Hello there. Here I am again with another campaign diary for my Dungeons and Dragons campaign that I’m running for a group of my colleagues at Ubisoft Quebec. This week the party recovered from their ambush on the road. They levelled up their characters for the first time and started to progress their characters. They also reached the town of Red Larch, where they interacted with a bunch of NPCs, had some down time, and looked into helping the locals with their issues.
Archives for February 2017
Buying Just One New Game Every Month (Or Not)
We live in a truly wonderful time (sort of). Every year, hundreds of video games, board games, films, TV shows, books, and comics are created and released for our entertainment. There’s so much media for us to consume that it’s impossible to keep up. The really depressing thing is that if nothing new was created from this point onward, there would still be too much content for us to consume in one natural lifetime. There is literally hundreds of years worth of media out there for us to consume and enjoy. Despite this, new content is created at a ferocious pace and nowhere is this truer than in the video games industry. Every month, dozens of new video games are released for our enjoyment. They range from Triple A titles worked on by teams of hundreds of people with budgets of millions, all the way down to games made by one guy in his spare time using free software. So what’s a guy to do?
Developer D&D: Campaign Diary #1
One of my goals when moving to Quebec late last year was to make sure I continued writing RPG campaigns and dungeon mastering games. I had decided that I would get a PC and simply run games online for friends back home, and other people on the internet, but what I really wanted to do was find a local group. I had this grand campaign idea in my head that I really wanted to write and play, so I wanted a group of friends that I could sit around a table and run it for. Luckily, working in the games industry means I’m usually not short of a nerd or two who wants to play in a D&D campaign. After running a successful Christmas themed one-off session for some of my new colleagues, I realized I had found a good group to play with.
Storm of Death is the name of my four part epic Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It takes place in the Forgotten Realms, and sees the players travel from the sword coast, all the way to the Anauroch Desert in the east, and to realms beyond. It’s divided into four, twenty four hour chapters, each containing four parts. This format allows me to structure the sessions properly, and makes designing narrative arcs much easier. It also enables the campaign to become modular in nature, so that when I publish it online, other groups can use some or all of the modules based on their needs. The campaign is designed as a complete campaign experience, taking characters from level 1 all the way to level 20. It can, however, be used by existing groups by picking one of the chapters and playing through it as a self contained adventure arc. I started the campaign on the 7th February, and we’ll be playing bi-weekly. I decided I wanted to record the play through on my blog so people can follow along, or see how my group played through it.
Resident Evil 7: Horror Finally Comes Home
Resident Evil is one of the biggest game franchises in the world. It’s had nearly a dozen titles, and spawned numerous books, films, toys, and merchandise. Every time I speak to someone about the Resident Evil series they have a different story about how they were introduced to the games, and what their first experiences were like. It’s a household name in the horror genre, and it set the bar for what a survival horror game should be.
Well, it used to be at least. Over the years the franchise has taken some pretty catastrophic twists and turns. The franchise has evolved with the times, and the results have been mixed to put it lightly. They’ve tried all sorts of things, but nothing seemed to work. They knew the old formula wasn’t selling, so they looked to the big hitters of recent times for inspiration. This, however, was not the direction fans wanted the series to go and the sales proved it. Now it’s 2017, another installment has been released after some very clever marketing. Things seem to be back on track.