It's World Trees All the Way Down.

Yes, I'm still running a Nobilis game!  And I need to gush about it a smidgen.

Our current campaign is a bit of a reboot of the game I was running when last I wrote regularly, so the principals will be familiar.  In the meantime, we played a game about a sort-of-doomed Creation staring a almost-certainly-doomed Familia of Nobles, the Powers of Openings, Awakenings, Patience and Vengeance.  That campaign (subtitled "Ashes of an Age") is a long, fun, dark story.  Remind me to tell it to you sometime.

But my players seemed really interested in going back to the characters and the campaign we never really finished.  So, we rebooted, giving everyone a chance to re-imagine their characters, and giving our new player a chance to work her ideas in.  Which didn't completely happen...

In Nobilis, the group plays demigods that each have/are one concept that actually belongs to a bigger being, called an Imperator.  The concepts, or Estates, that each player chooses help to define who the Imperator will be.  In this case (campaign subtitled "When Worlds Fall"), my returning players each rebuilt their Powers of The Dead, Tracking, and Blood, while I threw in an NPC Power of Blades.  Their boss was a giant serpent/dragon named Nidhogg, the Serpent Who Gnaws at the Roots.  But the newer player had a great idea I couldn't ignore - she wanted to play someone old, and powerful outside of the normal dynamic of Noble and Imperator.  That character would get injured, and Nidhogg - ever the collector of stuff - would come to rescue her.  What's left of that new character's mythic essence translates into the Power of Release, which Nidhogg - ever the collector of stuff - claims as his own.

Oh, and the character - the new one, old and powerful?  It's basically Lilith, Adam's legendary first wife.

I was pretty friggin' happy that this idea fell in my lap - my first Nobilis campaign dealt heavily with the origins of humanity - in that setting, I had decided that Adam and Eve weren't really created, so
much as imported from beyond Creation.  Now I have another reason to re-imagine lots of characters from that first campaign, dust them off and make them relevant for a new game.

Most stories about the Garden blame the Serpent.  The Peacock got off  scott-free. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Themes are important for lots of table-top RPGs, and maybe more so for Nobilis.  A lot of the theme comes from the Estates the players choose, but also from the Code their characters adhere to.  Codes are sort of like political parties of demigods - and this group overwhelmingly focus on Codes that talk about individual freedom in some way.  Some focus on Humanity's freedom to direct their own fates, especially if that has dangerous or deadly consequences.  Others favor every being's freedom to be exactly what they are or should be.  And one prefers focusing on how to protect Humanity, including from themselves.  We definitely range all over the security vs. freedom spectrum.  I find it compelling and fun, so I often feature NPCs that relate to that somehow.

So far these characters have a great time dealing with large plot points in the most complicated way possible.  I've always been fortunate with this group of players, because they are very good at providing more hooks just by playing, and they're all pretty great at enjoying themselves even when their characters are in trouble or pain.  I still want to stand by the idea that any roleplayer can play Nobilis - but these people make the game for me.

Sometimes literally.


Bonus Links:

• My favorite art of Nidhogg, by Ruth Taylor
• A whole DeviantArt group for Nobilis art
• Tumblr for Jenna K. Moran, game designer for Nobilis.

Driving Occupied.

There's been an important development to my life since I updated this blog regularly that I haven't really talked about yet.

I actually drive, now.

Yeah, I have a car and everything.  I'd been an avowed pedestrian for a very long time.  You can get away with that, living in a college town in the Midwest.  Living in southern California...good luck.  Places where you can afford to live aren't always close to places that can employ you.  The bus and train systems seem fine, but just not dense enough to really work for me.

Now, I get sleepy as hell when I'm in a car for any length of time.  Actually, mornings seem fine - it's that afternoon/evening drive, after the workday, that drains my consciousness.  Music, for the most part, doesn't help, and that seems really odd.  It doesn't matter how much nostalgia I feel for a song, or how funny or catchy or how much it incites the feels, music can't seem to compete with the hypnosis of the slow crawl home.

