Matthew Rossi

In case you were unaware that I am as ancient and hoary as a sinister black sword that drinks souls, let me introduce y’all to White Plume Mountain, the module that contains throwaway references to stuff that ended up becoming iconic Dungeons and Dragons villains and items. I mean, it’s heavily implied by the art in this module that Elric’s famous black sword Stormbringer ended up in this mountain under the name Blackrazor.

When I was a wee sprog of around 10, my fighter got his hands on that thing, and let me tell you, it was as bad an idea to let me have a sentient evil soul devouring greatsword as it would be for, say, the Prince of Lordaeron. But man, I can still remember the chant we all came up with for places we wanted to go after we were done inside the volcano of weird giant crabs and evil Efreets. Dragotha Dragotha Dragotha.

This is the Queue. We never actually did get to fight Dragotha.

No, you’re working on your own tabletop RPG with crazy time travelers going back in time and catching prehistoric animals and releasing them in, say, Greece in BCE 1200 just because they think it’s funny.

Tabletop RPG design is wild and I’m winging it, guys.

Anyway, it’s the Queue. Let’s goooooooooooooooo.

Titanfall 2 was sent out to die by EA.

Last week's Diablo 4 Campfire Chat introduced a lot of changes coming to the game in May (including a vastly overhauled itemization system), but one small change may have flown under the radar: increased zoom distance.

I play a lot of games and I am always hitting moments I completely find compelling or fun or interesting. And then, once I am done playing them — and usually much later, hours or days later — I realize that I should have screenshotted or recorded it. By then, however, I’ve moved way past it, and going back would either be a process of hours of gameplay from an old save, or with games like Diablo 4, literally starting the whole game over again.

So anyway, I had a whole lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 stuff I was gonna talk about, but then I realized I forgot to take the SS of me talking to an angry bird, so here we are.

Diablo 4 is about to upend itemization with a new philosophy that stresses quality over quantity.

I am rapidly becoming convinced that I am the most contrary human being to exist, because the more people complain about Diablo 4 Season 3, the more I seem to be loving it.

It’s okay to not be good at something you enjoy doing.

Sometimes I just stop and marvel at the way the Diablo 4 team worked our characters into the in-game cinematics. There’s my character up there, confronting Lilith. It’s not just Lilith monologuing, it’s not Tyrael blowing up the Worldstone or Baal breaking a man’s brain, it’s me. The character I’ve been playing all game is the one we get to see step up, and she’s a fully customized, distinct looking figure.

And they even managed to capture how utterly done with Lilith’s whole deal she is.

Lately pretty much every morning has felt like waking up with a mind flayer tadpole, so I figured I’d embrace it. It’s the Queue. I’m kind of splitting my time between Faerun and Sanctuary lately — yes, I’m that one guy who likes Diablo 4 pretty much just as much as when it launched — and I won’t lie, there’s some cognitive dissonance.

Luckily, I tend to do Dark Urge origins and those are a fair bit more… shall we say sanguine? It makes it easier to leap between them when I go from giant barbarian soaked in blood to giant barbarian soaked in blood, I guess.