Last night’s Monday Night Foundries were a mixed bag of awful and awesome, but more than that, I think we finally distilled the essence of what makes a successful Foundry — and what makes a good one. These aren’t necessarily going to be found on the same Foundry.
I also gave Kasul a first peak at the Foundry mission I’m writing. It probably won’t be either good OR successful, but you need to learn to walk before you can learn to run … and you need to learn to crawl before you get to walking or running. I’m still at the “Legs? What are they good for?” stage. Trying to wring a story out of the Foundry tools gives me a better appreciation for those that manage anything at all. And for those that do it well…..
The Goblin Feast by @wisetale
“The Goblin Feast” is one of three Foundry missions the author finished at the end of August; this is the only one that was long enough to be eligible for the daily Foundry mission. That’s important — if your mission doesn’t take on the average fifteen minutes to play, it won’t be eligible for the daily Foundry mission and few people will play it.
Your mission, as a subcontractor to the Mercenaries Guild, is to rescue some missing children before they are eaten by goblins. The mission takes you through some truly lush and detailed settings as in the picture above, but the terrible, terrible writing and spelling takes away all the good feelings that the settings inspired. I gave it three stars — and it would have been two if not for the good level design.
The Silence of Haydenwick by @grimah
This was a featured mission given top billing by the Neverwinter staff. The author warns that this adventure is hard and full of combat, and that’s no exaggeration. It also has the sort of old-school RPG puzzle solving you don’t often see.
The village of Haydenwick has gone silent; well, silent except for the calling out for brains and such, as the town’s drunks, gluttons and blacksmiths have gone and gotten themselves turned into infected drunks, gluttons and blacksmiths. After figuring out how to barricade the town against further attack from the outside, it’s into the town hall where the last of the survivors held out until they were betrayed from the inside. The story is told through journals and diaries scattered around. There’s a lot of running back and forth as you collect the bits of the mystery. Once solved, it’s back out into the town to escape the plague.
This was definitely a challenge at times for the two of us. I felt there was a little more combat than the story really needed, making this a fairly long adventure. @grimah has written a simplified version of the adventure, Haydenwick — Horde Mode, which is just the fighting and can be done in about fifteen minutes.
@Grimah’s previous outing was a generic kill-easy-mobs-for-event-drops Foundry called Charm Grind V.3 that appears to have used the same setting. Definitely an author to look out for.
Crazed Mutant Death Chickens by @Thunderspank
There’s something about chickens that, in Neverwinter, have been raised to almost mythic standards. I’m not sure why. Look for chicken-themed Foundry missions, though, and you won’t be able to ever come to the end of them. And with a name like Crazed Mutant Death Chickens, this quest seemed a good place to start.
Magical chicken feed has turned regular chickens into … mutant death chickens … and they are slaughtering the town. Seeing a couple of naked dancing girls — who are being terrorized by chickens — upon zoning in kind of set the stage for the whole adventure. After clearing the town, you’re sent into a tavern to clear that out as well, then back into the town for some more chicken killing.
A couple of the chickens were more feisty than others, but we were really expecting the fights to lead up to some sort of confrontation with a super mega-chicken or something, which never happened. Also, how was this not called Teenage Mutant Ninja Chickens? We felt an opportunity was lost there.
The author has previously written a four-part Foundry campaign that I have not played.
Party in the Arena of Poseidon by @XNURIAX
When the Foundry mission event comes up, it’s pretty easy to get a group grinding arena missions. These are exactly what they say on the tin; missions meant for a group that just toss increasingly difficult enemies and crowds more of them until the fifteen minutes is up, then they finish and you queue up for it again.
We thought it would be fun to try out an arena mission for ourselves to cap off the night.
In this one, Poseidon has called upon the greatest warriors of the land to meet the gods of old. We soon progressed from easy minions to the god of war, Ares. After that, the arena left the Greek myths behind and had us fighting enemies named after Biblical people and places. And then it got weirder.
The fights themselves were VERY challenging, clearly meant for a controller-heavy group. We, being neither of us controllers, had no luck. Each of us had five deaths before we were done, and had gone through a few dozen potions.
Neither of us felt like we had a good time — there are no real rewards from a Foundry mission aside from trash drops. If there WERE, nobody would do anything else, after all. We’d probably have liked it better if we’d been in a full group. Still, it’s an arena, we weren’t expecting a deep story or anything except continuous fighting for fifteen minutes, and that’s exactly what we got.
That’ll do, Pig.
I figure if I have a pig NEXT to me, I can always pretend people are insulting the pig and not me. But why would they insult the pig? She’s so CUUUUTE!
In preparation for next week’s expansion launch, and especially the new browser game Sword Coast Adventures, Kasul bought a new companion, a pig from the Midsummer event, to level up. You need four companions to fully play the game, though you can buy temporary ones within the game itself. We don’t know what characteristics the companions will need for the game, but I’m guessing with four companions and four roles (defender, striker, leader and controller), then having one of each type in companion form can’t hurt.
Kasul’s pig made it to level 12 through the evening, and his was so cute I had to buy one for myself, even though I already had a controller in the person of the cleric disciple whom I used as my healer until I did the Incredible Zen to Diamond Maneuver that bought me my current healer cheap.
If I’d been blogging when I did that, you’d have found out how I got a lockbox companion — which people spend upwards of $100 or more on keys to get — for much, much, MUCH cheaper by playing games with the Zen/Astral Diamond exchange. But, you’ll never know now. Except that it had something to do with the Zen/Diamond exchange. And in fact that’s all there was to it. The market was swinging wildly because of a special event for just that weekend, and it was the perfect time for some arbitrage.
Anyway, Hambone joins my other companions — Binky the Wonder Corpse, Phred the Dawg, Zenda the Prisoner Of, the Un-Healer Malificent and Adam Flambert the Phoenix — in waiting for Sword Coast Adventures, which you’ll probably read about here at some point.
Happy adventuring!
