Keyrock

I mean, it was my GotY, clearly I loved it. It was the evolution of the Telltale formula I had been hoping for years we'd see. It's like a Telltale game, but with actual gameplay. It has point & click elements, some clever and really thematic puzzles, and RPG-Lite elements. Plus, the choices you make actually make a difference. It had the usual bit of jank and ambitious but not completely up to snuff production value that you get from a smaller studio, but otherwise it was just a really well made game.

I'm going full melkathi Mordenheim on this thread and spamming it with Conan Exiles pics. I took a different route home from Sepermeru and did some sightseeing along the way. I call the one in the center Middle Finger Rock: Those are some creepy looking trees: Those tall jagged spires in the distance are definite contenders for the building site of my future ultimate fortress. I'll have to take a closer look in the future, but that looks like a rather perilous trip, so no just yet. That sure is a handy monument: Hmm, that looks kinda ominous. Let's take a closer look... Nope. Nope. Nope. I killed about a dozen Darfari cannibals in this place, wandered closer to the central... altar? Saw at least 20 more Darfari, and decided to leave well enough alone... For now.

Image & Form ain't done me wrong yet. I'll definitely be picking this up.

I decided to make the trip to Sepermeru. It's a long way from my base, but I was well armed and prepared I had to go past the Unnamed City to get there. I've been inside there before, briefly. It's pretty scary. I decided to go around the edge of the ruined city rather than through it. Finally I reached the gates of Sepermeru: I decided to dance with some of the locals: Target practice: Sepermeru at night: There are some people to talk to in Sepermeru that will fill in the story for you a bit, including Conan:

From what I read, the biggest complaints, besides being asked to create a Paradox account, seem to be that all the different countries are exactly the same with the same units, etc. and that there are a lot of mechanics that aren't fleshed out and don't do much of anything at the moment.

Another Vampire: The Masquerade game has been announced, no, not the V:TM2 we already know about. Details are scant and it's only been described as a "Narrative RPG" but what has me excited is that it's being developed by Big Bad Wolf who made The Council, my 2018 GotY. http://www.bigbadwolf-studio.com/

I haven't played it myself, but Imp Raider Rome got pretty much **** on in reviews, professional and user alike. Hopefully it's not a trend, because I generally have liked Paradox, but the change in leadership is worrying.

I finally got my Flawless Hykarian Raider Armor crafted: It weighs me down quite a bit, but the damage reduction is really great. Between the armor and the 200 snake arrows I'm packing, I feel confident to venture out into parts unknown.

The even more winning move is to wait a year and buy the complete edition that includes everything in the season pass for 50% of the original price of the base game. Patience is a virtue. Anyway, Rage 2 is out.

Bandages can stop bleeding, but you can't get that feat til lev 20 something. Status effects like bleeding and poison are king in Conan Exiles, it's what makes snake arrows so good and also why I favor war axes (shieldsmash + bleed) for melee weapons. Keep in mind that only heavy attacks proc melee weapon special abilities, light attacks don't. I've killed big bad bosses that were probably meant for a group of 3 or 4 lev 40+ chars solo by hopping up on a high ledge and just shooting them with snake arrows. It may take a long time, but that 10 stack of poison kills them eventually.

I'm waiting to finish breaking my tier 4 armorer thrall, Orqina Steeltongue in the wheel of pain, but it takes FOREVER to break a tier 4. I don't really want to venture out too deep into the unknown until she's broken and makes some Flawless Hykarian Raider Armor for me, so I've been passing the time sprucing up my throne room. I now have the entire floor of the throne room covered with hide rugs. I have beds and benches set up, and I've made 10 pillows so far that I've scattered about the floor and beds. I want to make 30 or 40 more pillows and put them all over the throne room so that everyone can be nice and comfy when debauchery is taking place, but I'm out of silk, so I'm going to make a short trek to spider country to farm up some gossamer. By the time I finish farming gossamer, turning it into silk, turning the silk + feathers (I have plenty of those, there are birds all over the island which I turned into my base) into pillows, and tossing said pillows all over my throne room Orqina should be broken and ready to start producing high quality armor for me.

