Tag Archives: Dungeons & Dragons

A good old-fashioned dungeon romp

Descent(4)_reduced

Strangely enough, in all my years as a gaming geek, I’ve never done an actual table-top dungeon romp before. I’ve played pencil-and-paper role-playing games in the past, but due to my snooty attitude towards Dungeons & Dragons, I’ve always stayed away from it and preferred less hack-and-slash oriented games like RuneQuest, Shadowrun and Robotech (okay, maybe this last one is a bad example.) I’ve cleared dungeons in MMOs like World of Warcraft before, but that’s not quite the same thing. So when Sean offered the opportunity to participate in a session of Descent, I agreed despite some misgivings over how long it would be expected to require.

The bad news is that our session actually lasted longer than I expected, about five and a half hours in all. The good news is I had a blast the entire time and would gladly do it again! It’s all a bit embarrassing really because even more so than BattleLore, much of the appeal of Descent lies in being able to play with all the awesome miniatures and other props. As one of the players in our session, Chee Wee (sorry if I got the spelling of your name wrong) commented, there’s an open-mouthed kid in the candystore feeling when you see all that cool stuff laid out on the table.

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A Game: NWN2 Mask of the Betrayer

If any RPG fan is still wondering whether or not to get this expansion for Neverwinter Nights 2, I have one single irrefutable argument to offer: Chris Avellone. That’s right, the lead designer of the celebrated classic Planescape: Torment is on the design team of Mask of the Betrayer, and, boy, does it show. From some of the craziest, oddest companions you can meet in any RPG since the afore-mentioned PS:T, a story of personal redemption that’s more about saving your own soul rather than the world to the multitude of genuine choices with lasting consequences, this is one of the very few RPGs that actually deserves the moniker “role-playing”.

Mask of the Betrayer picks up directly after the ambiguous ending of Neverwinter Nights 2. Following the player’s climatic battle against the King of Shadows, the entire cavern collapses and buries the player and his whole party. You wake up in a cave, but a different one, far, far away from the Sword Coast, disoriented from the cave-in and with only vague memories of what happened. A female Red Wizard of Thay retrieves you from a binding circle within the cave and as you make your escape, you discover a dark hunger within you that consumes spirits and you must either find a way to end this curse or have it destroy you from within.

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