An Explosive Bloodmoon in 7 Days to Die

My friend Dylan has been hard at work in 7 Days to Die. Every time he logs on, he sends out a text to me and his progeny that the server is up and ready to rock. It's been a busy week, and I haven't been able to log on and play with him as much as I would like to, but when I did finally log on this weekend, WHOA, these guys (and specifically Dylan) had been hard at work.

The Russian Brutalist Architecture of Dylan's Boys.

I quickly jumped on the bandwagon and started reading a bunch of tech books and wiring manuals so I could try and catch up on my skills as "the intellect gal."

I was unable to lock my second rank in shock baton and learn the basics of making a few things in the workbench like my old favorite . . . the punchy turret! Dylan had never really used the punchy turret, so I introduced him to its awesomeness while we delved into a rank 3 mine and then later at the base.

Pink nails and a blue stun baton, the perfect backup for Dylan's Assassin

He liked punchy so much that we incorporated it into our base defense design because here's the thing, he had been holding back the blood moon with server controls. He did that because he wanted to have as many people logged on and playing when it happened.  

Punchy turrets are the best!

So our first blood moon last night was 24 days in instead of 7 days, and MAN, it felt like we had been holding back a giant poop of zombies. there were spitters and vultures and leapers and all manner of nastiness in this blood moon.  It felt WAY worse than our "first" blood moon.

It's always these birds . . . ugh

As it turns out we had been worried we were over-prepared for the night, but we had prepared just about right. They did break through a weak point in our defenses by going under a wall, but none of us died.  We did go through a ton of ammo though.

Loot bags everywhere and zombies in my sights.

The punchy sledgehammers worked great until the zombies toppled the steps they were sitting on top of. All in all, it was a pretty great night of intense action in 7 Days to Die.

Happy Dueling!

Tales from a Casual Dune Endgamer -- FREE MAZE

I've been messing around in Dune Awakening's endgame for a month now, and . . . to be honest . . . I can see why people cycle out, especially if they're on a more casual server like we are. That's because once you get to endgame, you really only have the grind and game chores to look forward to each week . . . or just making your own fun. When you make your own fun, it's things like our "FREE MAZE" that occupy your day. 

Dylan loves the base building in Dune and makes the most magnificent looking palaces. His temple / sand buggy garage / carrier thopter storage base is a thing of legends. His small base ain't no joke either. He's modified it several times to get both a large spice and a large ore refinery to work there. 

This base of Dylan's is a thing of beauty

When we ran into trouble using solidos out in the Deep Desert, it was Dylan that came up with the upside-down pyramid structure that let us reliably copy our base each week. 

The Upside-down pyramid style is everything when working with Solidos.

As for me, I'm a goofy ex-game designer. My builds are all over the place, but I did come up with a maze at my base that led to a container holding all of my in-game gold. At each dead end, there was a chest full of random junk and in the middle of the maze, there's a trap that would dump you out to provide a little challenge.

How it started . . .

I had Dylan run through it and he solved it pretty easily, which was fine -- never was meant to be hard, just something to build.  After he went through it he said, "What about building a multi-level maze?" I admit, I was thinking the same direction. That's when our FREE MAZE was born.

How it's going . . .

The Free Maze is a structure on top of a hanging ledge that entices players in with the words "FREE MAZE" in old school billboard letter fashion. The maze features four downward levels of mazes.

The first level is just your basic maze. At first, I had included half-ramps to make it more interesting, but we had an online acquaintance of ours getting stuck because he was dashing and ducking everywhere. We nixed the ramps.

. . . up, down, up, down, don't get stuck!

The second level uses the new Duneman set of furniture and has you jumping up over barriers and ducking down angled walls while getting your view blocked a bit by columns.

Tree Trunks will make you . . . jump jump!

The third level is a set that features a lot of doorways and Harkonnen dividers. The hardest part of set up here is making sure all the doorways are set to public access. They're only meant to confuse and distract you, not completely block you.

It really does get confusing when everything looks the same and you can't look down hallways

The fourth level was originally meant to be full of pit traps, but as it turns out, the pit traps could easily serve as short cuts into the bottom of the maze and didn't have any real danger. Instead, we made it one that's kind of hard to maneuver around in with half walls you have to duck or jump over. 

It's a little tricky getting past these half walls.

