#I was not fine during that scene in TSR

[flo-n-flon]

"Do not let Lan follow me. He will try, if he sees me."

#The Shadow Rising #The wheel of time #wot book spoilers #moiraine damodred #lan mandragoran #book: wheel of time #character: moiraine damodred #character: lan mandragoran #fanart #clothing the ladies unnecessarily bared one scene at a time #but yeah I finished TFoH and UH #that quote is resonant #I was not fine during that scene in TSR #a lot of it is the strain between them and how little we get of them and suddenly this scene which is desperate and completely silent #come talk to me about those two because I am devastated #I have still one scene I want to draw from TSR but it's going to be the hardest emotionally #I am afraid

[the-last-cuddlebender]

Since when young Tenzin is underloved? His dad loved him the best and treated him as the special one and his mom adores him and maybe his siblings would give him shit when they were kids because they were jealous but he had Lin as a good friend and then he cheated on her with a 20yrs younger woman. The guy gets as much loved as he deserves

Hi, anon! So there’s a few things to unpack here, so I’ll try to be as concise as I can. This is pretty much what I think Tenzin’s childhood was really like and why he should be appreciated just as much as Bumi and Kya. Also with Kataang TLOK parenting thrown in. I’m pretty tired and don’t wanna edit an essay, so I apologize if it rambles.

Also, I’m not gonna touch the whole Tenzin cheating point. I’m fairly certain that that’s just objectively wrong. Everything else I’m more than happy to discuss, though:D

To be clear, when I say I feel like Tenzin is under-loved, I mean by the fandom (and by TLOK, but to a smaller degree). Under-appreciated might be a better word. Or under-explored? Idk. I just know that Tenzin’s childhood—just his—doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Outside of Tenzin having some angsty one-on-one’s with Aang (which I love, make no mistake!), I don’t see a lot fleshing out his childhood. Bumi and Kya get a lot of it, though (or the kids as a whole, but nothing that’s just Tenzin’s).

I don’t subscribe to the idea that Aang treated Tenzin as “the special one.” Bumi and Kya being jealous—in the way that seems to be the majority consensus—of Tenzin when they were kids is a bit hard for me to imagine, too. I try to stick to canon as much as I can, but, for some things, I have to draw the line. There has to be evidence, not just anecdote, otherwise I hc it into oblivion. I’m not saying their feelings in TLOK aren’t valid. They absolutely are, and Aang would never want those feelings to be invalidated. Children just retain things differently. A traumatic accident could have no effect on them but falling in the shower and bumping their head might. Developing brains are weird. 

I can see Kya and Bumi giving Tenzin some shit when they were kids (Tenzin does admit that Kya picked on him), but I highly doubt that was any more/less than normal sibling rivalry and Cain Instinct. Sure, Aang might have given Tenzin attention for being an airbender, but he gave Kya and Bumi attention for being a waterbender and a non-bender, too. To me, it’s like having siblings who play different sports. Just because dad went to every one of my sister’s soccer games doesn’t mean he didn’t attend every one of my basketball games. The hyperfixation on airbending in TLOK makes it sound like that was all Aang cared about, but even in ATLA we can see that that isn’t true. If it was, then he would have kicked out the mechanist from the Northern Air Temple. 

To say that Aang loved Tenzin the best is to imply that he loved his other children poorly, which isn’t true in the slightest. I can entertain the argument that he spent more one-on-one time with Tenzin, but that could be attributed to different children with different personalities having different wants and different needs for validation from their parents. And I will gladly defend it, even though I personally hc otherwise.

It’s hard to talk about Tenzin without also talking about Aang and Katara, so bear with me here:

Tenzin and Kya:

Tenzin was the last airbender besides Aang. Kya was the last waterbender from the Southern Water Tribe besides Katara. To assume Aang treated Tenzin as the “special one” because he’s an airbender would, if using the same logic, mean assuming Katara treated Kya as the “special one” for being a waterbender. 

I’ve never understood why The Southern Water Tribe being inherited by the Kataang kids isn’t as big of a deal as Air Nomad culture. Both of them were recovering cultures on the brink of extinction, so they both have a lot of pressure for the kids to live up to.

Plus, if Sokka had a right of passage for being a Water Tribe warrior, then who’s to say there wasn’t a right of passage for Kya, specifically, for being a waterbender? She would be the special one, there. And maybe Tenzin struggled with his two heritages because being an Air Nomad meant being vegetarian but being Water Tribe meant using dead fish to go penguinsledding?

Tenzin and Learning too soon:

Tenzin probably learned about his responsibility of carrying the legacy of the airbenders at a very, very young age. Aang and Katara probably tried their hardest to wait until he was older to tell him (a-la Gyatso wanting to wait until Aang was older for him to carry the burden of being the airbenders’—and the world’s—last hope, too), but it was unavoidable. It was a part of the world’s history, and the aftermath of the war wasn’t exactly something a kid could avoid. Plus, I’m sure Aang wanted to correct airbender history as it was taught in schools as soon as he got the opportunity after the war.

Tenzin just has the abstract “idea” of what his bending culture was like when it was alive and well. Aang has memories to draw upon from which to imagine the future that the airbenders needed to rebuild towards. Tenzin gets second-hand notes.

Tenzin also didn’t have a baseline by which to measure if he was a “good airbender.” He had only Aang to compare himself to. ONLY AANG. This is talked about in TLOK but only in regards to Aang being his dad, if I’m not mistaken. But Aang isn’t just Tenzin’s dad. Aang is his father, the Avatar, and the youngest airbender to get his master’s tattoos. That’s a LOT more to live up to than just being his kid. And it’s the only thing Tenzin has to compare himself to to measure whether or not he’s a good airbender. I’m shocked that his spiritual ineptitude isn’t more of a haunting issue for him, quite frankly.

Tenzin and Bullying:

Tenzin didn’t have any airbenders his age (anyone like him) growing up. Even Aang had a childhood with other airbenders. As a father, Aang was as playful as a kid, sure, but, to a child, it isn’t quite the same because they don’t share that special bond of growing together and having a shared upbringing. 

Katara can especially empathize with this. 

Airbending is the element of fun. It’s kindof hard to express/embrace that facet of the element if Tenzin is the only one his age who can wield it.

I can almost guarantee that Tenzin got voted out of playing with other kids at least a few times because he was the only airbender (and that would make teams unfair). He probably learned to play by himself. That would certainly make him serious. Toph would probably teach him how to entertain himself, too. And that might lead to Tenzin and Lin hanging out. Who knows?

I honestly think Tenzin was bullied quite a bit (and not by Kya and Bumi), and that the bullying attributed to his demeanor as he grew up. Him cowering from Kya or running from his siblings when they picked on him was an exasperation of what he was probably dealing with outside his home.

In the recent comic with Katara and the pirates, we see a Fire Nation soldier flaunt some pretty nasty ideas about the Air Nomads because of Sozin’s propaganda. I don’t think that 15 years (or however long Tenzin was born after the war) is going to reverse that. Tenzin was probably picked on for being an airbender in addition to being the Avatar’s kid. 

If the rise of fashion post-war was as fast-growing as industry, I can imagine kid-Tenzin being made fun of for being bald (even though it was part of his religion/culture) and for dressing in robes when the world, especially Republic City, was beginning to adopt different clothes. 

Tenzin is an incredibly tender soul around those he loves but also incredibly serious around his adversaries. He has a soft inside and an armored shell, and that thick skin is usually forged through unsavory interactions. And he definitely interacted with plenty of normal kids his age. Aang missed the chance after the ice, and Katara was the only one her age in her village besides (kindof) Sokka. There’s no way Aang and Katara would keep their kids cooped up and strictly homeschooled. At the very least, Toph would bust them out if they did.

Tenzin and Katara:

Now, I’m not saying that Tenzin blames Aang because he obviously doesn’t. But Aang has memories of what airbender life was like, and Tenzin has only dreams. Honestly, it’s like he’s caught in the situation Aang was in when he was a young Avatar. They both have to live up to something that was pretty much just a legend. How could Tenzin possibly be expected to compare himself to something like that and be peachy fine? Aang wasn’t. So maybe, just maybe, Aang and Katara decided to have Tenzin go on private trips with Aang so Tenzin could understand that part of himself that was so hard for him to get? Inner peace is pretty dang hard to think about with THAT much pressure. 

And yes, it was Aang and Katara who decided on the trips. I will not for a second believe that 1.) Aang would make that kind of decision without her input or 2.) that Katara would let one of her kids get private time with dad that would even potentially give the illusion of favoritism. 

Katara knew how important one-on-one time with a parent was to some kids. This is why she tells Sokka to go see Hakoda instead of her in Ba Sing Se. She saw not only how much Sokka wanted but how much he NEEDED to see their dad. Sokka and Tenzin were both caught in a “passing of the torch” scenario (tbh, the scene where Aang tells Tenzin that he’s proud of him in the Spirit World reminds me of when Hakoda tells Sokka that he’s proud of him during the invasion when he’s injured. In both instances, it kindof solidifies the official passing of the torch).

“You didn’t love her like I did”—Katara learned pretty quick in tsr about how incredibly toxic the assumption of loving or being loved more/less was. She would never under any circumstance agree to anything that would show favoritism to one of her children. Absolutely no way. Aang and Katara are a team, and to villainize one for favoritism is to villainize the other.

Tenzin and Yue:

Tenzin had a stressful upbringing. I would even make the argument that he and Yue had a similar time trying to conform to a responsibility that they were told/learned about at a too young age. Their mindsets are very similar—responsibility even at the sacrifice of their own wants and happiness and an overwhelming love for their father.

Tenzin: “I have a responsibility to Republic City.” Yue: “I have a duty to my Tribe.”

They were both determined to love and carry on the legacy of their father and their people, but they did it in their own way. They both struggled with their responsibilities from an extremely young age.

Finishing thoughts I guess:

*********************************************

I can imagine a young Tenzin crying and trying to hide from the world that was shoving its weight onto his shoulders, and who, when Aang finds him hiding in the bison stables or somewhere similar, cringes away from Aang for a split second before recognizing his father and holding on so tight that it hurt. Aang tried his damnedest to teach Tenzin airbending and the responsibility of being the last airbender when Aang was gone, but even he knew that he couldn’t keep the weight of the world off of Tenzin forever. Aang never got that chance when he was told he was the Avatar. He heard the monks say that he was “the airbenders’ last hope” because storm clouds were gathering. Young Tenzin probably felt just as hopeless. The one-on-one trips he took with Aang were specifically to the places Aang had visited in S1 when he was still recovering from realizing that he was the last airbender. Maybe Aang took Tenzin with him one-on-one, just the two of them, to drive home the message that Tenzin was not the last airbender like Aang had been?

