Alien Shooter

Fook me this is the biz, the bees nollocks! Imagine unimaginable amounts of alien horde swarming towards you in narrow science lab hallways, breaking out of walls and generally coming to dismember you. Then imagine having a leather clad honey (or leather clad butch) depending on your persuasion, with twin desert eagles blazing away, with shells falling all around, and pulsing techno beats rattling your brain. Then imagine, if you will, picking up a shotgun and emptying that into the green menace, out comes your minigun and you chain spray them all over the walls, they still keep coming, so you flip out the grenade launcher and thin them out a touch, to nail them hard with your plasma gun, instantly turning them into mulched goo! Nightvision equipped its time to crawl through another dark infested lab.

http://www.sigma-team.net/alienshooter/index.htm

Time limited demo available for download. I just bought the full version for £12 (inc VAT). It's isometric top down view (ala Diablo etc), it uses the WASD or cursor keys for movement (or right clicking the mouse) and it uses the left click of the mouse to empty your chambers. So the firing and the movement are separate mechanisms (ala Zax the Alien Hunter). My favourite. Gives you plenty of options to backtrack and lay suppressing fire, or circle strafe round a leggy horde to drop a grenade in the middle. The environments are nicely constructed with blowable walls, and doors that need power to open them, and walls that burst holding fecking millions of the things. The nasties are suitably menacing in very large numbers, bigger bipedal aliens and spitting crawlers etc are all there.

Blowing shit up hasn't been this good for a long time, and the action is relentless. You collect money and ammo on the way, health here and there. You use the money to buy equipment before the next mission. The bint decked out in full red armour (90% damage absorbtion) carrying a minigun is pretty impressive. The music is nice, although I haven't heard many different tracks, it goes plinky plonky for a while, until the horde start emerging then it picks up with the pounding techno, "kill em all". Theres one slight niggle, in that if you use the mouse totally to move and shoot, the pathing AI of your character to the next click point, is virtually non-existent. She'll bang into the wall in a straight line more or less and won't move unless you click somewhere else. This isn't a problem at all if you prefer the more responsive keyboard movement control mechanism. I wouldn't advise using the mouse for both movement and shooting, it slows the action down because you're having to worry about getting to where you want to be, whereas with WSAD I'm already there, and I'm already circling the perimeter of a seething mass of nasties. Gun sounds are great. Empty shells make a clink as they hit the ground! I try to keep the minigun stocked with ammo at all times, but for clearing the wooden boxes that sometimes carry equipment, the two pistols are sufficient. They have infinite ammo. Be careful not to clip a oxygen tank strewn across the floor or kaboom baby, say goodbye to that red armour. You can use the liberally sprinkled oil cans and gas tanks in the environment to organise ambushes that will take only a single bullet to initiate.

Top bloody stuff, this. If you like masacre of aliens on a grand scale its worth a butchers.

Star Wolves

http://www.excalibur-publishing.com/starw.htm

http://www.starwolves.ru/en/about.php (description of ships and weapons)

Well, there is considerable quality in the actual FMV that starts the game off, facial renderings and lots of detail on the skin of the main hero show that some effort has been put into this. It's a crying shame that the vocal talent seems to be out of sink with the graphical talent on offer. The narration is choppy and unconvincing, banal would describe it better. Like someone reading something nonchalantly off crib cards. Some of the cast are caricatures of square jawed heroes and hairy, butch, but dull Russians (the game was developed by a Russian company!). You could summarise the introduction to the game (and the actual game itself) as enthusiastic effort, but lacks polish.

