Articles by Danny Rupp
Danny works professionally as an architect and serves as managing editor here at CH, which means he shares many of the duties of being an editor but without the fame and recognition. He also writes about RPGs, videogames, movies, and TV. He is married to Sucilaria, and has a personal blog at Incorrect Blitz Input. (Email Danny or follow him on Twitter).
Game Review: Left 4 Dead 2
Late last year when the game Left 4 Dead was released by Valve for X-Box 360, our friend (and occasional writer here at CH) Joshx0rfz wanted to post a short and sweet review of it saying simply, “It’s as fun as a shotgun blast to the face!” We probably should have posted it at the time, but thankfully we made up for that by featuring the game in our 2008 Holiday Gift Guide. Not too long ago Dave wisely suggested the sequel, Left 4 Dead 2, in our 2009 Holiday Gift Guide but today I’d like to discuss it in detail and address some of the concerns I had about the game, specifically about a full sequel being released barely over a year after the first game.
The first Left 4 Dead game almost instantly became my favorite multiplayer game, probably of all time, finally nudging out GoldenEye (I know, blasphemy, right?) from the position it held for many years. Left 4 Dead 2 is a big improvement over the first game. It has fixed several of the problems the first game had while adding a large amount of new content that makes it worth buying. There is still a large issue that much of that new content seems like it could have been added to the first game in expansions and add-ons without the need to purchase a whole new game. However, when you factor in the length of the five new campaigns added to the game, the new scavenger mode, changes in weapons / adding melee weapons, and the new types of infected that can be played in multiplayer mode you would probably end up with enough downloadable content to equal the $40-$60 price tag of the sequel.
In essence I’m still torn on the issue. I now own both games and am a bit disappointed that many of my friends made the smart decision to trade in the first to make the second game more affordable so I feel that the first game has effectively become useless or not worth playing anymore. Much of my feelings on the matter are probably inspired by that disappointment, but putting them aside the second game takes everything I loved about the first and adds on to it with even more content and options that take the game further than I believe just DLC would have done. [Read the rest of this article]
Inq. of the Week: 4E D&D in 2010?
With the Holidays quickly approaching, two weeks ago Dave asked an actual “real world question” about which season of the year is your favorite. I’m the kind of person that finds little stuff like this interesting, then again Fall is my favorite season and it looks like I’m with the small majority of 33% of you on this one. Spring and Summer nearly tied with 23% and 24% respectively, and Winter came in last but very close with 20%. Also I’d like to extend my congratulations to Dave and Phil the Chatty DM for their excellent entries into the WotC Holiday Encounter Contest.
This week I’m taking a hard look at what has been announced for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition in the coming year (you can see them all at WotC’s catalog in wondrous chronological order) and wondering what’s in store, getting a taste of what I’m going to like and what I won’t in 2010. At the moment they have only really announced products up through the exciting Dark Sun Campaign Setting in August, but there’s still plenty in there already to get excited about or at least to keep us looking forward.
Loading ...I am most excited for Dark Sun, but since that is also the longest to wait for I am very much looking forward to the complete Psionics rules and the unannounced classes in the PHB3, as well as seeing what kinds of new monsters are in store for the third Monster Manual. I believe the product I’m most dubious about right now is Martial Power 2, as there have been no new Martial classes released since the first source book unlike the divine and arcane power sources. However, I am quite excited to see an official ranged Warlord build in the hopes that I can finally make a melee & ranged combat commander without multiclassing. How about you? Which products are you most looking forward to and why?
Review: "The Plane Below: Secrets of the Elemental Chaos"
The Plane Below is the first of several 4th Edition D&D books that delve into a bit more detail on specific planes and the kinds of adventures that can be found within them. As the title indicates, this one focuses on the Elemental Chaos and everything pertaining to it. This book is packed full of content, from cover to cover, and unless your game has absolutely nothing to do with the chaotic plane below you will want to give it a look. If your game strongly favors demons, elementals, the city of brass, or githzerai then this book is a must have.