“I-I’m just one kid…I can’t. I…I-I’m just—”

“Shhh, shhh, shhh…I know, buddy. I know. But you’re my kid, too. You’re my entire world.”

“Everyone says I’m—”

“Don’t worry about them. They’re not here.”

“B-But—”

“But? What but? Are you hiding someone in your sleeping bag, Breeze-Butt?”

“N…No…”

“And do you see anyone else here?”

“…No.”

“That’s right. So don’t worry about them. It’s just you and me right now, okay? Just breathe. There you go. Just like I taught you—You’re doing so well, bud. Shhh…You’re okay. You’re not just one kid. You’re Tenzin. And you’re my son. You and your brother and sissy are my entire world. I love you so, so much...Oh, see? There’s that million-yuan smile!”

“…Thanks, Daddy. Love you.”

“Love you more. Do you want to try going in the water again? Or we can stay up here if you like. Whatever you want.”

“I wanna try again. But…But maybe just a small fish? I don’t wanna fall off again…I-I can’t do the air-chute yet…and the water hurt.”

“I’ll round up the smallest koi there is. I’ll sit right behind you, too. How’s that sound? I won’t let you fall.”

“Okay!”

*********************************************

Maybe this has been said before idk. These are just my thoughts on Kataang parents and Tenzin. I retcon the entire Kataang family as it’s presented in TLOK, but this is how I imagine it going down in canon. 

This isn’t an attack on any person or fandom btw! I just think Tenzin isn’t as appreciated as the airbean deserves😞 He’s been through so much😭

If there’s a secret stash of young Tenzin appreciation content somewhere, please share!  I might be looking in the wrong places for Tenzin love, and I would love nothing more than to be wrong, honestly. So, please, if there’s a secret stash, yeet me that link!!

#tenzin #Avatar The Last Airbender #the legend of korra #atla #tlok #answered #aang #tenzin love #cloudbabies #kataang #katara #Kya II #Bumi II #the cuddles have spoken #im sorry for the late response anon I had a helluva day #tbh just my ramblings in a sorry excuse for an post I’m sorry okay😭 I tried to make it presentable at least lol #in this house we stan bestdad!Aang and bestmom!katara😤😤😤 #thanks for the ask! #post

[latin-dr-robotnik]

Team Sonic Racing final thoughts

So, according to Steam it took me around 17 hours to complete the Team Adventure mode of TSR...

That's wayyyy more than I initially anticipated, and there are still challenges I need to 100%. But I'd like to share some thoughts and frustrations.

First of all, this is a budget title and it fucking shows. I don't mind the presentation with the dialog boxes and pretty simple plot; but I do mind the fact that the final chapter was clearly rushed and they ran out of time, budget or both.

There's this problem recent Sonic games have with being budget titles and nothing more. The last proper "big Sonic title" was Unleashed, 11 years ago. Since then SEGA's been pumping game after game feeling more and more mixed than the last. Although Team Sonic Racing is solid fun and beautiful, the corners that have been cut are obvious. SEGA wanted a budget, solid, Sonic racing title and Sumo Digital did it perfectly. But there are only so much budget titles one can handle before asking: when is the big one coming?

I love what they did with the characters and their personalities. But it's embarrassing to say that a racing spin-off has more lore and character development than the last 3 mainline Sonic titles combined. I'm pretty happy nonetheless, and my shipping fuel is fully refill after:

Sonic and Amy casually hanging out and chatting like it's no big deal. No more awkward scenes for both of them.

Knuckles and Rouge returning to their good old teasing like SA2/Sonic X. Knuckles in general has been realized pretty well and I didn't mind Dave Mitchell as his new voice.

Silver and Blaze having the cutest and healthiest subplot of all. The way they support and trust each other is pure and simple #relationship #goals lol

Other things:

The ending was pretty lame. I hoped for a final race, racing against the clock during the climax of the plot, but no, it was resolved via cutscene.

The way the plot twist around Dodon Pa is presented left me with a feeling we'll see a sequel to this game involving him and his creations again. It's not a traditional sequel bait game, but there are seeds that imply we could see the Tanooki again, and I'm not against that idea.

The soundtrack is FUCKING BRILLIANT. Easily OST of the year and maybe top 10 soundtracks of the entire series. I can't recall the last time I rocked so much to a Sonic soundtrack. If the next mainline game is the SA remake and Senoue is handling the music again, sign me the fuck on the hype train.

So, yeah, TSR is a fine game that keeps showing signs of a deeper problem with the way SEGA handles the Sonic IP, what are your thoughts about the game?

#team sonic racing #review #big is weirdly wholesome in this game #omochao too #you can identify me online because i main amy

[thegaangg-blog]

Why Zutara?

Why Zutara? Well I just wanted both of them to be in a happy, respectful relationship where both of them are treated right. Their canon relationships Kataang and Maiko both Zuko and Katara aren’t happy and are NOT treated right at all. Zuko and Katara didn’t have to end up together, Katara could’ve ended up with Haru and Zuko could’ve ended up with Ty Lee maybe or that girl he went on a date with in the Earth Kingdom I forgot her name sorry lol. The point is they would’ve been in a good relationship if they ended up with these characters. But based on how the story went having Zuko end up with Ty Lee or the Earth Kingdom girl and having Katara end up with Haru wouldn’t really make sense because Haru was in like 3 episodes only, Ty Lee was an enemy and the other girl was only shown for like 5 minutes. That’s why having Zuko and Katara ending up together makes the most sense, ever since Zuko joined the group they’ve (Aaron Ehasz and majority of the writers) been building up their relationship slowly to possibly a romantic one. From the TSR episode to Katara slightly blushing and fixing her hair when Zuko sat next to her during the play, the dude could’ve sat anywhere else but he sat next to her, and then the final Agni Kai, that scene just screamed so much love to me man. All these are perfect build up for a romantic relationship between the two. They don’t fight nor disagree with each other, you notice how many times Aang and Katara disagree with each other? It was a lot, like I don’t know how that worked exactly when they married, but then again Katara was just turned into his trophy who follows him around everywhere and just says yes to everything. That’s why I prefer Zutara, it had the perfect build up and had the potential to be so much more if we had gotten that book 4 where we would have seen more of the two together and their relationship turning into a romantic one. Even if there was no book 4 a Zutara ending at the end of three books would’ve been fine as well, just something nice and subtle at the end to show that yeah these two like each other and will end up together very soon.

#zutara #anti kataang #anti maiko #anti bryke #aaron ehasz #book 4 #atla

[difficultycheck]

Review: Princes of the Apocalypse

by Colin Padgett Arnold

After running it for seven months, my home table has made it through the first four dungeons of Wizards of the Coast’s Princes of the Apocalypse, an adventure book for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. This comprises the book’s first act and covering roughly a third of its content. I figured this was as good a point as any to reflect back and review the book thus far. Specifically, I’ll be covering Chapters 1, 2, 3, 6, & 7 as well as Appendices A, B, & C.

Some quick notes for bias and control. I am a fairly experienced GM with most of my experience running games spread over D&d 4th Edition, 13th Age, and Dungeon World, and experience playing in just about everything else. The players consist of two experienced role players and table top gamers, two experienced creatives who have none the less never touched an analog role playing game, and one inexperienced player with impeccable comedic timing - a fine mix of sagely wisdom and fresh perspectives. The party is made up of a cleric, a paladin, a ranger, a barbarian, and a warlock. Suffice it to say, they are running a surprisingly balanced party with one more player than ideal for the adventure, but not enough to have to necessarily change anything prewritten. I won’t be detailing the specifics of how my players have played through the adventure, but if you’d like to follow my group’s exploits against the elemental cults then you can find us at #Kru.

Addendum: when I originally started writing this the group was seven months in, now we’re a whole year. A combination of me putting off covering the appendices and summertime simply being a busy time of year for me professionally had this just not happen! In a few weeks they’ll be through Chapter 4 with several more Side Treks under their belt. However, I won’t be covering that chapter in depth. Each of the dungeons in Chapter 4 are impeccably well designed and where the game really shines. The problem is, it’s also where the game becomes infinitely mutable. While you can run each of these as a highly tactical dungeon crawl, players can also get by them largely through skulduggery and diplomacy or, my favorite, using a cataclysmic weapon of the cults introduced in this chapter along with a myriad of spells and abilities to upend the sand box. My players have done all three, including clearing a dungeon entirely by leveraging a character’s backstory and the character arc we’ve been building to destroy it in a handful of encounters. Chapter 4 will be truly different for every single group that plays it, especially if the dungeon master is heavily integrating their players’ characters and backstories.

At a Glance

Princes of the Apocalypse is a heavy tome at 256 pages, brought to us by Sasquatch Game Studio. Its lead designer, Richard Baker, has had a prolific career in game design running Forgotten Realms development during the early 2000s, working on D&d since it’s TSR days, and writing a number of other games and novels. Princes was specifically written to bring the classic Temple of Elemental Evil storyline and concept into 5th Edition and to create a more free form foil to the previously released Tyranny of Dragons story line. The adventure sees you going on a hex crawl inspired by the classics to take down four cults devoted to elemental magic in a sleepy frontier valley. The scenario is structured into three acts, each one delving into a deeper layer of dungeons controlled by the elemental cults and is designed to take a party of four adventurers from level 3 to 14. It also contains two short adventurers to take a party of level 1 characters up to the book’s starting point.

On the whole, I’m on the fence on how effective Princes is at being an exploration game. Taking place in the Dessarin Valley just inland of Forgotten Realm’s Sword Coast, the meat of the adventure takes place in a measly ten hexes of a sum nine hundred and ninety hex map. Occasionally the book proper takes you out of this clump, and the adventure’s side quests are all far reaching into the rest of the valley. However, I’ve had to very heavily bait the party to any part of the map that isn’t the small neighborhood of scrub hills the elemental cults are based in. Not because they don’t want to explore the world, but because comparatively the distance to any extra location is two to four times the distance between the town Princes starts you in and the cults themselves. The game certainly is a sandbox as every situation has a number of vectors to approach from and contexts to find it in, but I rarely see my players tempted off the major roads and landmarks.

The cults themselves, who at the start are organized in four surface level strongholds, seem to have been designed with  a “correct” order in mind, with each one being balanced around a party level one higher than the last. While a smart party could certainly take down the level 4 or even level 5 dungeons right out of the gate, the “final” stronghold is filled with a number of enemies capable of casting Fireball. A level 3 or 4 party simply doesn’t have the mechanics to deal with or throw back that kind of firepower. Likewise, each stronghold has an entrance to that cult’s corresponding Act II dungeon and each one feels like the natural place to proceed in the moment. This does, however, land the party into dangers designed around a party 4 levels higher than they are.

