Umbral Echoes Blog

So after the fiasco of the previous night, you'd think I would stay in and sleep it off, right? Fucking wrong. 4 hours of sleep, then up, shower, and down to the registration area, and shortly thereafter to a Changeling the Lost game run by The Wrecking Crew. I feel the need to put in a few notes here.

First, I was on the design team for the CtL corebook. However, I had never actually played the game or even managed to read all the way through the book, as ironic as that is. So I was interested to see what the final product ended up being like.

Second, The Wrecking Crew is awesome. They run tabletop games for White Wolf products at all sorts of conventions. Back in the day they used to help White Wolf with the setup and breakdown of their booths at said conventions, too. They are not only rabid fans, but they are very good at what they do. So I was doubly excited to play in this game.

Third, I was still vaguely nauseas, hadn't eaten since 3pm the previous day, and hadn't even had any water that morning. But I am not a little bitch, and I was determined to get my game on. So instead of doing the intelligent thing and saying, "Hey guys, give me 5 minutes to go get a bottle of water," I toughed through it. HTFU.

–Begin geeky game reminiscing–

The game had pregens, I was the last to the table but I found a great character: an Autumn Court librarian. Autumn Court changelings are the creepy ones. The girl running the game left the specifics to us, so I described him as a spindly man in his late 40s with straight, almost dead-looking black hair that was about chin-length, who had the musty smell of old books. He had sunken eyes, wore a moth-ridden tweed jacket, ivory button-down shirt, and brown corduroy pants. Also, from time to time a spider or two would skitter out from the hair hanging at his neck, scamper across his neck or face, and disappear on the other side.

His mein (how he looks to other changelings) was much the same, except instead of eyes he had black pits that seemed to suck in the light, features even more gaunt to the point of looking skeletal, and elongated teeth that were all sharp canines.

The basic plot was that the group of us "came to" on a dock with a wooden crate in front of us, and a person, with no memories of the previous 24 hours. The person was contractually bound not to tell us anything. My character snooped and sniffed around, and figured that there was most likely a dead body in there. Around that time, a car drove up and we were shot at. My character, not being a fighter, hid and used his powers to freak out the gunmen — or at least one of them.

We gain control of the situation, find out who hired them, then go up the chain to find out who hired that person to hire them, find out who that person was working for. It was basically a big court plot to make it look like the Autumn Court queen was abducting/killing the other three courts' queens, the plot lead by someone who hoped to take her place, and was working with the True Fae (bad, bad news) to do so. We blew up the would-be queen, I did some research on the fae and found her weakness (she is known as the Weeping Willow, and can't attack anyone that's crying), and the local changelings banded together to smack her down.

Behind the scenes, apparently we were hired by the current Autumn queen to investigate the disappearances.  I'd thought maybe we were the ones that had caused them, since we did "wake up" in front of a box with a dead body in it that I was pretty sure was one of the other queens, after all.

–End geeky game reminiscing–

After that, Lauren, Charles Bailey, and I went to grab brunch. I wanted some gumbo (it's New Orleans after all, and I love me some cajun food), so on the advice of friends we went to Gumbo Shop. Yes, it's a gumbo place called Gumbo Shop. It was pretty good, except that they put a crab claw in mine and there were little bits of it in the gumbo itself that I had to spit out from time to time. I found them, of course, by crunching down on them with my teeth, which was none too pleasant.

Then we went to a gelato place right around the corner, and it was divine. Lauren and I got some horchata gelato. They had some single malt Glenlivet gelato that I really wanted, but thought might be a bad idea after the previous night's debacle.

We helped Charles find a geocaching thing, then I caught the tail end of an artist panel and we went out to eat again.

What? I have a tapeworm to feed, you know. Or a hollow leg to fill. Or both.

We really wanted to check out The Green Goddess, since it seems to have great Yelp reviews and some of our friends raved about it. By "we wanted to go" I mostly mean that I did, and Lauren grumbled about it. Turns out, it was too packed anyway — it is but a tiny place, not capable of handling even the runoff of the crowds that the convention brought. So we ended up at House of Blues, where I had some shrimp and catfish creole. Though we had to wait a long time to get our food, it was very tasty, and the waitress was awesomely nice as well. I will definitely go back there whenever I'm next in the area.

Damnit, even writing about this is making me hungry. Maybe if I lived in New Orleans I'd actually gain a few pounds.