The game comes across as an RTS/RPG hybrid. More Homeworld in origin, but based around small scale combat, and personal development of a few key characters. Which is a nice blend really, it takes the middle ground between games like X2 (http://www.enlight.com/x2/) and freelancer (http://www.microsoft.com/games/freelancer/) and large scale conflict like Nexus (http://www.nexusthegame.com/) and Hegaemonia (http://www.hegemonia.info/). It's all about progression within this small scale team of pilots. The tutorials are quite slow but do deliver the information needed if somewhat verbose. From the outset though, you'll find the interface 'quirky' to use. It's not really bad, it just seems to be sluggish to respond and not very intuitive. Certain functions like altering the camera angles and zooming in an out are fine and adopt standard UI convention from many other games however, moving and attacking are a little fiddly and sometimes the game doesn't seem to register the command until you repeat it once or twice. I'm sure with more hours at the helm of this game, the interface will smooth out once you get used to its foibles - its just a bit jarring at first.

Graphical wise, the game looks good. The expected star patterns and nova and star flares are all there, the craft look convincing if a little over painted and colourful. They move and respond as they should in turning arcs and even bounce off each other convincingly, their vapour trails leaving corkscrews in the darkness of space. The initial combat is all about combining your mother ship and her firepower with your fighter wing (your hero and a wing man) and taking out roving pirates. Small cannon weapons pepper the darkness with blue tracer fire and missiles are suitably flourescent and visual when they impact. Turrets on the mother ship align themselves against the enemy, whilst your fighter wing will dogfight waves of pirates making runs as and when. It hasn't got the 'oooh' and 'ahhh' factor from Nexus, with a web work of colourful lasers and constant pounding rockets. It's more of a personal affair concentrating fire on small groups and working at the closer level, battle certainly is less of a light show and more of a matter of combining the specialities of your hero and his wing man onto the enemy. I started out with the hero specialising in basic gunnery and missile capability, whereas the wing man has a large discharge sniper gun and I set him off down the route of ranged bursts and electronic countermeasures. The choice to develop the pilots starts right from the off, after the first patrol sortie. You are awarded experience points of sorts to spend in your chosen skill tree. There are four main skill trees to follow, based on gunnery, long range sniping, electronics and salvage.

I initially tried to place my mother ship in a 'safe' area in space and sent my two fighter crew out to battle the pirates jumping in through a captured portal. However, my fighter wing had major problems making any progress against what seemed to be a much more agile pirate ship. There was a pirate trainer transport stationary in an asteroid belt, presumably mopping up ore, so I could concentrate my fire on that and easily destroy it, but even with my long range wing man, we couldn't quite pick off this pirate fighter who was circling us and chewing away at our shields. I guess the ships and weapons available to us were just not up to the job. So it was time to call in the mother ship to add her firepower to the mix. As soon as she lumbered into weapons range the pirate had trouble with her four mounted turrets blazing and my fighter wing. Job's done. Had to dock the fighters with the mother ship to restock with missiles then I went the rest of the mission in the mother ship, un docking the fighters as necessary.

Missions start as soon as you enter an area, and the initial mission was a patrolling/killing pirates simple sortie that resulted in some money and another area to jump to. On the Mother ship after the mission you can trade equipment and spacecraft and buy more arms and special system equipment (if you have the money). No doubt the key to the game is kitting your fighters and mother ship out with appropriate weaponry and using the most appropriately trained pilots to fulfil the missions objectives. I bought a speedier fighter craft, and fitted it with a remote repair module, in the vain attempt that it could repair shields of the main fighter during combat. I have yet to try that out. In the next area there seems to be two more missions leading on, and presumably this fork is where I have the choice to take the story either way. So it looks that branching missions is the mechanism by which the game takes a step away from the more conventional linear progression.

During the game, the music that accompanies the action, is quite odd. Sort of Cowboy in space music, with howling rock guitar sometimes and steel guitar other times. It reminded me very much of Enterprise, without the singing. Perhaps a spaghetti western in space, sort of thing.

Overall, from just having had a couple of hours play with the game (including tutorials), I would have said its an interesting attempt at bringing the scale of space conflict down a notch, personalising it, and flavouring it with some RPG touches on the characters you use. The ham fisted vocals and underplayed visuals (compared with Nexus) means its probably going to remain an enthusiasts curiosity than gain any wider appeal. The awkward UI will go against it right from the off, plus the awful cheesy voice talents. However its obviously a labour of love for the developers and it does have that interesting niche appeal that could make it a staple in the space fanatics diet. I'm certainly looking forward to see how the RPG elements play out in completing the actual mission objectives, and also see whether the more money and power and ships you acquire it scales up without losing the personal touch.