I feel like Princes has two separate games inside it, just playing with the same elements. You can certainly run the game like Tyranny of Dragons or the Starter Box, with a lightly railed plot where the party goes around kicking in doors, one dungeon at a time. The surface text almost expects it. Each of the main villains of Act I’s “how to role play” blurb ends with “and then they probably just attack the party.” If you want traditional, heroic, storm-the-dungeon fantasy then Princes has you, which is weird because that’s not what it says on the tin.

A smart party that approaches Princes like a sandbox game will do perfectly fine in Act I as long as they at least half expect to get in over their head. That level 6 dungeon with all the Fireball casting mages? It’s a rickety tower in disrepair with spotty defenses that, if players have a mind to, could just be burned down with minimal effort. Every cult has a fairly easy way to infiltrate their ranks with a subtext that the players might even seriously join one. And the NPC villains are certainly more fun to play in Act I when they’re more concerned about their rival cults than this band of adventurers loping through the valley.

Ironically enough, the things that have helped motivate my players to range far away from home and the cults themselves have been trying to scrounge up resources, aid, and solutions when they’ve bitten off way more than they can chew. I think where the genius of this design comes in is when you run it as a sandbox for players that haven’t learned how to approach one. Yeah, I’d prefer if all four of the “Haunted Keeps” where on more even difficulty with each of them having some threats that were particularly too much to deal with. But looking forward to Acts II and III, I’m hoping that the rather large disparity of letting a party walk into a dungeon twice their level at the start of play is to help teach players how to scout, retreat, and really think about when they should fight, talk, or completely circumvent a problem. Princes really does present you with an exquisite chess set to play around with, even if the directions themselves are rather straightforward. There are relatively few cues for how to use the NPCs and their resources outside of letting the players roll up on dungeons, but each cult and character’s motivations are clear, concise, and interesting. I’ve honestly been surprised how easy it’s been to go off book with this adventure and have it still feel seamless to what’s already there. Any game master with a little experience willing to play back and forth with their players will find a fun way to run it.

Whew, that was a long glance.

Chapter 1: Rise of Elemental Evil

Simple enough, the first chapter gives you a sweeping backstory for the adventure. Four cults each drawn to a different Prince of Elemental Evil (supremely powerful beings who are each King of an Elemental Plane and associated with air, earth, fire, and water respectively) have taken up residence in some ancient castles on top of an ancient Dwarven city on top of some spooky Underdark caverns. A diplomatic mission to Waterdeep gets kidnapped by these cults, which kicks off the whole adventure. Chapter 1 details the philosophy of each cult and their elemental master, along with the history and motivations of each cult’s Prophet - the leaders that are ultimately going to be your big villains at the end of the game. Out of any of the story set up, I think the character write ups on the Prophets are the best things in this book. I’ve been so anxious to introduce them, I’ve been giving my players short aside scenes to build them up between major events. Every one of them has something akin to the Sending spell to start a real dialogue with the player characters, though it’s unlikely they’ll be on the cults’ radar until after Act I.

For players, there’s a list of several adventure hooks to give characters a reason to join the adventure. Some are cryptic rumors to help lead the party to any of the first four dungeons. Some are connections or bounties to encourage a character to seek out and deal with certain mid level villains in the cults’ chains of command. Some help reveal hidden information about the dungeons that lay beneath the valley, and a few even point all the way to the final dungeons. Regardless, each hook is a hint and a set of criteria for the character to receive 2-4 inspiration points. A little advice: don’t give out the adventure hooks that won’t pay off until the end game. If you plan on making your players stick with character deaths, you’ll need them to help fold in new characters. If you like to play fast and loose with character death so that it only happens when it matters to the story and characters, then you can always assign new, relevant adventure hooks at the start of each Act.

If you’re a big fan of Forgotten Realms, 5th Edition’s focus on Faerun’s faction system makes an appearance in this book as well. Each faction has an investment tied up in the delegation that goes missing at the start of the game, and each is represented by agents across every settlement in the valley. If a player would like to start as a part of a faction they get an easy in on the adventure, but there’s no additional benefit. My group elected not to start with any affiliations, and has still managed to frequently interact with them. The book leaves plenty of room to encounter the various factions at your leisure, and they feature in several of the Side Treks.

Chapter 2: the Dessarin Valley

Princes is set in the Dessarin Valley, a frontier wilderness off the Storm Coast of Faerun. Chapter 2 details the various towns, villages, and settlements throughout the valley, provides random encounter tables, and contains a helpful map of the whole region and all the various hidden fortresses and goodies. The most in-depth attention is paid to Red Larch, the town the adventurers start in.

Red Larch is a tiny little crossroads town with about twenty or so major businesses and locations for the players to interact with. It has everything from competing caravan carpenters and an adventurer supply shop to agents of every major player faction and either a spy or lead for every cult. Each location has an entry describing it’s look, business, and the key NPCs that reside there. Some also have entries for leads relating to the cults’ business in the area (Rumors of Evil) and secret agendas concerning the townsfolk for an optional side quest (Trouble in Red Larch). Of particular note: the local temple hosts shrines to any god imaginable and is manned by a single priest who is relieved every two weeks. The initial NPC is a contact for The Gauntlet faction, and getting the players involved with rotating clergy can give them a more personal connection to the outside world and the powers and resources of Waterdeep, the nearest major city, without having to abandon the adventure to actually go there.

The other half of the chapter details exploring the valley. Every major settlement or location has a quick description, details on any NPCs that might be found there, and a summary of why in the world the players would even want to go there. Mostly this details which faction can be found where, what can be bought, and whether or not the place is tied up in a side quest. All the locations have some nice flavor but, again, they are all particularly out of the way.

Aside from distance, my only real complaint is that the valley is inhabited overwhelmingly by humans, and humans end up being most of the cultists as well. Feel free to spice that up as you see fit. I certainly like my fantasy to be a little more fantastic, and you have plenty of room to add in things without out-shining some of the crazy stuff the cults will bring to the table.

A note on the scale of the map: the book’s scale says 1 hex = 10 miles, while the errata for the book says 1 hex = 4 miles. I’ve been operating under the errata’s listing but using The Alexandrian’s guide for traveling a Hexcrawl. Even ignoring terrain types, this travels a little slower than rules as written 5th Edition. However, even when running 5th Edition’s travel times, 10 mile hexes make most locations a week or more away, which doesn’t always match up with cues and notes throughout the book.

It does, however, match up with the math for random encounters. Princes’ random encounter check will have you encountering something every 3 or 4 days which is perfect for 10 mile hexes but with 4 mile hexes leaves the players mostly alone in the wilderness. If you go with 4 mile hexes, which I highly recommend, either roll double the twenty sided dice when doing random encounters or just throw in one whenever you deem it appropriate.

The biggest thing this adventure is missing is some kind of random weather or event table. The book frequently mentions how the Elemental Planes are affecting the valley, changing the weather, and disrupting daily life. Aside from the random encounter table, the cults themselves, and a few events keyed off of hitting checkpoints like clearing dungeons, Princes largely leaves it up to you to narrate. I would have loved to have a few prewritten tables for flash fires, thunderstorms, or earthquakes just to remind myself to remind my players the huge stakes early in the adventure.

Chapter 3: Secret of the Sumber Hills

One of the most important parts in this section is right on page 41 in a grey text box. This little box lists the level around which each of the four major dungeons are designed around, and suggests letting the players gain a level every time they clear one of the haunted keeps. This is fine if your players are clearing the scenario cleanly and easily. However, if your group embraces the sandbox aspect a little more or really likes tracking experience, take note: the math for experience in this adventure does not match up to rules as written. Raw experience for a four person party comes a few hundred short even with side quests under 5th Editions rules of only rewarding experience for killing, routing, charming, or otherwise neutralizing another creature. So feel free to throw them some extra exp for role playing, story events, creative problem solving, or whatever.

The first section gives details on how to get the players out the door. Details from any of several factions come in that an important diplomatic delegation has gone missing in the Sumber Hills, your own little neighborhood of the Dessarin Valley. A variety of clues can be found in Red Larch which can lead the the party around the local area in a simple investigation with a few combats. At the very least, the clues should get the party started and lead them to the Water, Earth, or Air cult dungeons. Just after this is a section titled “Cult Reprisals” with encounters to run after each dungeon to point them towards a new target. The Air and Water cult encounters expressly include directions to their bases, and fairly easy to find information in the Early Investigations lead directly to the Earth and Fire cult bases. If all else fails, the Air cult’s Feathergale Spire is visible on the horizon of Red Larch.

Of the four dungeons, Feathergale Spire is the most scripted. The party can walk right in, socialize, go on a quick hunting trip, and get back in time for the game master to figure out how long they want to stretch this one out. The air cult here is the easiest of the four mechanically, but strategically as a tower in the middle of a canyon with knights mounted on vultures it’s the hardest structure to assail by force. If they can charm their way through the front door, which is an easy task, they shouldn’t have any problems. The unit gives you two named NPCs: a rather blank knight named Savra who’s pretty easy to take in any direction you want, and the tower’s captain Thurl Merroska who will be an easy way to make the players distrust any NPC of authority they meet for the rest of the campaign.

The second dungeon, Riverguard Keep, is located on the major river of the area. The book recommends playing it out as a mercenary group attempting to renovate the castle to protect the river from pirates, who they secretly are. Fairly quickly my players gathered more than enough information about the local river pirates and the water cult that trying to keep up the deception would have been ridiculous, and this was the first place they visited. Mechanically, the keep throws a lot of bodies at the party which could be overwhelming, but there’s only a few spell casters spread out over the whole dungeon. This dungeon’s named lieutenant is a Genasi river boat captain that your players are just as likely to meet on the river or in the port of Wormford. Their leader Grimjaw can be particularly troubling depending on how much you stick to the rules as being a Wereboar leaves him immune to most early forms of damage and capable of saddling one or two of your players with lycanthropy for their next couple of levels. Goldenfields and Summit Hall are two religious locations that should have a high level cleric with remove curse, should you need to point your players towards one.

