will take the plot that you begin in a different, more interesting direction.  This is the main reason why I award roleplaying experience… it writes aspects of my plotline for me!

In fact, I have some content written based off of an incorrect assumption that one of my players made.  They took a pre-written plot point from Keep on the Shadowfell and assumed it happened somewhere else.  The player wasn’t wrong, they were just working with the information they had.  Because this piece of the campaign would work anywhere, I opted to let them go with it.  Now another major piece of my campaign is built on this piece of player generated content.

This provides a fringe benefit of the player “being right” when they show up to find something important happening where they thought it would.

So think long and hard about the motives that drive your early storyline, and foster roleplaying to help them take flight.

In my current campaign, I designed a small single-level dungeon for our players to explore.  Now, our group is comprised of several people that have children, so often our gaming sessions get punctuated by real life family needs.  The pacing and planning of our game sessions have transitioned somewhat naturally to episodes of content throughout the session, and there’s no reason that dungeons need to be any different.

Different Encounters Suit Different Needs

Battle encounters are pretty straightforward and there really isn’t much that can be done here aside from scaling the number or difficulty of bad guys up and down.  However, how you choose to tether these battle encounters together can make all the difference.  Within our dungeon, I built in puzzles, reward challenges (which I will cover in a moment) and standard battles all alongside one another.

Often when certain members of our group are putting their children to bed, the rest of the group can either choose to continue with a smaller non-battle challenge, or the game simply pauses in order to accomodate them.

Reward Challenges

This isn’t a new concept, however it is one that I have started to employ in lieu of treasure parcels.  So badly did I want to use the trap creation rules of the DMG and DMG2, I decided to accumulate a few parcels of treasure from bad guys in the dungeon and hang a easy-to-medium level difficulty trap around it for them to overcome.  You would be amazed to watch how many lengths your players will go through to get at some treasure, and how much they doubt that a giant treasure chest full of gold is safe to touch.

If I had a silver piece for every time I heard “this had better not be a Mimic” I would be a pretty rich Dungeon Master!

Pacing is your friend

In all, learning to structure your campaign to suit your audience is a fun process.  Figuring out what works, what makes your group crazy (in the bad way) and what makes your group crazy (in the good way) is a great process to sharpen your Dungeon Mastering skills.  As always, the cardinal rule of branching out into new territory is to listen to your players.  They usually do a fair job of communicating to you what is working and what isn’t.

I’m happy to report that the entire StupidRanger crew has converged at StupidRanger West Headquarters.  Vanir and Efreak have joined us on their vacation, so the whole band is back together for the first time in over a year.  This means several things: gaming, gaming, and more gaming.

And nobody will have to decide anything…

As some of you may remember, Efreak has an aversion to traditional D&D.  It happens to also be Vanir’s birthday this week, so we gifted him an acceptable alternative to this situation: Talisman, by Fantasy Flight Games.  So this weekend we will be giving this one a try.  The graphics and look of it reminds me of an old game I used to play as a kid named Hero Quest.  This one appears to be less dungeony and more card-based, but it still looks like it will be a good time.

This is a considerable departure from our usual gaming motives.  Previously, our group has proven to be very change-averse so trying out a new type of game is a pretty big deal for us.  Here’s to hoping it’s fun!

It seems that a common feature of the expansions to the core rulebooks seem to be punchy little sections expanding the available artifacts.  The DMG2 offers a great segment on new artifacts, which provides a few classic favorites and some more meat behind the principles of artifact creation presented in previous books.  Here I present a long overdue look at this excellent segment of the DMG2.

Artifact Care and Feeding: Concordance and you!

The preamble to the artifact details outline some excellent advice for how and when to introduce artifacts into your game.  There are a few paragraphs outlining how to put your players in conflict with the motives of the provided artifacts and how to embed the artifacts more fully into the backstory of your campaign.  Happily, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to heavily ingrained artifacts and your campaign.

I really enjoy the sections of the book that relate to artifact concordance.  The DMG2 expands artifact concordance with insets that expand on some background and motives behind certain artifacts.  For me, this is an invaluable tool that gives some context to these items and it helps to really polarize how I would use these in my own campaigns.  I particularly like the descriptions when the artifact is pissed off at the character and what negative effects come along with it, mostly because I like seeing how the artifacts will screw with my players.  Does that make me a bad person?  Yes, but I don’t care.

