Kobold Love Playtest pack available
Hey there!
Last weekend I attended Draconis, a small Gaming Con in Montreal. I had the occasion to DM 2 playtest sessions of Kobold Love (one in English and one in French).
I’ll post the playtest Report over at the Chatty Studios site later this week. Suffice it to say that it was very successful, the adventure shows great potential.
While the adventure is far from being finished (scenes 2 to 5 need work), you can still piece up a playable D&D 4e draft from the following links:
- The Adventure’s Introduction
- The 1/2 Kobold Template
- The Pregenerated PCs
- Scene 1: Dungeon Diplomacy (Part 1 and Part 2)
- Scene 2: Ambush!
- Scene 3: Skill Challenged Kobolds in the City
- Scene 4 and 5: Showdown in the Tavern of Clichés
See you later this week.
Credits: Wizards of the Coast (Image)
Critical Hits is a Trilogy
From the Desk of the Editor-in-Chief:
The time has come once again where we indulge in a little celebration. A little over three years ago, I started the conversations that would eventually lead to founding Critical Hits. Looking back, we definitely started a bit rocky, and it took us a while to find what we wanted to do with the site. After year 1, we started to establish schedules, set deadlines, and become a slightly more serious operation. Year 2 was where we started to hit our stride.
In this last year, I’m confident in saying that we’ve really started to “make it.” We’ve finally gotten attention for doing serious work (starting with the announcement of D&D 4e last year and our first glimpses of it at D&D XP) covering the gaming scene. Starting at Origins and continuing through GenCon, we’ve finally started to be noticed by the gaming industry and the public at large. Such exposure, and the nature of blogs, does not come without the occasional stresses: this year in particular I’ve learned that people don’t really care that you’ve put a lot of your free time, effort, and cash into providing a free service… if they disagree with you. Regardless, I couldn’t be prouder of the work we’ve done this year, and look forward to doing it for a long time to come. I’ve taken a big step in actually paying for a new theme, which hopefully will be agreeable to everyone (once we finish the work on it), and will pay for itself in time.
And as always, many, many thanks to my friends who write for me, our blogging buddies, and to our readers, of which there are more than ever. I hope you all will stick with us for wherever we go next!
Sincerely,
Dave Chalker
Editor-in-Chief
Basic Stats
Twice makes it a tradition, so here’s the new tradition of sharing our stats from the previous year! [Read the rest of this article]
Epic Laundry Basket: After the Rule of Cool and the Rule of Fun…
From a Gtalk discussion earlier with Dave the Game about a game he played in over the weekend.
Dave:
But I think (the DM) also hit on a new rule of DMing in a later part of the adventure
We arrived in a new town, snuck through it, etc. Basically (this) gave us a new set of missions, one of which was to get explosives out of a warehouse.
Of course, that’s the mission we went after right away.
I think the rule could be that players are happier if an adventure involves explosives.
Chatty DM:
The Rule of C4
Dave:
Yes!
103 words.
Inquisition of the Week: Upcoming 4e Options
Last week, with comics on the brain, we asked what kind of comics you read. 62% of you read Webcomics, possibly because they’re great, possibly because they’re free. Second at 48% are mainstream comics that you can pick up in most comic stores (and some book stores.) Third are the indie/self-published fans are at 30%. Only 15% of you don’t read any comics at all, which is awesome that the number is so low, but we’ll convince you to pick them up yet!
After a short delay, the playtest preview of the Barbarian is out now (go check it out, I’ll wait.) After looking through the Advanced Player’s Guide and seeing some classic character options hit print again, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic. As much as I love 4e, I forgot how hard it is to be near the beginning of the edition lifecycle and desparately want more options to be in print. The APG made me want to follow up my last campaign with an epic level epilogue, and there are plenty of other ideas I’d love to revisit, were the book to be out (and were I to have enough time and players to do all of this!)
It is in the frame of mind that I ask…
Loading ...Many of these are expected in books in the next year or so, but hopefully they’ll be plenty of surprises as well!
And I kindly ask that if you want to complain that X thing you like wasn’t in the core book that you instead comment on, oh, pretty much any RPG messageboard out there, in an attempt to keep the discussion on target here. Also, feel free to talk about the Barbarian too!
Review: "Advanced Player's Guide"
Overview: Advanced Player’s Guide is one of the first licensed 3rd party products for D&D 4th Edition. It bridges the gap between editions for races and classes, providing options for those who miss certain iconic classes and races from previous editions. It is highly recommended for anyone who wants to play one of the missing races or classes from the 4e core books and/or is trying to convert over an existing campaign to 4e.
Available from: Your Games Now (in PDF) or directly from Expeditious Retreat Press (Print).
