Turbine continues style="font-style: italic;">Dungeons and Dragons
Online's descent into madness with new content with Update 10, which (conveniently) goes live today. Offered the chance to get a hands-on preview, I jumped at
the opportunity and was run through the first adventure in the Reign of
Madness adventure pack in addition to learning of the crafting update
heading players’ way. My tour guides were Ian Currie (Design
Director), Erik Boyer (Producer), and Fernando Paiz (Executive
Producer).


Reign of Madness

Update
10
is primarily the Reign of
Madness adventure pack. This series
of adventures (level 17 and up) continues the madness-themed
adventures, Harbinger of Madness, from style="font-style: italic;">Update 9.
As we were starting
up, I told the style="font-style: italic;">DDO
team that I was looking forward to the new adventure
as long as there were no beholders as that my entire party had been
wiped a few times by a bad-ass beholder the night before. (We were
eventually victorious). The response from the style="font-style: italic;">DDO
team was a great deal
of laughter and I was informed that not only would I be facing
beholders, but there were, in fact, three new beholders in this
adventure pack. Sighing with the certainty of failing my saves, I
plunged into the adventure.


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You'll find yourself facing a
ton of beholders like the new Fleshmender Beholder.

The overall theme of Reign of Madness is that the Tower of the Twelve
is overtaken by forces from Xoriat, the plane of madness. To free the
Tower from the grip of insanity, you’ll have to travel to
Xoriat itself and turn powerful Xorian lords against one another. The
quest begins with the Acute Delirium adventure.


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The evil mindflayer who
possesses the scepter.

In Acute Delirium, the goal is to recover the Scepter of Belashyrra, a
powerful artifact that can open portals between the world of Eberron
and Xoriat. The hapless Rorry Malcanus has lost it somewhere in the
Sleeping Spell Inn and it is up to you to recover it. Overall, this
adventure is broken into four distinct parts and is incredibly
imaginative.



First, the players look and attempt to recover the scepter.
Once you
enter the inn, you'll begin your search. Eventually, you’ll
find
the scepter within the grasp of a mindflayer, who you’ll
chase throughout the inn. Poor souls who have been tainted by chaos
will assault you. If you take too long in dealing with them, hideous
floating eyeballs will erupt from them and attack you. After
dispatching those doomed souls and killing the mindflayer, the scepter
is there for you to take, but….



As soon as you go to grab the scepter, a treasure chest in the corner
comes alive, rushes over, and swallows the scepter. This is no mere
treasure chest, it’s a mimic! A mimic is a creature that can
change its shape and disguise itself as an inanimate object, which is
usually a chest. This marks the introduction of the mimic to style="font-style: italic;">DDO.
You
will then be forced to chase the mimic throughout the inn as he capers
about taunting you as you chase him. You eventually corner him in the
laundry room where he activates the scepter, which opens a portal to
Xoriat. Your screen changes with an eerie red tinge to it and the
perspective becomes slightly warped. As you look up to the ceiling, you
see the ceiling break apart and the portal to Xoriat becomes clear.
Next, a huge beholder comes down and swallows the mimic whole and
returns to Xoriat.


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The mimic taunts you
worse than the French guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

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style="font-style: italic;">The mimic is a cruel,
taunting creature.

Thus begins the second stage of the adventure. You have to travel to
Xoriat, but the portal is high up past the ceiling. What to do? The
voice of the DM informs you that you need to build an
airship…an airship built from the materials from the inn.
Since the properties of Xoriat are now flowing into the inn, natural
law no longer exists.






Your goal now is to construct an airship by using the beds and
bookcases in the inn. To do so, you’ll go up to the various
beds and bookcases and talk to them. They will then animate and begin
to march their way to the laundry room. However, since the portal is
open, minions from Xoriat are entering the inn. You’ll have
to keep them from destroying the furniture as they march. Here
you’ll get your first taste of the Frost Beholder. This is my
favorite part of the whole adventure and I found it incredibly
entertaining and imaginative. Watching the furniture march through the
inn was like seeing style="font-style: italic;">Fantasia
mesh with Bedknobs
and Broomsticks
. Once the
furniture reaches the laundry room, they swirl together high in the air
until you assemble enough components. I was reassured by the style="font-style: italic;">DDO
team that you can never run out of furniture. If furniture is
destroyed, it will respawn. If the furniture is destroyed several
times, it will respawn as hardier furniture and will be more difficult
to destroy. Once you have enough components, they will form a giant
airship and you’ll find a ladder nearby to climb up and enter
the portal to Xoriat.

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Furniture on parade!

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Swirling furniture.

Once aboard the airship, you’ll enter the third stage of the
adventure. Here you’ll race after the beholder that ate the
mimic while attempting to keep hordes of beholders from boarding your
airship. The airship has a rest and resurrection shrine and the look of
the airship is damn cool as you see the beds and bookcases that
comprise its construction. The beholders you’ll face during
this stage include the Chaos Beholder introduced in style="font-style: italic;">Update 9,
plus the new Frost Beholder, Beholder Fleshmender, and Armored
Beholder. These fights are extremely brutal in that the beholders can
push you off the airship with telekinesis. If
you’re pushed off, and you probably will be, you’ll
plummet to your death back to the inn. You’ll have to rez in
the inn and to get back to the airship, you’ll have to climb
an impossibly high ladder in the laundry room.

