The last time I wrote about idle games was nearly 2 years ago. In that time the games have evolved further. And if you look at my Steam account, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is a game I have played for over 300 hours. Or rather, not played. Or to be even more precise, played for a few hours, but have left running on my computer for over 300 hours. It's complicated!

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms combines the idle game genre with the RPG genre, and sprinkles a bit of an endless runner into the mix. You start out with one dwarven warrior, Bruenor (who is "famous" in the lore of D&D) on a side-scrolling screen encountering endless hordes of monsters on his way. The dwarf kills monsters, and you can help by dealing damage through clicking on monsters. Every monster drops gold. And that gold can be used to increase your click damage, or to increase the level of Bruenor, or unlock additional heroes and level those up. Once you have fulfilled certain requirements, e.g. kill 25 monsters, you can advance to the next level, where there is the next endless stream of monsters.

Because that is the point of an idle game, there isn't a whole lot to do. However the game has more strategic depth than one would think, because you need to arrange your heroes in a formation. And with levels each hero acquires special abilities which influence his neighbors in the formation. At one point you will have more heroes available than there are slots in the formation. And selecting the best heroes in the best formation is far from a trivial task. In addition there are some story elements, mostly in the form of friendly banter between the heroes. So for an idle game it is the most interesting and strategic game I know. Yeah, I know, that isn't saying much. But, anyway, I keep "playing" this.

The math behind the game is interesting in as far as it is exponential, and human brains have problems with exponential. Your stats and gold found quickly go up into million, billions, trillions, quadrillions, etc., until you switch to scientific notation in the settings because you don't even know the units any more. The one thing that remains linear is gems, with just a handful of them dropping every 5 levels at each boss. With gems you can buy chests, which contain things like helpful potions or gear for your heroes. And, because this is a free-to-play game, of course you can also buy those chests for real money. I probably spent more than I should have, but sometimes when I feel down I use buying special offers in free-to-play games as a sort of retail therapy, and this is my current game of choice for this. I don't claim that this is rational behavior. :)

One of the more interesting choices to do in this game is choosing when to stop a run and to start over. At the end of a run you get divine favor in function of the amount of gold you gathered. And that divine favor increases the amount of gold you will find on the next run. The exponential math is tuned in a way that your divine favor basically determines how far you get in a run, because at some point gold gathering and level gaining becomes very slow, while the monsters keep getting harder and harder, until you can't beat them any more. So the ideal strategy is doing a run until you hit a progress wall, and then reset to collect divine favor and start the next run. The game is organized in a way that this also over time gives you access to different stories and locations. To make this trickier you can also spend your divine favor for bonuses, but of course if you spend too much the lack of divine favor hurts you more than the bonuses help.

The reason for my 300+ hours is something that I am not really happy about: Idle offline gives far less rewards than idle online. For example while the game is running online, you can set the levels to auto-advance. The latest patch even added "familiars", which are legal click-bots, but also only work when the game is running. Thus one is pushed towards leaving the computer on for example at night. The whole thing smacks a bit of mining bitcoins, only that the rewards of the game are less valuable than bitcoins. Offline you still gather gold and divine favor at the level you currently are, but with diminishing returns. If you are on holiday and offline for a week you don't come back with a huge amount of divine favor collected, you'd have gathered more online in a day or two. Still it is nice to get at least some rewards while offline.

Overall I like the game for the D&D Forgotten Realms theme, and the relatively large number of non-trivial decisions you need to make to advance. But it remains an idle game, and I am well aware that this won't be everybody's cup of tea.

I recently offered a young player of D&D who was interested in becoming a Dungeon Master to give him some pointers on how to be a good DM. But while I have been a DM for nearly 4 decades now, it isn't actually all that easy to describe what makes a good DM. In some ways it is more an art than a science. And where it is a science, it is a badly documented one.

The basic role of a DM is easily described: He sets the scene, asks the players what they do, and then reacts to their answer by telling them the consequences of their actions, thus setting the next scene. Rinse, lather, repeat. What makes the description of a good DM so complicated is that different people are good DMs in very different ways. You ask a player what he specifically liked with a DM, and realize that whatever that was, it was probably something optional. For example when I ask for feedback from various players in different groups of mine, I frequently get told that they appreciate my preparation of visual playing aids: Battlemaps, 3D printed miniatures, handouts. But you can play with another good DM who doesn't use any of those! Another DM might be appreciated for his creation of fantastic worlds, but you can play great games without those as well. Some DMs are great play-actors doing accents and voices for NPCs, but you don't need that either. So what is the stuff that is actually essential?

Dungeons & Dragons, and any other pen & paper role-playing game, inherently always exists on two different levels: Horgar the barbarian swings his battleaxe and with a satisfying crunch decapitates the evil wizard. John the player of Horgar declares that he wants to attack the evil wizard and rolls a 20 on his attack. Horgar and John need each other. Without John, Horgar doesn't exist. Without Horgar, John isn't playing D&D. I believe that an awareness of those two levels, and a constant effort to keep the two levels in balance with each other, might well be the most important part of a DM's job. Concentrate too much on the story, and the players get bored because they don't get to roll dice any more. Concentrate too much on the dice, and you end up playing a board game.