I found a solution to both this problem and the fact that I don't read books as much as I used to.  Audiobooks and serial podcasts.

I seem to subscribe to a lot more things, these days, and one of those things is Audible.com.  This was my initial solution, and I could not stop gushing about how good it was.  I checked out a couple of Stephen King novels I hadn't read before - Mr. Mercedes, then Doctor Sleep (after The Shining, because before I had only seen the movie).  I finally finished The Baroque Cycle novels by Neal Stephenson, and just recently revisited an old favorite, Good Omens by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman.  And since each of these books are fairly lengthy, they managed to keep me awake for weeks of commuting.

It's weird to me that I can be perfectly aware of what I'm doing while driving at the same time as I'm giving a ton of attention to someone with an interesting voice read a good book to me.  How does this actually work?  I feel like I should have gotten into several small accidents or I should be missing huge gaps in the stories, but for some reason, brains seem to keep everything tidy.

From the intro for the first episode.  Hooked right there.

Meanwhile, my sisters had been hyping some podcasts for a while, and some of my nerdier friends had been hyping other podcasts.  I'm not (yet) into news or talk show podcasts - maybe I haven't found personalities that really interest me, but stories - stories hook me.  So I started checking some of those out.

My first, and favorite, has to be Welcome to Night Vale.  It's the ongoing story of a strange little city in the American Southwest, told by a local radio personality via his radio show.  Most episodes are, well, episodic, but that only helps highlight all the characters, all the stories going on there, and there is enough continuity to help me wonder what happens next.  It's not easy to sit on the edge of the driver's seat.

Other favorites I've found include Serial (thanks to my sister for that one), a much more serious, sobering, and less fictional story, and The Thrilling Adventure Hour, which is less serious, sobering, and...nah, probably equally fictional.  The Thrilling Adventure Hour is actually a number of more-and-less episodic stories, from space westerns to WWII-era adventures, all done in the style of, as they say, "old-time radio."

So, that's how I use my travel time wisely.  I ask you, theoretical reader - what totally legals means do you use to stay awake for your commute?  Do you have a favorite audiobook or podcast?  Do you just read normal novels while in traffic instead?


Disclaimer 1:  This post is not sponsored by Audible.  I just use it, because it is a thing I know exists.

Disclaimer 2:  Look for Welcome to Night Vale art on the internet, but be warned - none of it will leave you with less questions than you had before you searched.

Fooled Around and Fel in Love.

So, I mentioned once or twice that I've played World of Warcraft, right?

Since it's been awhile since we've talked about it, and update is in order.  The Cataclysm expansion saw most of the serious raiders leave our guild for guilds they could raid with - that expansion gave a lot of reasons for guilds to always raid as a guild, and so, eventually, our herd thinned.  And because our herd thinned, I became less interested in playing.  Other officers began to lose interest in the game, or in the guild, and we thinned more.  During the Mists of Pandaria expansion, we only had a handful of players who logged in, and were generally surprised in anyone else from the guild was around at the same time.  Ditto for Warlords of Draenor, even after a well-hyped launch.  I didn't log in regularly during either of these expansions.  Essentially, the steam was out of our sails, and without a certain amount of active people providing steam (analogy...breaking...down) we couldn't seriously try to recruit to get more steam providers.

Warlords of Draenor.  Pretty, but...where is everyone?

But we have a new expansion, Legion.  The storytelling is both literally and figuratively fantastic, the art is amazing, and the content is plentiful.  I've been hyped.  The remnants of the guild were, too.  So I started trying to recruit.  I'm back to playing WoW.

There's still a lot of recruiting to do - and I've been trying since May - but right now everyone is having so much fun with leveling and checking out the new systems and content that we aren't missing the number much.  We have a couple of great new members, and a couple of great vets.  It's a start that I'm grateful for.

