Well folks, I’m officially closing down the Tome of Knowledge blog and web comic. I spent a fair bit thinking it over and decided that it’s time to close shop and explore other things in life. You’ve probably noticed I hadn’t been posting up here as frequently yet there was a fair bit of excitement surrounding the latest mail-out promotion by Mythic, but I just haven’t got the time nor the drive to keep doing the blog. So all things come to an end and I thank you all for spending your time to read and enjoy my blog!

A big thanks to Mythic, for without whom we wouldn’t have had a great game to enjoy. You did some great things and there are lots of people happy because of it. If you guys ever need a comic artist, please feel free to look me up! Although I imagine things are pretty crazy right now down at Mythic.

As for me, I’ve decided to drop my subscription and try other things. Yes, I have gone back to WoW for a time as there are some changes there that I’m rather interested in seeing unfold. As for beyond WoW (and yes, there is always a beyond when it comes to WoW) who knows? Maybe Star Wars, maybe Star Trek. I’m just waiting and seeing what the MMO world puts out there.

Thanks to all the WAR community bloggers and WAR-heads out there including, Snafzg, Keen, Graev, Br3ntbr0, Syp, Ziss, JoBildo, and PhoenixRed. Thanks to the WAR sites out there like Ten Ton Hammer, HammerWiki, and of course, Warhammer Alliance! You’ve all been a great community and I’ll always compare future online communities to this one. Thanks to all!

And lastly, my readers, it was for you guys I created the comics and I loved all the great comments and feedback you posted up. Any artist will tell you that their greatest appreciation is when their audience understands your message. You read my comics faithfully and responded great!

Cheers and all the best folks!

Well I had a spare bit of time this morning, and I’m always a sucker for a good story, that I decided to compile the pages that each blog got of the Diary of Doom and put them all into one post. I highly recommending you read the story, its quite vivid and the details are rather neat considering you’ll see these adventures yourself within the Land of the Dead!

We’re only missing one page, Day 3, unless of course there are more than 9 day entries to the diary. Day 9 seems to have come to a somewhat conclusion, but you never know. If Day 3 pops up, I’ll be sure to add it to this compilation.

So click on the More link below to read the compiled story from start to finish of
The Diary of Doom!

(more…)

I gotta hand it to Mythic. You have to appreciate their very creative, and sometimes creepy, methods to promote WAR! Before it was the Night of Murder greetings cards, now it’s something larger and way more complex!

Got a package in the mail today filled with a whole assortment of curious items. After I signed for the box, I glanced at the address and smiled big and wide. Tearing open the box, I found these items all crammed inside:

Here is a photo of what was crammed into the tiny package.

I kinda knew these were coming. Paul and Jeff talked about it in their XPlay interview on G4TV and I was hoping I’d be one of the lucky blogs to be sent some human remains. (Rest assured, they are perfectly artificial human remains!)

After glancing over the rather ghastly bones, I scanned over the letter. Rather than type it all out, here’s a link to a PDF scan of the document:

http://tok.blogwarhammer.net/wp-content/uploads/letter.pdf
** if you don’t have the Adobe Acrobat reader, you can get it here.

The letter basically covers a few questions about the bones, the little flag, the map, and the worn parchment.

Let’s start with the bones since most people will be wanting to see those first!

Pulling out my old Gray’s Anatomy (all artist’s should have a copy), I know these bones are:

the Sacrum:

and a single lumbar vertebrae:

Both of these bones have symbols scrawled on them. If you have trouble reading them off the bones in those photos, I’ve scribbled copies down for you to see:

As the letter suggests, these symbols act as a Rosetta bone (taken after the Rosetta stone, which I just saw a casting of the real thing this weekend ironically!).

Mythic has posted (or will post) 5 Tomb King cartouches. The only way to translate these five cartouches is to have the keys to the symbols, hence these bones. So in looking at my bones, we know the symbols for the letters “J”, “O”,“V”,“N”, and “C”. Other blogs will presumably post their own hieroglyphic codes and we’ll eventually have the solution to the 5 cartouches.

By translating these five cartouches, you’ll uncover a game code (hint: name of a long dead Nehekharan royal), you can then activate the game code on your Warhammer Account by going to: https://accounts.eamythic.com. The item you’ll receive is the Scarab Amulet. An item that releases a swarm of beetles all over you in true Mummy style!

There are only 1,000 of these Scarab Amulets so don’t stall if you think you’ve solved the puzzle!

OK, now on to the other, less morbid items in the package!

The Flag

The flag in my package was the *cough* *cough* *Canuck here!* an American flag, which tells us these hieroglyphic code keys are for North American (look at that! Not just the US??) only. Europe is getting their due attention this time with their very own version of these Tomb King cartouches!

