DDO: We’re kind of a big deal

“Hey guys,” I said, “better take a screenshot, because you’ll never see giant spiders in an MMO ever again!”

I am so full of it.

This past week’s DDO adventures took us to a relatively brand-new module for many of us — last year’s White Plume Mountain pack. We figured that it’d be a nice change of pace from doing ages-old content, especially since a lot of it was at level 6 or so. So we jacked up the difficulty levels and off we went.

Our first quest, Kind of a Big Deal, took us through a rather ugly looking canyon (seriously, it was as chunky and ill-designed as an old-school EverQuest zone) and into a cave where many enemies were oversized. The word of the day was “gargantuan,” which the narrator used a couple times before the writers found a thesaurus and added some variety.

Traps were pretty ornery in this cave, with some rooms filled to the brim with dart-spitting traps that couldn’t be turned off. So for the most part we swam under them. Felt like a cheese move, but hey, it worked.

In a hilarious twist, toward the end of the quest we were turned into GARGANTUAN versions of ourselves, which sent the kobolds into a skittering panic. Suddenly the level design of the cave made a lot more sense, especially with the extra large corridors and oversized doors.

Next up was Memory Lapse, where we went into the Memory Library of a wizard in order to help him prepare a speech. It’s the sort of bizarre weird activity that infects a lot of DDO, because D&D has a lot of oddball quests like this. If only the RPG industry that drew off of it had half this much fun.

One room was chock-full of math-related puns, as evidenced above. A dad must’ve designed it.

My favorite part was getting to ride an oversized book like an amusement park ride across a room. Then, the problems began. About 10 seconds after I took this picture, some weird critters two-shotted me with lightning bolts. Once I, the healer, was down, we were in trouble — more so because we didn’t know this dungeon very well and weren’t sure where the rez shrine was.

Before you knew it, members were dropping left and right, thanks to the high difficulty level of the instance and a lack of heals. We dead people did try to run for the rez shrine — and actually managed to get there with about one or two seconds on our “out of bounds” clock remaining. Unfortunately, the room was full of bad guys, and one or two people resurrecting with minimal health are destined for a bad end in that situation.

At least being dead gives you an opportunity to roam about taking pictures in mostly black-and-white. This manticore is one of the freakier creatures to inhabit DDO’s bestiary.

With a full wipe underway and no time left on the real-world clock, we had to call it at that point. Hopefully next week we’ll clear out all of the tales from this pack!