Dark Shades of Gray

So let's see... a quick game roundup...

In Guild Wars, things have slowed down in some senses. With the campaigns finished for most of us, we're spending time on other things. Getting the black moa chick minipet (worth a point or two in the HoM) is a primary goal now, it seems. Sunday we also helped a guildie slog through some of the drabness that is Kaineng City. I hunted up the last bog skale fins I need this morning. What's left? Skree wings and getting to Sorrow's Furnace, I think. The latter will be the longest for me, I suspect, given my current "main" wasn't the character I used for the Prophecies campaign, so I need to cover somewhere around a third of the storyline's worth of territory.

WoW was a little light this weekend, too, actually. Short a few people, we downed Razuvious for the weekly quest, then went to the Black Temple - base of Illidan and the last big raid of the Burning Crusade primary storyline (Sunwell came later, but it feels a little tacked-on to me, not unlike the Ruby Sanctum in Wrath). That was interesting. Some things were easy. Some things were still hard. The penultimate boss fight kicked out tail as it was getting late and we stopped there. Even eight level 80's put out plenty of DPS to down the bosses, but the place was tuned for 25-man groups, and you see that in how some of the fights expect access to a lot of interrupt abilities or somesuch.

I also started on Fallout: New Vegas. It looks a lot like Fallout 3 (naturally). It crashes occasionally, but hasn't been very bad for me. I dislike the reliance on Steam, however - I want to be able to play the game myself, not have to connect to servers somewhere to do so. The whole thing feels more Western in style, which I suppose is deliberate, but interests me less than F3's focus on life before and after the apocalyptic war. Still, I've plenty of wasteland left to explore.

Then there's Friday night's roleplaying. That got... interesting.


We picked up a couple characters from what was sort of a one-shot Aeranos (homemade fantasy, system based very, very loosely off Unisystem) game and added a couple new ones. Previously, we'd found ourselves short several people and decided to do something new. We ended up with three outlaws of varying sorts, two of which were aged past their prime, making their way to a town only to find it with obsidian spires jutting up from the earth, buildings ablaze, and inhabitants slain. We only had about an hour to play that night, so we didn't even make it to the central tower to investigate.

At the time, I decided "hell, why not?" and made a very melee-optimized character. Shade is a half-elf who's live a long life of being an assassin and now, starting to show his age, is somewhat disenchanted with pretty much everything. He doesn't really believe in redemption, so what's left? Go out in some sort of blaze of glory? He's actually a fairly bleak character, all told, but I wasn't expecting to play him more than once. Stat-wise, he's pretty much a badass, almost never missing and usually one-shotting minion-level enemies in his way.

Another character from the original session was Burin, a dwarf with some clerical abilities. The newly-introduced (found tied up among the loot the creatures were taking from the town) included a fast-talking archer elf and a hatchet-throwing, dodge-heavy human (I think it was).

So we found these ogre-like beasts hauling things to the central spire, killed a few on the way, got in and went up. Things got more complicated when we came across an elf mage in there with them, too. He went so far as to go invisible - which ended up not saving him from the old assassin with blindfighting. The toughest fight was in a deception-spelled stairway, were we had to down a couple of the ogre things, a couple smaller, toothy, Jawa-ish demon things, and a couple elven warrior types. One elf was left alive to interrogate as to how to get past the "unending" stairs.

It was about here the GM asked how far our characters were willing to go to get the information. I looked at my sheet, looked back up, and replied something along the lines of "however far it takes." And no one in the party really objected, which should tell you something about the particular group. Morality was not in abundance there.

Answers were had after some torture, the elf actually died to his master's magic, however, and the group was more or less "invited" up to a dark room higher in the tower. There, the "master's" voice offered riches and such to the PCs in an attempt to hire then rather than fighting them. At first, two of the PCs were pretty much ready to jump aboard, a third was looking for a way out, and my character was entertaining the idea simply because one job's as good as the next for an assassin. I was actually thinking Shade might have to (or be ordered to) kill the one dissenter. But the other two who were initially taken with the offer started having some doubts. And that's about where things left off - undecided and with the possibility of going either way. Big throwdown with a demonic baddie, or going to the dark side and working for him. That's unusual.

Along the way (about the time with the elf on the stairs), it came up how horrible this sort of thing would be in the real world. And while it was originally intended toward the thought of torturing someone for information, my mind spun that out a bit further. Your stereotypical "adventurer" is a frickin' psychopath!

They go around essentially graverobbing and taking money to kill. Orcs, goblins, dragons - you name it, adventurers contribute to obliteration of entire tribes and villages, usually without remorse. Sure, they often have some sort of justification ("Well, they attacked the town first!"), but... wow. If you truly take a step back and think about what some of these so-called heroes have done, it's apalling.

Now there are exceptions. We had one group of PCs that would always offer any sentient opponents a drink of ale and use the opportunity to discuss non-violent resolutions (it didn't always work, but the effort was made). I've played a character or two who have gone out of their way to leave opponents alive (especially city guard types). But by and large, when swords come out on either side, it's a fight to the death and no one's going to be shedding any tears over it.

In some time periods, in some settings, that's basically what you have to do to live. But by civilized metrics, that's cold.