Corollary to that is the need for balance between DM actions and player actions. D&D is a game of interactive story-telling. Take the interaction away, and it becomes a lot less interesting. No DM's hour-long monologue beats Netflix in entertainment value. But letting the players role-play alone without feedback on the consequences from the DM only leads to people becoming lost and confused. Players need "agency", the ability to influence the story and the outcome of situations. But that agency only makes sense in the context of there being a story and a situation to overcome. The DM needs to make sure that he tells the players enough for them to understand what is going on, so they can act, but also to leave enough room for different choices and original ideas from the players.

That gets us to another important point: The "never say no" rule. It isn't an absolute rule, because it applies only to constructive input from the players. But the idea is that as long as the player proposes something constructive, the DM should accept the proposal and try to work with it. You can still judge that the idea is very unlikely to work, and require the player to succeed in a very difficult roll. But that is still far better than letting the players propose lots of things and always saying no until by chance they come upon the one solution you previously decided was the good one. Saying yes can change the whole campaign to something you hadn't imagined, but that is the beauty of it. The goal is not to have the story proceed on predetermined rails, but to have everyone at the table contribute to the story and together create something greater than one man's story. In my Zeitgeist campaign the players were a group of policemen working for the king; but it was up to the players whether they wanted to play those policemen as the Keystone Cops or the Gestapo or something in between.

While these rules certainly don't cover everything a DM needs to do or needs to be, I do think that they are among the most important for success. What other advice would you give a new DM to help him become a good DM?

In the previous session the group encountered Demogorgon and found out that there was a demonic incursion into the Underdark. While Demogorgon demolished Sloobludop, the village of the kuo-toa, the group fled by boat over the Darklake towards Gracklstugh, city of duergars.

With the group now at level 5 and in possession of spells like create food and water, I decided to stop playing the voyage day by day. Otherwise the 20 days of voyage from Sloobludop to Gracklstugh would have become tedious. So I fast forwarded about two weeks to the point where the group was just a day or so away from their destination. On the way the Darklake had become a lot less open, consisting now of streams through tunnels and caves. The group was making good progress, with a current flowing in their direction. However that current became stronger and stronger, until the water was flowing faster than they could row, making return impossible. And a sound from ahead suggested they were heading right towards a waterfall.

Using spells of water walking the group managed to move their boat towards the side of the stream. There they found an artificial basin separated from the waterfall by a thick stone wall. The basin led to a lock, into which they could move their boat, close the door on top, and with the help of a well-oiled wheel open the door at the bottom, 20 meters below. But while their boat was slowly descending, they heard combat noises from below. Suddenly with a big crash somebody ripped out the lower lock door, making the boat descend the last 10 meters very fast and spill out of the lock. Holding the door was a Barlgura demon, while 4 lesser ape demons [which I had to design myself, there not being any demons in the Monster Manual of CR around 2] were fighting the duergar garrison of the lock. Thanks to the ongoing water walking spell the group wasn't too much in trouble from being thrown out of their boat, and had quite a tactical advantage over the demons. So they killed the demons and rescued Horgar, the sergeant of the garrison and chief engineer of the lock. The lock being too damaged to further operate, Horgar commanded the group to bring him to Gracklstugh.

Gracklstugh turned out to be a cheerless place (think North Korea), with the dour duergar constantly working and having no interest in art or merriment. Non-duergar were only allowed in the Darklake district, but couldn't enter into the city proper, and thus also not exit the city towards the rest of the Underdark. But before tackling that problem the group went onto a shopping spree, buying masterwork weapons and armor with the treasure they had found in the previous session. [While the armor and weapon made by the duergar is described as being of superior quality, there are in fact no official rules for that. So I searched the internet and found a suggestion for masterwork weapons and armor at twice the regular price. The weapons allow you to reroll damage rolls of 1, while the armor allow you to reroll enemy max damage rolls. As a more expensive alternative I used the adamantine armor from the 5E Dungeon Masters Guide.] They also found out where there was an inn in which they could stay, and where there was a tavern, always a good way to learn more about a city.

They learned that duergar had the ability to turn invisible, and that invisible guards kept everybody honest. So on the way to the tavern they tried to look out for signs of being followed by invisible dwarves. That led them to remark invisible persons crossing their way towards a dock on which a lone duergar merchant was standing. They shouted out a warning, which turned out to be a good idea, because the invisible dwarves turned out to be assassins, trying to kill the merchant. The group intervened and saved the merchant, whose name was Werz Saltbaron. The merchant told them to go to the tavern, where he would meet them later, after dealing with the approaching guards. In the tavern Werz offered them a job, transporting a bag full of raw gemstones to a contact in Blingdenstone, city of svirfneblin. Although the group wasn't sure to be heading that way (they hoped to find a way to the surface that Buppido the derro had told them was in the Whorlstone Tunnels in Gracklstugh), they accepted the job, because they were curious about the gems. Those turned out to be empty spell gems, used by the deep gnomes in the defense of their city. They also met some orcs in the tavern, the only foreigners there that evening.