Guild Wars Preview Event

I know most of you don't want to hear me rattle on about yet another MMORPG. But, this one seems to be very different.

http://www.guildwars.com

I took advantage of the 2 days free session this weekend, and I have been playing it more or less non-stop. I can sum it up in one word. Action.

I thought Guild Wars was primarily a stab at PvP MMORPG. But having steeped myself in their Co-operative quests most of the weekend I can truly say, that the PvP aspects of the game have rarely caught my attention.

GW is basically a bit like Dungeon Siege only multiplayer. This may put some people off. But, I would say give it a try. It's action, all out action, but it has some exquisite quests. They are linear in that your character has to do the first quest to open up the second one. Each quest takes place amongst the world, but is instanced for the party embarking upon it. If you can't make 6 players, then you can take generic AI henchmen (bots basically) of the 5 types (ranger, warrior, monk, elementalist, necro, mesmer).The game is highly detailed. Although its not all shiny like EQ2, however, the world itself is very well modelled, very recognisable all over. It loads bit by bit, in a unique attempt to only download the content you need, so after your initial download of the game files, some quests are loaded on demand during a loading screen, most of these seem to be like 300k so on broadband the wait is very bearable.

The first three quests that I've done many times on my four different characters, were very impressive indeed. The first one being a jaunt through a nasty path between cities, where you meet a confessor at a sort of ruins, and have to endure the onslaught from different directions, with many waves, alternating and combining against you and your team. Bosses included. Then you have to take the news to another chief in another city, coveted by another boss. Once the quest is complete, you get a quite lengthy cutscene, with lots of story, and of you and your team (in the cutscene) being initiated into the order of knights.

The second quest was embarked upon, and you had to retrieve a sacred artifact and return it to a particular village. However, after fighting your way to the artifact, you had to cleanse all your party in a particular font before gaining possession of the artifact. Once cleansed, you go back to the temple where it is stored, and the artifact (which was a glowing eye on top of a pyramid) is then transported by you and your party (literally being hovered over your party's head, with lighting forks of connection attaching the glowing artifact to you and yours). Very well implemented. Never seen anything like that in a MMORPG before. More fighting but with the artifact in tow, and deposit it to the village at the end, another cutscene, with bucketloads of story included.

The third quest, leading on from the cutscene of the second, was a rather nasty affair with lots of beefed up enemies in small tunelled ravines, and massive canyons only traversed by vine bridges that you have to 'grow' by collecting seeds from special vine plants to make the bridges. Cutscene for the first bridge growth, Jack and the Beanstalk style. Plenty of bosses and side exploration quests to perform, whilst on your general journey. The map/radar can be drawn upon to explain directions to the party. Plus you can click and highlight certain points on the map and make the map peep to the rest of the team. Invaluable tools for keeping the party focussed. Basically these quests play out like single player quests, lots of story, lots of complexity and all for a co-op party of 6 and under. Very impressive.

Loot is assigned by the game, no problems there, the game combat mechanism allows for targetting and firing at an enemy, plus alternate targetting and say healing of an ally, once heal stops, auto target and fire back at enemy. Works really well as a bowgirl who heals (ranger/monk combination). Each character has two roles, primary and secondary, skill points are spent between the two. What is novel is that the skills, or specials are bought with money. The first skill you buy, costs 1 gold coin, the next 2 and so on, so the order in which you buy them determines their overall cost. Different trainers sell different skills (for your professions).

