Another week with a bit of a change in schedule. The majority of the house is either getting over some sort of sickness or coming down with it. Qvaid and I managed to get some game time in on every day we normally do. Although, not quite as much as we typically would, and we did call it a bit earlier through out the week. Just trying to make sure we got enough rest to keep up with the tasks, work, and chores at hand.
To my knowledge at least, we all still had great times gaming! It just came with a bit of some relaxed scheduling, and interruptions for being under the weather or having to play a bit of catch up from being sick earlier in the week.
I will be on of the first to admit, that I am absolutely loving The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria. It has a lot of gameplay mechanics that are similar to Valheim, which has been nice to have at least some familiarity with how things are working. There are, of course, a lot of things we are not familiar with, and learning has been interesting, tedious, and sometimes painful. All that said, it’s still been an incredible and certainly enjoyable experience for me at least. Kilen seems to be hooked, and the fact that Aces not only joined us, but DNC made an attempt as well, leads me to at least believe it has their attention. Error seems to love these new dwarven adventures, although his play time has all but slowed to a crawl with only a single weekend day per week for now. We were doing our best to try and get the most of it possible on Saturday! Sometimes it’s just the way scheduling can be, I guess.
Hopefully, we will all start to feel better, and get back into the normal gaming routines soon! In any case: Game Long, Game Hard, my friends!
Days played: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
Players: Qvaid, Hobbit
Monday evening: In truth, Monday was more or less a wash for Qvaid and I and our gaming schedule. No complaints there, we were occupying Lil Bit, while Mav went to the ER with my son (Error) and his wife. We managed a bit of game time before all that went down, but it was a very short, and fairly unproductive session for the most part. Fortuantely, Mav is doing much better, alongside of the fact that Lil Bit is also still recovering at a fairly rapid pace. The sickness running rampant in the house current is probably breaking records.
Tuesday evening: Qvaid and I made some decent progress on building our characters. We had a bit of character swapping shenanigans to get equipment and materials from our previous characters. I mean we did earn all that stuff after all. We both managed to get our 3rd and final class for our new characters. Qvaid ended up going full: Kazite Spellblade, Cabal Hermit, and Primal Ritualist. I settled on full: Hex Mage, Mercenary, and Wild Hunter.
I’m using a bow and I have at least one gun on me, with contemplation of perhaps picking up a second gun or so. I’m still debating that idea because I don’t use the gun I have very often right now, and carrying so many arrows has me a bit strapped for carrying capacity.
Qvaid and I had a good bit of travel on Tuesday to complete our class options, gather the supplies we could, and head back to Cierzo. We haven’t even started the faction quest yet. By the time we made it back to Cierzo after our adventures, it was time to call it a night. We are starting to feel the effects of the sickness in the house as well, and an extra bit of rest was in order.
Wednesday evening: While Qvaid and I were met with a few interruptions on our gaming session for Wednesday evening, we did still manage to get quite a bit of adventuring in.
Prior to getting into any real combat, Qvaid and I took the time to test some of our new abilities. She placed down her totems together, and practiced hitting them, and running back to simulate being mobile with an enemy in the Totemic Circle. After she felt she had that down, we picked up the totems and were on our way.
Asides from the encounters we met while traveling in Chersonese, we managed to completely clear: The Blister Burrow, Montcalm Clan Fort, and the Heroic Kingdom Conflux Path again. The later of course being my fault as I had slowly come to the conclusion that 3 points of mana were just not enough for the build I had in mind.
We fought our way back to the Ley Line, which had long since reset. I had already taken 3 points prior, as had Qvaid. I moved forward with 2 more points hoping that might be just enough. Qvaid contemplated doing the same, but felt like the stamina loss in her build might be too much of an issue. This put me at exactly 100 points of stamina, and given I had went with Wild Hunter, I still have 140 points of health.
This leaves me with the option to take more mana if I find I need it, but given you can not reverse the process, I decided to play it safe for now. I’m hopeful with 100 points of mana, I can have some Hex Mage options available too me in my build without completely diminishing my mana pool during even a single combat. Now this affliction, could also be from the fact that I don’t have Philosopher so I have no innate mana regen. Our supplies are low so it’s not exactly been feasible for us to carry foods that give that property during all our travels. Hopefully with time that will be remedied.
We left Conflux Mountaion (Ley Line) with the intent of hitting the Vendavel Fortress since the exit by the boat puts you there in any case and we had such decent luck with the other adventures. We cleared quite a few of the bandits outside of the fortress, and rested with the intent on entering and seeing if we could clear it.