On to Legion itself, though.  For one, loads of effort have gone into highlighting the individual classes and their specializations.  All "specs" have been reworked (as they usually do every expansion), but with a focus on making each spec feel different, special.  Shortly after starting the content, each character begins a quest line specific to their class, and part of that is choosing to hunt down a legendary (well, artifact - Blizzard has particular names for these things for reasons, I promise) weapon tied to one of that classes specs.  So yes, they have separate questing content for each of the 36 or so specializations in the game.  And this game has more specs now because they introduced a new hero class, the Demon Hunter.

Stop it.  I love antiheroes.

Then there are 4 leveling zones, so far one max-level zone that has loads of content that I'm nowhere close to finishing, 10 dungeons (well, 8 classic difficulty dungeons, and 2 more that are only available in the new "Mythic" difficulty).  The first raid just unlocked yesterday, and there's a new difficulty system for dungeons that keeps that content challenging and rewarding even past the normal, Heroic and Mythic modes.  And they've also introduced World Quests - a system that basically replaces static end-game daily quests with randomly selected quests out in the new zones that may stick around for 4 hours to 6 days, and are then replaced by different quests.  Oh!  And crafting and gathering professions also have large, immersive quest lines, too!

Warlords of Draenor was heavily criticized for it's lack of content.  Does it show?

Let's see how much you like green after a couple years.

The main plot at the start is that the demonic horde of the WoW universe, the Burning Legion, is invading Azeroth for the third time, and they seem to know about charms, now.  Invasion warships, protals, and evil green fire are everywhere, and we're in trouble.  Heroes are lost.  The factions are reeling.  The classes are banding together across the faction lines of Alliance and Horde even as some old faction tensions flare up again.  We take up our awesome new artifact weapons, and rally our factions, or classes, and the populations of the new zones - the Broken Isles - against villains who can now respawn almost as fast as we can, thanks to a giant, open portal to the demons' home, the Twisting Nether (basically, evil space).

I'm back on my warlock, my "main" since Mists of Pandaria.  And even though I want to play through all the class-specific stories on all of my other characters, there's just so much to do with my main.  It's a great problem to have.

I'm sure I'll gush about my experiences in game a bit more in later posts, but for now, I'd like to share a few WoW-playin' YouTubers that have helped build the hype for me.


You May Also Enjoy:

• Preach Gaming
• BellularGaming
• Taliesin & Evitel Do Games

...I'm not sure why my list is full of British people, but run with it.

Welcome Back / Getting Out There.

Hallos again, players.

It's been a while!  I've been planning a return to blogging (see the last post, over a year ago, suggesting just that thing!), so here we go - a weekly blog, published Wednesdays, talking about a variety of games, movies, books...basically whatever nerdy thoughts I have that week.  I really want to get back into a regular writing schedule - a writing groove, if you will.  If you somehow find this blog, feel welcome to comment - my hope is to have real interaction with other people about there about these topics, in a way that isn't lost in a comment thread with eleventy-thousand other people.

Unless, of course, we get eleventy-thousand people reading this blog.

Besides writing, I've also been playing around with a few other ways to talk about and show off my nerdy interests.  Now, you may know I play video games - particularly MMORPGs, but since the last time I wrote regularly, I've picked up a few other games, like Minecraft (of a few modded varieties), Overwatch, and a smidgen of Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone.

Yes, I seem to be a Blizzard fanboy.

Fanman.

Whatever.

The point is, I have new games to talk about, but also new games to STREAM.  Yup - I've got myself a decent microphone, an alright webcam, and a Twitch account.  The experience has been...different.  I haven't often had people interact in chat while I've been streaming (so far just Minecraft, WoW and Overwatch), but when they do?  It's usually just to spam abusive, racist or sexist crap.  I did have one awesome interaction with someone from Europe who decided to check me out.  This is mostly awesome to me in relation to the others, but also in the fact that it was someone who shared an interest with me from half a globe away.  Striking up a conversation with a stranger about anything has been a terrifying idea for so much of my life, so it's amazing that I could randomly, casually chat with someone from such a distance away about a thing we both found fun.  I like Twitch, but I must confess that even after streaming several times, I'm still a bit shy.  I need to stream more.  Maybe I should work out a schedule for that, too.