The Stone Monastery, the Earth Cult’s base of operations, is the first problematic dungeon as far as order goes. The abbey contains four gargoyles which can be particularly tough without some strong magical damage. And while the Earth Cult’s base enemy monk is fairly easy to deal with, they have two other unique enemies with strong defenses, strong attacks, and some very good spell casting. The dungeon itself has some specific notes about what to change if the party leaves and returns to take the cult down another day, which is likely to be the case. The monastery gets three named NPCs. A friendly Lich has been living in the building since it was his family home and can drop some exposition about the area’s history. A rather boring priest is there to greet visitors and possibly induct the characters into the lowest level of the cult. Lastly, the abbess of the monastery is Hellenrae (or, as my players have taken to calling her “Literal Actual Toph Bei Fong.” A blind, no nonsense, female kung-fu master who can see through vibrations in the very earth? Yeah, checks out.) Probably the most dangerous thing about the Stone Monastery, though, is that the entrance to it’s Act II counterpart is right in the basement and only needs a key that the party can pick up from either leader on site. Equally frustrating for dungeon masters: depending on how you approaching looting, the Earth Cult’s priests and guards all wear splint and plate mail. Granted, it’s all made out of magically shaped stone as opposed to metal, so if you do allow your players to upgrade their armor this early you can at least saddle them with the awkwardness of constantly looking like Earth Cultists.

The last dungeon, Scarlet Moon Hall, is a burnt out hill with an old wooden tower and a flaming wickerman where some long lost druids are performing some kind of a sacred right. Fantasy Burning Man’s mechanics do a lot to compartmentalize all the various forces in the area, and many of the camps around the hill are druids and adventurers come to see the supposed ritual that can be recruited to the parties cause. This is great because between the giant fire elemental in the burning giant, the hell hounds, the fire cultists with magically flaming swords, and the several priests capable of casting fireball twice per day Scarlet Moon Hall throws some heavy punches. The big boss is Elizar, a fire themed druid who can summon smoke mephits from his tobacco pipe and possibly the most fun I’ve had running an NPC in this whole book. Princes’ NPCs have only the minimum of text to motivate specifics, but Elizar is the only one depicted coolly taking a drag in front of an explosion.

Chapter 6: Alarums and Excursions

Here we have the side quests. The first set includes a number of small excursions into the wilderness around Red Larch and two dungeons. Designed to take a party quickly from level 1 to 3, I feel like it gives new players a very nice crash course on combat, exploration, and investigation without bogging things down too much for experienced players. The first dungeon focuses on a necromancer who can net the party an early wand of magic missile. While the quest does end with a perfect moment to pass around a piece of paper with the Elemental Evil logo drawn on it, it never really ties back into the deeper machinations of the book. If you happen to start your party at level 1, be prepared to tie this back in during Act III somehow.

The second dungeon is wrapped up in a conspiracy controlling Red Larch. It’s dungeon directly hints towards the ancient Dwarven city which makes up Act II, and helps throw a little action to endear the party with the townsfolk of Red Larch. The aftermath shows a number of town elders in the pockets of the Earth cult, and leaves you to elevate whatever NPCs the party has really taken a shine to to be their reliable home contact when they come back. The villain of this dungeon, an Earth priest by the name of Larrack, makes a perfect recurring villain if your party happens to kill all the other cult captains. I’ve personally got a soft spot for the village idiot, a half-orc named Grund who spends most of his time pickling, and elevated him up to a major supporting character for the party.

The rest of the chapter is devoted to what it calls Side Treks, largely one shot style side quests. These are fun romps to try to entice the party off to the four corners of the valley. All of them net new equipment, opportunities for allies, or magic items, so don’t worry about the challenge for experience if you’re running by the book’s estimates of leveling up after each major dungeon in Chapter 3. Do try and keep an eye on the recommended level for each as they’re meant to be peppered over the whole adventure. The Vale of Dancing Waters is an adventure designed for a party at level 8 that’s particularly easy to accidentally run for a party of 3rd level characters poking around in the early game.

Chapter 7: Monsters and Magic Items

While there are some wild magic items made for this adventure, you really don’t come across many of them early on. For the time being, you really want to look at the sections on Monsters and NPCs. Every cult has a more physical, warrior thug and a spell caster priest that make appearances. Some even have two! Enemies inspired by the Monk character class make a big show. All of the spell casters have heavily elemental themed spell lists, and might have some particular inspiration if you have a sorcerer in your party. The most interesting of all of them is the Water cult Fathomer, a second spell caster that can transform into a watery serpent.

Largely, I don’t really like 5th edition monsters. Either their complexity is so simple that it comes down to how many attacks they get with their multi attack, or you’re tracking an entire spell list for them (I highly recommend the 5th Edition Spellbook app found in the iTunes App Store and Google Play. It contains every spell available through the Players Hand Book and Princes of the Apocalypse, and lets you organize individual spell lists for characters. And it’s free). Some of the lower level enemies have once per combat abilities or special circumstances like the Crushing Wave Reaver’s double damage to unarmored enemies. The Assassin ability along with sneak attack damage plays a recurring role in many NPC enemies in the Side Treks, which is good because it’s potentially fatal no matter what level it shows up in and does a great job at teaching why players should start combats on their own terms instead of charging into every situation head first. Combats that don’t involve spell casting enemies largely become boring, however, and the Black Earth Guard’s plate mail leads to some particularly slogging combat as the party levels up. At the very least, Princes adds a large number of spell casting enemies to the game, something I found sorely lacking in the Monster Manual. If your players really need a challenge, I’d suggest playing around with how enemies from different cults can interact mechanically under the narratively plausible idea that the cults are so fed up with the player characters that they’ll actually work together to try and stop them.

Appendices A, B, & C: The Good Stuff

Appendix A details a new player race for 5th edition: the Genasi. Listen, there are one hundred different articles out there talking about the optimization standards of the Genasi and their sub-races. Who cares? Do you want to play an elementally powered humanoid? The peasant version of a Djinn/Jeanie? Do you want to have rock skin, flaming hair, fin ears, or just constantly float a few inches off the ground? Do you want to have jewel colored skin and magical abilities regardless of class choice? Genasi are amazingly fun to play and for once you have a setting and adventure that neatly ties them in regardless of how Tolkienic you like your fantasy. Each cult has a major Genasi NPC to pit against the party as well. Beyond that, if you pick up the free player supplement for Princes, you’ll get Aaracokra and Deep Gnomes as well. Aaracokra can fly, which is considered the most broken level 1 ability in the whole game. Take that as you will.

Appendix B adds a slew of particularly elemental themed spells which are included as part of 5th Edition’s free content. Druids, Sorcerers, and Wizards make out with the most additions, the first two getting the most thematically out of having more elemental spells. Each element gets their own Prestidigitation/Thaumaturgy style cantrip to control an element. Frostbite, Create Bonfire, and Thunderclap are all cantrips worth considering for build optimization period, if that’s a thing you’re into. Regardless of if you’re playing Princes of the Apocalypse or not, the added spell list does a ton for filling out spell lists for characters that just want to cast Ice spells and nothing else, or whatever element happens to take a player’s fancy.

Lastly, Appendix C describes how to take Princes and apply it to different settings. Mostly focusing on transplanting the campaign into Darksun, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and Eberron, this section details a lot of focus on how to pick the region your players will explore and exactly what function each player faction is supposed to bring to the story. Even if you intend drop Princes into a wholly original setting or just keep it in Faerun, seeing four more takes on the adventure’s context helps understand what’s supposed to be important and what isn’t.

Final Review

All in all, this is one of the best pre-written adventures I’ve ever run or played. My biggest complaints are a somewhat mundane cast of races and a lack of a full service for weather and elemental effects in the overworld, which are things that are easily changed and designed at home. Princes’ set piece dungeons are so tightly designed, inspiring, and well notated that any dungeon master should have plenty of time and energy to fill in whatever gaps the book leaves in their play style. As for length, a focused and effective group of players could finish this adventure in around a year with weekly sessions, though there’s plenty of room for role playing and side content to keep a group content for even a whole two years. This ranks up there with the best games I’ve ever been a part of.

Thanks to Peter Tesh for editing.

#review #dungeons and dragons #dnd #d&d #Princes of the Apocalypse #Elemental Evil #prewritten adventure #adventure module

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Whisper Network, Bradbury, James Bond, Isle of Dread

H. P. Lovecraft (DMR Books): The first thing to keep in mind is that this cache represents one of the great epistolary friendships in the history of letters. The two never met in person, but the Mutual Admiration Society CAS and HPL formed between them was forged of eldritch steel. Both considered the other the Greatest Living Weird Fiction Author. It is obvious in every letter they wrote and confirmed by comments they sent to other correspondents.

  Comic Books (Bleeding Fool): Two weeks ago, we published the second part in our ongoing series of articles investigating the secret “Whisper Network” – a secret group of (mostly) women that’s been allegedly colluding to torment comic book pros and publicly harass creators they disagree with. Within that exposé, a major story was uncovered that should have rocked the comic book industry when it first happened, but was buried or “memory holed” by comic industry press at the time, with sites like Bleeding Fool erasing it after publishing it and Comics Beat, IGN, Newsarama and all others ignoring it entirely.

Cinema (Bounding Into Comics): In a new video interview J.J. Abrams declared that his film production company Bad Robot will make hiring based on looks a top priority. Speaking with Time Magazine about the film industry Abrams discussed what he wants the industry to look like in the future. He then made it clear that Bad Robot will be focused on people’s outward appearance when it comes to hiring.

Robert E. Howard (John C. Wright): As previously announced, Jeffro Johnson, author of Appendix N, Zaklog the Great, Nate the Greater, and your truly gather electronically to talk about Robert E. Howard’s verse….

Ray Bradbury (Pulpfest): Ray Douglas Bradbury was born on August 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Illinois. From an early age, he was a voracious reader and consumer of popular culture — movies, pulp magazines, radio programming, newspaper comic strips, circuses, magic, and more. He was enamored with the Buck Rogers newspaper strip, the stories of L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more. By age twelve, he wanted to write.

James Bond (25 Years Later): Raise your martini glasses! We are only a few months away from (hopefully) another fantastic James Bond adventure (er, at least, we think so. It’s already been delayed once by a global pandemic that is starting to feel like something a diabolical Bond villain would think up). No Time To Die, the 25th official James Bond release, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation), stars Daniel Craig for the fifth, and likely final, time as superspy James Bond ending what has been a sterling era for the rugged 52-year-old.

Fiction (Benespen): This is another expedition into the past of popular literature. Abraham Merritt, whose byline is nearly always A. Merritt, was a popular author who wasn’t even best known in his own time for his fiction. Rather, he was a celebrity journalist, making enough money to travel widely and pursue arcane hobbies.  The Moon Pool [Amazon link] is the work I usually see cited as typical of Merritt’s work, and it is listed in Gary Gygax’s “Appendix N” as an influence on Dungeons and Dragons. Let’s dive into the Moon Pool and see what happens!