We did leave one pit though. It was the only one that was dangerous enough to keep. (Tipa found it and fell all the way down to the sands below.  SUCCESS!)

At the end of the fourth level, we had originally constructed a fifth level that was an upward obstacle course, but ultimately it was a little confusing, so we just put our reward chest at the end inside the fifth level and changed the upward obstacle to be our behind-the-scenes homebase instead.

Welcome one at all! NOT A TRAP! 

If you managed to make it to the end chest, we stuffed it with 10k gold, some spice, and a bunch of other little goodies. As for the maze itself, ultimately it takes about an hour to an hour and a half to rebuild this maze the way Dune is currently set up to handle solido blueprints, and that makes it a big downer for breaking out each week in the Deep Desert.

Just to be sure you understand, each week the Deep Desert resets and any base you built out there is erased. Everything in the Deep Desert is erased and then the next week you play, all the caves and instances and treasures are located in different areas within the sands.

This corresponds with the Lansraad event where you go about earning favor for each house in the Dune Universe by either holding control points out in the Deep Desert or by doing small tasks for them during the week, like killing scavengers in the noobie-area or mass producing suspensor belts and turning them in for credit "in the name of the Red Duke."

Just craft 24 suspensor belts to win the ultimate prize!

Ultimately it leads to a lot of "chores" you have to do each week to play the end game, which can seem extremely tedious. Sure, the rewards are pretty fantastic . . . but they're also so fantastic that if you 100 percent them in a week, you're going to be sitting pretty well geared, fat with gold, and happy. 

Since I've been on government shutdown, I've been able to be on a daily quest to capture control points with our allied guilds on the Atreides side of house. On our server cluster, the Harkonens really aren't much of a threat. We dominate, and we dominate hard.

Every day at 11:00 MST, everyone logs on, gets in a party, and claims control points together as a group. It is hands down the best way to claim your Lansraad rewards. Most control points on our server aren't even contested that much. If you miss the party for control points, you're out of luck and will have to rely on doing the chore associated with the house.

Capturing Control Points with my new buddies on the server.

When I'm not on Government Shutdown, I'll be at work. There's no way I can do those control points, so it's going to be chore city for me (and hopefully soon).

So that's it . . . rebuilding bases every week, running Lansraad chores, collecting spice, collecting ore, processing spice, processing ore, flying over a vast desert in less than thrilling game play . . . it's all a bit tedious after a while, and that's why (like I said back at the top of the post) I can see why people cycle out of this game, which is something they've struggled with.

Behold the thrilling game play of Purple Lawn Mowing Simulator!

Chapter three will apparently bring updates to the game that will amp the fun on the end game, but you won't see that happen until sometime early 2026. I'm afraid we'll have likely cycled out of the game by that time unless we start over on an actual public server where griefing and slowdowns are to be expected as you participate in the Deep Desert.

For now I'm just happy Dylan and I have had the chance to build our FREE MAZE and share it with the people of our server cluster. They're some fun people, and I've had a good time capturing control points with them the past few weeks.  I guess it really is friendship that brings us back.

Sometimes it's just about watching the sun come up over the dunes tbh.

If I was to make a couple suggestions:

• Make the solido able to be built in one click. Just give me a chest that asks for multiple raw building materials needed to construct it, and when I fill up the chest, it auto builds my creation. (Reference the game Creativerse)
• Make a way to UPS (mail) goods from the Deep Desert to my home base in Hagga. As it is now, you'll make multiple trips back and forth through an overland map. I'd prefer a vendor that would allow me to pay for shipping back to my home base. I'll pay a price to do that. It'd be worth it.

Those two small changes would be pretty fantastic alone. Dylan and I have been making a small list of other changes we'd love to see, but those two would help make things feel much less of a chore. (I know, I know, first world videogame problems, but I had to mention it on the off chance a dev might drop by someday.)

Happy Dueling! 

BG3 es fini and the Everquest Beastlord Build

People of the Friendly Necromancer!  In the past week I have wrapped up two (count 'em, TWO) play-throughs of Baldur's Gate 3. What a fantastic game. Even now I'm feeling compelled to start up a new character download a few mods, and do this all again! But no . . . no . . . self-control is necessary here. I have some Wizard101 and Path of Exile 2 in my very near future.