They stayed the night in the only inn available to foreigners. The next morning their companion Buppido had disappeared. And there was some commotion, as one of the orcs they had met the previous night had been killed in a ritual fashion, just like Shuushar had in the previous session. A speak with dead spell confirmed their suspicion that Buppido was in fact a serial killer. They really wanted to follow him into the Whorlstone Tunnels, the place he had mentioned as a possible exit to the surface world. But that was in a different district, where non-duergar weren't allowed.

They learned that to enter the rest of the city they needed badges from either the guard or the Keepers of the Flame, guardians to the local red dragon who kept the city's forges going. So Surina the dragonborn sorceress used alter self to assume the form of a duergar sergeant, took Nyx as a spider on her shoulder, and headed through the gate towards the main city and the dragon cave. Nearly there she saw a procession heading her way: The somewhat overweight adult dragon with his Keepers moving from forge to forge to boost them with a breath of magical fire. The dragon could easily detect the dragonborn in spite of her disguise and addressed her in draconic. He invited her and her friends to come to his cave later that day, and instructed his keepers to give her the necessary badges, golden coins with the head of the dragon on it. So Surina returned to the group, and they all went to visit a dragon. They even thought of bringing gold as tribute, which was welcome in spite of the fact that the dragon was sitting on a huge pile of treasure. The dragon sent his keepers away, and told the group that he needed agents of his own, as he suspected that the Keepers of the Flame were keeping information from him. He told the group to report to the Keepers for an assignment he knew they had, but then report everything they found out to him first. The Keepers in fact were psionics and had discovered a "disturbance in the force" from the demonic incursion. However they believed that the disturbance had to do with their enemies, the Gray Ghosts, the local thieves guild. They asked the group to watch the bazaar the next day for a derro named Droki, with a tentacled hat, and follow him to find out what the Gray Ghosts were up to.

On the way back to the Darklake district, the group came upon a commotion on a plaza: One of the stone giants, who normally lived peacefully with the duergar, had sprouted a second head and gone on a rampage. He punted a duergar with his club, but lost grip of the club, so that both the now rather dead dwarf and the giant's weapon crashed into a wall next to the group. The double-headed giant in his confusion blamed the group, and attacked, now fortunately with his bare hands. The fight was tough, but the group subdued him, opting to use non-lethal damage. For that they were thanked by an arriving other Stone Giant, who asked them to accompany him and the unconscious giant to the giants' gave. There they learned that the giant had been "communing with the stone" at a religious altar in the cavern when suddenly he had sprouted that second head and gone mad. An examination of the site revealed no malicious influence, and an examination of the giant suggested that there was some sort of curse involved. They managed to heal the giant with a remove curse spell, and as a reward received a crystal that worked like a wand with some divination spells.

The next day they spread out through the bazaar and watched out for Droki. Merchants could tell them that Droki was a frequent visitor, and that he worked as a courier, always bringing messages and parcels from one person to another. The derro turned up, and with the stuffed tentacles attached to his flamboyant hat was easily recognizable. Droki was very much in a hurry, so they could follow him easily without being detected. Droki left the Darklake district, went into the West Cleft district, which was a derro slum, and from there disappeared into a crack in the cavern wall from which phosphorescent fumes emerged: The Whorlstone Tunnels.

In the tunnels the group came upon a crossroads. To their left they could see Droki eating a mushroom, shrinking to a tiny size, and disappearing through a tiny tunnel. [Droki is behaving somewhat like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.] But from the right they heard Buppido chanting, and they decided to go after him first. Buppido was in the process of arranging skeletons like he had arranged his other victims. They could attack him with surprise, but not before he had animated 6 skeletons. That turned out to be a rather easy fight at this level. They captured Buppido, who turned out to be completely deluded, believing himself to be an avatar of a god on a holy mission. As the group isn't exactly knights in shiny armor either, they decided to just cut his throat. While searching through his cave they disturbed the remains of a gnome, who rose up as a (friendly) ghost. The ghost asked them to return his hand to him, recognizable by an obsidian ring. Through the foul magic of the cave the hand had animated and crawled off some months ago, and he needed his remains to be complete to find eternal rest.

The tunnels were a twisted maze [I used a tablet computer with paint program to show it: Map goes on the lower layer, while the upper layer starts out completely black. While the group explores the dungeon, I erase the black where they go, revealing the map below. Works much better than drawing a map for more complicated dungeons.] which the group followed somewhat at random. They either didn't think of or didn't want to use the size-changing mushrooms, which forced them to use different tunnels than Droki had. But they did come upon traces of him sometimes.

In one cave they came upon a group of myconid behaving strangely (according to their NPC companion Stool). All but one of the myconids were dancing ecstatically to a silent tune. And Sarith the drow, their only other remaining companion, rushed past the group and joined the dance. They were unable to get him to stop dancing. The non-dancing myconid sprout turned out to be a friend of Stool, called Rumpadump. He told them that they had been on a scouting patrol from Neverlight Grove, but had started to behave strangely when arriving in this cave full of mushrooms. The leader of the myconids stopped dancing and asked them whether they would accept "the Lady's gift". Arkoy and Fenn accepted, and were treated with spores that allowed them to once a day travel from one large mushroom by teleport to another one, like a tree stride spell. The spores also made them feel very friendly towards all plant creatures, and they concluded that Sarith had been infected by the same spores before they had met him (he had always been a friend to Stool). The group left without Sarith, but with Stool and Rumpadump.

