That creative itch isn’t particularly satisfied by the accompanying module editor either. Tampering with the story, ad-libbing with the dialogue, reacting to players’ choices in any way, other than simply confirming success or failure-everything that makes being the dungeon master fun is absent from their real-time duties here. In Sword Coast Legends, the wonderfully creative role is reduced to that of an invisible antagonist for the playable characters, buffing up a creature here, concealing a spike trap there it’s like playing Dungeon Keeper while your friends are playing Diablo. This is an immensely complex set of responsibilities, one that sceptics doubted could be contained within the inherent constraints of a digital game and, judging by the results of n-Scape’s work, they were probably right. Which makes it easy to understand the early buzz surrounding Sword Coast Legends’s promise to provide the crucial feature of the tabletop experience, one missing from all other attempts to simulate it: a player-controlled dungeon master, a role encompassing rule arbitration, storytelling, and world-building-in short, controlling everything in the fictional world other than the player characters’ own actions. The influence of tabletop roleplaying in the evolution of digital gaming is immeasurable, much stronger than the annual figures on Bethesda sales and World of Warcraft subscriptions would indicate. And if that example seems obsolete, as the game is a relic of a time when hardware limitations meant the most imaginative settings had to be created with words rather than moving images, there’s also the example of Rogue, a D&D-inspired title that, like the gaming equivalent of My Bloody Valentine’s first two LPs, was only appreciated by a limited, specialist audience in its time, but whose influence still reverberates throughout the industry, as evident in the deluge of roguelikes that have dominated the indie scene for the last five years. Colossal Cave, the first-ever text adventure game, was written by Will Crowther in an attempt to combine his two favorite pastimes: spelunking and Dungeons & Dragons. The desire runs so deep that it’s not even contained within its specifically appointed genre. And consumed by their own power struggles, feeling backed into a corner, the drow may just be desperate enough to call on demonic forces from the deepest reaches of the Abyss, and unleash a disaster even the Underdark could never have prepared for.Recapturing the magic of the tabletop roleplaying experience has been a holy grail of video-game design since its earliest days. "The dark elves of Menzoberranzan, including the powerful Archmage Gromph, aren’t done with Drizzt yet. "A new day has dawned on a victorious Mithral Hall, but no matter how bright things seem on the surface, Drizzt and his companions know that what lurks just under their feet remains steeped in evil and charged with unimaginable power. "The pall that had descended over the North is gone," reads the books Amazon pre-order page. WizKids, GaleForce 9 and Smiteworks - makers of the Fantasy Grounds suite of online tabletop tools - will be supporting the Rage of Demons storyline with accompanying physical and virtual tabletop products.Ī new novel by Salvatore, called Archmage, is also on the way in September.
Salvatore himself will be writing a unique questline for Neverwinter, which will first come to PC and later to Xbox One.įinally, tabletop players will be able to get in on the action with Out of the Abyss, a new adventure being designed by Green Ronin and published by Wizards of the Coast. Later in 2015 Neverwinter, the D&D-based free-to-play MMO will offer an expansion tentatively titled Neverwinter: Underdark. Sword Coast Legends, the new CRPG from n-Space and Digital Extremes in partnership with Wizards of the Coast, will be among the first properties to explore the Underdark with Do'Urden.
Rage of Demons will launch across console, computer and tabletop incarnations of D&D starting this fall. R.A Salvatore's iconic Drizzt Do'Urden, the dark elf from Dungeons & Dragons' Forgotten Realms campaign setting, is the focal point of Rage of Demons, the franchise's newest shared storyline.