That night there was a… well, cocktail party is the best way I can think to describe it, at the Blue Room downstairs. CCP was giving the fans a chance to talk to some of the game developers, and have some nice snacks and free booze while they were at it.

This seemed to translate to "OMGfreebooze!!!!" and instead of talking to the developers, everyone seemed to go straight for the two bars, resulting in about a 45 minute wait to get drinks. I chatted some with Rich Thomas, Bill Bridges, and others before deciding to move along to bed.

Thus ended day 2. Not terribly exciting, but it involved good food, and the next day was the birthday party, so I knew adventure awaited. And indeed it did, but more on that in the next installment.

This is a post for MMO gamers (and possibly comic fans). The rest of you should probably feel free to skip it, lest your eyes glaze over.

At GenCon this year, I spent a fair amount of time at the Champions Online booth. This is a superhero MMO made by Cryptic. Yes, the same Cryptic that produced City of Heroes. This is, essentially, City of Heroes+++. It was both sad, but informative, that almost every question and comment I overheard was comparing CO to CoH.

There are cosmetic improvements. The game looks a lot more comic-book-like, with the thicker black outlines and cell shading. You can customize how your powers look. Do you want that power beam to come from a jewel in your forehead instead of your fists, or maybe from your chest? You can make it so.  There are even more character appearance customization options than in CoH (an almost overwhelming amount, in fact).  There are some cool gameplay improvements — you can mix and match powersets as you please, so there are no set archetypes, for example. You get 14 total powers at max level (if I recall), and you can mix and match them from different power sets as you please.

But what I really want to talk about are the more groundbreaking aspects of this game.


Perhaps the biggest is player-created arch-villains. At level 20, you start getting clues that someone is watching you. For example, you might find some pictures of yourself during the last mission. These develop into a storyline, and then at level 25, you actually design your own arch-villain. You choose their power set (though not specific powers), design their look, determine what sort of a villain they are (mastermind, mad genius, thuggish brute, etc.), and you even design the look of their minions. You proceed along a storyline that culminates in an epic battle, and your arch-nemesis being jailed.

And then, you get to make another one. Think Batman here, putting people away in Arkham Asylum. And just like that, sometimes your villains will escape and come after you. Sometimes several of them will escape. And if you group up with people, sometimes your arch-villains will also team up against you.

I haven’t seen this in action yet, but if the implementation is as cool as the idea, this could really go light-years forward in making an MMO feel more personalized. I’m very much looking forward to it.

On a technological level, everyone is on one server (just with different instances of zones). That’s right, no more, “Oh you play too? Awesome, what server are you on? … Oh, well I guess I could maybe make a toon on that server.” All MMOs should do this, and I think in the future, I think most will.

But this brings up another issue: it is (or, can be) sometimes difficult to find an unused name in an MMO when everyone is split between servers, much less with everyone on the same server. Well, you can use whatever name you want, even if someone else has used it. You’re uniquely identified by your account name + character name. So there can be fifteen Shadowbats, or Tits McGees. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this, but I think I will like it.

There are Open Missions, which I think have promise.  As you’re flying by somewhere, there is a bank robbery in process.  You, and other heroes, can intervene.  No creating a group necessary, you just jump in and do it, and get a mission reward at the end of it corresponding to how much you helped.  This I will have to see in action, but I love the idea.  Helps a lot in making the game more… well, open.

On the marketing side, they’re offering a lifetime subscription option for $200, but I believe this is only good until the release date of September 1st. It’s ingenious from a marketing perspective (City of Heroes was also very good when it came to marketing ploys). From a consumer perspective, I feel like I’m taking a $200 gamble though. Sure, in about 14 months it’s paid for itself. But what if, once the game goes live, I don’t like it after 6 months of play? I suppose I could always sell my lifetime membership to someone else, but I’m relatively sure that would be against the terms of use.  I will note that I’ve gone ahead and ordered a lifetime subscription, and am feeling a little unsure of it even though I think this game has a lot of promise.

Overall I’m pretty excited.  There are other cool features to this game that I haven’t even touched on, and it seems like CO is doing a better job of appealing to both casual players (like me) and hardcore gamers, though still with more of a focus on the casual player.  My preorder copy is on its way, and once I get that I’ll be able to delve deeper into this game.