Next they came upon a forest of mushrooms, which the druid was able to communicate with to find the way Droki had passed. Then they came into a large cave with a flat hill in the middle, from which voices could be heard. It turned out that through some acoustic phenomenon these were voices from Gracklstugh. By trying to listen to a single conversation among many they could gain information about the city, but a failed save provoked psychic damage from the multitude of voice, so they only learned that the guards knew Droki and suspected him of being a courier for the Gray Ghosts.

Finally they came upon a gate made of iron bars. After making some noise a derro appeared behind the gate, who didn't want to open the door for them. So the group picked the lock, while the derro ran back into the dark. Entering the cave they were attacked by two derro and their three cave bears. As by then it had gotten late, we finished the session after that fight.

I've been in the Magic the Gathering Arena beta for quite a while, but only this week the NDA dropped. So now I can finally express how incredibly disappointed I am with this game. In Magic Duels they had a great game which was mobile and playable for all different sorts of players, including casual and new players. And they stopped supporting that to make Magic Arena, which is solely tailored for the needs of a very small hardcore crowd.

Magic the Gathering is 25 years old this year. So over the years there have been quite a lot of digital editions of the game. And every time, after a few years Wizards of the Coast stopped support of the current platform and launched a new platform. Which means that every time any cards you had bought became useless, and you needed to start your collection all over again. One needs to be very hardcore under those conditions to invest heavily into Magic Arena. But with Magic being the original pay to win game, the people who do invest heavily have a huge advantage over those who don't.

Because Magic Arena only features a single player vs. player mode, constructed, this mode is dominated by those hardcore players. You simply can't start up Magic Arena and play a fun, casual game. There are neither casual PvP modes like two-headed giant, nor are there any modes to play against an AI of various difficulty levels for practice or just plain fun. There aren't even less cutthroat competitive events, like limited mode leagues. There is only hardcore constructed, where anybody who isn't hardcore and who hasn't spent much on cards is just simply crushed. There doesn't even appear to be some sort of matchmaking algorithm to even try to get people a more equal opponent.

That means that the flow of play of Magic Arena for a new player looks like this: He starts his first game, gets crushed, then gets crushed again and again, until he either uninstalls the game, or pulls out his wallet to be able to play with the big boys. My guess is that very few people will opt for the latter. It is as if the developers had carefully studied exactly what made Hearthstone such a big success and then decided to do exactly the opposite. Magic the Gathering simply isn't such a mass market game any more that you can run a digital platform only for the hardcore.

I really don't understand why Wizards of the Coast had to stop supporting Magic Duels, they could have kept that one going for the casual and mobile players. There is no overlap in the target audience of Magic Duels and Magic Arena. And now I am really sad that there isn't any digital Magic game for me any more.

Sea of Thieves wasn't high on my radar until its release this week. But the headlines of servers crashing due to too many players strongly reminded me of, well, every MMORPG launch ever. So I was wondering whether the description of "multiplayer action adventure" meant that it was something completely different than a MMORPG, or whether Sea of Thieves basically is a MMORPG and they just changed the label because MMORPG isn't fashionable any more.

I am wondering if this is something I should buy. However the game is not on Steam, and as we all know, PC games that are not on Steam basically aren't real. :) And buying a game at full price at release when everybody is complaining about overloaded servers and lack of content doesn't feel like a good idea. I'd really like to have a better idea about the gameplay first: How necessary is PvP? How twitchy is the gameplay? Et cetera, et cetera.

Anybody here playing who can give me advice?

Typical home 3D printers use the fused filament fabrication technology, which consists of melting a thread of plastic in a nozzle and building up the printed object with the molten plastic from the bottom up, layer by layer. As a consequence you can't just print any shape you want: Everything needs to be connected to the bottom layer with an angle of no more than 45°. For my particular application, printing figurines of heroes and monsters for Dungeons & Dragons, that is certainly a problem. Think of a hero with his arm stretched out, holding a sword, or a dragon with spread wings: These parts are "overhangs", which when seen from the bottom up start up in the air, and thus can't be printed like that.

The solution to the problem is supports, temporary parts of the model for printing which are removed after the print is finished. Most printers even have software to automatically create such supports. Unfortunately for my particular printer, the XYZ Da Vinci jr. 1.0w, the automatically created supports don't work very well. The software simply creates supports straight up from the bottom under every minor overhang. That creates far more supports than actually needed, wasting material and producing lots of ugly connection spots on the underside of the model.

For some time I created supports manually, using Tinkercad. That is somewhat fiddly, and also far from optimized. Again the supports I design are mostly straight up from the bottom. Choosing the right number of support points is somewhat hit and miss, so sometimes I print a model, see where my design didn't really cover an overhang, and then have to add more supports.