OK, so first, my buddy Dylan and I finished up our playthrough with Moonstar and Avantador. It was a pretty interesting journey where we crashed through the game, failing all kinds of encounters, and skipping all kinds of side content to reach the final conflict. We even failed our final battle once. We even failed the trip up to the final battle once, but it was nothing we couldn't overcome on our second try. 

The best Firework Show Baldur's Gate has ever seen!

To make matters even better, Moonstar and Shadowheart finally hit the sack together. You have no idea all Dylan went through to riz that character up.

Blush!

Unfortunately Laezel left me and went to be a slave to her queen. I tried to stop her, but she was all Marty McFly about her density, I mean, her destiny.

Bye Laezel! Enjoy servitude!

I was able to take everything I learned from the playthrough with Moonstar and Avantador and use it to make my trip through the finale a perfect trip with Volt. I had gathered a MEGA ton of heroes and helpers, which made everything easy with the dragon fight. I mean, it wasn't without a few challenges, but without my playthrough with Dylan, I wouldn't have known the best use of Shadowheart's Divine Intervention comes right before you trash the netherbrain.

Bye Bye Giant Brain!

As you may recall, Volt was my experiment in building an Everquest Beastlord in Baldur's Gate 3. I'd say it was pretty successful.  To those ends, he’s a glorious 2 monk, 5 Ranger, 5 Cleric.

Similarities to Everquest Beastlord:

• He’s got a pet. When I call a pet out, it’s typically a Bear and it’s awesome at goading attacks. For a while I was even using special demonspirit gloves that would give him extra resistance to pretty much everything, which was great.

At fifth level, your pet gets introduced to helmet hair

• He’s got a slow spell and heals. This was a main requirement for me and is why I spec’d him all the way to 5th level cleric in the Domain school. That’s how he’s sporting his slow spell. It’s pretty epic.

Such a good debuff

• He’s a dual wielder with martial arts. Having two weapons and mixing it up in melee with your pet was always what set the Everquest Beastlord apart from the other pet classes (necromancer and Mage specifically).

If only Everquest models looked this nice!

Where things start to get different is just the nature of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the D&D gameplay:

• Use of psionics. The illythid tadpoles I add to my character’s brain are giving me all kinds of psionic abilities. One thing that’s actually pretty cool is the ability to shapeshift into a Displacer Beast. I suppose the argument could be made that the ability to shapeshift into a beast is very much in line with a few of the AA abilities in the Beastlord’s repertoire.
• Scrolls and potions. I mean, scrolls and potions give you access to every spell in the game. You’re not going to see a beastlord casting Disintegrate and Firewall in Everquest. On the other hand, Haste Spores are very in-line with casting haste, and poison being applied to your weapon strikes is also very “Everquest beastlordy.” Again, you could argue these things make up the gaps.
• Dragonborn aren’t Iksar. I mean, if I could play as a lizardman in Baldur’s Gate 3 I probably would. There actually is a mod that changes Dragonborn into Lizardmen, which doesn't seem horrible -- just not my pointy iskar from Everquest.
• Bears aren’t a good pet for Iksar (although they are for Barbarians). In Everquest, your Iksar pet is a little dino puppy/stegosaurus thing. Rangers in BG3 get your choice of bears, wolves, falcons, spiders, and boars (I believe). Again, there is a mod that will allow you to get a Dilophosaurus pet at level 7, but that wouldn’t work with my build anyway. I suppose the argument could be made that the flexibility of the type of pet you can summon is way cooler than Everquest's system anyway.

So there you have it. I'm very happy with the amount of value and fun I've gotten from Baldur's Gate 3. If you're concerned about the mature things you can encounter like Moonstar rizzing up Shadowheart, there's a toggle for that so you can turn it off.

Overall, I really love this game.

Happy Dueling!

A New Night in the Old 7 Days to Die

This week has been all about LONG DAYS. I've been running my youngest to Band practice and that's also meant a lot of waiting around. Yesterday, however, I got a message from my good friend Dylan (aka Moonstar aka Montgomery aka Hansel), and it was decided that last night would be the official 7 Days to Die night! My wife and I worked it out, and I was in! Time to kill zombies!

My inner critic always thinks the UI sounds could be a little crisper here. I'M BACK BABY!

