A few gaming odds and ends for Friday:

• "Hooray! A XX! That's a critical hit on the Gaul, Gaius Maxiumus!" Were the Romans d20 gamers? It would appear so.

• Via Rock Paper Shotgun (a must-visit for any crpg fan), a cautionary tale: if you're going to rip off art from a game, don't make it a well-known and popular game with a huge online fan base. That's what Majestic Studios is finding out as it gets nailed for ripping off substantial art from Oblivion.

• Via Kotaku, an interview with the author of a book that looks fun for gamers: This Gaming Life, about the author's exploration of online gaming culture in London, Seoul, and Reykjavik.

• Finally, the new Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion looks promising, particularly the portions that allow full party customization (I don't care for in-party NPCs, a leftover of my days playing Wizardry) and fairly free exploration.

. . . minus all the things I forgot while expending energy to write this post.

As a Diablo 2 clone, Depths of Peril is a decent though not groundbreaking game. There are dungeons with monsters who collect piles of loot; all desperately waiting for you to come along and explore, exterminate, and collect and then turn around and do it all again. There are four character classes – the staple fighter, mage, cleric, thief – and each one has 3 unique skill trees (and a fourth special tree that each class has access too). There is the color coded item system – now a genre staple thanks to Diablo – where green is a magic item, orange a unique "named" artifact, and so on and so forth. Graphically, the game has a retro but pleasant look. There's large variety to creature graphics and the art style is very effective, ranging from the familiar (giant scorpions) to the bizarre (like the big behemoth looking poison gas belching crab-spider spawning things. I'm, not even sure what they're called). That variety extends into how the monsters "play", if you will. There are a wide variety of monster abilities, employing a wide variety of elemental or annoyance inducing attacks (like stunning, or immobility, or preventing you from using special abilities). Not to mention champion monsters (green color to the name, and much tougher), elites (yellow/gold color, and tougher still) and unique/named (orange, and they're often really nasty). There are quests to do, quests in spades, and I don't know if the player will ever run out of tasks to complete. It all works well enough, if unspectacularly. Depths of Peril, though, isn't just a Diablo 2 clone.

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For a while now, Grandy and I have been talking about putting up a wiki with comprehensive-as-possible coverage of indie/shareware/freeware computer role playing games. It would be a resource linking to downloads, guides, reviews, and the like, with screenshots and a brief description of each game. We'll solicit independent reviews of games, opinions on strategy, etc.

The idea isn't to cover the mainstream published games, but the labors of love: the Spiderweb Software games (like the Avernum and Geneforge series), Tom Proudfoot's games (Nahlakh, Natuk, etc.), Helherron, Eschalon, Mount & Blade, and many more. We'll cover games in development as well, like Age of Decadence.

Watch for it here. We'll be keeping more control over the wiki than is standard, because we're control freaks. But if you'd like to make sure we covered your favorite game (or one you developed yourself) drop us a line at ken at popehat dot com and we'll include it and maybe let you write the page.

Edit: Discuss the project in our forums here.

Via Rampant Coyote I caught this informative short playtest of Age of Decadence, an indie crpg that I've been drooling over for some time. Check it out.

Good news on the indie crpg front: indie leader Spiderweb Software has just released Avernum V for Windows. I'm downloading the demo now.

Spiderweb Software has developed the impressive Exile, Geneforge, and Avernum lines of indie crpgs. They're perfect for people hankering back to the golden era of Ultima and Wizardry — big on gameplay without so much eye candy. The mechanics and gameplay of the Avernum line of games has become increasingly polished, and it still offers the joy of discovery that you often don't get with the big-budget graphics-card-taxing titles. Enjoy in good health. Look for a review later.

Today’s timewaster, Kingdom of Loathing, stopped being just a time waster a couple of years ago; as such I’m somewhat hesitant to post about it in this fashion. It represents one of the most successful indie MMO-type games, though it’s not quite an MMO either. In the “My blog [kinda], so I can do whatever I want [though I can expect to get called on it by my peers if I do something absurd; and I dearly love them for this] vein”, we will kill two birds with one stone here and I’m sure there will be some good alternate suggestions in the comments thread.

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