But recently I found a much better solution. The free Autodesk Meshmixer software has the possibility to generate supports in the Analysis - Overhangs menu. There are even tons of parameters you can set to optimize those supports. And instead of simple straight up supports, the software produces angled and branched supports, which use much less material. You can also optimize the thickness of the support and the width of the tip to create supports that are stable to print but minimize the size of the connection points.

This software has quite opened up my possibilities of printing miniatures for my game. For example the Princes of the Apocalypse cover art shows a winged female with a spear. Between the wings and the spear she would have been nearly impossible for me to print. But now I printed her with the Meshmixer generated supports and even managed to make her "fly", her feet not touching the ground. Now I'm only limited by the fragility of the wings and spear when printed at 1:60 scale.

The #1 on the iOS app charts this week is Fortnite, despite the fact that the game only runs if you got an invite from Epic. The pull is that except for the control scheme the game is equivalent to the PC / console version. Likewise Civilization VI exists in a mobile version equivalent to the PC game, and Final Fantasy XV on mobile is also rather close to the console version. Meanwhile PC and console games are getting closer to mobile standards regarding their business models, if you consider lootboxes.

There appears to be a huge demand to play AAA games on the go. It is one of the explanations frequently cited to explain the huge success of the Nintendo Switch console, in spite of obvious battery life problems of the concept. But the Nintendo Switch as a mobile device at least still has the same JoyCon controllers, which works a lot better than just a touch screen for some games. I wouldn't be surprised if we would see alternative controllers that can be connected to Android and iOS mobile gaming platforms in the future.

There are still some issues to resolve on the way. Civilization VI is $60 on Steam, but there are various deals to get it much cheaper; I personally paid $12 as part of a Humble Bundle Monthly. On iOS Civilization VI costs $65, and the best deal ever was the introductory half price. With the PC version having more options in the form of DLC, as well as user-made mods from the Steam Workshop, paying more for the somewhat less mobile version doesn't look attractive. Final Fantasy XV is better, the Steam version costs $50, while the "pocket" mobile version is $20, and you can try for free or just buy some of the chapters if you want. As much as people might like the idea of mobile AAA games, the full price of a console game is very high compared to the usual price level of mobile games.

However the main attraction of high-priced AAA games is that they tend to be "pay once, play forever". Some companies believe that when porting games to a mobile platform, they should rather use the business models of mobile games, sometimes to a rather exploitative extent. The Sims Mobile is only playable in short bursts, until you run out of energy; then you either need to wait for hours for the energy to restore itself, or spend real money to advance with prices that make the highly expensive The Sims DLC look cheap (The Sims 4 isn't on Steam. The Sims 3 from 2009 is, and still has $550 worth of DLCs listed.)

Part of the reason that mobile platforms are catching up to the PC is that the period of fast development of PC graphics appears to be over. My 3-year old graphics card (Geforce GTX 970) in my 4-year old computer is still playing every game at good frame rates. I used to have to change PCs every 2 years to keep up. And as Final Fantasy XV pocket edition shows, you can downgrade graphics for mobile platforms and customers won't care all that much, as long as the gameplay is good.

In summary, I do believe that there is a trend towards more AAA games on mobile platforms. And as long as that happens at reasonable prices, I'm all for it.

In the previous session the group had cleared out the keep of elemental evil earth, leaving fire as the last keep to attack and get the fourth magical key from. A previous encounter with a druid had given them the information that an unknown druidic circle called the Circle of the Scarlet Moon had sent word throughout the Dessarin Valley was performing the Rite of the Wicker Giant, a ritual that was said to restore nature's balance in the troubled region. As the location was at the same place as their ancient dwarven map showed for the fourth keep, they knew that this must be the elemental evil fire cult.

At the location they found a tower with a crumbled wall around it on top of a hill. Before stood the Wicker Giant, a huge giant-shaped bonfire that seemed to burn without being consumed. On the slopes of the hill were various camp sites, with smaller bonfires. All those fires caused a certain haze, lightly obscuring vision. The group visited the first camp site and met the druid they had previously saved. He told them the ritual would take place tomorrow, and nobody was allowed to go up the hill until then. The druids with him were celebrating in anticipation.

The group used the haze to sneak past the other camps and up the hill. The scouted that besides the tower and the Wicker Giant there was a pit with 3 hell hounds and a guard. Two figures danced around the Wicker Giant, and two guards were patrolling the scaffolding around the tower. At this point a very long discussion about what to do ensued. Finally the group went over the crumbled wall to approach the tower from the side away from the Wicker Giant and pit. They killed the guards coming under a silence spell without alerting the cultists on the other side of the tower. Then they entered the tower, and found room with a big hole in the floor and a staircase going up. Two more guards were in that room, which they killed, but this time without the silence. So we ended the session when they heard more guards being alerted a floor up.

I must say this session depressed me a bit. We got so little done, just compare this to the other post today of the other group I am playing with. People weren't focused on the game, and had a hard time to make decisions. I think I need to do something to increase motivation, making the story a bit clearer, in spite of the group not making much effort to gather information. I was also slightly annoyed by the Princes of the Apocalypse chapter on this place: One discussed option was to wait for the Rite of the Wicker Giant. Fortunately they didn't do that, because I found out that this option wasn't foreseen in the book, and there was zero information what exactly the fire cult had planned to achieve with that ritual, and why they had invited the druids to it. There are some vague hints that the cult wants to recruit some, and sacrifice the others, but the sequence of events would have to be improvised by me if the group had chosen to wait.