Unfortunately, a later interruption left us with little time to attempt the excursion. We opted to just call it there in from of the Fortress, ready to attempt it later in the evening on Thursday, should scheduling be on our side for some more game play.
Thursday evening: Qvaid and I picked back up at the Fortress and managed to take it down quite a bit easier than we had in the past. The new combination we use with her Primal Ritualist Totems, and my sheer speed has been a decent flow for us over all. We even wiped out the Witch room of the fortress with relative ease. Our packs were full from all the previous adventuring, so we left for Cierzo after finishing up the Fortress for a bit of rest and much needed inventory management.
After our reset in Cierzo we decided it was time for us to talk to Oliele, Yzan, and Rissa so we could at least get our faction quest underway. We had supplies set to travel, and I toss my tent in our stash so I could pick up a new one in Berg on our way to Levant. I managed to do just that once we landed in Berg. We camped in Berg for the night, and headed out at first light for Levant.
Except… I mistakenly took us to the Caldera exit of Enmerkar Forest, and we had to back track all the way back up to the Abrassar exit. Qvaid doned her hot weather gear once we landed in the desert, and we headed off to Levant traveling through the darkness while getting a bit more practice in with our new combat skills.
Once we arrived in Levant we decided to talk to Baron Montgomery, and he gave us access to a letter for citizenship to Levant, and… a tent for the coin we gave him. Ah, well, lesson learned. Qvaid and I took the letter to the Queen, and joined The Heroic Kingdom. We were told Cyrene would have us a task within 3 days, but sadly with the interruptions alongside of being a bit under the weather, we ended up having to call it not long after that.
Even still we managed to get all our classes, some gear, and at least a start on the 3rd Faction quest line in Outward. We are both excited for the adventures that may lie ahead. Some of those will be a bit of a repeat, while others will give us new insight into the over all story that transpires in Outward!
Days played: Saturday, Sunday
Players: Aces, DNC, Error, Kilen, Hobbit
Saturday: Being under the weather has certainly took a toll on several of us in the house. I mean, I didn’t game at all Friday, and opted to effectively just chill and watch videos after dinner, until I fell asleep. Which, I did really early for a Friday evening, but I woke up something like 2.5 hours later, and then watched more videos until once again fell asleep. Technically speaking, Saturday was met with a late start for all of us.
Error, Kilen, and I started some Return to Moria in the afternoon on Saturday, and made some progression and had a few grand adventures.
Aces and DNC joined us, later on Saturday evening, although DNC hopped out shortly before anything could get started. Aces, Error, Kilen, and myself faced off against a huge orc in Orctown, and managed to defeat him. From there, we were able to progress deeper into Moria as it were.
That progress of delving deeper, however, did not come without some interesting consequences. In our infinite desire for exploration, several of the group found themselves stuck at the bottom of the Crystal Descent.
To be fair, it’s really difficult to just be flat out stuck somewhere as those quick planks only take 1 piece of scrap wood to make, and generally you can find that with just a bit more exploration. Now, the tricky part does come into play of surviving that exploration to get that scrap wood, to make those planks to escape. Well, that and surviving the attempt to use quick planks to climb out of said gorge, valley, cavern, etc…
I managed to quick plank myself back up to the mapstone for the Crystal Descent. I headed back to our base, and gathered materials to setup a small hearth and a mapstone, and headed back to the gang. I got to their location, we setup the small hearth and mapstone, and viola. Everyone back to the base safe and sound.
Aces had already called it (and might very well still be stuck in the Crystal um, Pit shall we call it? Kilen ended up calling it shortly after we got back, and Error and I made a trek back, where he ended up getting ported to the bottom of this Pit. We ‘think’ it was because we used the mapstone at the exact same time to port to the exact same location. I’ve already seen cases where it tosses me outside of our base when we do that at other locations. Seems to only likely theory at this point. In any case, I destroyed the small hearth, and the mapstone, and headed down to Error, where he found a new mapstop already in place that needed repaired.
We repaired that, chopped down as many mushrooms as we could (new wood type we needed), and we hauled our dwarven butts out of there after we seen a slew of spiders heading our way from the depths! Not… that we were cowards mind you (at least not completely)! By this point it was late, and the last thing we wanted as we were getting ready to call it was a corpse recovery run in the bottle of the depths for the next 20 – 45 minutes!
Sunday: While there was a very minute amount of gameplay on Sunday for Kilen and I, as Error was MIA. Over all, it was mostly a wash. I did watch Kilen stream his solo run in RtM a time or so in between breaks, and I ended up calling it quite a bit early for a Sunday night to finish up the weekend watching some videos while I prepared to get the much needed rest to start the next week of work.