Science Fiction (Starship Cat): This novel is pretty much a direct follow-in to Citadel, and continues to be mostly Dana’s story, with occasional appearances by Butch and some cameos by Vernon Tyler. Dana’s story is pretty much an enactment of the proverbial Chinese curse “May you come to the attention of those in high places.” Her heroism at the end of the last book has made the Powers That Be decide that she’s leadership material — and send her to the new station, to command a squadron from the various Latin American countries.

H. P. Lovecraft (Tentaculii): I’ve encountered an interesting item which perhaps throws a small sidelight on the use of the telephone in Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1919). You’ll recall that a telephone is taken on the descent… The telephone might sound like an unlikely thing to take down below. But wired long-distance field telephones were a known ‘thing’ at that time, not least because of their use in the war.

Conventions (Dragoncon): Part two of our three-part interview series where past Dragon Award recipients talk about their award-winning novels and their Dragon Awards experience. In part one of our three-part Dragon Awards interview series, our award-winning authors talked about their background, what motivates them to write, and about their novels that captured Dragon Awards audiences everywhere.

Cinema (0themastercylinder): William Smith. He was born in 1933 in rural Columbia, Missouri on a cattle ranch. That background served him very well during the many Westerns he was to appear in later. The first big surprise I got in examining his background was how early his film career started. He appeared as a child actor in 1942’s “The Ghost of Frankenstein” as the boy who befriends the Monster portrayed by Lon Chaney Jr.

D&D (Paint Monk): wo years ago, I picked up Goodman Games’ Original Adventures Reincarnated #1, where I re-lived the fun of TSR’s original D&D modules “In Search of the Unknown” and “The Keep on the Borderlands”. This month, I finally picked up OAR #2 – The Isle of Dread, and I’d like to share just how much I enjoyed this book and the work the fine folks over at Goodman put into making it a success.

Fiction (Dark Herald): Been a while since we’ve seen a new Dresden Files book and we will be getting two this year. So at least 2020 isn’t a total write off. Butcher’s last addition to this series was in 2014. He had been rather productive up until this time. Usually producing one or two books a year. I’m not sure why there was a prolonged interrupt, possibly it was his divorce.

Beer (Trinkelbonker): Got these as a delayed birthday gift the other day, six cans of Ace Of Aces American Lager with a rather nice (and collectable, if you ask me) motif. The aircraft you see is an American Lockheed P-38 Lightning and the pilot that flew it was Richard Ira Bong, the first child of nine of Carl Bång, an immigrant from Sweden and Dora Bryce, who was an American by Scots-English descent. Richard, nicknamed Dick by his friends, shot down over 40 Japanese aircraft in the Pacific Theater during WWII and became one of the most decorated pilots of the war.

Game Review (Black Gate): This is the second article in my “explanation” of Conan 2d20. Last time I focused on 2d20’s core mechanic and on this game’s design philosophy insofar as it is an emulation of the “physics” and flavor of Robert E. Howard’s Conan fiction. This one will detail more aspects of gameplay, particularly player character components and action scenes. Last article, I maintained that Conan 2d20 characters begin as powerful in mechanical ability (unless the alternative Shadows of the Past character generation is used).

Cinema (Irish Times): because these things only happen in the greatest superhero movie ever made: Flash Gordon. The 1980 camp classic, which has been restored in 4K to mark its 40th anniversary, has a history of happy accidents following its hero’s first appearance in a comic strip in 1934. Buck Rogers, another intergalactic hero, had already spawned novelisations and toys when King Features Syndicate – a subsidiary of the Hearst newspaper empire – approached Edgar Rice Burroughs with a plan to adapt John Carter into a comic strip.

Small Press (Tentaculii): New on Archive.org…Howard Collector #5, Summer 1964.  Howard Collector #6, Spring 1965. With the poem “Who is Grandpa Theobold?”, from a letter. This would count as another early use of ‘Lovecraft as character’, albeit not in fiction. I wonder what the likely year on this poem is?

Cinema & T.V. (Dark Worlds Quarterly): Heroic fantasy films and television changed after 1982. The release of Dino DeLaurentis’ Conan the Barbarian sent Fantasy films in a new direction. Movies had to have a mix of violence, sex and flash that previous movies seemed to lack. Whether you like or hate these films is a matter of opinion. There were bright spots of Fantasy filmmaking among the direct-to-video duds like the Brian Froud-Jim Henson films, Legend by Ridley Scott, and Ron Howard’s The Lord of the Rings known as Willow.

Book Review (Benespen): War Demons [Silver Empire affiliate link] is the veteran’s take on supernatural horror. Sometimes we casually refer to the men who come back from war suffering from PTSD and survivor’s guilt as demon-haunted; but for Michael Alexander it is anything but a metaphor. We now come to the third book covering similar territory I have read recently. I don’t often end up reading lots of similar books together in succession, so I can compare and contrast these.

Science Fiction (Future War Stories): Packed in seemingly every military science fiction work are futuristic firearms and some, like the Colonial Marines M41A1 Pulse Rifle has become an icon of sci-fi weaponry…then there are others that never get their day in the limelight. One of those military sci-fi weapons is the United States standard issue endo/exo assault rifle of the 2060’s: the M590. Featured in the legendary 1990’s FOX one-season TV show Space: Above and Beyond.

Science Fiction (Rough Edges): Robert E. Vardeman has been writing top-notch science fiction for about forty years now, and that’s almost how long I’ve known him. His latest novel, THE DUST OF STARS, is the first book in a new series called ENGINEERING INFINITY, and it’s everything I love about science fiction. First, it has big ideas. And I mean E.E. “Doc” Smith big: An ancient, long-disappeared alien race scattered planet-sized machines throughout the galaxy.

Pulp Fiction (DMR Books): Merritt outlived the CAS-HPL correspondence of 1922-1937, though not by much. In the CAS-HPL letters, one sees Klarkash-Ton belatedly discovering Merritt–and HPL belatedly discovering The Metal Monster. Throughout the course of the correspondence, Merritt was the most successful exemplar of the weird fiction that CAS and HPL were themselves creating. While they did not always agree with the directions he took in his fiction, there was no denying that Merritt dominated the market for pulp fantasy.

Tolkien (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): So, for years I’ve been convinced that the old story about the Tolkien Estate having gone after TSR for their use of hobbits, ents, balrogs et al in early printings of D&D was wrong and that it was actually Saul Zaentz’s group, Tolkien Enterprises (the movie merchandising people) who’d issued that cease-and-desist back in 1976. But while I’ve able to build up a probable case I’ve been lacking direct proof. Now Gygax has provided it.

Sensor Sweep: Whisper Network, Bradbury, James Bond, Isle of Dread published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[ciathyzareposts]

Betrayal at Krondor

During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game. These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. The paradigm shift this entailed was such that for many players these games ceased to be games at all in the zero-sum sense. When a group came together to play Squad Leader or Dungeons & Dragons, there hung over the plebeian kitchen or basement in which they played a shared vision of the beaches of Normandy or the dungeons of Greyhawk. The games became vehicles for exploring the vagaries of history or the limits of the imagination — vehicles, in other words, for living out shared stories.

In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that some of the stories generated in this way would make their way out of the gaming sessions which had spawned them and find a home in more traditional, linear forms of media. And, indeed, just such things were happening by the 1980s, as the first novels born from games arrived.

Needless to say, basing your book on a game you’ve played isn’t much of a path to literary respectability. But for a certain kind of plot-focused genre novel — the kind focusing strictly on what people do rather than why they do it — prototyping the whole thing as a game makes a degree of sense. It can keep you honest by forcing your story to conform to a simulated reality that transcends the mere expediency of what might be cool and exciting to write into the next scene. By pushing against authorial fiat and the deus ex machina, it can give the whole work an internal coherency — an honesty, one might even say — that’s too often missing from novels of this stripe.

The most widely publicized early example of the phenomenon was undoubtedly the one which involved a humble insurance salesman named Tom Clancy, who came out of nowhere with a techno-thriller novel called The Hunt for Red October in 1984. The perfect book for a time of resurgent patriotism and military pride in the United States, it found a fan in no less elevated a personage than President Ronald Reagan, who declared it “my kind of yarn.” As the book topped the bestseller charts and the press rushed to draft their human-interest stories on the man who had written it, they learned that Clancy had gamed out its entire scenario, involving a rogue Soviet submarine captain who wishes to defect along with his vessel to the United States, with a friend of his named Larry Bond, using Harpoon, a tabletop wargame of modern naval combat designed by the latter. Clancy’s follow-up novel, a story of open warfare between East and West called Red Storm Rising, was a product of the same gestation process. To the literary establishment, it all seemed extremely strange and vaguely unsettling; to many a wargamer, it seemed perfectly natural.

Another line of ludic adaptations from the same period didn’t attract as much attention from the New York Times Book Review, much less the president, but nevertheless became almost as successful on its own terms. In 1983, TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, decided to make a new series of adventure modules for the game, each of which would feature a different kind of dragon — because, as some of their customers were writing in their letters, the existing Dungeons & Dragons modules “had plenty of dungeons, but not many dragons.” The marketing exercise soon grew into Dragonlance, an elaborately plotted Tolkienesque epic set in a brand new fantasy world — one which, yes, featured plenty of dragons. TSR asked employees Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman to write a trilogy of novels based on the fourteen Dragonlance adventure modules and source books they planned to publish. Thus Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first volume of The Dragonlance Chronicles, was published in the same year as The Hunt for Red October. It promptly became a nerdy sensation, the biggest fantasy novel of the year, spawning a whole new business for TSR as a publisher of paperback novels. In time, said novels would become as big a part of their business as the games whose names the books bore on their spines.

A third, only slightly less heralded example of the games-into-books trend actually predates the two I’ve just mentioned by a couple of years. In the last 1970s, a group of students at the University of California San Diego took up the recently published Dungeons & Dragons. Growing dissatisfied with TSR’s rules, they scrapped them one by one, replacing them with their own home-grown versions. Meanwhile they evolved a world in which to play called Midkemia, complete with its own detailed history, bestiary, sociology, and geography. Forming a little company of their own, as so many Dungeons & Dragons fanatics were doing at the time, they published some of their innovations to modest sales.

Raymond E. Feist

But one of their number named Raymond E. Feist had bigger ambitions. He wrote a novel based on some of the group’s exploits in Midkemia. Calling it simply Magician, he got it published through Doubleday in 1982 as the first volume of The Riftwar Saga. It sold very well, and he’s been writing Midkemia novels ever since.

