Tomorrow issue #3 of the comic book Revelations will be released. I splurged a couple weeks ago and bought the second and third issues of the Serenity comic as well as the 7 issues of Y: The Last Man which haven't yet been put into a compendium. I re-read the first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and then plowed through the second. And so I'm about ready for a new installment of something. Speaking of comics, the new issue of Entertainment Weekly features a piece on Watchmen. It was interesting to read about its genesis but I was disturbed by the curmudgeon that is co-creator Alan Moore. While I have a great respect for Moore's work, he came across as a real asshole in a couple quotes. While I certainly can't berate him for his less-than enthusiastic reactions to Hollywood, but he made a comment about how Watchmen is a comic book and the story should only be told in that medium and this really rubbed me the wrong way. I take his side regarding the Hollywood adaptations of his work (with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen being horrible and From Hell having a terrible ending) but I don't think that the change of medium is mutually exclusive with getting a good movie made. Maybe he was having a bad day when he was interviewed but I feel that a motion picture adaptation of his work doesn't have to be horrible just because it's a motion picture. Often times the film version of a story that was originally conceived to appear on paper is terrible. Hollywood is egregiously guilty of this. But I don't think it's the medium – it's the lack of a good script, lack of an imaginative director, etc. Kubrick's The Shining and Scott's Blade Runner are the first two films that come to mind when I think of movies made from books that work well in the new medium. While both deviate from the source material, neither is formulaic nor strictly adheres to Hollywood conventions. So it can be done. Still, Moore is right to have skepticism.
Last night I enjoyed another adaptation but, this time, it was a pen'n'paper role-playing game adapted to the computer. While I had loaded it last week, yesterday was the first time I tried playing The Temple of Elemental Evil. It is an old Dungeons & Dragons adventure given a new lease on life via the PC. The First Edition rules were updated to the latest (3.5) and the game beautifully ported over to the computer. While I'm sure I played the adventure back when it came out, I don't recall anything about it so I was starting fresh. I was, however, starting anew when it came to PC games. Although I own Baldur''s Gate, I've never played it so I would also be learning a gameplay interface from scratch.
I loaded the game and ran through the tutorial which was surprisingly handy. I decided to use pre-generated characters instead of rolling up my own from scratch. With my party of five ready, I began. We started in a city whose name I forget and, while walking down the street, hear a cry from an alley. We rush to investigate and find a man hovering over a woman's body. Dispatching with the man, a thief, we find the woman to be dead. She is wearing a brooch which identifies her as Canoness Y’dey of the Church of St. Cuthbert. Our next step is to travel to a podunk town called Hommlet to return the brooch to a member of her temple.
Hommlet turns out to be your average village with the usual characters and amenities found in such places: a blacksmith, a trading post, an inn with rooms and serving mead & ales, plus the temple and farmers. Upon returning the brooch to the chief cleric, we discover more. The village is suffering occasional raids by brigands and the cleric, Terjon, suspects that they are based in an old abandoned moathouse nearby. In the course of our discussion with him, he also revealed that he fought a decade ago against the hideous creatures of the Temple of Elemental Evil but lost a necklace (or was it an amulet?) during the battle and has never been able to recover it. So we had a choice between going up against the brigands or finding a long lost piece of jewelry. We chose the latter once and died so I decided to concentrate on the brigands at the moathouse.
The moathouse is surrounded by swamps and approaching it means being attacked by giant toads. Not the greatest threat in the world but still a pain in the ass. Entering the moathouse itself, the brigands immediately attack us. And we die. Well, we did defeat them once but we were wounded badly. I rested the party only to encounter a group of giant lizards who were dynamite! Every time I started the campaign over, we died at the hands of the brigands. I suspect that I am supposed to poke around Hommlet more and either enlist some folks there to join our band of hearty adventurers or there are some better weapons & armor to be had. We are lowly first-level characters and we need to find some way to kick it up a notch.
No comments:
Post a Comment