The Jabberer

    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

I personally never got terribly far into World of Warcraft , mostly due to burnout from questing, finding other games more interesting, or myself not being a particularly good fit for MMO's. Among that genre that repulses me at every turn, there's something about World of Warcraft that keeps bringing me back every year or two, and it's only now with Shadowlands that I've really been able to put it into words, and I have a lot of words to say on the subject. To tell the truth, this sort of straddles the line between review and retrospective, and while I am most certainly not the most qualified to speak about how World of Warcraft has changed throughout the years, I've seen and experienced enough to form an opinion on my last roughly ten years of playing the game, starting from Cataclysm to the present day, Shadowlands. This review is going to be multiple parts, and while none of this is set in stone, this is basically going to be the outline of the review. First, I

The persuasion implant returns as an easy way to get through tough conversations, but I found that its use was somewhat limited, with only about three important conversations it could be used in.   About a month ago I sat down to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided after having played Human Revolution Director's Cut a few years prior. I had heard that it was something of a step forward and back, so I was somewhat wary, but aside from that I heard little of it.  The plot begins a few years after the conclusion of Human Revolution , after the so-called 'Aug Incident' (augs meaning augmented humans), where due to a software update acting as a Trojan horse, mechanically augmented humans were sent into a berserk rage by the inventor of augments as some sort of warning about the dangers regarding their use. Seems a little harsh. Anyway, in the two years following the incident augs have become something of a discriminated group, essentially experiencing segregation/apartheid/ghettos/c