Also buffs are handled slightly different, your mana (or energy) regenerates at a given rate, the more buffs you hold onto party members the slower the regen. So you can more or less hold three buffs all the time, if you are near the characters, still having an acceptable rate of regen. If you need more, then drop the buffs for a while, take them up when you can. Equipment and weapons seem to play a more minor role in the game, you can still be effective with your starting kit, only looted stuff later on will make you much better. Most loot seems to be of regular damage, and you can customise it at weaponsmiths, and you seem to be able to crystalise certain skills/spells so you can use them even if its not your profession. Obviously over two days, I can't really comment on the crafting side to the game. Since Skills are related to loot, loot is really important. Every nugget gained, can afford you another skill in the long run. So even tat loot is good loot.

The preview sets you all at level 15 to start with, so perhaps the stuff you can play with is way over the top compared to the retail release, but from what I've seen its something to work towards, and you can certainly get a good feel for the classes.

I honestly had trouble finding downsides to the game. The only ones I can mention are that you can only have 8 skills in operation during a quest, and you have to set these before embarking. And if some of your fickle team decides to abandon you mid quest, you are going to have a hell of a time trying to complete it. Travelling on the world map involves opening spawn points really, and once open (usually through a quest or exploration map) then you can virtually travel there again for free. So third quest leaves you in the middle of nowhere, you can log, come back hours later and log to city, travel to quest site and begin again with another group. All seems very set up for casual players.

Because of the delivery of the game, the whole place seems instanced, everywhere. Even cities have like 30 instances, called districts, so not only do you need to know where your mates are you need to know the district number - think PSO lobbies. Each external place from the city, is also instanced for a party. Even if you're solo, or with just henchmen. Some are exploration, some quest based, some PvP arenas. You chose where you go and what you do. I've spent most of my time in the co-op quest areas though, lots of excitement.

The PvP that I have done, was ok to start off with, some sort of confrontation to deal as a warm up, then into a closed arena for a battle with another party (whilst online they raised the PvP party limit to 8 ). I didn't care for it much, lots of 'we were owned', 'joo sux' etc. Still was good to see PvP so organised, reminded me of Quake 3 in a way. You can even play on the servers when there is a patch pending, several times I had the server has been updated please log out at the next appropriate time. I mean their delivery system of content is just top notch. It all comes down very small bits, as and when you need it. Works brilliantly. The only time you notice it badly is when all party members enter an instance of a quest, and some come in a few moments slower than others because they're still downloading it. But once down and on the go the quest is a self contained peice of story with goals and rewards. And they seem to be able to conjure up quite complex and unique instanced quests - knocks Lost Dungeons of Norrath into a cocked hat.

So, overall, GW is worth the effort, if you like casual action based MMORPG. Probably not going to suit everyone, especially hardened EQ fans I'd guess. But bugger me, they've got a sparkle to the mix here. Since the game will be a purchase the box only, no subscription fee, I can't see it failing in its release. It's just whether they can keep on adding content based on retail box purchases.

Saga of Ryzom Event

Meant to post about this earlier.... Saturday evening, there was a continent wide event run on the European Server in the MMORPG Saga of Ryzom. Luckily I was around when the event kicked off.

The event was announced throughout the continent of Fyros, with a small description about an invasion force kidnapping a number of Levier nobles. The Leviers are a band of nomadic patrollers who wander the wastelands and deserts of Fyros. The event lasted about 2 hours and at the start of it, we noticed that a lot of the resident herds of animals and insects started dissappearing. The call to arms was made, and every player in the region was asked to search out the Frahar kidnap groups and set their prisoners free. The Frahar are bat winged apes that have facial that even Noddy Holder would be proud of. Everyone started migrating to the major city Pyr, to collect up and form searching parties, and on our way to the city, we were attacked by quite a large invasion force. The way Nevrax implemented the invasion was quite effective. There seemed to be spawn points peppered all over the land and if a player or group of players approach it, the invasion force spawns. The invasion group was made up of a large number of these monkies, and their companion guard and patrol dogs. So to the players moving around, you would get a horde of angry beasts coming over the next dune and making a charge at you. Very effective. The invasion groups seemed to be quite low level at first, so we could cleave through them quite easily, but the closer you got to key event areas their level and quantity raised quite sharply. What impressed me the most was the event was continent wide, and everyone from level 1 to level 200 could take part in it. The invading forces were indeed very intimidating, and if you spotted them forming at the base of a hill, and then they detect your presence, a whole stream of these nasties amassing and charging towards was a very unsettling sight. There were three or four kidnap camps, as far as we could tell from the region chat, guilds were grouping together and performing area searches. Initial confusion slowly turned into determined searching and hunting down the camps. Once all kidnap camps had been liberated, there was a call to say that the 'boss' had arrived on the planet and was sending in more monkey patrols. We got close to the boss camp, but were swamped by really nasty monkies.

