Video Gaming

My name is Adam and I'm an alchoholic.  Oh wait, wrong type of introduction...

My Steam name is Bardorp and I play all sorts of kinds of games, some of them even multiplayer.

I'll play almost any MMO, or at least try it.  I've recently got into Minecraft and Battlefield 4, and am just starting out in Archeage.  I've got too many other games on Steam to list, but I have many with multiplayer options, so give me a shout if you want to play something together.

My one caveat it MOBA's, I hate them all.

Anyone here play any of the Diablo series?

I think have 3 installed but haven't played it.

Highly suggest playing and finishing 2 (with Lord of Destruction Expansion), has the best storytelling of them. It's an excellent standalone even without 1 because a lot of stuff from 1 is discussed/explained in 2, and 3 is sort of an awkward epilogue IMO.

Anyway, I wrote a little spinoff of 2 and I wasn't sure where to put it, so I figured here would be the proper place.

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I remember it quite well...



I had been traveling for months now, from Westmarch of Khanduras to Arreat, my purpose before me. Through haunting forests of the Sharval Wilds, and the biting, freezing winds of the Dreadlands I walked. The sorcerer sent a messenger through a caravan promising a great reward for a piece of the Worldstone for his magical research. The piece itself, I thought would be fairly easy to get to; since the Heroes cleared all of holy Arreat of the evil lurking about, surely finding a piece large enough to be substantial but small enough to carry would not be a problem that soon after the defeat of the last of the Prime Evils. How foolish of me.



When Arreat was sundered in the Worldstone's destruction, the air was filled with the corrupted dust of the Worldstone's explosion. Animals, people, and the land itself warped into a hellish mockery of what was once a beautiful snowy landscape. Creatures warped with a hatred only demons could possess lurked in the shadows. Crazed barbarians, eyes glowing red and spines protruding as their transformation took place roamed the highlands. It took everything I had to avoid these terrors, but they were not the worst part.



The worst part was the constant screaming. No matter where you were, there was either wailing, howling, crying, yelling, roaring, or even babbling. Not all of it came from the environment; even in deathly silent barrows, untouched by the cataclysm, I heard them in my mind. Never before have I felt the influence of a Prime Evil upon my very soul, but in those days, my spirit was tested. Though he was destroyed completely, Baal's voice echoed through the highlands and its inhabitants' souls, a shade of his terrible presence. It drove me mad. Do as I may in my efforts to retain my humanity, I found myself losing minutes at first, and then hours. I discovered, once, a carcass of... something in my hands, now covered in its blood, and my face sticky from an apparent feast upon raw flesh. I was sick to the stomach not long after, and I thought I would become part of this hell on earth.



It was in this dark moment that I saw it. Faintly glowing crimson, mesmerizing, shifting even its destroyed form, a piece of the Worldstone. I had never seen it before nor did I know what to look for; I simply assumed it would be like a gem. This was far more. It called to me, it called to something within me I did not know was there, a remnant of something far older and hidden within me. As soon as I touched it, its mesmerizing pattern changed, and my mind was cleared of the hell that was clawing its way inside. I put it in my pouch, looked for the rest of my gear that was not lost in whatever hours I spent succumbing to the infernal landscape, and left. The way out took far less time than the way in, I noticed, and before a week had passed, the Dreadlands were beyond the horizon and Arreat was only indicated by the dark cloud of black and red that soared into the sky from the day the Heroes emerged victorious.



Oh, but the journey... The journey turned quite peculiar as soon as I had the shard in my possession. Every greeting, every look seemed to have a disgust lying just under the smile. There was many a night I slept with my shortsword half-drawn, expecting someone to come kill me. Whenever I joined a caravan, I would hear whispers about me from the other travelers, but once I turned to see the speakers, there would be silence, or, more alarmingly, normal conversation accompanied by whatever chores needed to be done. Paranoia was setting in and I realized carrying a once-holy artifact to turn a profit seemed blasphemous to at least some religious part of me. Once in a while, I would feel a certain nudge from deep within, a sinister warmth and tension I could not put my finger on. It was only after a friendly encounter with a merchant's daughter turned quite dark when we were getting quite close and I grabbed her arm with a grip that turned my knuckles white to stop her hand from going near the pouch the shard was in that I realized something of the Dreadlands was still lurking within me. Upon thinking about it (after getting dismissed from the caravan once the girl showed her father a terrible purple bruise on her arm), it dawned on me that something about the shard was... Off. I noticed I was eating very little, and the company of others made me suspicious and bitter.



Once I crossed Khanduras and went past the now-repaired Eastgate Keep into Aranoch, my concerns switched from the darkness that was growing within me to the needs of a lone man traveling through a desert. I encountered no caravans here, and only the occasional proximity to a tomb or abandoned town kept me awake as the sense that something else stirred in the darkness itched in the back of my head. After a few days of this, with no water and only a bit of the rations I had from my stop in Khanduras with the caravan, I had reached Lut Gholein, the Jewel of the Desert, and I knew my days with the shard were nearly over. I had reached a point where I would catch myself thinking a dark thought over and over, repeating it in my head. After some time to truly think about the source of these thoughts, I realized they were not my thoughts at all, and in fact someone else's. An echo of a mind now gone. Dread filled my heart.



Everyone had heard of the Dark Wanderer by now. How the hero that saved Tristram was slowly possessed by Diablo, the Lord of Terror, and destroyed the very town he saved, and freed his brothers from their prisons wrought by the Horadrim. The potential of my fate being sealed in a similar fashion terrified me to an extent I did not think was possible, and this fear drove me onwards. I found the Vizjerei sorcerer in his sanctum, gave him the shard, and received my payment, feeling like I was both released of an enormous burden, and like I had let slip a seed of something quite more sinister than I first thought when the offer was made.



The gold was substantial, however, and I came out of it fine, more or less. Friendly tip, though; when a sorcerer makes an offer with a lucrative sum of money for you to give him something for "research", don't accept it. Let the Dark Wanderer be a lesson to us all.

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Anyone here named Mustard on Steam?

I got a friend request from a Mustard, no idea who it is...

Fallout 4 is coming in less than 48 hours! I'm kinda pretty excited despite my lack of sight I've been waiting for the next installment!

Anyone else gonna be playing? Or even enjoy the post-apocaliptic 40s-futuristic nuances?