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Your makeshift airship.

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Bookcases and beds =
airship.

Once you’ve beaten off the beholder hordes, you’ll
find the beholder that swallowed the mimic, but now he has grown huge.
Luckily, he is asleep so to retrieve the scepter from the mimic,
you’ll have to jump into the beholder’s mouth and
go into his innards.



Once inside the nasty innards of the beholder, you’ll see
several chests and other creatures swallowed by the beholder. Some of
the monsters are free and they’ll attempt to free the trapped
monsters. The best strategy of a group is to target the free monsters
first to keep the number of monsters manageable during the fight. Once
you’ve dispatched the monsters, you’ll have to
determine which chest is the mimic. You have the option to break open
any chest, but if the chest isn’t the mimic but a real chest,
the contents of that chest fall into the stomach acid of the beholder
and dissolve. There are a number of ways to determine if a chest is
real or the mimic, such as a rogue using their abilities, using skills
like Search or listen, or having a high enough Wisdom or Intelligence.
Once you find and defeat the mimic, you can grab the scepter and keys
that will open the other chests.

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Inside the beholder's
stomach.

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Making the beholder
vomit.

You now have the scepter, but you’re still inside the stomach
of the beholder. To get out, you’ll have to destroy some
glands within the beholder to force him to vomit you back out and onto
your airship. Once you’ve destroyed enough glands,
you’ll be vomited back out onto your airship and
you’ll see the beholder reduce in size. After you destroy
him, you can use the scepter to open a portal back to Eberron.






You’ll then reappear back in the laundry room of the Sleeping
Spell Inn. When you use the scepter to try to close the portal to
Xoriat, something bad happens and another portal opens. Appearing
before you is the Lord of Eyes, a lord of Xoriat and a being of
incredible power. He will demand the scepter from you, and while you
have several dialogue options, the end result is that you’ll
be forced to hand the scepter over to him. He takes the scepter and
decides not to kill you, but instead closes the portal and disappears
to begin his plan of taking over our dimension. This ends the Acute
Delirium adventure.


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The powerful Lord of Eyes.

The following adventures in the Reign of Madness adventure pack (The
Lord of Eyes, the Lord of Stone, and The Sane Asylum) find you helping
out everybody’s favorite respect NCP, Fred the Mindflayer,
helping out another Xoriat lord to help you against the Lord of Eyes,
and then the final showdown with the Lord of Eyes to free the Tower of
the Twelve and the Sleeping Spell Inn from his dominion.



Playing through the adventure was a blast and the design is extremely
inventive. You’ll face many dangers, and the fight on the
airship is hard, but cool. That first step is a doozy! There is also a
tremendous amount of voiceover content in the adventure from the DM
script to the mad ranting of the mindflayer. Players should definitely
enjoy this latest adventure pack.


Crafting, New Armor, and Tower
of the Twelve Changes

Crafting gets a boost in style="font-style: italic;">Update 10.
The crafting level is being raised
from 75 to 100. In addition, players can now create unbound shards so
you can buy, sell, trade, auction, or just plain give them away if you
wish. There is also one new item that will become available in the style="font-style: italic;">DDO
store and that is a new docent for Warforged called Cog Armor. Lastly,
the Tower of the Twelve gets a makeover emphasizing the magical prowess
of the Tower’s denizens. Turbine was never enthusiastic about
the original layout, so they thought it seemed a good time to give the
Tower a makeover seeing as it features in the adventure pack.

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The new Tower of the
Twelve.

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The Tower of the
Twelve's spiffy makeover.

Future Updates for 2011

After the adventure was played, I asked about future updates for the
rest of 2011. I was told that there were 2 more planned updates ( style="font-style: italic;">Update
11 and style="font-style: italic;">Update 12)
for the year and that style="font-style: italic;">Update 11
was going to be the
biggest of the year. The Turbine team mentioned that their focus was to
increase the end-game content for the level-capped players. When I
pressed for more details, they hit me with a Ray of Paralysis, so I
stopped asking.



Overall, Update
10
for style="font-style: italic;">DDO
is essentially the latest adventure pack
with an increase in crafting levels. If the remaining adventures in the
Reign of Madness are half as good as the first one, Acute Delirium,
then players will be very happy. You can tell the style="font-style: italic;">DDO
team put a great
deal of effort into crafting these adventures and it shows. My only
gripe is that I always seem to fail my saves! style="font-style: italic;">Update 10
launches
Monday, June 20th, for VIP members and is available in the style="font-style: italic;">DDO
store
for other players starting Wednesday, June 22nd.



My thanks to Ian Currie, Erik Boyer, and Fernando Paiz for taking the
time to give me a hands-on preview of Update 10.





To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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