Unlike the later cases of Tom Clancy and Dragonlance, Magician wasn’t widely publicized or advertised as being the product of a game. It was seen instead as merely the latest entry in an exploding branch of genre fiction: lengthy high-fantasy series inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien, often to the point of one-to-one correspondences between characters and plot events, but written in a manner more immediately accessible to the average Middle American reader, with more action, more narrative thrust, less elevated diction, and markedly less digressive songs and poetry. Dragonlance, of course, is an example of the same breed.

I must admit that I’ve personally read only the first book of Feist’s series, and not even to completion at that. This sort of derivative high fantasy doesn’t do much for me as a rule, so I’m not the best person to judge Feist’s output under any circumstances. Anything positive I do say about it runs the risk of damning with faint praise.

To wit: my wife and I used the book as our light bedtime reading, and we made it about two-thirds of the way through before terminal ennui set in and we decided we’d had enough. If that seems like less than a ringing endorsement, know that it’s farther than I generally get with most fantasy novels, including ones with considerably more literary credibility. I thus feel comfortable in saying that at least the early Raymond E. Feist novels are well-crafted examples of their breed, if you happen to like that sort of thing. (I do understand from others that the quality of his work, and particularly of his plotting, began to decline after his first handful of Midkemia novels. Perhaps because he was no longer basing them on his gaming experiences?)

The world of Midkemia is most interesting for our purposes, however, for the computer game it spawned. Yes, a series of novels based on a game got turned back into a very different sort of game. And then, just for good measure, that game got turned into another novel. It’s a crazy old transmedia world.

The more direct origin of Betrayal at Krondor, the game in question, can be traced back to June of 1991 and a chance meeting between John Cutter and Jeff Tunnell at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show. Both names may be familiar to regular readers of these histories.

John Cutter

Cutter had spent several years with Cinemaware, helping to craft many of their most innovative creations, which blended strong narrative elements with play styles that were unorthodox in story-heavy computer games at the time. In late 1990, with Cinemaware in the process of collapsing, he and several colleagues had jumped ship to New World Computing, best known for their Might & Magic series of CRPGs. But he was trapped in a purely administrative role there, without the freedom to create which he had enjoyed at Cinemaware, and was already feeling dissatisfied by the time he met Tunnell at that Summer CES.

Jeff Tunnell

Tunnell, for his part, was the founder of the studio known as Dynamix, now a subsidiary of Sierra Online. They were best known for their 3D graphics technology and the line of vehicular simulators it enabled, but they had fingers in several other pies as well, from adventure games to a burgeoning interest in casual puzzle games.

Recognizing talent when he saw it, Tunnell asked Cutter to leave Southern California, the home of the erstwhile Cinemaware and the current New World, and come to Eugene, Oregon, the home of Dynamix. Not only would he be able to have a creative role there once again, Tunnell promised, but he would be allowed to make whatever game he wanted to. Cutter jumped at the chance.

Once in Eugene, however, he struggled to identify just the right project. His first instinct was to make a point-and-click adventure game in the Sierra mold, but Tunnell, having made three of them in the last couple of years to less than satisfying effect, was feeling burned out on the genre and its limitations, and gently steered him away from it. (Absolute creative freedom, Cutter was learning, is seldom really absolute.)

At last, Tunnell came to Cutter with an idea of his own. He’d been reading a very popular series of fantasy novels by this fellow named Raymond E. Feist, and he thought they’d make a fine CRPG. Dynamix had never dabbled in the genre before, but when had that ever stopped them from trying something new? He suggested that Cutter give the first few of the books a read. If it turned out that he liked them as well and agreed that they’d make a good game, well, perhaps he should ring Feist up and have a chat about just that possibility.

Glad to finally have a clear sense of direction, Cutter did the one thing and then did the other. Feist was very busy, but was himself a long-time computer gamer, having sat down in front of his first Apple II some twelve or thirteen years before. He liked the idea of seeing Midkemia come to life on a computer screen. Although he didn’t have much time for working personally on such a project, he told his agent to make the deal happen if at all possible. So, a contract was signed that gave Dynamix the right to make Midkemia games until January 1, 1995, with Feist given the right of final approval or rejection of each title prior to its release. By one account at least, it was the most expensive literary license yet granted to a game developer, a sign of Feist’s ongoing popularity among readers of fantasy literature.

Another, slightly less welcome sign of same followed immediately after: upon being asked whether he was interested in authoring the game himself, Feist said that his time was money, so he’d need to be paid something beyond the terms of the licensing agreement itself — and, he noted flatly, “you couldn’t afford me.” This posed a dilemma. Cutter believed himself to be a better designer of game systems than a writer, and thus certainly wasn’t going to take on the job personally. Casting about for a likely candidate, his thoughts turned to one Neal Hallford, an enthusiastic young fellow with a way with words whom he’d befriended back at New World Computing.

Neal Hallford

A fresh-out-of-university Hallford had joined New World in the role of writer some months before Cutter himself had arrived. His first assignment there had been to make sense of the poorly translated English text of Tunnels & Trolls: Crusaders of Khazan, a project New World had chosen to outsource to a Japanese developer, with underwhelming results all the way around. After that truly thankless task, he’d worked for a while on Might and Magic III before playing a pivotal role on Planet’s Edge, an ambitious science-fiction CRPG that had tried to do just a little bit too much for its own good. He was just finishing that project when his old friend John Cutter called.

Like Cutter before him, Hallford found Dynamix’s offer difficult to refuse. Eugene struck him as idyllic by contrast with the crowded, smoggy streets of Los Angeles; meanwhile Dynamix’s offices enjoyed the well-deserved reputation of being just about the most stylish and comfortable in the entire industry, vastly outdistancing even the parent company of Sierra in that respect. Certainly they compared favorably with the chaotic jumble of tightly packed cubicles that was the domain of New World. Thus on Halloween Day, 1991, Hallford shook hands with his old colleges there for the last time and hopped into his Geo Metro for the drive north.

Upon Hallford��s arrival in Eugene, Cutter pulled him into his office and kept him there for a week, while the two hashed out exactly what game they wanted to make and wrote the outline of a script. Hallford still remembers that week of frenzied creativity as “one of the best weeks of my life.” These two friends, different in talents and personality but unified in their vision for the game, would do the vast majority of the creative heavy lifting that would go into it. Broadly stated, Cutter would be the systems guy while Hallford would be the story guy, yet their visions would prove so simpatico that they’d seldom disagree on much of anything at all.

Jeff Tunnel had initially fallen in love with a Midkemia novel called Silverthorn, and the original plan he’d pitched to Cutter had been to make the game a fairly straightforward adaptation of that book’s plot. But such a thing is inherently problematic, for reasons I’ve had ample cause to discuss in earlier articles. Players who buy the game because they read and liked the novel — who are, after all, the whole reason for making a licensed game at all from a business perspective — won’t be excited about stepping through a plot they already know. At the same time, it’s all too easy from the design side to make a game where victory hinges on taking all of the same idiosyncratic, possibly irrational actions as the protagonists of the novel. And so you end up with a game that bores one group of players to tears, even as it frustrates another group who don’t happen to know what Character A needs to do in Situation B in order to replicate the novel’s story.

The biggest appeal of the Midkemia novels, Hallford believed, was indeed the world itself, with its detailed culture and geography and its cast of dozens of well-established characters. It would be better, he thought, to set a brand new story there, one that would let Feist’s many fans meet up with old friends in familiar locales, but that wouldn’t force them to step by rote through a plot they already knew. During the crash course on Midkemia which he’d given himself in the few weeks before starting at Dynamix — like Cutter, he’d come to Feist fandom cold — Hallford had identified a twenty-year “hole” in the chronology where he and Cutter could set a new story: just after A Darkness at Sethanon, the concluding volume in the original Riftwar Cycle that had started the ball rolling. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Feist was willing to entrust this young, unproven writer with creating something really new in his world. Betrayal at Krondor was off and running.

Hallford may have come to Midkemia late, but his dogged determination to capture the world exactly as it existed in the novels would come to a large degree to define the project. He calls himself a “born fanboy” by nature. Thus, even though he wasn’t quite of Feist’s hardcore fandom, he had enormous empathy for them. He points back to an experience from his youth: when, as a dedicated Star Trek fan, he started to read the paperback novels based on the television series which Pocket Books published in the 1980s. I read them as well, and can remember that some of them were surprisingly good as novels, at least according to my adolescent sensibilities, while also managing to capture the spirit of the series I saw on television. Others, however… not so much. Hallford points to one disillusioning book in particular, which constantly referred to phasers as “ray guns.” It inculcated in him a sense that any writer who works in a beloved universe owes it to the fans of said universe — even if he’s not really one of them — to be as true to it as is humanly possible.

So, Hallford wrote Betrayal at Krondor with Feist’s fans constantly in mind. He immersed himself in Feist’s works to the point of that he was almost able to become the novelist. The prose he crafted, vivid and effective within its domain, really is virtually indistinguishable from that of its inspiration, whose own involvement was limited to an early in-person meeting and regular phone conversations thereafter. Yet the latter became more rather than less frequent as the project wore on; Feist found his enthusiasm for the game increasing in tandem with his surprise at how earnestly Hallford tried to capture his novels and the extent to which he was managing to succeed with only the most limited coaching. The fan verdict would prove even more telling. To this day, many of them believe that it was Feist himself who scripted Betrayal at Krondor.

But Betrayal of Krondor is notable for more than Neal Hallford’s dedicated fan service. It’s filled to bursting with genuinely original ideas, many of which flew in the face of contemporary fashions in games. Not all of the ideas work — some of them rather pull against one another — but the game’s boldness makes it a bracing study in design.

Following the lead of GUI advocates working with other sorts of software, game designers in the early 1990s were increasingly embracing the gospel of the “mode-less” interface: a single master screen on which everything takes place, as opposed to different displays and interfaces for different play states. (For an excellent example of how a mode-less interface could be implemented in the context of a CRPG, see Origin Systems’s Ultima VII.) Cutter and Hallford, however, pitched this gospel straight into the trash can without a second thought. Betrayal at Krondor has a separate mode for everything.

The closest thing it has to a “home” screen must be the first-person exploration view, which uses 3D graphics technology poached from Dynamix’s flight simulators. But then, you can and probably often will move around from an overhead map view as well. When interesting encounters happen, the screen is given over to text with clickable menus, or to storybook-style illustrated dialog scenes. When you get in a fight, that’s also displayed on a screen of its own; combat is a turn-based affair played on a grid that ends up vaguely resembling the Battle Chess games by Interplay. (Thankfully, it’s also tactically interesting and satisfying.) And then when you come upon a locked chest, you’re dumped into yet another new mode, where you have to work out a word puzzle in order to open it, because why not? All of these modes are accompanied by different styles of graphics: 3D graphics on the main exploration screen, a no-frills Rogue-like display for the overhead movement view, pixel art with the story scenes, digitized real-world actors with the dialog scenes, the sprite-based isometric view that accompanies combat, etc.