Some old favorites, and some new hotness…

As many of you have already discovered, the DMG2 repackages the Rod of Seven Parts and the Cup and Talisman of Al’Akbar – two classic artifacts of editions past.  The effort to retreat these artifacts is great… they seem to fit organically into the new edition.  In addition, these two really articulate the value of the concordance tiers.

For fun, I went ahead and took a few artifacts that I have encountered in past and found it very easy to fit most artifact archetypes into this pattern.  But I get off-topic… some of the new artifacts almost act as set items.  One such set, Rash and Reckless, is two sets of boots that can bestow special abilities on the person that is wearing the other pair of boots.  In addition, you get some Dexterity related benefits to your attacks.  These boots can suggest courses of action to the wearers, sometimes to the advantage of the character and other times merely to amuse or entertain the boots themselves.

If you haven’t already, check out this section of the DMG2.  I left the 14 pages with so many ideas I’m pretty sure I can’t contain them all in one campaign, which is a great problem to have!

Those of you paying attention recently may have noticed a small addition to our front page recently: the “Upcoming Conventions” section. We here at SR love going to conventions. We heart them. But, sadly, usually we only get to do one a year. A big, giant one in Indianapolis. But there are plenty of other ones out there. Yes, more than Dragon*Con. But you might not know about them. I personally feel extremely stupid for not knowing I had one all of a half hour away from my house until recently. And that’s why we’re going to try and highlight upcoming conventions wherever we can – so you never ever have to explain to your children why Daddy cries into a dicebag every October.

The nearby convention that I was completely unaware of happens to be FlatCon. Held Oct 2-4 at the Interstate Center in sunny Bloomington, IL (where I lived for almost a decade, hence the crying into a dicebag), Flatcon offers three days of good old fashioned gaming. The guys who run FlatCon (David Ross, Aaron Issac, and John Beemsterboer) were kind enough to take a few minutes out of their insane pre-convention schedule and answer a few questions about the proceedings:

1. Give us a little history about FlatCon and your involvement with the event.

DAVID:

Our single goal is to promote our gaming hobby.  We want to see this activity we spend hours enjoying shared with others.  Tabletop gaming is a blast!  It just has to be made approachable. We started the convention 10 years ago.  I originally had in mind running a Pinnacle (makers of Deadlands rpg and The Great Rail Wars miniature game) day.  A few folks were asking to run other games.  Aaron Isaac and I had just started gaming together, so he offered his organization skills.  The next thing I knew we had a small convention on our hands.  The first FlatCon was in the front of one game store and in the basement of another game store.  The two stores were a few blocks apart in downtown Normal, IL.  Records show we had 75 attendees, but I think it was more like 45.  My friends thought a higher number was better.  I didn’t care as we had a blast. From there we moved to running the convention at a local university.  Then eventually to our current location at the Interstate Center. For the last few years attendance has been around 450.

Aaron Isaac and I coordinate the 30+ volunteers who run the core of the convention.  These folks are the heart of the convention.  FlatCon would have never grown to what it is today without them.  It’s a very simple recipe.  Everyone doing one or two things for the convention adds up to the whole result needed.  This has really helped with volunteer burnout – especially in the key roles of Aaron and I.  I have a few volunteers that try to do too much, but we all quickly learn.  In a pinch we have several go to folks that will take on the extra bit needed to make the convention seem flawless.  In the first few years I never got to play games at our convention.  Now with our staff I play in 5 or more of the 7 slots.  Sunday during the last slot I’ll be playing The Great Rail Wars weird west miniatures game.  We have great traditions, and that one is mine.

AARON:

I was the friend of a person (Dave Ross) who thought it would be fun to get people together who like playing games.  Since Frontier Wars (a local gaming convention to Bloomington) had stopped year ago, Dave envisioned Flatcon.  I helped with some moderate planning and building skills.

2. How is FlatCon different from other gaming conventions people have been to?

DAVID:

What makes our con maybe a little different from some other cons is that all prize support goes towards raising money for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. Gamers for a Cure, a Relay for Life fund raising group, joins us for the third year in a row. Gamers for a Cure will be sponsoring a number of activities, including game demos, silent actions, a build-your-own-sword workshop and the ever imperative Prize Support Raffle. All proceeds raised from your prize support go to the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. Gamers for a Cure raised over $1,800 dollars in one weekend last year.