Why was it official 7 days to die night? Well, the new 1.0 release had launched, and now our wonderful in-development indie darling was official after being, what, 10 years in early release? Listen, it's a glorious game that I've talked a lot about before, and if Dylan says it's 7 Days to Die night, it's 7 Days to Die night!

It wasn't just Dylan who was playing with me, it was his 3 sons as well. I felt a bit like Alice on The Brady Bunch when she was invited to go on vacations with the family. In fact, I somehow accidentally chose the female model when I went in and just ran with it. I guess that's my new persona for this game . . . I'm Alice. I guess I should start reading up more about cooking.

Anyway, it took a bit to remember how to work the controls in the game since it had easily been, I don't know, over 2 years or more since I had played last. Eventually, it worked out, and I was crafting bedrolls, clubs, and axes with the best of them.

Alice finds the Brady Men standing naked over a zombie . . . 

We all started claiming weapon styles, and so I barked out that I wanted to be the engineer gal. Give me my shock clubs and punchy turrets! It was always truly my favorite way to play the game anyway. I just need to start finding some good stuff -- give me all your engineering manuals, STAT!

By the end of our 3-hour play session last night, I think we were around level 5, I was starving with broken bones, and life was good on top of a local Pass-N-Gas store on Day 3. My gear was less than ideal, and I was still looking for a good shock club, but in the meantime, I was happily wielding a big lead pipe baton to smoosh in the undead skulls and break open the locked doors.

The top of the Pass-N-Gas is where the party gets real!

We actually found our trader right by the town we were raiding. He gave us all our intro quests, and then we started to move on to a few Tier 1 missions.  

oh yeah, you press E to start the mission . . . it's right there in the middle of the screen. Got it.

To be honest, it was all very familiar, and really I'm not exactly sure what's even changed with the game yet. If I took the time to read through the patch notes, I'm sure I'd find some gold, but so far, it's pretty much exactly what I was playing 3 years ago . . . and there's nothing wrong with that. A good game is a good game.

My only thought now is: man that was fun, when can I play again!

Happy Dueling!  

Diablo 4, Season 3: Surf's Up, Satan!

 About two weeks ago, tragedy and mercy struck me simultaneously in a weird way. 

1- My mom's house was diagnosed with a case of black mold, and come to find out, I had been breathing in some nasty stuff for a couple of weeks while living there.

2- My real estate agent and her husband, Dylan, who are also really good friends in Utah from way back, invited me to stay in their basement apartment while everything got sorted out at my mom's house. 

This was great news for me for a few reasons. I was in a better, safer place that was also closer to my work here in Utah. Even better, my buddy Dylan plays a lot of the Diablo IV . . . and thus I'm once again delving into the magical game known as Diablo IV!

Coolest Necromancer Shield eva!

Dylan decided to play a Druid and loved how his character looked like a big burly, surfer dude. He was dubbed Hanzel the surfing druid, and I made a necromancer surfing sidekick for Hanzel named Kelp.

Hanzel and Kelp, Surfing Outcast Buddies Against Demons (SOBAD)

As the story goes, Kelp got caught in a most unrighteous undertow and, koo koo kachoo, ended up almost dying in the ocean. When Kelp washed up on Hansel's surfboard, he mysteriously could summon skeletal surfer buddies to ride the waves with him.

If you read that last paragraph in a stereotypical California surfing voice, you've got the basis for our entire role-play while playing Diablo IV. Cha, Dude! It's totally like that!

Hanzel, the Bronze Legend.

We're currently level 30-32 playing Veteran II and Chilling in Act 4. Good times! It does definitely get out of hand with surfer terms and role-play. My surfer voice sometimes slips into a quasi-Bill Clinton. I'm working on it! 

 Chat GPT just served up 10 great suggestions for battle cries that I'm going to have to use next play session:

• "Shred the Shadows" 
• "Hang Ten on Hell's Waves" 
• "Demonic Wipeout" 
• "Barrel Roll with Beelzebub" 
• "Radical Exorcism" 
• "Soul Carve" 
• "Demon Dunk" 
• "Demon Tide Takedown" 
• "Surf's Up, Satan!"
• "Wicked Wipeout Wraiths" 

Unfortunately, Season 3 is just about to wrap up . . . or I guess you could say fortunately, it will wrap up. The word on the street is that Season 4 is going to be game-changing for Diablo 4.  I can't wait to check it out.

Kelp's ride is appropriately themed.