The first-person exploration view.

The overhead view.

A bit of exposition. Could this be a side quest before us?

The combat view.

A puzzle chest. The answer to this one, for the record, is “die.” Later riddles get much more complicated, but the mechanics of the puzzles ingenuously prevent them from ever becoming completely insoluble. Many a male player has had a significant other who couldn’t care less about the rest of the game, but loves these puzzle chests…

This mishmash of approaches can make the game feel like a throwback to the 1980s, when genres and their established sets of best practices were not yet set in stone, and when many games that may strike us as rather odd mashups today were being produced. We can certainly see John Cutter’s roots in Cinemaware here; that company made a career out of ignoring the rules of ludic genre in favor of whatever systems best conveyed the fictional genre they were attempting to capture. By all rights, Betrayal at Krondor ought not to work, as so many of Cinemaware’s games tended not quite to work. All of these different modes and play styles — the puzzle chests in particular seem beamed in from a different game entirely — ought to add up to a hopelessly confusing muddle. Somehow, though, it does work; Betrayal at Krondor actually isn’t terribly hard to come to grips with initially, and navigating its many modes soon becomes second nature.

One reason for this is doubtless also the reason for much else that’s good about the game: its unusually extended testing period. When development was reaching what everyone thought to be its final stages, Dynamix sent the game to outside testers for what was expected to be a three-month evaluation period. Even this much usability testing would have been more than most studios were doing at this time. But the project, as so many game-development projects tend to do, ran way longer than expected, and three months turned into nine months of constant player feedback. While our universe isn’t entirely bereft of games that seem to have sprung into being fully-formed, by far the most good games attain that status only gradually, through repeated iterations of testing and feedback. Betrayal at Krondor came by its goodness in exactly this hard, honest way. Unlike a dismaying number of games from its time, this game feels like one that’s actually been played — played extensively — before it got released. The niggling problems that dog even many good games from the early 1990s (such as the infuriating inventory management and rudderless combat of Ultima VII) are almost completely absent here. Instead the game is full of thoughtful little touches to head off annoyance, the sort of touches that can only come from real player feedback.

The final verdict on its mishmash of graphical approaches, on the other hand, must be less positive. Betrayal at Krondor wasn’t a notably attractive game even by the standards of its day, and time has done it no favors; the project desperately needed a strong art director able to impose a unified aesthetic vision. The parts of it that have aged the worst by far are those employing digitized actors, who look almost unbelievably ludicrous, cutting violently against any sense of Tolkienesque grandeur Hallford’s prose might be straining to evoke. Most store-bought Halloween costumes look higher rent than this bunch of survivors of an explosion at the Loony Tunes prop department. John Cutter acknowledges the problems:

We digitized a lot of the actors, and we assumed they were going to be so pixelated that the makeup and costumes didn’t have to look that great. They just kind of had to be… close. But by the time we launched the game the technology had improved… yeah. You could see the elastic bands on the fake beards. It was pretty bad. I wasn’t crazy about a lot of the graphics in the game.

Tellingly, the use of digitized actors was the one place where Betrayal at Krondor didn’t blaze its own trail, bowing instead to contemporary trends.

For all of Betrayal at Krondor‘s welcome willingness just to try lots of stuff, its approach to story remains its most memorable and interesting quality of all. This aspect of the game was so front and center in the mind of John Cutter that, when he wrote a brief few paragraphs of “Designer Notes” for the manual, it came to occupy more than half the space:

We decided the game should be an interactive story. Characters would be multidimensional and capable of stirring the player’s emotions. The story would be carefully plotted with lots of surprises, a good mix of humor and pathos, and abundant amounts of mystery and foreshadowing to keep the player intrigued.

Balancing play against plot is the most confounding job any game designer can face on a fantasy role-playing game. In Betrayal at Krondor, we have integrated our plot so that it provides ample gaming opportunities, while also giving the player a sense of time, place, and purpose. This is achieved by making an onscreen map available to the player at all times, and by creating short-term goals — the nine chapters in the game — which give us a unique opportunity to tell a progressive story that still gives the player plenty of freedom to explore and adventure without being confined to a scripted plot.

In thus “balancing play against plot,” Cutter and Hallford were attempting to square a circle that had been bedeviling game designers for a long time. All of the things that mark a rich story — characters with agendas of their own; big reveals and shocking turns; the classic narrative structure of rising action, climax, and denouement; dramatic confrontations with expressive dialog — cut against the player’s freedom to go wherever and do whatever she wants. As a designer, says the conventional wisdom, you can’t have it all: you must rather stake out your spot on a continuum where at one end the player does little more than click her way through a railroaded plot line, and at the other she does absolutely anything she wants, but does it in a world bereft of any larger meaning or purpose. Adventure games tend to lean toward the set-piece-storytelling end of the continuum, CRPGs toward open-ended interactivity.

Even CRPGs from around the time of Betrayal at Krondor which are written expansively and well, such as Ultima VII, generally send you wandering through other people’s stories rather than your own. Each city you explore in that game is full of little story stubs revolving around the inhabitants thereof rather than yourself; your role is merely to nudge these dramas of others along to some sort of resolution before you disappear again. Your larger agenda, meanwhile, boils down to the usual real or metaphorical collecting of pieces to assemble the big whatsit at the end — a series of actions which can be done in any order precisely because they’re so simplistic in terms of plot. You’re in the world, but never really feel yourself to be of it.

Cutter and Hallford, however, refused to accept the conventional wisdom embodied by even so markedly innovative a CRPG as Ultima VII. They were determined to deliver the best of both worlds — an adventure-game-like plot and CRPG-like freedom — in the same game. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t quite work as a whole. Nevertheless, the attempt is well worth discussing.

Betrayal at Krondor positively trumpets its intentions via the metaphors which its user interface employs. Once again ignoring all of the fashions of its time, which emphasized the definitively non-textual aesthetic of the interactive movie, this game presents itself as an interactive book with an enthusiasm worthy of the 1980s heyday of bookware. The overriding look of the game, to the extent it has one amidst all its clashing graphical styles, is of an illuminated manuscript, ink on yellowing parchment. The story is told in a literary past tense, save points become “bookmarks,” and, as Cutter himself noted in the extract above, the whole experience is divided into nine neat “chapters.”

The game is relentless about describing every single event using full sentences worthy of one of Feist’s novels. Sometimes the end result can verge on the ridiculous. For example, every single time you search the body of an opponent you’ve just killed — something you’ll be doing an awful lot of, what with this being a CRPG and all — you’re greeted with a verbose missive:

Owyn looked for supplies. Feeling like a vulture, he turned the body this way and that as he searched for anything that might be of value to them on their journey. All in all, he supposed that if he were the dead man, it wouldn’t matter to him any longer what happened to his belongings.

Every character has the exact same feeling when searching a dead body, despite very different personalities. This is one of many places where Betrayal at Krondor‘s verbosity winds up undercutting rather than strengthening its sense of mimesis.

Of course, you can and quickly will learn to click right through this message and its one or two random variations each time you search a corpse. But it remains an amusing sign of just how committed Cutter and Halford were to their “interactive storybook” concept in even the most repetitive, mechanical areas of their creation. (Imagine what Pac-Man would be like if the title character stopped to muse about his actions every time he swallowed a power pill and killed another ghost…)

All of this past-tense verbosity has an oddly distancing effect. You don’t feel like you’re having an adventure so much as reading one — or possibly writing one. You’re held at a remove even from the characters in your party, normally the primary locus of player identification in a game like this one. You don’t get to make your own characters; instead you’re assigned three of them who fulfill the needs of the plot. And, while you can guide their development by earning experience points, improving their skills, and buying them new spells and equipment, you don’t even get to hang onto the same bunch through the whole game. Characters are moved in and out of your party from chapter to chapter — again, as the needs of each chapter’s plot requires. The final effect almost smacks of a literary hypertext, as you explore the possibility space of a story rather than actually feeling yourself to be embodying a role or roles in that story. This is certainly unique, and not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just… a little strange in relation to what we tend to think of CRPGs as being. These are, after all, role-playing games.

As I’ve described it so far, Betrayal at Krondor sounds more akin to the typical Japanese than the Western CRPG. The former tend to lie much closer to the set-piece-story end of our continuum of design; they provide a set, fairly linear plot to walk through, generally complete with predefined characters, rather than the degree of world simulation and open-ended exploration that marks the Western tradition. (A Japanese CRPG is, many a critic has scoffed, just a linear story in which you have to fight a battle to see each successive scene.) Yet Betrayal at Krondor actually doesn’t fit comfortably with that bunch either. For, as Cutter also notes above, he and his design partner were determined to “give the player plenty of freedom to explore and adventure without being bound to a scripted plot.”

Their means of accomplishing that relies once again on the chapter system. Each chapter begins and ends with a big helping of set-piece plot and exposition. In between, though, you’re free to go your own way and take your time in satisfying the conditions that will lead to the end of the chapter. In the first chapter, for example, your assignment is to escort a prisoner across much of the map to the capital city of Krondor. How and when you do so is up to you. The map is filled with encounters and quests, most of which have nothing to do with your central mission. And when you eventually do finish the chapter and continue on with the next, the same map gets repopulated with new things to do. This is the origin of a claim from Dynamix’s marketing department that Betrayal at Krondor is really nine CRPGs in one. In truth, it doesn’t quite live up to that billing. Only a subsection of the map is actually available to you in most chapters, much of it being walled off by impenetrable obstacles or monsters you can’t possibly kill. Even the repopulation that happens between chapters is far from comprehensive. Still, it’s an impressively earnest attempt to combine the pleasures of set-piece plotting with those of an emergent, persistent virtual world.

And yet the combination between set-piece storytelling and emergent exploration always feels like just that: a combination rather than a seamless whole. Cutter and Hallford didn’t, in other words, truly square this particular circle. There’s one massive block of cognitive dissonance standing at the center of it all.

