Dream Come True

I finally got the opportunity to play RealmSpeak with combat with players online (1000 miles away) last night. It was awesome.

The first game we played, I chose the Elf, and my friend selected the Black Knight. Pretty good team, until the second week found us facing down a Tremendous Troll and 2 Heavies. A crummy missile roll and some clever monster moves left the Black Knight and the Elf dead in the clearing.

We took a quick break, and then started a new game, with another player joining in. This time, I played the Woods Girl (love those archers!), joined by the Dwarf, and the Berserker. The map layout was sweet, with a lot of the major tiles clustered along the Eastern edge.

Combat broke out in several clearings at once, when we split up to explore two different tiles. The Dwarf and Woods Girl slaughtered a Tremendous spider in the Caves, and the Berserker cooked himself a Heavy spider in the Ledges. Though the Caves had the Cairns treasure location, we opted to leave it behind in favor of looting the Hoard, discovered by the Berserker in the Ledges.

After cleaning out that location (and a few more combats), we moved on to the Borderlands to work on the Vault in the Lost City. The fear of Orcs hovered over our heads, but the Monster Roll never let us down. Though a few monsters came our way, the Berserker, Dwarf, Woods Girl combination was a well oiled killing machine, and took care of business without batting an eye.

We cleaned out the Vault as much as we could before moving further South to explore the several clustered Mountain tiles. We ran into a Heavy Bat in the Deep Woods, and decided to move on quickly (where there's one bat...), since there was nothing of interest there. We made a brief visit to the Statue in the Mountain, and decided to check out the Crag. Motherlode, baby!

Yes, it was the Lost Castle, and 3 major treasure locations: Lair, Pool, Altar. We quickly dispensed with the Tremendous Dragon guarding the lair, and moved into the Lair, only to discover the Demon was hanging out there too! Fortunately, the Dwarf had the Magic Wand, and thus was able to subvert the Power of the Pit roll that hit him to a fairly harmless "Rust" result. The demon went down quickly, and the Lair was all ours!

Lots of treasure, including the Toadstool Circle (which we left ALONE), and it was time to move to the Pool. Hadn't seen the Octopus yet, so it was time to work on that treasure before time ran out on the game. Lots of fatigues later, (and still no Octopus), we ended the game.

Don't remember the precise scores, but the Dwarf won with something like 8 points. The Berserker was just under that, and I scored a measly -18 points.

Not one thing failed during the whole game. No crashes or freezes, and play was quick, even with three different players. FOLLOW worked very well (important for the Dwarf!) for its first real field use! There's still stuff to work on (Character trading was sorely needed during our game!), but for the most part, it worked like a champ (if I do say so myself). :)

If you haven't tried an online game, I highly recommend it. Make sure you have some form of online communication, since RealmSpeak doesn't have a chat interface yet. I recommend TeamSpeak if you don't already use it. It's easy to set up a server, and get many people talking at once (miked-headphones are your best bet here).

Now, its time for some breakfast.