It is great to be able to enjoy playing a game again. Saturdays are all about doing laundry and "Shredding the Shadows" with Hanzel. Hopefully, we'll be able to do some fun stuff with these characters before the season change puts them back into the eternal realm. 

Happy Dueling!

Blink your eyes, lose half a month: Brawl Stars, BG3, and more!

Hi readers! Am I the only one who feels like January is flying by like blink your eyes, lose half a month? This is crazy. Maybe it's just because I've been either hard at work, watching hockey (I have a new fascination with the Utah Hockey Club), or playing either Brawl Stars or Baldur's Gate 3. I feel like I've been ignoring my faithful few readers! Sorry! Let me take a second here and catch you all up.

Brawl Stars

I continue to kind of suck at this game. It's alright though--I'm still having fun.

The Brawl Pass this season is called Starr Force and involves more cartoon-esque character skins. I love the little animations they do on these things. Of all the heroes in this video, my favorite obviously is Berry, who recently got a buff and a beautiful, new hypercharge ability.

I am tempted to buy this one just because I'm feeling the gold pinch lately. 

In other news, Buzz Lightyear is still in the game, still overpowered, and I think people are genuinely over it. Once Buzz is gone, the game can return to normal. It was fun for a while, but I think we (the collective we of Brawl Stars Players) can move on here soon. Please? It feels like Buzz overstayed his welcome.

The one good, new thing coming out of the Toy Story promotion is the Pizza Planet deals and events that are now running. You can pick up great little prizes in exchange for the pizza slices you earn, including a brand new brawler character named Meeple, who is . . . a meeple made of meeples. A cheating Meeple at that. Check out his video promotion.

This game is absolutely crazy. I love it. All I need is 15 more pizza slices, which I should earn tomorrow, and then I can unlock the new hero. woot!

Baldur's Gate 3

A couple weeks ago, my old buddy Dylan and I both got the bug to play Baldur's Gate 3 together and the hit team of Moonstar and Avantador were back together. We crashed through the end of Act 2 without much trouble and promptly skipped off to the final act.

Bai Myrkul!

The town of Baldur's Gate proper is pretty great. Where else can you take on a quest to find a flying cat that eats delivery pigeons and discover severed body parts of a clown?  Baldur's Gate is the only place to be for wacky side quests.

Bad dad joke clowns are the worst clowns

As for main quests, we just recently took down a lady who liked to wear meat suits (not Lady Gaga unfortunately), and we seem to be on our way to confronting the last "absolute" God before dealing with the Elder Brain situation.

Meat suits for everyone!

Progressing with Dylan also meant that I could play more of my Everquest Beastlord in BG3. It's my second play-through, and I don't want to get ahead of my original play-through. As for the character itself, Volt's gameplay is definitely more "sneaky" than our pretty straightforward Fireball and Moonbeam spell light shows from when Dylan and I are playing Moonstar and Avantador. 

I suppose that's the influence of having Astarion in my party and being a bit squishy as a Ranger/Monk/Cleric hybrid as a main character.  My bear pet needs a serious upgrade to be honest. It's dying in one or two hits these days. Although for all intents and purposes, playing a real beastlord in Everquest felt that way sometimes when you were just one level away from getting a new pet summoning spell.

Other Stuff

Outside of those two games, my old friends in Team Spode are working through the latest expansion in Guild Wars 2, but my interest in that game has been waning lately. 

I have dipped my toes into Marvel Rivals, and it is in fact giving me HUGE overwatch vibes. I need to get back into it again. Playing Dr. Strange with a superhero team in a 6v6 pvp game was a blast.

Man, he was super fun to play

So there you go!  That's about all I've been playing. I still want to write up an article on the remaining two boards of Bounce Arcade and finally get back into playing more Asgard's Wrath, but while my mother-in-law is still in town, it's been difficult to play any VR. (She stole my office space and I'm stuck in the basement.)  

I'll be writing more as I can!

Happy Dueling!

Skip and Julia Sailing the Hungry Seas in Windrose

After our last foray into Diablo 4, Dylan and I have been looking around for what we could play next. We have a lot of ideas, and with lots of demos available on Steam right now, we decided to give Windrose a try. Actually, it unfolded like this . . . I get a text from Dylan saying he's ready to play Windrose, along with this character picture attached:

The scurvy looks have just begun!