In the previous session our heroes traveled towards the kuo-toa village of Sloobludop, pursued by the drow. They had learned from their kuo-toa companion Shuushar that there were two factions in Sloobludop: The followers of the goddess Blibdoolpoolp (aka "the Sea Mother") with her archpriest Plooploopeen (aka "Ploop") were vying for control with the upstart followers of the god Leemooggoogoon (aka "the Deep Father") and his archpriestess Bloppblippodd (aka "Blopp"), daughter of Ploop.

Before they reached the village they were accosted by a patrol of kuo-toa, who offered them safe passage to Sloobludop if they would put all their weapons in a sack to prevent a surprise attack. They agreed, but before they could reach Sloobludop another patrol of kuo-toa attacked and killed the first patrol. That second patrol was led by Ploop, who explained that the first patrol was from the other faction, who would have sacrificed the group to the Deep Father. Ploop led them to the village and told them which quarters to stay in to not attract the attention of the other faction. But Surina the sorceress was curious about the other faction, magically disguised herself as kuo-toa, took Nyx the druid in the form of a small animal on her shoulder, and went exploring. She found that in fact the altar of the Deep Father looked rather grim: Two octopi were tied together on top of a manta ray, to give the impression of a two-headed monster. Traces of blood sacrifices were visible. In contrast the altar of the Sea Mother had offerings of knickknacks like sea shells, and looked more welcoming.

Based on that information the group agreed to a proposal of Ploop: They were to hide their weapon and armor under robes and be led by a group of Ploop's followers to the upcoming festival in honor of the Deep Father. Ploop would pretend to give them to Blopp as a peace offering, as sacrifice for her god. But then Ploop, his followers, and the group would attack Blopp and her followers.

They executed the plan as intended. When striking down Blopp, the archpriestess called out "Leemooggoogoon", and fell bleeding on the god's altar. Suddenly the dark surface of the lake behind the altar began to bubble, and a huge monstrosity with tentacles and two baboon heads rose from the water. "Leemooggoogon" turned out to be the demon prince Demogorgon! With a single attack Demogorgon killed Prince Derendil, one of the NPC companions of the group. They also lost another NPC companion, Jimjar, by getting separated from him in the ensuing chaos. While Demogorgon killed Ploop, the group escaped and found a boat. With their remaining NPC companions Buppido, Shuushar, Sarith, and Stool, they got away from Sloobludop. Now they knew that something more dangerous than drow was afoot in the Underdark!

With the help of Arkoy's curse that gave them a sense of direction, and Shuushar's knowledge of the lake, they decided to travel towards Gracklstugh, the duergar city where Buppido claimed to know a way towards the surface world. But that was 20 days of travel away. On the evening of the first day they stopped at an island where they found a tunnel leading underground in which fungi grew. Unfortunately those turned out to be Timmask, a poisonous mushroom, whose spores put a confusion on Nyx, so she wandered deeper down in the tunnel. Following Nyx to stop her, the group was caught in a tremor causing a cave-in and were trapped. However a new passage had opened in one of the tunnel walls, leading to a strange temple. At first the group encountered gray ooze twice, who fell from the ceiling and damaged Mog'burz' weapon with acid.

Then they saw a strange sight before them: A skeleton (not animated) was seemingly floating in the air, along with a dark metal mace and some coins. Trying to take the mace with a mage hand spell led to the hand encountering an invisible wall, and a telepathic message of "Hey! Stop tickling me!". Thus the group encountered Glabbagool, a gelatinous cube who had become sentient. Glabbagool was friendly and spat out the mace and coins on request, and told them about the rest of the temple. He warned them about traps full of black puddings in corridors leading to a closed door, of which he didn't know what was behind it. The group went there with Glabbagool escorting them (and dispatching quickly some more gray oozes). They discovered a new cave which Glabbagool said hadn't been there before, from which water flowed into the temple.

They went to the closed door, which turned out to be easy to open for creatures possessing hands to use the door knob. Behind was an octagonal room with 7 niches, of which 4 contained strange, formless sculptures, and a big fountain in the middle containing dark water. Touching the statues unfroze them, and they turned out to be another 4 gray oozes. After killing those they discovered some treasure under the water of the fountain. Having explored the whole temple, there was no apparent way out. And from the new cave water kept rushing in, the whole complex being below the surface level of the darklake. They explored the cave and saw that the water was coming from fissures in the ceiling. With the help of a Magic Missile (and creative rule interpretation by me as DM) they made the ceiling collapse, at which point they could swim to the surface of the lake and back to their boat.

There a nasty surprise awaited them. Buppido was found unconscious with a big bump on the back of his head, while Shuushar was dead, with his entrails arranged in a bizarre fashion around him, like by some sort of ritual. Woken up, Buppido couldn't provide an explanation of what had happened, and the group found no traces of the killer. So the next day they said goodbye to Glabbagool (who wouldn't fit on the boat) and rowed off.

