A busy March

2025-03-28 3 min read

Boy, I had a pretty good blogging streak going there for a while! Well, at least I’m not gonna let a whole month go by without putting something here. Heh.

I haven’t had a lot going on in March in terms of the usual things that I blog about: no completed video games to wax poetic about, no big projects like the great De-Googling, nothing like that. Bullet point time:

  • I’ve been going back and forth between two different ideas for game development projects, trying to decide which one I’d rather do first; I think I finally settled on one and am doing a good amount of worldbuilding as well as some low-level actual code writing. The other is on the back burner waiting to become more fully baked for the time being.
  • The Traveller 2e game that replaced my (now-wrapped-up) D&D 5e game finally started. I am currently playing former noble and current lawyer Fontaine Infinity, who has no combat skills to speak of but is surprisingly good at giving orders in combat as well as, well, lawyering. (He made it out of character creation with 4 ranks in the Advocate skill and a smattering of other face skills, but – surprisingly – none in Deception.)
  • World of Warcraft’s second major raid of the current expansion dropped, and so my raid team is back to raiding twice a week. We’ve made pretty astounding progress, clearing the entire thing in normal in one week and then trouncing 3 out of 8 heroic bosses very quickly, with a 4th likely to go down on Monday night when we raid again. Here’s a kill shot of us gathered around the most recent to fall, Rik Reverb:
    Screenshot from World of Warcraft of TTGF’s heroic raid team gathered around a defeated Rik Reverb, one of the bosses in The Liberation of Undermine raid
  • The third of three episodes of an actual play I ran for The Tavern Watch Podcast, playing Triangle Agency, is up now. I thought it was a lot of fun, although trying to keep the spotlight going for six people can be a real task. I also thought on reading the adventure as written – it’s a pre-written one from The Vault, a book of premade mysteries that came with the Triangle Agency core book – that it’s not, uh, a very good mystery. As written, Dead Quiet presented a whole list of locations for players to go to, but they were so saturated in clues that led directly to the end of the mystery that there was not really a reason to visit more than one. (Essentially they only even went to two because the second one had an easy way to rack up 10 Commendations from the company.) A lot of the contents of The Vault are like that, so if I run TA again, I’m definitely going to be trying to write something of my own.
  • I have another actual play next month for the same podcast in which I’ll be running Legend in the Mist’s playtest materials. Should be fun; expect that to be out sometime in May, most likely.
  • Also my actual job has just been kind of going at breakneck speed? I’ve been pulled back and forth between two major projects, with a third looming in the wings to occupy any downtime I might have, which – well, look at the timestamps on previous posts, and maybe the explanation for why my post count in March is 1 might make sense. Heh.

Anyway: all that to say I am alive and well and keeping myself busy. Maybe I should do some devlog posts here once that game project starts being interesting to look at? Not sure if it’ll be here or somewhere else, but given how much I’ve enjoyed keeping everything sequested in Obsidian, it might just be here in a subfolder. Something to look forward to.

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A weekend full of games

2025-01-27 6 min read

Diablo 4: Vessel of Hatred

Back in my post about Transistor I mentioned that the second game I finished in 2025 was probably going to be Helen’s Mysterious Castle; instead, it turned out to be Diablo 4’s expansion pack, Vessel of Hatred. It was… okay.

First, about Diablo 4 as a game: it’s actually really good, although it took some time to get there. The Diablo 4 team seemed entirely determined to learn absolutely nothing from the Diablo 3 team’s mistakes and recoveries early on, and honestly that’s still kind of a recurring theme across Blizzard as a whole (I suspect inter-team communication basically doesn’t exist), but Diablo 4 got really good – the game is fun to play, the classes are varied and have a lot of viable endgame builds for what is now a large variety of endgame content, it’s really everything you could want out of an action RPG. The seasonal content is hit or miss, but the current Season of the Witch is probably my favorite since the Season of Blood’s vampire-based content back in Season 2. So my comments on Vessel of Hatred do not reflect on how fun the game itself actually is to play.

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