And after streaming, I've been uploading the videos to my YouTube channel - partially in order to save the streams I've done (Twitch only holds onto them for a month, maybe?), but also because I myself have been going to YouTube a lot more for geekish news and content.  What started as a way to get info about the alpha for World of Warcraft: Legion ended up introducing me to a host of channels from content creators about games, comics, and general nerdy news.  I'd like to venture into the world of YouTube videos myself soon - proper videos of me talking to a supposed audience, rather than just copies of my streams.

Baby-steps.  Let's just get the writing thing down for now.

So, since I lost wrote regularly, my life has changed drastically, and got itself sorted out again.  I'm not really going to go into all of that here, but old posts may refer to situations and people, and new posts may refer to different situations and different people.  Crap like that can happen when I forget to update my blog for 4 years.

I'm also currently running another Nobilis campaign with a fantastic group  of players - most part of my old group, with one newer player - as well as playing in two D&D campaigns - one 4e game that I've talked about in the past, and one 5e game that's going pretty well.  I have tons more to say about all of that, so I'll save it for later - just wanted to keep you all in the loop.

Related articles

• Twitch co-founder discusses the site's efforts to move beyond live gaming content (techcrunch.com)
• Azeroth Burns With Excitement for Legion! (blizzard.gamespress.com)

It stirs.  It awakens.

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Force Lightning and Robes With Hoods.

In pure me fashion, I end up playing (relatively) good guys in the Sith Empire.

The game is Star Wars: The Old Republic, and as previously mentioned, I've been playing since just before public launch.  A handful of guildies from WoW were going to form up Imperial-side, but I wasn't sure I was going to play this game at first.  I was busy trying to keep our WoW guild afloat, and failing.  I wanted to be more dedicated to putting in the effort there, not spending time on another game.  Even if it is Star Wars.  And Bioware.

But it is Star Wars.  And it is Bioware.

And friends who played in the beta were sold--so, a couple of days left in the early access launch, I signed up. I made a character on the server (damnit, I hate having to choose servers) that my WoW guildies were talking about--a Sith Inquisitor, a master of the darker, esoteric disciplines of the Dark Side.

Palpatine-y! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Think lots of purplish lightning, robes with hoods.  You know.  Emperor Palpatine-y.

The game has a focus on story not seen in most MMORPGs.  Okay, any MMOs I've seen so far.  The story is personal for SWTOR.  Each main character class has a specific background and storyline that lasts through all 50 levels in 4 story arcs, and keeps pace with the more generic content designed for all characters.  As your class's story progresses, you gain access to a handful of companions that can fulfill various roles in combat, and have a range of personalities.  They come with their own quests that unlock as they learn to like and trust your character more--which happens as you make decisions while questing with them (or by giving them nifty gifts).  Oh!  and you make decisions while questing that can align you more-or-less with the Light side or Dark side of the Force!  Beware--evil makes you ugly.

The game content makes it obvious that it's a continuation of Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic games.  If you played those, enjoy a look at the galaxy 300 years later.

But what is this Legacy subsystem I mentioned before?

Well, it's late, but it's here, at least in part.  It's a rewards system, of sorts, for playing.  After your first character finishes Chapter 1 (which includes the Prelude) at around level 30, you gain Legacy XP along with your character's normal XP.  From them on, any character you play on that server also adds to the Legacy XP total.  Legacy XP (finally) unlocks a bunch of features that are either free, or cost in-game currency (credits, or creds if you're cool).  Got a character to level 50?  Congrats--you can now make a character of that race for ANY class in the game, Imperial or Republic side.  Is that level 50 character a human?  Like mine?  Then they give all your characters a bonus to the stat that makes their companion characters more effective.  You can also buy a bunch of convenience items for your starships--mailboxes, repair droids, Trade Network kiosks, etc....  Your characters gain special emote commands and abilities depending on which of your other characters reach certain benchmarks in the game.  Got a Sith Warrior to Chapter 2?  You unlocked the /warrior emote for all characters that makes them roar and flex with the power of the Dark side--and your class-based buffing ability now automatically includes the Sith Warrior buff as well.  Get your Sith Inquisitor to level 50, and now your characters can all summon a storm of Force Lightning  once in a heroic moment.