You can learn other religions, you just need to find a person to teach you. For example, Yakira (pictured in my post above) teaches Derketo. In theory, you could eventually build shrines to every god (except Crom), but from a RP perspective, it would be kinda messed up to build both Set and Mitra shrines, given that they are diametrically opposed. I can't compare to what you can craft from any of the other gods, but Set's snake arrows are are ridiculously OP. Crocs are a pushover once you get a halfway decent weapon. Their attacks are very predictable and they are easy to get away from if things go south. Generally speaking, 2 hacks with your weapon then either roll far enough away to avoid their lunge attack or put up your shield. Wait for them to attack then go back in for 2 more hacks. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I explored the jungle some more and came upon the ruins of a city: On the outskirts of the city I found a Derketo shrine: As a proud Stygian, I attack Mitra worshippers on sight. Same goes for Yog, Ymir, Jhebbal Sag, and Crom (though Crom worshippers don't really build shrines, since Crom doesn't answer prayers anyway). Derketo, on the other hand, I'm more tolerant of. I don't worship Derketo myself, but there are plenty of Derketo cults in Stygia and The Goddess of Lust and I do see eye to eye in some respects. Derketo and her worshippers are very much into orgies and I'm staunchly pro-orgy (the Anti-Orgy Lobby hates me), but they get into some weird **** like bestiality and necrophelia. I draw the line there. I keep my orgies strictly human, breathing human. Still, I'm willing to allow Derketo worship in my realms, so long as my followers still pay respects and sacrifice faithfully to Father Set. Luckily, the priestess of Derketo at the shrine was not hostile and we had a nice conversation: I can't say the same about all the Lemurians around the shrine, who were very much hostile, and are all now very much dead. I got some really sweet Lemurian armor (high-tier medium armor) out of the deal, all the pieces except the helmet. Unfortunately, I can't repair Lemurian armor (yet), but maybe once Orqina Steeltongue (my captured tier 4 armorer currently in the wheel of pain) is a loyal thrall, she can repair it. Edit: I wound up going back and farming up a few more Lemurians until I got the mask to complete the set: All of the armor is at really low durability and I have no way to repair it right now, so I likely won't use it much until I can get it fixed up. On the way back, I ran across this fellow: I did not fight that giant spider. I highly doubt I'm ready for that. I did, however, wait patiently until it wandered away, then I snuck into its lair and swiped a bunch of gossamer.

A fellow Setite. You chose wisely. I don't know exactly where along the river your location is, but you'll probably need to make a decent trek to get ironstone, which is why I built my base on an island in the jungle area very close to plentiful iron. Still, you have plentiful water, wood, and animals for meat, plus you are probably not that far from a certain cave that contains a bunch of crocs and a giant croc boss, but, more importantly, lots of brimstone. Plus, there are spiders not that far from you for chitin and gossamer. What I'm saying is that it's a perfectly cromulent location for your first settlement. My jungle base is now complete: I'm doing a lot more exploring now. I've managed to get named (tier 4) carpenter and armorer thralls, though they are both still in the process of being broken (tier 4s take forever to break), but I'll be able to craft some flawless armor and flawless bows once they are loyal and ready to work. In my travels I'm keeping an eye out for a suitably EPIC location to build my ultimate base in the future. I'm thinking along the lines of on the side of the cliff (not on top of the cliff, but built into the sheer side, hanging off the ground) or something equally as crazy. No hurry, my current base will do nicely for the time being, but I'm taking notes of potential locations. My next trek will be to Sepermeru, the Relic Hunter city. The one big drawback to where I made my base is that it's on the far end of the map and Sepermeru is on the opposite end of the map. Oh well, I just need to make sure to be well prepared before I make the trip and to bring a sandstorm mask (tha mask from the Setite garb conveniently doubles as a sandstorm mask, since it covers your entire face).

I regret nothing.

Big **** second half from Steph

I just found out about City of Heroes: Homecoming, a private server that has brought back City of Heroes in all its glory. It's free, no subscription, and it includes all the content ever put out for the game, including City of Villains and all the issues. With Conan Exiles consuming all my gaming time, I don't know if I can find time for a MMO, but I' really tempted to give it a shot. City of Heroes was my favorite MMO of the brief time I was into MMOs. I played it for 6 or 7 months before jumping ship to WoW (which I didn't play nearly as long before life changed and I didn't have enough time to play MMOs to justify spending $15 a month). I'm curious to see if this game holds up 15 years later, if it's as great as I remember or if my fond memories are of the rose-tinted variety. Anyway, it's out, it's free, google it and download it if you want to play it.