The Map

This here be a treasure map me boy! Take it yonder, scurvy knave and scuttle yer butt to the “X” markin’ the spot! - Sorry couldn’t help it. I just love Pirates!

Here’s the map:

The letter indicates that where the “X” is on the map is where we can visit in-game in the Necropolis of Zandri to get special tome unlocks! (and maybe more ye bilgerat!) My map shows an “X” in the lower right corner. Remember you may have to rotate it to match the map in-game.
Personally, I hope when you reach the spot Jack Sparrow pops up and says “All the rum is gone, mate. Better luck next time!”

The Parchment - Diary Page

This is a page from the Diary of Doom. An in-character (who said there’s no RP in WAR?) guide to the Necropolis of Zandri. The page I got was for Day 6.

Here it is:

To me, the story sounds like it’s written from the perspective of a dwarf in the manner of speaking and the references to “smellin the gold”. In the story the party comes across a large hall, presumably they are already inside. They find two large statues and a bit of glimmering gold resting between them. Strangely not smelling the trap for what it was, a dense dwarf by the name of Tunari risks picking it up. Well that wasn’t the ONLY thing that was getting picked up (and I don’t mean the kind you find in a bar). Suffice to say, in the Land of the Dead, beware the adage:

“All that glitters is not gold.”

UPDATE

Confirming my suspicions, Epic Slant has recieved a package as well. In his package, there was the top of a skull and similar documents to mine. Check his site out for the other Cartouche hieroglyphic codes!

Keen & Graev have now posted up their bones, along with Da’Toughest!

For US Cartouches, they have now been posted up: (skulls with Paul Barnett glasses. CLASSIC!)

Kotaku.com

MMORPG.com

Massively.com

MORE UPDATES

RainbowMMO and Werit are now added to the list of bone recipients!

Annnnndd Bio Break is a reciever of bones! Nice photos Syp!

WAR EU Readers:

For those of you across the pond, MMO Zone has popped up for the European puzzle. Be sure to see their puzzle pieces too!

Since I had my house invaded by family over the past few weeks, it’s been crazy busy to get back on track with my usual blog posts. One type post is my usual WCPI promotion post that’s been sadly neglected.

I’m back with a promotion post this week, but however with a shameless promotion on my part!! Hehe

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Stonetroll Certified Podcast

The first podcast was for Lagwar.com’s WAR specific podcast: Stonetroll Certified Show #28. In this podcast, I was asked to guest host along with Ziss of Lagwar.com. We had a blast talking about WAR blogging, comics, and the community in general. Be sure to check it out at:

http://lagwar.com/home/archives/5355

Be sure to check back there soon as I was also a guest host for their Lagwar Presents podcast as well!!

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Warhammer Alliance Podcast

The other podcast I recently guest hosted on was with the group over at Warhammer Alliance.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?t=290603

In this podcast, we chatted about the upcoming Patch 1.3 and talked about the introduction video of the Disciple of Khaine. Again, had a blast and well worth listening too!

So be sure to check out both podcasts! The regular hosts are great and they’re both incredibly informative and a great tap into the WAR community! Ahem…and not just because I’m on there!

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About the WAR Community Promotion Initiative:
The WAR Community Promotion Initiative, or WCPI for short, is a player-wide effort for WAR fansites, blogs, forums, and other WAR community efforts to cross-promote and expose content to everyone who visits them. Members of the WCPI regularly promote each other through links, spotlights, and other features. If you have a WAR site and you’d like to join, check out the WCPI thread or PM PhoenixRed on the Warhammer Alliance forums.

Last night, my son, wife, and I went to go see Video Games Live which was visiting our town on their 2009 world tour. Suffice to say, it was an amazing night filled with amazing music from such games as World of Warcraft, Halo, and Chrono Trigger, all played by a symphony orchestra! Hosts (and renown video game music composers) Tommy Talarico and Jack Wall put on a great show with the orchestra, video and light show, and uniquely innovative interactive entertainment. We had a blast!

One highlight of the show was witnessing the amazing (read brilliant) talent of Martin Leung hammer out music from the Mario Brothers family of games. Oh yeah, did I mention he did it blindfolded? If you don’t believe me, here he is in Lisbon at VGL:

high quality version, give a few moments to load

However by far the most stunning event during the show was it’s historical perspective. Starting the show off with showing footage from video games I grew up on like Donkey Kong, Joust, Gauntlet, and yes, even Frogger! The crowd obviously must have been as old as I am because the theater erupted with cheers at each game. Although I am sad, Karateka wasn’t in that list. Man I played that game for hours!