Consider: you’re told at the beginning of the first chapter that your mission of escorting your prisoner to the capital is urgent. Political crisis is in the air, war clouds on the horizon. The situation demands that you hurry to Krondor by the shortest, most direct path. And yet what do you do, if you want to get the most out of the game? You head off in the opposite direction at a relaxed doddle, poking your nose into every cranny you come across. There’s a tacit agreement between game and player that the “urgent” sense of crisis in the air won’t actually evolve into anything until you decide to make it do so by hitting the next plot trigger. Thus the fundamental artificiality of the story is recognized at some level by both game and player, in a way that cuts against everything Betrayal at Krondor claims to want to be. This isn’t really an interactive storybook; it’s still at bottom a collection of gameplay elements wired together with chunks of story that don’t really need to be taken all that seriously at the end of the day.

The same sense of separation shows itself in those lengthy chapter-beginning and -ending expository scenes. A lot of stuff happens in these, including fights involving the characters ostensibly under your control, that you have no control over whatsoever — that are external to the world simulation. And then the demands of plot are satisfied for a while, and the simulation engine kicks back in. This is no better or worse than the vast majority of games with stories, but it certainly isn’t the revolution some of the designers’ claims might seem to imply.

Of course, one might say that all of these observations are rather more philosophical than practical, of more interest to game designers and scholars than the average player; you can suspend your disbelief easily enough and enjoy the game just as it is. There are places in Betrayal at Krondor, however, where some of the knock-on effects of the designers’ priorities really do impact your enjoyment in more tangible ways. For this is a game which can leave you marooned halfway through, unable to move forward and unable to go back.

Dead ends where the only option is to restore are normally less associated with CRPGs than adventure games; they played a big role in all but killing that genre as a commercial proposition by the end of the 1990s. CRPGs are usually more forgiving thanks to their more simulation-oriented nature — but, sadly, Betrayal at Krondor is an exception, due to a confluence of design decisions that all seem perfectly reasonable and were all made with the best of intentions. It thus provides a lesson in unexpected, unintended consequences — a lesson which any game designer would be wise to study.

The blogger Chet Bolingbroke, better known as The CRPG Addict, made these comments recently in the context of another game:

One of the notable features of CRPGs in contrast to some other genres is that they almost always support a Plan B. When one way of playing doesn’t work out, you can almost always resort to a more boring, more banal, grindier method of getting something done. I tend to mentally preface these fallback plans with “I can always…” Having a tough time with the final battle? “I can always reload again and again until the initiative rolls go my way.” Can’t overcome the evil wizard at your current level? “I can always grind.” Running out of resources? “I can always retreat from the dungeon, head back to town and buy a ton of healing potions.”

The most frustrating moments in CRPGs are when you suddenly find yourself with no way to finish “I can always” — when there is no Plan B, when luck alone will never save you, when there isn’t even a long way around.

This is precisely the problem which the player of Betrayal at Krondor can all too easily run into. Not only does the game allow you to ignore the urgent call of its plot, but it actually forces you to do so in order to be successful. If you take the impetus of the story seriously and rush to fulfill your tasks in the early chapters, you won’t build up your characters sufficiently to survive the later ones. Even if you do take your time and explore, trying to accrue experience, focusing on the wrong skills and spells can leave you in the same boat. By the time you realize your predicament, your “Plan B” is nonexistent. You can’t get back to those encounters you skipped in the earlier, easier chapters, and thus can’t grind your characters out of their difficulties. There actually are no random encounters whatsoever in the game, only the fixed ones placed on the map at the beginning of each chapter. I’m no fan of grinding, so I’d normally be all in favor of such a choice, which Cutter and Hallford doubtless made in order to make the game less tedious and increase its sense of narrative verisimilitude. In practice, though, it means that the pool of available money and experience is finite, meaning you need not only to forget the plot and explore everywhere in the earlier chapters but make the right choices in terms of character development there if you hope to succeed in the later ones.

On the whole, then, Betrayal at Krondor acquits itself better in its earlier chapters than in its later ones. It can be a very immersive experience indeed when you first start out with a huge map to roam, full of monsters to battle and quests to discover. By the time said map has been repopulated three or four times, however, roaming across its familiar landmarks yet again, looking for whatever might be new, has begun to lose some of its appeal.

And then, as Neal Hallford would be the first to admit, Betrayal at Krondor is written above all for Raymond E. Feist fans, which can be a bit problematic if you don’t happen to be among them. This was my experience, at any rate. As an outsider to Feist’s universe, watching characters I didn’t know talk about things I’d never heard of eventually got old. When an “iconic” character like Jimmy the Hand shows up, I’m supposed to be all aflutter with excitement, but instead I’m just wondering who this latest jerk in a terrible costume is and why I should care. In my view, the game peaks in Chapter 3, which takes the form of a surprisingly complex self-contained murder mystery; this is a place where the game does succeed in integrating its set-piece and emergent sides to a greater extent than elsewhere. If you elect to stop playing after that chapter, you really won’t miss that much.

As I noted already, Betrayal at Krondor ran dramatically over time and over budget. To their credit, Dynamix’s management didn’t push it out the door in an unfinished state, as was happening with so many other games during this period of transition to larger and more complex productions. Yet everyone, especially poor Neal Hallford, felt the pressure of getting it done. Not only did he write almost every word of the considerable amount of text in the game, but he also wrote much of the manual, and somehow even wound up on the hook for the puff pieces about it in Sierra’s customer newsletter. After weeks of virtually living at the office, he collapsed there one day, clutching at his chest. His colleagues rushed him to the hospital, believing he must be having a heart attack even though he was still in his twenties. It turned out that he wasn’t, but the doctor’s orders were clear: “You’re not going back to work for a week. Get some rest and eat something proper. No pizza. No soft drinks. It’s either this or next time you leave work it’ll be in a hearse.” Such are the perils of commercial game development.

Betrayal at Krondor finally shipped on June 15, 1993, an inauspicious time in the history of CRPGs. Origin Systems was about to take the Ultima series in a radically different direction after a less than overwhelming response to Ultima VII; Sir-Tech was about to put their equally long-running Wizardry series on ice for similar reasons; SSI was facing dwindling sales of their Dungeons & Dragons games and was on the verge of losing the once-coveted license; other publishers were quietly dropping less prominent franchises and would-be franchises. The several years to come would be remembered by CRPG fans as the Dark Age of their favored genre; relatively few of games of this stripe would be released at all, and those that were would be greeted by the marketplace with little enthusiasm.

Initially, Dynamix’s first CRPG performed about as well as you might expect in this environment. Despite some strong reviews, and despite whatever commercial advantages the Feist license brought with it, sales were slow. Cutter and Hallford had gone into Betrayal at Krondor imagining it to be only the first entry in a new series, but it soon appeared unlikely that a sequel would come to pass. Sierra, Dynamix’s parent company, was having an ugly year financially and wasn’t in the mood to make another expensive game in a passé genre, while Jeff Tunnell, the man who had had the original idea for Betrayal at Krondor, had stepped down from day-to-day management at Dynamix in favor of running a smaller subsidiary studio. Cutter and Hallford begged their new bosses to give the game time before making any final decisions, noting that good reviews and positive word of mouth among fans of the novels could yet pay dividends. The leadership team responded by laying Cutter off.

But over time, Betrayal at Krondor continued to sell steadily if not spectacularly. Then a genuine surge in sales came in early 1994, when a CD-ROM-based version featuring a lovely soundtrack and enhanced if still less than lovely graphics was released, just as the influential magazine Computer Gaming World was crowning the game the best CRPG of the previous year. Dynamix now made a belated attempt to start work on a sequel, asking Neal Hallford to helm it. But he considered the budget they were proposing to be inadequate, the time frame for development far too compressed. He turned it down, and left the company shortly thereafter. Dynamix would never make a second CRPG, whether set in Midkemia or anywhere else.

Nevertheless, that wasn’t quite the end of the story. Feist had been profoundly impressed by Betrayal at Krondor, and now took the ludic possibilities of his series of novels much more seriously than he had before seeing it. As soon as the Dynamix license expired at the beginning of 1995, he began to shop the property around once again. Initially, however, he found no one willing to pay his price,what with the current state of the CRPG market. While interactive Midkemia was thus in limbo, Sierra came up with another, cheaper idea for capitalizing on the first game’s belated success. Lacking the Midkemia license, they decided to leverage the first half of the Betrayal at Krondor name instead, releasing the in-house-developed Betrayal in Antara in 1997. It copied some of the interface elements and gameplay approaches of its predecessor, but moved the action to a generic fantasy world, to less satisfying effect.

And yet the story still wasn’t over: as the CRPG market began to improve in the wake of Interplay’s Fallout, the first real hit in the genre in several years, Feist licensed the Midkemia rights back to Sierra of all publishers. Sierra turned this latest project over to an outside developer called PyroTechnix. Feist played a much more active role on Return to Krondor, the game which resulted, than he had on Betrayal at Krondor, yet the result once again pales in comparison to the first Midkemia game, perhaps because Cutter and Hallford once again played no role. Its mixed reception in 1998 marks the last implementation of Midkemia on a computer to date.

Two of Feist’s later books, 1998’s Krondor: The Betrayal and 2000’s Krondor: Tear of the Gods, were based upon the first and second Midkemia computer game respectively. Thus Midkemia completed its long, strange transmedia journey from game to book to game to book again. Feist continues to churn out books apace today, but they don’t sell in the same quantities anymore, bearing as they do the stale odor of a series long past its sell-by date.

For many of us, Betrayal at Krondor will always remain the most memorable entry in the exercise in competent derivation that is Midkemia as a whole; the game is ironically much more innovative in its medium than the novels which spawned it are in theirs. Indeed, it’s thoroughly unique, a welcome breath of bold originality in a genre usually content to rely on the tried and true, a game which doesn’t work perfectly but perhaps works better than it has any right to. As a writer, I can only applaud a game which takes it writing this seriously. If it’s not quite the revolutionary amalgamation of narrative and interactivity that its creators wanted it to be, it’s still a heck of a lot more interesting than your average dungeon crawl.

(Sources: the book Designers and Dragons by Shannon Appelcline; Sierra’s newsletter InterAction of Winter 1992 and June 1993; Compute! of December 1993; Computer Gaming World of February 1993, April 1994, June 1994, and August 1996; Electronic Games of October 1992 and June 1993; Questbusters of November 1991, August 1992, April 1993, and August 1993; Retro Gamer 84; Dragon of January 2004; the CD-ROM Today bundled CD-ROM of August/September 1994. Online sources include Matt Barton’s interviews with Neal Hallford, Jeff Tunnell, and John Cutter in Matt Chat episodes 191, 192, 201, 291, 292, and 293; Neal Hallford’s blog series Krondor Confidential; the “History of Midkemia Press” on the same publisher’s website.

Betrayal at Krondor and Betrayal in Antara are available as a package purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/betrayal-at-krondor/

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