Scourge of Worlds: A Dungeons and Dragons Adventure

• Overview
• Map
• Tracks
• Try Again
• Spoilers

If you're looking for official Scourge of Worlds information, check here. The official site disappeared, you can find an archive here. Internet Movie Database information can be found here.

Scourge of Worlds (SOW) is a strange DVD. It's basically a pick-a-path style story on a DVD. The story plays out and every once in a while you make a decision. There appear to be 23 potential decisions, you'll see about 8 per game. The game claims that there are over 990 potential combinations, my calculations suggest there are 757 actual possible paths. I'm not sure how they came to the 990 count. Technically there is nothing especially noteworthy about SOW, DVDn as they term it is just a fancy name for using the existing DVD menuing system to create a pick-a-path story.

The publisher has disabled chapter skipping and a great deal of functionality in an attempt to force you to stick to the official paths. If you'd like to jump directly to various tracks, I suggest getting a non-crippled DVD player. Some standard DVD players can be easily configured to remove this crippling behavior. Linux (and other Unix-like operating systems) have access to excellent software players like Xine and MPlayer that are not crippled. Note that if you jump around in the disk, you may skip important signals that control future events; you can view any part of the game you want, but the game may not work correctly until you start over from the beginning.

The game has four primary endings, two failures, one sad victory, and one complete victory. (For more information the endings, see the spoilers.) When you reach these endings you're stuck with your decision, all you can do is watch the ending and the credits. There are six other failure endings in the game, but they offer you the chance to pick a different option.

The story is set in the Greyhawk universe of Dungeons & Dragons. Specifically, the story is set somewhere west of the Barrier Peaks and the Yatil Mountains, on the edge and inside the Sea of Dust. The Sea of Dust is a sandy desert, a dead wasteland that results after an ancient cataclysm wrought in a war between two nations.

The story stars the elven wizard Mialee, the human warrior Regdar, and the halfling thief Lidda, three of the iconic characters of 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons. The plot is a stereotypical save-the-world story, the characters are unbelievably stupid. This is the full story with spoilers.

Visually the DVD is a mixed bag. The entire video is computer rendered. On the up side, the character animation is very solid. On the down side, everyone looks like their skin in made of plastic, a common problem in computer rendered footage. The biggest problem is that the scenary is, by and large, drab and boring. Computer generated imagery should allow truly impressive vistas and scenes, but here there is nothing to note. There are a few gems, like this dragon attack:

All in all, it's a cute gimmick, but certainly not worth the $24.95 the publisher asks for. It might be worth a rental, especially if you find the idea of a movie based on the D&D iconic characters amusing. Netflix has copies for rent.

Map

Here is a map of all of the choices you can make. This map omits irrelevant tracks, if you're interested in the gory details, see the full map. You can click on individual nodes for more information on a track.

In general any node with multiple exits indicates a choice you can make. Two nodes have multiple exits, but appear to automatically redirect you, possibly based on prior choices. 8.29 doesn't appear to be too important, but 10.6 is key. Which exit is taken from 10.6 will determine which of the four final endings you have access to.

These are all of the tracks on the DVD. Those tracks labelled "Nothing" have a mere fraction of a second of footage from the previous track. These scenes appear to exist solely to tell the DVD player to jump to a different track.

Each entry is in the form Title.Chapter.