The historical perspective went even further with a look at the first television broadcast of a video game with Ralph Baer and Bill Harrison playing their creation in 1967 (ping-pong - yes, predating Atari’s Pong by three years). Their invention led to Mr. Baer being called the Father of Video Games. His hand written notes for the development of the game now safely held within the Smithsonian.

As I watched that news clip from before my time, I wondered if Mr. Baer ever saw how significant his creation was in sparking a digital revolution? In the span of a mere 40 years, a small fragment of a man’s lifetime, we have the video games we have today; where people like me are blogging on the Internet about video games where hundreds of people play and fight with each other from all over the world all at the same moment in a virtual world with complex avatars. It simply boggles the mind to think how far video games have come and how advanced they’ve gotten in such a short span of time as a mere 4 decades. I truly wondered what Mr. Baer thought of that?

Well, as if in answer to my thoughts, Tommy Talarico shocked us all in the theater by having a live video chat via Skype with Mr. Baer asking those exact questions in my head. The audience was floored and the pioneer of video games was greeting amid tears to a standing ovation by thousands of grateful gamers.

Man, we’ve really come a long way. Good show, Mr. Talarico. Good show.

TOK Comic : Issue #20

Things have finally settled down in my house and things are slowly (very slowly) returning back to normal. My visiting family have now left and once again I’ve got the time (and the energy) to post up another comic! This one, a mild homage to George A. Romero, sets the stage for the upcoming, highly anticipated expansion for Warhammer Online.

The Land of the Dead is just around the corner, staggering towards us like a zombie horde. Will it succeed in exciting us about the game and revitalizing the WAR community and player base or will it chase us away screaming in terror? Will Tier 4 get a recharge or will it end up becoming a ghost town now that everyone will be scouring the desert in search of treasure?

Keen raises some very good concerns about the upcoming expansion and the possibility that the lack of a third faction may end up becoming a major flaw in the new massive RVR zone. Will the dominant army on a given server pretty much own the new zone like a bully dangling the poor short kid’s lunch over his head?

Only time will tell is the only answer I can offer up.

I can guarantee that within the first few months of the zone opening, dominant armies will appear, but the question will be if they remain the dominant army. Maybe the sand swept Necropolis and the Tomb of the Vulture Lord will be just enough incentive for the underdog?

Quoting a little PB Shelly, this cinematic (cinematic quality with unbelievable in-game footage) trailer packs a lethal and long undead punch!

Jeff (the) Hickman and Paul Barnett recently did an appearance on the G4 Tech show, X-Play, and they brought along with them some Tomb King preview goodness!

In the preview, we get a more finalized glimpse of the upcoming Live Expansion and particularly a look at some of the Tomb of the Vulture Lord’s denizens. I gotta say, the expansion looks simply awesome. The terrain is covered in wind-swept desert and the Tombs itself are massive in scale.

View the video here on the X-Play website.

What is particularly striking is the sheer sizes of some of the bosses in the dungeon. As Gabe mentioned in a previous article, inspirations came from a lot of console-style action games. Some of the footage in the video definitely supports his statement. The “secret” boss encounter looks like it could have come right out of God of War. Hmm….could be a possible pun there! Maybe Gabe was fashioning himself to BE a God of WAR?

Sigh…regardless of my bad puns, check out the video. It may just get you exciting about what’s to come in Warhammer Online.

UPDATE

br3ntbr0 from A Wall of Text has the two X-Play vids up on his blog, be sure to check out the second vid he’s linked there!

Look a cheater!

Things are still busy at my place and cutting heavily into my game time, but I saw this issue (and heard about it) and it’s such an important issue that I couldn’t avoid not posting about it.

This issue, eloquently stated by WARP, needs to be addressed and it needs to be done FAST! Crap like this is what makes or breaks a game and the jerks that built this addon should be slapped with as much legal power as possible.

I agree with Don’t in saying that this is not at all amusing.

Spring is here with Summer soon to be, and with it, the house gets all a bustle with cleaning activity. In addition, some family of mine are coming to visit with me and stay at my place for a couple of weeks, so you may not see me posting here on the blog over the next week or so as this is the kind of family that turns the house upside down whenever they visit. (But at least in a good way)

I’ll also be taking this busy time also to think about a new project I’ve had in the back of my head for some time now. I’ve had it brewing in my brain for a few months now along with the many other projects that stir in my head and recent info I’ve learned has caused it to rise above the others and take precedent. I’ll let you know what I come up with, but in the mean time, sit tight and enjoy what WAR has to offer while I’m away.

Cheers!