I haven't been on a MMORPG event as such, not one with a real story behind it and a continent wide level of co-operation. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and although there was little experience points to be gained at first, because the invading forces were quite low level, there was a sense of city defence and a purpose to save the Levier troops. The only downside I could see was the fact that they removed most of the normal flora and fauna, so you were more or less thrown into the event, without the choice of sticking around the area you were hunting in. I should explain the continent level of segragation. Basically, in Ryzom the four races don't get to see each other, or travel to each others cities very easily. We're emerging from our beaten down state to fight against the kitin horde. To get to the other races continents involves a nasty run and usually lots of deaths and lots of luck is needed. So the isolation is real. Nevrax seem to be running different events for the different continents. So the Matis had an event about a week ago, where they were swamped by an insurgence of starship trooper like bugs. Not sure how often these events will happen, or how they will differ from the invasion model, but I'm looking forward to the next one.

Starfleet Command III

I picked up this little gem at the weekend, after Haegemonia had fuelled my thirst for more space based gaming. Now I know it is a Star Trek game. And I'm not a big Star Trek fan (in all its forms). But what drew me to the game was the idea of piloting a large spaceship down at the combat level. 'Heg' had given me the Homeworld buzz of commanding a whole fleet - SFC3 seemed to promise me the option of zooming in to a single space hulk and commanding the battle from there. It's a fairly involved procedure commanding a ship in this Next Gen combat simulator. Luckily the quite lengthy tutorials, voiced by Picard himself, are very well paced to give you a fighting chance. Having said that some of the tutorials take a while before you acquire the knowledge and dexterity to command one of these babies. ', 'It's definitely bewildering to begin with, especially if you haven't tasted any of the Starfleet games before. And you seem to have to practice certain manoeuvres a bit before you get a feel for them. The best thing about the game is the way combat is a slow paced but very strategic affair. Turning these lumbering starships is a skill in itself. Each ship has four shields, one either side, one fore and one aft. To do any damage at all to an enemy you first need to take down at least one of these shields (and they regenerate at a given rate - depending on the quality of the shield and the power assigned to them). Once you've punched a whole in a shield, which takes a while since you've got to hit the same shield with many salvos to disable it, you can begin to do hull damage. If you get in close enough to the ship with the gaping shield wound, then you can transport a sabotage party across to try and take out key ship systems (which you specify), or you can attempt to send a whole group of marines across to take over the ship. This is a tricky operation to pull off though, because up close and personal is where you can also take damage easily, and those shields are regenerating all the time, so you won't be able to transport any more troops over unless you keep the wound open. You have two common weapon types at your disposal, beams and torpedoes, primary and heavy respectively. Each weapon mounted on your ship has a firing arc, and requires a considerable charge up time. You have to time your engine and retro thrusts to keep your ship (and its weapons arcs) focussed on the achilles heel. This takes quite a bit of skill to achieve as a cohesive manoeuvre. You have a crew of officers who start out with little experience - but the more victorious you are, the better they become. After each victory, you are awarded prestige points which you can use to refit your ship with more weapons, better versions or indeed buy another ship class altogether. You can hire even better officers if you have the prestige spare.