So, this stuff makes character creation and play more flexible.  Which is awesome if you want to go beyond the original restrictions to make an even more remarkable character.

See, I'm gushing about the game, and I haven't even mentioned how guilty I feel for not being more active in WoW in, like, paragraphs.

But, like WoW and other MMOs, sometimes something happens in the game world (galaxy), and suddenly there is new, special content to deal with the event!  Bioware has been pretty good with introducing more content with updates, but this week the game world (galaxy!) was rocked by an outbreak of a mutant-zombie-esque plague, infecting and killing "tens of thousands," and giving players even more reason to be more active, with new daily quests, world  bosses and rewards that include companion skins, pets and weapon color customizations.

Now, while temporary vaccines are available, some people have embraced (are down with) the sickness spreading throughout the game wor...the galaxy.  Since dying to the plague gives you special currency to use for the event's rewards, people on both sides of the new galactic war are cooperating to infect and reinfect each other using PvP mechanics.

Who knew that such a devastating event could bring the galaxy to a new peace?

Anyway.  I'm thoroughly invested in the game, now.  My characters are, by and large, relatively good guys who happen to be a part of a nasty, evil empire--and I have some characters on another server to explore the Republic side of the story.

I don't care what you've heard.  Get in there.

Related articles

• A look at Star Wars: The Old Republic's end game (news.cnet.com)
• Blizzard Admits that People May Be Leaving WoW For The Old Republic [World Of Warcraft] (kotaku.com)
• Star Wars: The Old Republic Receives Huge Update 1.2 (godisageek.com)

Clones Needed.

Do you or someone you know have a cloning lab?  Because I may need one in order to keep up with all the beta tests and game updates hitting my computer all at once.

I'm a long-time World of Warcraft player, but recently I've lapsed from playing.  Cataclysm isn't as interesting to me, now, and many of my guildies have moved on to raiding guilds, other games or are taking a break.  But I've kept my account current for the year-long commitment that would guarantee me a spot in the Mist of Pandaria expansion and a free copy of Diablo III.  I check in from time to time so keep my main active, but that's basically it.

And then Blizzard sent me my Mists beta invitation.

Let's take a step back.  Meanwhile, I've been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic (or SWTOR for short) since, well, two days before the game officially launched--I signed up for the early release kind of late.  I've been frustrated by the lack of, and greatly anticipating the introduction of the game's Legacy system--a way to tie your characters together in-game, and earn rewards for playing a variety of characters.

And I've been stopping in to update my characters' costumes and builds on Champions Online--a supers MMORPG with particularly great character creation.

Last week, Bioware finally updated SWTOR and introduced their Legacy system.  The day after, Cryptic Studios updated CO with a major overhaul to stats, equipment, crafting, and a host of other systems.  The day after that, Blizzard sent me an email inviting me to download and playtest the DIII beta.

Oh, I almost forgot.  After all of this, a Galaxy-wide game event started in SWTOR yesterday.

I'll be posting in the next few days about my thoughts on all of these games and updates.  I just wanted to break the surface and take a deep breath first.



Related articles

• World of Warcraft Lures Lapsed Players Back with Cataclysm Upgrades and High Level Characters [World Of Warcraft] (kotaku.com)
• Deliberately missing the bus (tobolds.blogspot.com)
• Blizzard producer attributes drop in WoW subscriptions to Star Wars: The Old Republic (arstechnica.com)