My love for Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 is well documented. But my secret geek shame? I’ve never really played Icewind Dale. 
So I'm finally booting up the Enhanced Edition and heading into the frozen unknown. I know there’s something about undead (maybe a lot of undead?), but that’s about it.
So tell me, wise adventurers of the north: What’s your go-to party build for Icewind Dale and why? Hit me with your best combos, weird synergies, and must-have characters. #CRPG #PartyPlanningIsHalfTheGame
If you'd like to see what I concocted back in 2009, here's the links:
Players Handbook: https://chgowiz-games.etinerra.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/The-Siege-Perilous-Players-Rulebook.pdf
Game Ref's Guide: https://chgowiz-games.etinerra.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/The-Siege-Perilous-Game-Referees-Guide.pdf
(Edited - put non-Google Drive links up, these links are to my own domain.)
I think the one campaign that I wish had taken off, but it didn't, was my Ultima game (based off the CRPG that became an MMORPG).
I had always wanted to see my Sosaria develop and grow as the players made their way and names.
For now, I do random small con events running it, using my "Siege Perilous" rules (Ultima games 1, 2 and 3 implemented using Swords & Wizardry Whitebox).
But I still wish...
Look at this extremely cool game jam that's ongoing with plenty of time still left:
Narrative Alchemy Jam 2025
https://itch.io/jam/narrative-alchemy-jam-2025
*This is a jam for transformative narrative games of all kinds. It will be judged by me (Chance). Since I prefer to cultivate a collaborative rather than a competitive environment, and since judging is often highly subjective, I have chosen to use the word "Favorite" rather than "Best" for the award categories:
Favorite Educational Game - Open to educators and non-educators, as long as your game teaches something intended to be useful for players' personal growth or learning.
Favorite Therapeutic Game - Please enter only if you're a therapist, social worker, psychologist, counselor, life coach, neurodiversity researcher, etc. Games about therapy or therapeutic topics are allowed in other categories; this category is specifically for games intended for use as part of a therapy session.
Favorite Spiritual or Religious Game - You don't need to be clergy to submit to this category. Religious fundamentalists, including militant atheists, are not welcome.
Favorite Recreational Game - This is for games primarily intended to be fun to play, while also exploring a thought-provoking or emotionally resonant theme / genre.
Favorite Serious Game - This is for games intended to be thought-provoking, emotionally intense, or culturally important, but not necessarily fun or light-hearted.
Entering multiple categories is allowed, as long as it makes sense for your game. The only two categories that are mutually exclusive are "Favorite Recreational Game" and "Favorite Serious Game".
Since I'm a TTRPG and LARP designer with academic training in transformative role-playing game design, this jam is primarily geared toward analog, physical games. But if you're a CRPG or visual novel designer with an idea that fits, go for it! Some of my favorite transformative narrative games are computer games (e.g. The Longest Journey, The Talos Principle, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Disco Elysium).*
I am not a puzzle person.
I happily* spend 100 omnigel to solve that bloody Towers Of Hanoi puzzle.
*Grumpily
We're currently building a system to create cinematics quickly. Now it's easy to make camera movements and animations!
I have been restructuring Richard Garriott's DND1 code that was written in BASIC. The old kind of BASIC where you had line numbers and did a lot of GOTO a line number.
It is fascinating trying to move it around with more modern eyes and years of programming dogma.
The code only has the concept of global variables. Every variable you make is then in the global space.
You can reuse a bit of code anywhere by just doing a GOTO line number. But it makes it very difficult to reason about because you might think of a stack of lines as a function and want to group them together, but some code somewhere else might just jump right into the middle of it!
Some bit of code might rely on some variable from somwhere else but it is difficult to know if some other bit of code is clobbering it.
Anyhow, this is the restructured version I put together.
https://codeberg.org/random-wizard/dnd1/src/branch/main/restructured/dnd1.basic
I moved things into GOSUB sections. Each GOSUB gets 1000 lines (usually it goes by 10s so only 100 lines) and the last line always ends in 999 and is a RETURN. A REM SUBROUTINE means nothing will GOTO in the middle of it.
This way it sort of acts like a traditional function. Still does not have arguments though.
I wonder if there are any companies out there looking for BASIC programmers.
In Richard Garriott's DND1, written in 1977, he is using ascending AC.
The monster attack against the character is as follows.
Use the following number for the character's armor.
None = 6
Leather = 12
Chain = 16
Plate = 20
Add that to the character's dexterity score (which will be between 3-18)
The monster then rolls a 1d40
The monster needs to get above the characters armor + dexterity.
Was reading Richard Garriott talking about writing code and porting it to different systems and how porting to the PC was harder than other systems, because most computers in the early 80s used the same cpu, the MOS Technology 6501 and 6502.
It is not too far fetched to imagine a world where Intel did not become the dominate cpu.
In Richard Garriott's DND1 written in BASIC in 1977, I thought this bit of code was interesting.
It would be Death Saves for HP in more modern discourse.
If the characters's HP are 0, the character survives if their CONSTITUTION is 9 or above.
If the characters' HP are below 0, the character survives if their CONSTITUTION is 9 or above, but they lose 2 points of CONSTITUTION and gain 1 hit point.
This was only 3 or 4 years after D&D had been introduced to the world.
I think I have found a programming language that hurts my brain more than Perl.
https://codeberg.org/random-wizard/dnd1/raw/branch/main/applesoft_basic/dnd1.basic
I took Richard Garriott's BASIC code from 1977 and did as little to it as I could to get it to work with Applesoft BASIC. You can copy the above code and paste into the Applesoft BASIC in Javascript emulator.
https://inexorabletash.github.io/jsbasic/
Do not ask for instructions!
And you have to name your character
SHAVS
Speaking of BASIC. Someone should write a code linter for BASIC. It could check for errant GOTOs and the like.
The free demo of my #MagicalGirl #DungeonCrawler Minerva Labyrinth is now available on Steam and Itch!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3520970/Minerva_Labyrinth/
Richard Garriott wrote a program to simulate a d&d like rpg in the 1977-1979 timeframe. He kept his notes he wrote from that era. He would have been 16-18 years old at the time. Here is a picture of the first dungeon he made.
I copied out the series of 0,1,2,3,4 as text and ran it through my ascii dungeon tile converter to make the second image.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/143932/dungeons-and-dragons-1/
It's about time Evermist got a little misty! 
Tunnels & Trolls: Sword for Hire
I may be committing some light copyright infringement...
https://chasingdings.com/2025/03/03/tunnels-trolls-sword-for-hire/
They say that to make a story, you have to start with a map.
Placing things visually allows you to stand back and take stock.
A map created with Nortantis, free and open source!
Why Not Zoidberg? 
Evermist Dev 