This was not just a Skip Legday, but a whole gosh-dang Skip Gymday. In my mind, it just looked like a sorry bag o' bones Pirate that needed to be fed, so who better to join Skip Gymday than Julia Child.

Sailing the good ship Quiche Lorraine, mind you . . .

Thankfully, Windrose didn't disappoint, and there was a whole slew of things Julia could cook up for Skip in this Pirate-based Survival Game Demo. I was making coconut smoothies and grilled dodo kabobs a plenty! 

. . . also smelting a lot of copper ore

Honestly, I wasn't expecting much from this demo, but I came out of it pleasantly surprised. There was a nice quest system tied to our experience, and even a few islands beyond the "tutorial isle" you could get to. Ultimately, it was all about crafting a camp, finding a shipwreck, fixing it up, freeing your crew of jailed buccaneers, and sailing the seas to engage in broadside combat.  End of demo.

A pirate with a whole crew out to cause trouble on the high seas!

The combat was satisfying and fun, and t'was also incredibly familiar. To be honest, it felt a lot like a less realistic Icarus crossed with Valheim and a side of Pirate101 (or perhaps Sea of Thieves). Pirate101 you say?  Well, not a turn-based story-based game, but that broadside combat alongside Skip felt really good: both of us shooting cannon fire at a ship, get the enemy ship's health low, then dock and engage in hand-to-hand combat with the scallywags on deck . . . you know, THAT part of Pirate101 ship combat.

Treasure and Charging Boars await us in the ruins!

The Windrose Demo lasted about 7 hours in total, and if there was more to play, we'd still be playing it. I'm going to keep this one on my wishlist and give it a real play when it releases. Let me know if you've played it and what you think!

Happy Dueling!  

Here for Opening Day of D4 Vessel of Hatred!

Well, I can officially say I played Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred on opening day! My buddy, Dylan, and I made it to level 22 before he had to get his son from work and I had to get my son from Band Practice. Plus, to be honest, I was getting pretty sleepy at the end there.

Lafonda and Stingite . . . ready for Spiritborn awesomeness

We both decided to play the new class and go as bit purist with them. I'm playing a full poison-based Spiritborn and he went full fire-based Spiritborn. I don't know if we'll keep going that direction, but it's been pretty good so far for us. As it should be. We're only playing normal difficulty and just taking it easy and enjoying the story.

Poisoning everything around me

So far my favorite moments are those involving my giant poison centipede jumping out of the ground and spitting on everything. It's an epic-looking moment where minor enemies are executed on the spot, which feels super powerful . . . at least for now. Best of all, one of the abilities I use is named Stinger, which goes perfectly with my Stingite handle.

Speaking of this incarnation of "Stingite," I'm like half supermodel, half Aztecan warrior, and I'm here for the love affair.

So hawt

My only disappointment so far is that Dylan and I haven't established a role-playing accent to go along with our characters! The pure genius of our southern gentlemen, Montgomery and Leufroy, will probably never be topped.

I hope to talk a bit more about our adventures as we have them! So far, it's a thumbs up from me.

God of Spiritborn?

Happy Dueling!

Catching up with Friendly -- March 2025 Edition

Hey readers!

Just thought I'd take a second to let you know what's up with me since life's been a little weird. I've got a few thoughts, and I like making lists, so here we go:

~~

1- I'm in pain -- I'm going to the chiropractor tomorrow to see if I can get this left shoulder of mine worked on. I've never been to the chiropractor before, but after a month of pain, I think I'm ready to try it out.  I think it might have something to do with when I went Hatchet throwing.

wow, blogger's video upload quality leaves a lot to desire

2- We went to Colorado over the weekend -- It was to celebrate the life and mourn the death of my wife's half-brother. 

I supported however I could, whether it was helping with flower arrangements or lifting boxes and examining old computers and things or just giving a shoulder to cry on.

He was a great guy! He loved the music of Morrissey and the Cure, which played throughout the chapel. I can't get Everyday is Like Sunday out of my head now. 

Always great to see my extended family. They warmly hosted us in the midst of their mourning. I've got a full heart and hope their family finds peace and abundance. They've had to say goodbye to 4 of their kids now. Truly heartbreaking. 

I'm feeling pretty humbled and grateful I still have the ones I love around me. I can't imagine the pain of losing a child. My heart goes out to those of you who have experienced that unique type of sadness.