The Plane Below is about 160 pages deep and contains just under 50 new types of monsters for you to throw at adventurers to murder and startle them. The book is very clearly, and logically, organized starting with the general features of the Elemental Chaos including at-will rules for mentally influencing the plane’s instability to attack creatures with motes of earth or fiery energy. This section reads exactly like the Elemental Chaos chapter from the Manual of the Planes but magnified by four, including various vehicles used to travel the plane from other sources and a few new ones, various weather effects, fantastical terrain features like acidic mires and flowing rivers of earth, and a handful of new hazards that can be found on the plane below. Next the chapter presents a handful of new skill challenges such as how to bargain with an efreet, reasoning with a Slaad (it’s not easy!), and repairing a lightning skiff.
My favorite part of all of the 4E supplemental books has been the Campaign Arcs section where ideas are presented that take you from the heroic tier through paragon and finishing in epic, nearly every single one I read gives me a handful of new ideas to apply to my own game. This book is no exception, presenting a variety of arcs to include elemental creatures and even one that focuses on planar characters that start their adventuring lives in the Elemental Chaos. Next they present a handful of varying level adventure ideas building on the same themes as the campaign arcs. Several potential patron NPCs are detailed as well as some “Orders out of Chaos” like the Cult of the Elemental Eye which are just as interesting to me as the full campaign arcs because they provide lore the players can learn, information just for the DM, organization of the orders, history, goals and methods, and adventure ideas for each of the groups. The chapter ends with three new artifacts for paragon and epic characters that can bring even more elemental themes into your game and directly into a player’s hands. [Read the rest of this article]
Dwarven Dice from Q-Workshop
If you look at many of the hobbies that we have, aside from video games, dice are a common element in a large majority of the games we play. Whether its Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer 40k, or Settlers of Catan they all use dice and as a result many of us end up really liking our little random number generation devices.
Q-Workshop is a company in Poland that I first heard about at GenCon this year and I was immediately impressed by the quality of the dice they had on display. A few days ago I received a review set of their Dwarven Dice including a d4, d6, d8, 2d10, d12, and a d20. The numbers on the dice are sharp angled in classic Dwarven style and most of them include graphics of battle axes along side the numbers, but what impresses me the most is that these aren’t simply painted dice, the sides are slightly sunken and the numbers raised with a textured background. [Read the rest of this article]
Monster Manual 2 – In Depth #5
Now that it is nearing the end of 2009, at long last I bring you my final in depth analysis of the Monster Manual 2 and the creatures contained therein. While the book has been out for half of a year now, I still have not gotten anywhere close to using even half of the monsters that are contained within.
Slaad – These terrifying beasts of the Elemental Chaos, perhaps one of the most feared monsters for a party to encounter due to the chaos phage they inflict that spawns more slaad at the cost of the infected character’s life, are expanded in this book with the versatile Flux Slaad that actually cannot inflict chaos phage at all. This monster is a level 9 Skirmisher that shifts around (a lot) and slashes with its claws, but what makes it truly intriguing is its variable resistance and vulnerability shift. The Flux Slaad begins an encounter with vulnerable 10 to a random damage type (determined by a d6 – cold, fire, lightning, necrotic, psychic, or thunder) and has resist 5 to all of the other damage types listed above. When it takes damage of the type it is vulnerable to, its vulnerability changes randomly to a different type making this monster an interested and unique challenge.
The second type of Slaad added in this book is actually tied to a new template, Slaad Spawner, which allows you to create elite Slaad that spit out level 17 minion skirmisher Slaad Spawn whenever they are hit by an attack. These spawn minions have a bite attack and a chaotic slam which can knock enemies prone, but scarier than that is their penchant for exploding when they miss with the slam attack doing damage in a close burst 1.
Slaughterstone Construct - When I first looked through the MM2 this was the entry that seemed the most out of place to me because they are large combat constructs, but now that I’ve played in an Eberron game I can understand the type of D&D game they would fit into a bit more clearly. The Slaughterstone Eviscerator is a large level 18 brute construct that can take and dish out a large amount of damage. It’s whirling blade aura does 10 damage to any creature that starts its turn within two squares of it, if that’s not enough its whirling bladestorm recharge power will do even more damage in a close burst 2 on its turn. One unique ability of the eviscerator is Tunnel Fighting which allows it to take no penalty to attacks and it does not grant combat advantage while squeezing. The Slaughterstone Slicer is a lower level imitiation of the eviscerator with many of the same abilities but it malfucntions when hit by a critical or when it makes a critical hit, causing it to be dazed for a turn.
