Reading, Comics, and DDO on Day 21 of #Blaugust

Daily Ramble 19: Reading, Comics, and DDO on Day 21 of #BlaugustReborn

Today I got caught up on a few of the RSS feeds that I’ve been following for Blaugust and I’ve noticed a bunch of posts talking about DDO and I’m thinking of giving the game a shot. I also had the opportunity to read a couple of comics and finish off one of the books I’ve been working on for the month.

Six Degrees of DDO

One game that I’m seeing mentioned a bunch that I’m kinda interested in playing is DDO. I used to play plenty of pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons back in the day and enjoyed Baldur’s Gate and the Icewind Dale games but I never started up in DDO. With people posting like Syp over at BioBreak and Telwyn over at GamingSF who’ve obviously played the game quite a bit I wonder how easy this game would be for a noob like myself. Is it like Everquest where there’s tons of expansion content to wade through or is there a straightforward newbie experience?

With posts talking about the expansion coming up or diving into the pirate experience in Crystal Cove
My interest is definitely piqued and I may just have to seek out an installer and give this MMO a try. I’dlike to see how it lives up to my PnP experience or the gameplay of Baldure’s Gate.

Spidey and the Avengers

While I’m still taking a bit of a break from my more in depth comic reviews I am still reading plenty of issues. Today I took a look at the next installment of the 1963 Spider-Man. In issue #4 Peter takes on Sandman and it’s a pretty good fight. Sandman’s abilities make him a formidable foe and it takes some quick thinking on the part of Spider-Man to apprehend him. Jumping forward to a more recent release, I took a look at The Avengers (vol 7) first issue from 2016. This issue comes after the Civil War II event and has an interesting lineup of heroes. Hercules, Vision, and Redwing are your standard, expected characters, but Thor is actually Jane Foster, Wasp is Nadia Van Dyne, and Captain America is Sam Wilson. It’s interesting to see a cast with the same names but different faces and I think it’ll be fun to see where this goes. As it stands, the team looks to be facing a pretty powerful foe called Kang the Conqueror who can manipulate time.

Every Heart a Doorway

I finished off this wonderful book by Seanan McGuire and think I’ll be headed back into the world soon as there are other novels in the series. Apparently there are 3 books so far in the Wayward Children series but there are 2 more scheduled and I could easily see dozens of stories that could be told in this well crafted universe.

The basic idea as expressed in Every Heart a Doorway is that children have always disappeared into fantasy worlds over the years and while most come back, some are changed and some only want to return to their magical world. Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is a place for those children that come back with fanciful tales of the places they’ve been. When the parents can no longer deal with the stories of the fantasy worlds and the kids refuse to integrate into the “real” world, Ms. West is there for them.

This first entry in the Wayward Children series not only lays out the boarding home but it builds out many of the fantastical worlds that the various children visited. These worlds are amazing and creepy, logical and nonsensical and they also form the foundation of a mystery when some of the children start showing up dead.

The story is well put together and a fun read. My only complaint is that I want more…it’s a bit short and I could easily enjoy spending more time in this particular magical world. I suppose I’ll have to get that from reading the next book in the series.

A Series Won and Another Started