Supporting Grandma and Grandpa through these difficult times

3- I want to make a game -- I do! I feel like that Game Designer part of me has been sleeping for a year, and because of that, I just really want to try something crazy. I have two things I would love to drop. I have a game jam demo from my old company where they gave me permissions to release it, and I have a unique game idea that only the friendly necromancer would love. lol.

4- My friend Dylan soft-dumped me -- I mean, we're still friends and he's going to plan a D&D campaign that I will totally jump in on, but he surrendered his computer to his son, and thus, the dream team of Montgomery and Leufroy is on hiatus.  The last thing we did together was play a little Path of Exile 2, which to be honest, didn't really light my flames.  I need to give it another shot.

PoE II did light some weird boss's flames though!

5- Oops No Zone of the Month -- Dangit, I was on a roll there for a couple of months with those Zones of the Month, but life got really busy (see above), and I've dropped the ball. Maybe I'll get to one mid-month.

6- What's a VR? -- MAN, I really lost my fire lately with VR games. I think part of it has to do with playing a bunch of games with Dylan. I would like to get back into the original Asgard's Wrath and try to actually finish that game up.  I'd expect that to happen.

7- What's an MMO? -- I need to find an MMO that I'm passionate about again. It's so much fun to get sucked into a game and take screenshots and meet new people. Again, I've really lost my fire to this genre. It'd be fun to get back into it . . . MMOs are definitely The Friendly Necromancer's jam.

8- I want to write music -- I swear I do, but for some reason, I just haven't. The most interesting music thing that's happened to me lately is this: So most of you who follow me know we recently moved back to Utah. So far the biggest surprise finds from moving was this: four copies of a lathe-cut vinyl record I had made during Quarantine. I called it the "Quarantine Mixes," which featured six songs I remade during lockdown. 

The white album?

1- Cetu Javu's "Fight Without a Reason"

2- Morrissey's "Now My Heart is Full"

3- Cabaret Voltaire's "Code"

4- The Cure's "Night Like This"

5- A song from my teens I remade called "Bit by Bit"

6- A remade song from Decussion Council (My high school band) called "Don't Stop"

I listened to it on my kid's cheap record player and thought that the record mix came out so bad it was knocking the needle off the record player. I thought I had thrown them all away in disgust, but actually, my wife had saved them. I'm so glad she did! Kind of a quirky cool record. There's a low bass drum kick on Don't Stop that turned out weird in one part, but other than that, it sounds pretty good.

~~

Ok, that's probably enough ranting and raving for now. I just wanted to get a blog post out here and let you know what's what.

Happy Dueling!

Updated Test Realm Information for hybrids

With the full reset to the test server yesterday came some surprising news about pet evolution.

1- There have been mixed results now when combining level 48 pets.
Hydra and a Wraith made a brownish red wraith with some fancy trim on his robe. Colossus with a wraith made a kind of cool icy blue wraith. Unfortunately the helephant and hydra combo that Paige Moonshade and hanamana tried combining resulted in . . . a helephant and a hydra. There was also a report of mixing a helephant and a wraith and nothing unique happened. In both cases it's good to announce that neither of the level 48 combinations resulted in an unusable pet for either party. Interesting.

2- The rare and exclusive pets now form new pets when the same type are combined together. Everybody and their Dangerhound wants a Ghosthound now. :-) I actually do have a few of the exclusive pets, so this particular item was interesting me, which leads us now to the next item . . .

3- sheep + anything else = piggle It's funny to see that Olivia had the exact same idea I did. She got together with Dylan Emerald and tried to see what a danger hound and a sheep would create, and this resulted in a ghosthound for Dylan and a Piggle for Olivia.

After I got home from work yesterday, I frantically leveled my pioneer dragon and kyle's sheep to adult. Man that's a lot of dancing. Then came the combination . . .


What resulted was . . . *blush* . . . piggle power.



4- The rest of the story is that Olivia and I contacted each other over Central. Last night we both logged on and tried to get Sammy and Baby Baxter together.


The result of this effort was . . . *boot*. /shrug It wasn't working.


The current thinking is that maybe one of our hatching slots were full (from what I understand, you can only hatch two pets in one day . . . correct me if I'm wrong). We're going to try again tonight.

Happy Dueling!