Two days later they were passing by another island, when they heard a soft feminine voice inside their heads pleading for help. Somebody on the island needed rescue! On the island they found a big green door, which turned out to be of heavy marble, covered in corroded bronze, and with an axis in the middle. Pushing with much force on the side opened the door (we were joking that Mog'burz, who failed several door opening rolls in this dungeon, kept pushing in the middle of the door). Behind the door was a Nethril tomb from millennia ago (basically Ancient Egyptian in design), the Lost Tomb of Khaem.

In the tomb the group came upon a room with a stone sarcophagus. That turned out to be a false tomb with a trap cursing them to have disadvantage on all attack rolls and saving throws. As they were all affected by the curse, this turned the dungeon into a far more deadly place. And there was another strange feature to the tomb: Any spell cast resulted in a wild magic surge, giving a random result form the wild magic table of the chaos sorcerer. That turned out to be an insidious feature when in the next room the group was attacked by four specters, who were resistant to non-magical damage. It turned downright deadly in the final (hidden) room, where the group encountered Brysis of Khaem, an evil sorceress who was now a wraith. Mog'burz the eldritch knight countered an attack of Brysis with a shield spell, but that triggered everybody's favorite wild magic surge result: a fireball.

They barely survived this encounter, but then found the source of the voice: an intelligent sword called Dawnbringer. They also found a bunch of other nice treasures, like a necklace of fireballs, and over 2,000 gold pieces worth of valuables. Danger has its rewards in Dungeons & Dragons. At that point we ended the session, the group having reached level 5.

For a president, Trump is remarkably unguarded in his speech. In absence of a teleprompter he talks stream of conscience with no regards for the party line or the politically correct. So when presented with a clip of footage from several modern games, his reaction appears quite honest: "This is violent, isn’t it?" and then "I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts. And then you go the further step, and that’s the movies. You see these movies, they’re so violent and yet a kid is able to see a movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved.".

Now video gamers are as partisan as the next guy and quick to dismiss any criticism as just being motivated by a desire to distract from the NRA. But can't you just step back for a moment and read these quotes above at face value? Aren't they fundamentally true? We do have a "violence in entertainment" culture. We do have systems in place that prevent movies and video games from displaying sex, but not from displaying gore. And it would be extremely callous to assume that a kid's mind is in no way affected by seeing that sort of stuff. That doesn't mean that there is a direct causal link between playing video games and school shootings, or that gun control wouldn't be a better option than games control. But there is also a lot of very visible denial from the games media, which shows you that Trump's remarks have hit close to home.

The violence is frequently gratuitous, games like Splatoon prove that you can take the same genre and cartoonify it into something much less violent. Nintendo makes a lot of great games with minimal violence. And it isn't just the graphical display of violence in video games, it is also the gameplay. Multiplayer shooters or games like Fortnite Battle Royale with its last-man-standing victory condition are inherently teaching a very wrong message of hate. There are a large number of games out there which I simply can't play because I am too disgusted by both the violence and the toxicity of the players.

I have zero trust in Trump coming up with a viable solution (he appeared muddled on the existence of rating systems). But his gut reaction that this stuff is violent and potentially a problem is right. Gamers need to overcome the denial step and face the truth. If the industry doesn't change voluntarily, politicians are going to intervene at some point.

Capitalism is the best economic system for the overall creation of wealth. However it is lousy at distributing that wealth fairly between the people who contributed to the creation; and it equally sucks at all other issues which require solidarity (e.g. health care) or involve the common good (e.g. the environment). After WWII it appeared that the first world countries had solved that problem: They had all created political systems in which "the right" fought for freedom and capitalism, and "the left" fought for fair distribution, solidarity, and the common good. Alternating between left and right governments created a balance, and even allowed different countries to arrive at different points on that balance, e.g. Scandinavian countries having more solidarity, and the US having more capitalism.

However the system had one inherent flaw: Politicians are by definition members of the elite, the ruling class. And that is true for left wing politicians as well. Thus a right wing politician fighting for unfettered capitalism that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer was both following his party politics and his own greed. While the left wing elite was naturally less inclined to fight for policies that aided less well off, because it didn't help them personally. So at various points in the 90's the left wings in different countries simply gave up on economic policy for fairer distribution of wealth, and just joined the capitalist camp which made the elite richer. Today a left wing politician like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn who still push for some economic fairness and solidarity are considered as "odd" and decried as "communists".

Now this has created a growing rift between voters and the elite that leads them in politics and media. The people simply isn't represented any more. They are being fed lies like "your salaries are only low because of immigrants" or "tax cuts for the rich will trickle down to you". In their desperation they increasingly vote for extremists and populists, and end up harming themselves even more through the resulting policies. And the left and right wing elite in order to be seen to do something play acts a culture war to distract the masses from the real problems.

In Germany there is an organization of soup kitchens which collect food past its sell-by-date and distributes it to people who are so poor that they have to beg for food. One local organization recently made headlines because they enacted a controversial "Germans first" policy, after food fights had broken out in which younger male immigrants shoved aside elderly German grandmothers. And the discussion is all about the culture war, with the left fighting for equal rights for the immigrants, and the right defending priority for the natives. Only the extreme left is mentioning the real problem: That in one of the world's richest countries, at the top of the economic cycle and full employment, there are still so many people having to beg for old food that the soup kitchens can't feed all of them.