With my base nearly complete in Conan Exiles, I've been venturing further away from my home and exploring. I ventured into the far northern desert to hunt some elephants because I needed elephant hide to make some sweet heavy armor. As you can imagine, elephants are no pushovers. They have a metric ****ton of HP and, while their attacks are relatively easy to dodge once you know their patterns, they do a ton of damage if they hit and most of their attacks knock you down. Luckily, The Serpent God rewards the faithful and provides them with a super easy way to kill these lumbering giants. As a follower of Set, I can craft snake arrows. Next, I find my prey elephant and also a rock outcropping or cliff or any high place the elephant can't reach. Then I simply start shooting the elephant with snake arrows. Like all other negative effects in Conan Exiles, poison effects stack. One stack of poison doesn't do that much damage per tick, but stack enough poison on an enemy and their health dwindles very quickly. 10 seems to be the maximum stack size (for poison, anyway, I don't know if the maximum is 10 for bleeding, crippled, sundered, etc.). The way the game works, all stacks share the same timer and applying a new stack resets the timer, so once I have 10 stacks of poison on an enemy, I only need to shoot it once every 7 or 8 seconds, to make sure the poison stacks don't time out. The elephant dies from poison, I climb down the cliff face, harvest the goods, climb back up, find another elephant. Lather, rinse, repeat. Always repeat. Anyway, after collecting a veritable bounty of elephant hide, tusks, and meat, I started making my way back home, but took a slightly different route this time. On my way, I made a shocking discovery (Top 10 Conan Exiles discoveries, number 7 will SHOCK you). Near a river, someone had the gall to build a shrine to Mitra . As a proud and faithful Stygian, Mitra worship is HIGHLY offensive to me, what with their bogus beliefs in "virtue" and "justice", pfft, as if. Naturally, I did what any proper Stygian would do in such a situation and slaughtered all the heretics there, cutting out their hearts to offer to The Old Serpent, except one. In a stroke of mercy, I spared the life of the high priest, instead knocking him unconscious, binding him, and dragging his body all the way back to my base, where I put him in the wheel of pain until I break his mind and show him the heinous error of his ways. Once fully broken and cleansed of his former heretical beliefs, I will allow him to make up for all the wrongs he had committed by serving as a priest at my Shrine of Set, offering blood gifts to The Serpent God and spreading the truth of Set worship. In the future I will take a few of my warriors and return to that disgusting Shrine of Mitra so that we may reduce it to rubble. For the glory of The Old Serpent!

Doing a bit of exploring I hit lev 30 and unlocked mid-tier armors, so I went ahead and crafted this Stygian Raider set. I favor medium armor since it gives you the same mobility as light armor, albeit with a higher stamina drain for dodge rolling and sprinting, yet offer decent protection. Heavy armor has great damage reduction, but at the cost of mobility. Also, heavy armor is terrible for exploring because your stamina drains super quick when you climb in it, and there's plenty of climbing in the game.

I finished building the staircase up to my Shrine of Set, upgraded the Shrine, and crafted a sweet Setite Ritual garb set. It's tier 2 light armor, so not the strongest protection in the world, but it is does carry the Hallowed effect, which protects against undead and corruption. I also finished building the crafting area. There's a roof overhead to keep everyone dry, but it's very open to let the smoke from the cooking station, furnace, etc. escape. Now I'm building the foundation for the housing for my thralls.

Rage 2 has gone gold, releases May 14th. https://bethesda.net/en/article/6y9pozm34bp07uV7zFBJOp/rage-2-has-gone-gold

While my own house isn't 100% finished in Conan Exiles, it's at a point where it's functional and a comfortable enough place for me to sleep, hence I've moved on to other, more pressing, building projects for now. I put my Shrine of Set way up on the top of a cliff so that it can be seen from far away and anyone that gets anywhere near my base immediately knows that's what's up, but it's unreachable without climbing, so I'm in the process of building a grand staircase so that the faithful may worship and sacrifice human hearts to the Old Serpent easily. After that I'm going to pave a plaza for all my crafting stations (currently they're just directly on the ground, haphazardly arranged in a vague L shape), then I'm going to build a home for my thralls. It's not going to be as grand as my own house, obviously, but I wanna make it a decent enough place for them to live, give all of them their own room (rather than just a bunch of beds is a single room, like a barracks), and a place to eat and relax and stuff. I feel I'm a pretty good mistress. Sure, after I knock people out in the wild I rope em up and drag their unconscious bodies back to my base, then put them in the Wheel of Pain for as long as it takes to break their spirit and mind. After that, though, provided they do their jobs properly and always "Yes mistress", "Of course mistress", "As you desire, mistress" when addressing me, they get to live in relative safety, have plentiful food, a roof over their heads, and are invited to all my wild parties and orgies. The vast majority would have probably just been killed out in the wild anyway, so all in all, they lucked out.