For a “small” convention we have some fantastic gaming experiences.  Aaron Isaac is Over the Top!  He’s built a 11 foot 28mm scaled space station.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this station could actually orbit while you play.  He’s also done a 3D tunneled StarShip troopers planet.  We have also seen several Star Wars battles recreated, like the battle of Hoth.  We have a 6 foot in diameter globe to play Risk on.  Our historical gamers have some of the best terrain and painted figures you will see outside of the larger historical conventions.  Last year we had Alamo, Pirates, WWII, and many other recreated battlefields.  These game guides are really detailed and offer very approachable games.

My kids love this convention.  They’ve grown up around FlatCon along with several other families.  We strive to offer a family friendly convention.  My daughter has been a Guitar Hero and my son revenged my characters demise in an old west game with flair

AARON:

Flatcon focused on customer service from the start.   What would make people have a great experience and what to come back to do it again.   Also one low cost for 3 days of games with exclusive games built for the convention being introduced each year.

3. What is Gamers For A Cure, and how can people help?

DAVID:

Our financial goal each year is to have enough funds to host another convention the following year.  Now we are expanding the goal and turning over the convention to new leadership.  These guys have been taking our convention to the next level.  They have given FlatCon a cause.  For me this has really been a feel good part of the convention for the last few years.  I am excited about having a focus of gaming for a cause. Joining FlatCon again this year is Gamers for a Cure, a group raising funds to help fight cancer. Gamers for a Cure will be sponsoring a number of activities, including game demos, a raffle, used game auction on Saturday, and a build-your-own-sword workshop. All proceeds raised will go to the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. The members of Gamers for a Cure have all been affected by cancer, having watched grandparents, parents, siblings, and spouses battle—and sometimes die—from the disease. One member, John Beemsterboer, helped his wife fight breast cancer after she was diagnosed with the disease while pregnant with their daughter, now 5.

JOHN:

Cancer is a devastating disease for any family to face. I want to do whatever I can to prevent others from going through what we went through. This is also an opportunity to support two great loves of my life: my wife and gaming.

4. What kind of games/activities can gamers find at the ‘con?

DAVID:

Tabletop Miniatures, Board and Card games, RPGs, RPGAs, CCGs, tournaments, computer console gaming Xbox,Wii, PS, computer pc gaming, videos, shopping, hands on activities – terrain making, painting, foam sword making … and more.

5. Any highlights or must-see events?

DAVID:

There are two Hoth battles – one with Legos™ another with 28mm miniatures.  These are huge games.  Also Aaron is bringing out the Space Station (11’ in diameter hex that you can play from the inside).

AARON:

Every year there is a completion to see who can build the ‘over the top’ game of that year.  Past winners have included a massive Star Wars Hoth Battle, A 6 foot World Globe on which Risk is played, a 12 foot diameter Space Station for Space Hulk..  You see things at Flatcon you don’t see other places.

6. What are you looking forward to playing most this year?

DAVID:

The Great Rail Wars miniatures game on Sunday.  I plan to sling some lead with my undead cowboys.  Kind makes it hard to take’m down.

AARON:

Last year the BattleStar Galactica board game was a hit with many of us.  We will try to navigate it this year with the new Pegasus expansion added.   I also look forward to playing in the annual RailWars tournament in which everyone has a great time and this will be the last year for Space Hulk on the large Space Station table.

Thanks to David, Aaron, and John for taking the time to tell us about FlatCon! I’m really excited about this thing, and it certainly doesn’t hurt that I’ll be helping a good cause. In fact, I will be attending Flatcon on Sunday Oct. 4. So, if you for some godforsaken reason want to meet me or put me in a murder van or something, now’s your chance. But bring either your WoW cards or a game of Catan. Because – no Catan, no van.

SEKRET FLATCON INFOEZ:

Location: Interstate Center, Bloomington IL

Website: http://www.flatcon.com

Contact Info: Contact Page (from their website)

P.S. If you’re organizing a local convention (or you go to one you’d like to see get a little more exposure) and you’d like to see an article about it on Stupid Ranger, please contact us at this email address: contact(AT)stupidranger.com