As Bill Clinton still knew, "it's the economy, stupid". If the centrist parties fail to represent the economic interests of the majority of the population, they will fade into irrelevance. History repeats itself, and the rise of populist parties in Europe in the 1930's (not just in Germany) isn't really the example we would want the world to follow. We need to see the culture was as the distraction that it is, and concentrate on the real economic problems.

I just noticed that I am behind on my reporting on the Elemental Evil campaign. In the previous reported session the group had reached level 5 and was about to head for the Sacred Stone Monastery. Sessions 13 and 14 were about the adventures of the group in that monastery. However once again it has to be remarked that this particular group is mainly interested in the combat aspects of D&D, and less interested in the role-playing aspects. And the campaign has been chosen with this preference in mind, containing a lot of dungeon crawls. Nevertheless even in that campaign the group still managed to avoid most opportunities to find out more about the story, and spent those two sessions mostly in combat encounters.

The group entered the Sacred Stone Monastery via the garden and from there into the main hall. However that was exactly what the bad guys had planned for invaders, as the main hall contains a trap that drops the group down into the dungeon and into a cage with an Umber Hulk. Having beaten the Umber Hulk and then some orog and ogre guards, the group liberated a group of slaves used for mining work. That included members of the Mirabar delegation, which in the book is the official story hook. However the group showed absolutely no interest in asking them about what had happened to the delegation, and allowed the slaves to leave unescorted.

Next the group entered a part of the dungeon in which a Lich lives. A Lich is a challenge rating 21 monster and obviously not meant as a combat encounter for level 5 characters. But in spite of the Lich just being a bit grumpy and not immediately attacking, the group decided against getting information from him, and just fled. Having otherwise cleaned out the basement, the group found another staircase up, and found themselves in the middle of the monk's quarters, where a big fight ensued. That included the boss of the place, a blind female monk with the name of Hellenrae. Just like in the previous two elemental keeps, the group killed the boss, looted the magical key part the bosses are carrying, and then legged it.

Then they returned to Red Larch to rest and recuperate. But the next morning at breakfast in the inn, they were attacked by four hell hounds. That was a bit annoying for the sorceress, who mainly had fire-based spells like scorching ray and fireball, to which the monsters were immune. But although they took heavy damage from fire breaths, the group prevailed and sent the dogs packing. They (correctly) concluded that the hell hounds had been sent by the one cult they hadn't visited yet, the fire cult. As they had previously heard about druids planning a fire ritual at a location which corresponded to the location of the fourth elemental keep on their ancient map, they plan to go there in the next session.

Maybe it was to be expected with an offer that involves charity, but it turns out that for me the Humble Bundle Monthly is mostly an investment in a source for philosophical thoughts. When I initially bought the bundle in order to get Civ VI for cheap, I went for the three-month plan. So even if I since unsubscribed I just got my second months worth of games. And compared to the first month, there are even less games in there which I can see me playing. That is not to say that the offer is a bad one, or the games on offer are bad. Rather it reflects upon how my interests got narrower over time.

I am old enough to remember a time before video games. The first video game I played was Pong on a console that couldn't play anything else, in black and white on a TV screen. When people got the first consoles with cartridges and computers, kids typically had just a handful of games, not necessarily chosen by themselves. If you only have 3 game cartridges, you will play the hell out of each of those games, whether those are your favorite games or not. Fast forward to 2017, where 7,672 games were released on Steam alone, again nearly doubling the number of Steam games available for a fourth year in a row.

Everybody has favorite games and favorite genres. If you are limited by the number of games available to you, you play what you got regardless of genre. If you have an abundance of choice, you get more and more picky and only play your favorite genres. The bottleneck becomes the amount of time available to play, so why should you play let's say a platformer if you prefer role-playing games? Of course the consequence of that is that you end up with a much narrower experience. You only play a handful of favorite genres and don't have the time for a bunch of other genres, which might offer a very different experience of gaming.

I see a parallel to the world of news and politics. Back in the day where your only source of news was one paper you and everybody in your street was subscribed to, you all got the same variety of news and opinions. Today there are so many sources of news and opinions that you can choose one which aligns well with your own opinions. If you are a fan of Trump, you watch Fox News and read Breitbart, if you are on the other side you watch CNN and read Huffington Post. But the result is that you end up in an echo chamber which doesn't allow for a variety of opinions. This has gone so far that the echo chambers of today don't even agree on the same set of facts. A news source that reports something uncomfortable to you is "fake news", truth has become subservient to opinion.

The future is one in which we lead comfortable lives in which we play only our favorite games, see only our favorite genre of movies and TV shows, hear only news that please us. Until we have become so isolated from another group of people (which might well be our neighbors) that the two groups don't consider each other of being of the same kind any more, and start killing each other off. The internet, which had a promise of offering us a much wider offer of everything from information to entertainment, ends up making us all poorer and more narrow-minded.