Knights of the Cardboard Castle

The war begins with Lord Paramount Edmure Tully, Lord Paramount Mace Tyrell, our own Doran Martell and some other lesser lords supporting Princess Daenery Targaryen’s claim to the Iron Throne. Supporting King Steffon are mainly Lord Paramount Eddard Stark and Lord Paramount Renly Baratheon. At first we were displeased with Lord Edmure for not allowing us more time to discredit King Steffon’s claim to the throne. But it turns out to be fortuitous because less than one month after the commencement of hostilities, King Steffon passes away of illness. His heir Prince Gulian is a much more palatable candidate to most of the realm.

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With King Robert Baratheon dead, the Iron Throne falls to his heir Steffon Baratheon. From our perspective, the good news is that though only 4 years old, he is visibly inbred and plainly retarded. This means that just about everyone hates the idea of him being king. Due to our previous plots, many of the lords of the realm also harbour suspicions that he is not the legitimate scion of King Robert. The bad news is that he is deathly ill and will likely not live long. This means that the Kingship will probably pass to his heir, Prince Gulian, who does not as yet show such traits. So we have a narrow window of opportunity during which the Baratheon royal line will be extremely unpopular.

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The rest of the year passes uneventfully but in 285, King Robert Baratheon invites Doran Martell to King’s Landing to serve as his Master of Laws. Since refusing would cause offence and it would not do to break openly with the Iron Throne so early, we accept. Besides, we surmise that being in King’s Landing would put us in a better position to know what is going on at the highest echelons of power.

Unfortunately we did not count on the extreme stupidity of this oaf of a king. He apparently thinks that taking back the New Gift that was given by Queen Alysanne to the Night’s Watch during the reign of King Jaehaerys I Targaryen would be a splendid idea. So he sends Doran Martell to the far north to fabricate a claim that the crown can use as a pretext to seize the lands.

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It is the 284th year after Aegon’s Landing. Robert’s Rebellion has ended with a decisive victory for the rebels, resulting in the establishment of House Baratheon of King’s Landing as the new royal line. House Martell, together with House Tyrell, sided with the Targaryen dynasty, despite the dishonourable acts of Rhaegar Targaryen. Rhaegar was married to Elia Martell, sister of Doran Martell, yet he had disdained her when during the Tourney at Harrenhal he awarded the winter rose crown for the Queen of Love and Beauty to Lyanna Stark instead of his own wife and a year later kidnapped her, sparking the rebellion.

In the end the rebels won and in their haste to prove their loyalty to the new order, not only did Jaime Lannister betray his Kingsguard oaths to slay King Aerys, but the bannermen of House Lannister, Sandor Clegane and Amory Lorch, acting under the instructions of Tywin Lannister himself, murdered Elia, together with her children Aegon and Rhaenys. Oberyn Martell, younger brother of Doran and Elia, wanted to continue the war, but Doran knew that Dorne did not have the strength by itself and made his peace.

But House Martell does not forget and in the fullness of time, we will have our vengeance.

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I recently started playing Crusader Kings 2, a game I have had sitting in my games library for a very long time now. Like the other grand Paradox strategy games, they are complex, time-consuming and often very buggy affairs. I feel like I ought to like them but it’s easier to appreciate them in the abstract than to actually sit down and play one seriously. It gets especially bad if I actually need to do extra history reading just to understand who’s who and what’s going on.

To those who don’t know, the difference between this series and the better known Europa Universalis games, apart from the timeline, is that in the EU games you play as a nation but in CK2 you’re actually one specific person. Typically you gain control of a duke or a king (though you can go all the way down to a count if you want) and directly control only a limited number of holdings. However, you may have many vassals sworn to you. CK2 is therefore a game about delegating authority and managing personalities. In a way, it’s like The Sims. Each person has different personality traits and wants different things. If your character’s personality is compatible with theirs and you manage to give them what they want, everyone stays happy. If you have a personality clash and a vassal desires a landholding under your control, be on the look out for a rebellion in the near future.

Anyway after messing around with the game for a short time in order to get familiar with the interface, I promptly downloaded the excellent A Game of Thrones mod for it. This way I don’t have to actually read up on European history and hey, the mod actually adds a ton more mechanics to the base game. So I’ll be writing a game diary on what happens in my game.

I’ll be playing as Prince Doran Martell of Dorne under the Crowned Stag scenario, that is immediately after the rebellion of Robert Baratheon that ends in him being the holder of the Iron Throne. This way, I’ll have a nice, long period of peace to learn the game and hopefully Dorne is powerful enough to have decent options while not being too directly embroiled in war with the other major factions. I can’t guarantee however that this will result in an interesting game since I intend to play conservatively, much as Doran Martell did in the novels, but we’ll see what happens. Note that I’ll upload large versions of all screenshots. Just click on the image to get the full version.

I looked forward to playing Dead Island. I really did. Part of it is because I missed out on Dead Rising, because Steam won’t sell it in Malaysia. Part of it is because like everyone else I watched the fantastic trailer of the game and was enthralled. I have to say that I was disappointed on almost all counts.

• It turns out the award-winning trailer wasn’t made by the developers at Techland anyway and has nothing to do with the game at all. The story here is terrible, seriously terrible. It has no purpose other than to offer a very thin justification to shuttle your characters from one quest hub to another hub. NPCs who were important mysteriously drop off the radar when you move to the next quest hub. Remember that head lifeguard who saved your life and sent you all over the island to collect supplies. Whatever happened to him after you get to the jungle? Who knows and your characters seem to act as if he and everyone else in the resort area and Moresby city never existed at all because they blithely flee Banoi ahead of an impending nuclear strike without even a backwards glance.

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This is a remake of Jagged Alliance 2, a game that I spent countless hours on, especially under the Wildfire mod. Similarly after only a short time with the main game, I switched over to the highly regarded Combat Evolved mod and all of my impressions of this game are gleaned this way.

• This is a rather faithful remake with the most obvious difference being that everything is now in 3D. This means much better graphics. I recall that in the old game it was hard to visually distinguish between your mercenaries. That is certainly no longer the case. Similarly environments are prettified and quite detailed. Nothing to shout about by the standards of modern games of course, but light years ahead of the original. And of course you can rotate the view and zoom in and out to your heart’s content. One of my favourite things about moving to full 3D is that all of your equipment is accurately reflected on the character models. The absurdly long sniper rifles some of them tote around look very impressive!

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The first Witcher game was one of the most interesting RPGs of 2007. It also taught me that there was such a thing as non-English fantasy since the game is based on a fantasy book series by a Polish author. Here’s my take on the sequel.

• I spent something like 100 hours on this game so yes, I like it quite a bit. But that’s also because this game has an unusual structure. There are three main chapters and accounting for just these, the game actually feels quite short for an RPG. The odd thing is that you need to make choose one of two options at the end of chapter 1 and depending on what you pick, chapters 2 and 3 play almost completely differently. In my case, I played one option on hard difficulty and the other one on Dark Mode.

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