In-Depth: Advanced Player’s Guide is authored by Ari Marmell (Fortress of the Yuan-ti, Last Breath of Ashenport.) The book is 110 pages with a B&W interior. It contains a fair amount of interior artwork (with a decidedly old-school feel), though it is mostly dense text, and formats the rules material similarly to how the core books from WotC do it. [Read the rest of this article]
Chatty jumps from an unexpected cliff… and catches an updraft.
Last week I was prepping for a one shot D&D 4e game.
I got this really good idea and it started eating my brain as good runaway ideas are wont to do.
I sat down to write a blog post about it when my nascent buisness sense chimed in.
You see, after Gen Con, the guys at Critical Hits and I agreed to send one submission each to a RPG publisher (namely Dragon or Dungeon Magazines) before the end of September.
So instead of making a blog post with the idea, I re-edited it and made it into a submission proposal. I sent this proposal to Goodman Games.
While waiting for the answer I tried my concept in our one shot game.
It worked beyond my wildest expectations!
Early last week I got an email from Harley Stroh who works at Goodman, saying that my idea was cool enough to make it into an adventure anthology, provided Goodman Games did a second one (There’s one planned for December).
This morning he chimed back in saying the project was approved!
So come Gen Con 2009, I will likely hold in my hands a hardcover RPG product with my name in the writing credits!
Joy!
I owe a lot of this to you all dear readers. I’m just bummed I probably won’t be able to share my idea with you before then.
Have a great weekend, I’m spending mine playing D&D with my buddies tomorrow night and playtesting 2 sessions of Kobold Love Saturday.
The Professor X Paradox
Many of us here at Critical Hits enjoy comics, especially of the superhero variety. So it’s natural to try and combine our love of roleplaying games with our love of superheroes into one solid package.
Primarily, our experience with superhero games was in GURPS Supers. GURPS is a system we developed a fair amount of experience with, so it seemed natural to build on our previous low point powers and crank up the character points to make ourselves some superheroes. The system also afforded enough flexibility to cover a wide range of characters that we wanted to play, from a super-fast speedster (named, guess what, Speedster) to a powerful hulking brute (The Uncrushable Gronk.) The only concept that GURPS was completely ill-equipped to handle was the Green Lantern archetype. Other than that, our group experimented with a wide range of classic character types, enabled not just by the Supers rules, but any other GURPS books that we needed to fill it out.
Unfortunately, there always seemed to be a wall that our campaigns hit, and has made us reluctant to pick up another superhero game in many years. While discussing the issue and attempting to settle on a new system, The Main Event and I hit on the core of our problem, and we dubbed it “The Professor X Paradox.” [Read the rest of this article]
Ideas File: Writing a D&D for Children Adventure
So I was talking with friends on Twitter and someone mentioned the Monster Manual Gnome and his Pet Weasel named Francis.
Many people remember that it was kicked out of the scene by a Tiefling Warlock in the D&D 4e promotional TV ads.
That gave me an Idea I do not currently have the time to pursue.
What if I wrote a D&D adventure for Dungeon Magazine called ‘Where is Francis?’ made especially for kids between 6 and 10?
There would be fights against animated objects and plants (I want to limit violence against sentient beings), a Jealous “Villain” starved for friends and an overexcited Gnome seeking adventurers to help him recover his minion.
I pitched this to Wizards of the Coast yesterday. You think they will go for it? Would you be curious to read such an adventure?
Any hints and ideas I should think about to make it fun for both children and adults playing with them? I’m surely going to focus on what my son did and write several DM hints on letting go of the rules in favour of the Story.
The Amazing Graysons: Baby Nightwing?
In honor of our Inquisition:
It looks like the CW doesn’t want to leave a void when comic book inspired Smallville finally ends…
But, really though, I wonder how interesting a bunch of circus performer will be? Surely we won’t have Dick flying around a trapeze for 8 whole seasons? The actor would age past his origin as Robin…
Blog Carnival: Super Heroes in RPGs
The RPG Blog Carnival‘s idea started with Johnathan of The Core Mechanic (Although Geek’s Dream Girl used to do it too):
- Initial Idea (Subject: Resurrection)
- Roundup
Then Donny the DM took up the torch
This month I offered to take up the torch and reinforce a nascent RPG blogging meme that has cropped up in the last few days.
Greywulf started it with all with ‘Let’s Play Super Dungeons and Dragons‘.
Stargazer ran with the idea with his ‘Fantasy Superheroes‘ post
So why not continue and talk about all things Super Hero this month? Not just Fantasy Superheroes (Although I adore the concept), but everything that can be used from that genre into RPGs.
It could be about your favorite Super Hero RPG, about cool characters and art concepts, it could be doing a cross-genre experiment and injecting some Pulp in your Superhero juice or some Mutants in your Sorcery.
The rules are simple, you post about it and you leave a comment right after on this post. My Commentluv plugin should pick it up, if not, I’ll edit the comment myself to show the link.
I’ll participate too, with a much needed new entry in my trope series.
Up up and away!
Credits: Pam’s Twins, just because.