Other combat devices at your disposal are shuttles, mines and tractor beams. You can launch shuttles with several mission objectives, to defend, to attack, to snipe, to distract - they provide you with a small decoy or a small additional amount of firepower. You can purchase mines, and lay them in combat as a defensive mechanism whilst fleeing to recharge your shields - or you can lay them in the midst of a battle to provide additional damage. You can use tractor beams to hold your prey preventing them from turning their damaged shield side away from your guns, you prevent them from engaging their warp drive, and the most effective use it for one ship to hold the enemy in place whilst another pounds the living daylights out of its vulnerable side.

There are other speciality devices that allow you to use shield inversion and some tricks that are race specific (like the Borg cutting lasers, and the klingons and romulans cloaking device). You start the single player game playing as a Klingon, and your flighty but weak shielded Bird of Prey requires a cloaked hit and run tactic. Whilst cloaked you cannot engage in combat and your shields are down, immediately after uncloaking there is a small delay when your shields and weapons are recovering - so are very vulnerable. Timing of your un-cloaking is key to bringing down a much larger Federation vessel.

The slow paced tactical battle unfolds over quite a long period of time, you have to employ all the advantageous mechanisms you have at your disposal to come through it with a ship in tact. Last night, for a laugh, I tried the Multiplayer Campaign (or as its known the Dynaverse). It's basically the same sort of game as the single player one - however most of the AI ships in the single player game are replaced with online players running through their own campaign. A bit like Battle.net, in that your dynaverse campaign is stored (or at least is tied up) on their server. You need a Gamespy account to create a character in the Dynaverse. I went in as a fresh Klingon (mainly because I'd started to get the hang of the Klingon cloak, warp, uncloak, attack strategy.

The world map is a large hex map and you move through the world from your races starports, perhaps running a single mission against AI opponents, refitting as necessary. But, the big plus is that you can form Fleets with other players. The fleet moves as one, and you can then start to explore deeper into enemy territory (federation, romulan and the borg collective). I teamed up with two other Klingons warriors, both a little higher up in terms of prestige and ship development, and we scoured a Federation space lane, and initiated attacks on some borg vessels. The world map is essentially a hex board, where you move around, with an IRC chat client below it - where you can discuss with all your races players (in a specific Klingon channel) or bad-mouth the other races in the general channel. So you team up, move around until the Leader finds a quadrant where theres some action, and then you are taken into the battle. Suddenly all your single player tactics seem to change. Cloaking was not really necessary as I often found myself in the position of tail gater. I would fly round the back of the enemy, whilst they were busy with my other fleet members, and I would eat away at their weaker back shields. Once through all ships could begin transporting troops and I could shift back and forth laying salvo after salvo of torp and beam into the hull of the ship. Admittedly I would have been toast if it were not for the other two players constantly engaging the enemy in waves. Often tractor beaming him into position so I could come about easy enough to lay a torp smack on. Now, I think I had an easy ride last night, because I was with two players who seemed to understand the mechanics of their ships and it felt a bit like my newbie bird of prey was being powerlevelled. But I can see how a large force could be established and if the opposition did not rally together all of their ships - the Dynaverse could fall after a few massive and lengthy major battles.

What would be interesting would be to affect a co-ordinated effort by a single group to enter a Dynaverse and spend their time building an efficient killing fleet that could stomp over all the opposition. Would take a bit of doing, which is why Dynaverses don't fall that often, theres always a constant niggling of each others boundaries. But I saw some clanned players there, Klingon High Council or something. Overall, I didn't expect to enjoy the online game much - but even though map wandering is a bit tedious, the actual combat is very good - there were a number of head to head players who spent their time chasing each other and fighting it out, and then brag flooding the general channel. But on the whole, it was very enjoyable. I think its a much more tactical piloting game based on specific science fiction mechanics pulled out of the Star Trek universe - and as such the battle is very involving, much more so than the likes of Earth and Beyond.

