The Jabberer

     The past few days I've gotten the World of Warcraft bug again. It's been one of my favorite games of all time, if my playtime and sheer number of times I've returned to the MMO over the span of my life are anything to go off of. I started playing retail back in Cataclysm , the third expansion, that bid a more or less fond farewell to the Azeroth of yore. I've played off and on since then, playing for a month or two each expansion, never getting to the endgame or raid content, but feeling like I had gotten good value for it. Across the years and through various characters I had seen little glimpses of what the original World of Warcraft played like, mostly through professions, which I never found particularly useful or meshed well with questing. It was with this inexperience that I approached World of Warcraft Classic . I didn't play any of this offshoot branch of WoW when it launched and remained intrigued but uninterested as it went through the first two ex

  Spark in the Dark is a dungeon-crawling action RPG made by the first-time game dev team of Stellar Fish, and recently as part of the Steam Next Fest a demo was made available. What had been showcased prior had caught my attention because of its visual similarities to Exanima , a favorite of mine, but the games are really not at all similar. The demo was quite promising, though there is still a great deal of room for improvement. The demo covers the first level of the rogue-like adventure, where after choosing a class (essentially a playstyle), the game plops you in the entry room of the dungeon. The four classes (Warrior, Hunter, Rogue, and Blacksmith) offer dramatically different playstyles that go beyond simple weapon/armor choices. The map is the same on each run, with the same item and enemy placement. From this, the presence of containers and their status is randomized, as are traps. In some runs there are hardly any, and others a secret passage is littered with the things, whi

 I've been on a bit of a sci-fi kick and real-time strategy kick lately, and as I've been meaning to play Homeworld for ages, I figured I'd buy the prequel on sale, even though prequels aren't typically recommended for newcomers. The reason for this is that typically prequels generally require or recommend prior knowledge of the franchise's plot (even if that seems bizarre). That being said, Deserts of Kharak doesn't fall into that pitfall, and as someone who hasn't played Homeworld , you will miss nothing if you play this admittedly somewhat short but solid singleplayer campaign prior to the first game. I had a lot of fun with this one, and apart from its short length with high price tag, the game is a very enjoyable tactical strategy game. While the first and second game are based in space and utilize 3D movement, Deserts of Kharak is a bit of a step backward, taking place on the desert planet of Kharak. Air combat is limited to 3 varieties of attack ru

    I had gotten this book on a whim when I was in Books a Million while I was in Indiana for a wedding in mid-November, largely because I had earlier bought the boardgame Blackstone Fortress . I could go on about the story of why I bought the Blackstone Fortress boardgame, but it would take far too long and would not add anything besides making me seem very silly, so I will not. While I was flying up to Canada I finished the book, and while on the whole I enjoyed it, the book's conclusion left something to be desired.      To give some broad background, Blackstone Fortress: Ascension is the concluding chapter in a duology (I had no idea that this was the case when I bought it, silly me) that along with a collection of short stories forms a sort of novelization trilogy of the boardgame of the same name. In the boardgame, you and a number of other players play as intrepid explorers/treasure hunters/fanatics in the 41st millennium trying to get to the innermost depths of a space st

The Evil Eye is an adventure in the Ravenloft setting for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition (which came out at least five years before I was born, good lord), and while I currently have no plans to run it in either 2e or 5e, I can definitely see a lot of potential for this adventure. Due to 5e producing campaigns labelled as adventures and 2e producing campaign guides and standalone adventures separately, it's important to describe what to expect with this book. After reading through it all the way once and returning to earlier sections, I'd say that this adventure is best run as a standalone short campaign. It was originally designed for levels 4-6 in 2e, but I'd say that with some tweaks for difficulty it could be made to work for a 1-5 campaign for 5e without much trouble. Now it's time to break down this campaign and talk about its components, for some reason described internally as six different scenarios, even though they are far better as a whole. Tangen

Rime of the Frostmaiden was the first 5E campaign I have ever had the chance to run to completion, and honestly I think it was a lucky choice in that regard, because while Frostmaiden is not perfect, it is a great adventure for DMs and players alike. Run as written, the adventure offers unique characters, memorable sequences, and a captivating atmosphere that by and large works quite well with little to no modification or rewriting.  The Adventure To give a quick spoiler-free summary of the adventure's conflict: A network of hamlets, villages, and two walled towns known collectively as Ten-Towns in an extreme northern region known as Icewind Dale have suffered under a brutal winter that has raged for the past two years, all the while the sun never rising above the mountains. Obviously there's something unnatural about this, and in an interesting twist the majority of people know who the culprit is at the start of the adventure: Auril, the minor goddess of winter's cruel i