The Curse of Fade was lifted

A mighty conjurer telepathically connected with Fade's Elven senses on a higher plane of existence. The mystic promised a cure for her curse, but only after a physical and spiritual purging, could this remedy be applied. With some in trepidation, Fade agreed to be metaphysically transported to the conjurer's shelter. The thought of being able to breathe fresh forest air without the metallic twang from behind the helmet was enough to make her almost giddy. She slipped into the ethereal atmosphere for little beyond a second and appeared before the mighty conjurer with a jolt of her soul that shook her nerves for one moment. She clasped her bow tighter as if only it could protect her now. The conjurer was soft spoken and looked remarkably younger than she'd first expected.

The purge must begin before we can lift the curse. Quickly she shed all her equipment, removing the helmet to reveal the grotesque sight of her almost naked decapitated body. She trembled as deposited her bow, her only source of comfort through the years before. Her last vestige of self. The kind conjurer waved a little, with slight of hand, and Fade dropped to the floor asleep. She dreamt of nothing, in fact the purge itself seemed to be one big black hole with no escape. Emptiness. No sooner had she forgotten who she was, lost in some macabre wilderness, then she was wide awake again. Fully clothed in rough leather, it took her a moment to readjust. She could not remember her name. Who was she?

Another slight of hand from the conjurer and she was climbing steps, re-learning everything she had once known, her archery skills tingled in her fingertips, she smelt the sweet smell of the yew and fresh sap covering of her bow, she could pinch the fibres from her bowstring and remember how to nock arrows in rapid succession. She was overcome with empathy for the animals of the world, she longed to call her forest mate Bara the Brown Bear, she longed to comfort him with her song again. As incredibly dizzying as it was, it was also reassuring that she could feel the seasons mature within her, climbing her body like rampant ivy, as the conjurer dropped his hand to his sides, the process was done. Fade had become whole again. She clutched her face, picked up a potion bottle and peered within the reflection. Her beautiful face was there again, shining back at her, almost luminescent. she could see her nose if she crossed her eyes. She danced. The conjurer chuckled.

It was to tears of joy that she said her farewell to the conjurer, reseating her arrows, and adjusting her armour, she was ready again to face the world, with all its dangers, but this time she could hold her head up high, this time she could smile at those she loved and grimace at those she loathed, and her enemies filled with darkness and hate would see the elven piousness on her face as she filled them with arrows of justice.

The conjurer, his name was Kai, and she vowed to name her firstborn after him, in memory of his deeds that day.

The Distressed Bard

No sooner had I entered the city today than I had an almost manic lady chattering away at me about Guards being slaughtered in the Commerce District near the gate to the Docks area of Port Cruces.

This lady named Trill, was an inexperienced bardic singer, who seemed to be shaking like a leaf. She said there are adventurers amongst us who are slaying Cruces guards without remorse. She mentioned two names who she claimed she has seen perform these acts of murder. They were a gold clad blade warrior called Lanan Rift and a small arcane user named Zephyr. Trill apparently stumbled onto the fray whilst she was heading to the Docks to take provisions over to Dulce. She was most upset, claiming they had even chased her around the city Commons area.

Trill said, when she asked Lanan for an explanation he had gloated over the kill, allegedly claiming he was weeding out the weak guards from the strong ones - making the city a safer place - and that the whole populace of Port Cruces should thank him.

Obviously I was concerned about this news. I tried to calm her down. But she seemed to have lost all faith in anyone with a blade in their hand. She scurried off in the direction of Curces Outskirts presumably in hiding, for fear of her life.

Now I cannot claim to believe her one way or another, and Bards do have a way of elaborating to make things floral, but it does seem very strange that there have been a much increased amount of attacks on the commoners and guards of Port Cruces, and now we have allegedly seen Adventurers themselves claiming kills for the amusement value. I myself managed to pin a couple of Elite Belen Soldiers as they ransacked the Commons area the other day. The place was alive with glowing columns of blue light, and strange blue glowing orbs. The air was rank with arcane trickery.

I believe it is time to stand up for the good and the honourable, and make Port Cruces a safer place. Do not let your malaise turn against the goodness of the city! Use your adventuring skills for the good of Amon.