The Slaughterstone Hammerer is a large, level 25 soldier construct with a thunder step aura that slows creatures within two squares. It has a slam attack that knocks characters prone, a hammer attack that dazes, and also has the tunnel fighting ability that lets it squeeze and still fight at an advantage. [Read the rest of this article]
Inq. of the Week: Friendly Local Gaming Stores?
Over the weekend I’ve done my fair share of video game playing, the most fun of which was easily several hours of playing four player New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii. With the great selection of new games that have come out this Fall, it seems natural that Dave asked last week about which games all of you are playing. Dragon Age: Origins is clearly the most popular with 80% of you playing it, Assassin’s Creed 2 came in a distant second with 38%, and Borderlands in third with 29%. Left 4 Dead 2, New Super Mario Bros, and Modern Warfare 2 all came in around the 20% range, and several commentors mentioned Batman: Arkham Asylum and Uncharted 2 as games they’re playing.
This week December is officially upon us, and with it comes the full force of the holiday season and all of the shopping that implies. I find it a shame that ordering RPG books online from places like Amazon is so much cheaper then it would be if I were to go to my local game store. That’s not the only problem though, unfortunately all of the stores around my area have one problem or another that makes them less than my ideal for a gaming store, if that weren’t the case I’d most likely patronize them more regularly. That being the case, I go to a game store in my area only several times in a year. I’m interested in seeing how often all of you go to your local game stores.
Loading ...Please share with us your thoughts on your local game store, what they do right or wrong, why you go there as often (or not) as you do, or even just share the name and location of the store with us and we’ll pay it a visit if we’re ever in town!
Inq. of the Week: Video Formats?
There are tabletop RPGs that focus on story? Seriously, how many people actually like that kind of stuff? I’m kidding, of course, but that’s what our Inquisition last week focused on – What’s your experience with story games/indie RPGs? The largest number of you, at 26%, only play story based / indie RPGs occasionally, with another 24% of you playing them only rarely or a few times in your life. 22% of you never play story/indie RPGs either intentionally or by chance, and the rest are broken up into 14% who play them regularly and 13% who play semi-regularly. I think it would be safe to say that 27% of you are story/indie game players and the rest aren’t that into them. Dave and I are currently working on changing that, as I have started planning at least a one-shot adventure in Mouse Guard that I will run in the next few months.
We seem to be at an interesting crossroads when it comes to movies and video formats, with Blu-ray beating out HD DVD I assumed everything would transition over pretty quickly but it still seems that regular DVDs are the primary format for people watching movies at home. I have no doubt that given a little bit more time, Blu-ray would dominate but with cable companies offering HD movies on demand and netflix streaming online the digital medium might be changing the whole market. I have not yet made the jump to Blu-ray because of cost and a less-than-eager attitude towards re-buying hundreds of movies that I already purchased on DVD. In the end I think we will purchase new movies and maybe a handful of ones we already own that have stunning visuals we really want to see in HD (like the first Transformers movie). The results of this poll may be a bit skewed, because most of you are gamers and the PS3 has a built in Blu-ray player, but that’s one of the answers I’d like to get from this poll. With that in mind, I’m very interested to find out how many of you watch movies on DVD, Blu-ray, or digitally. I’ve included Beta and Laser Disc for the sake of being inclusive, and because the odds are if I didn’t someone weird would ask for them.
Loading ...Are You Watching Venture Brothers Yet?
About three weeks after the 3rd season of The Venture Brothers started, I wrote about it to make sure that anyone who hadn’t heard of it by then knew to check it out (Venture Brothers: Watch It). Now it is three weeks into the 4th season and I’m following up. Seriously, are you watching it yet?
I knew after only three episodes that I was going to end up buying the whole season on DVD, and I was oh so right. Much to the pain of my finances, it has become ridiculously clear that the same is true for this season as well. This show speaks to me, to my current age, position in life, and memories of cartoons from my childhood in all the naughtiest ways. Even the episodes that you might consider sub-par for the course are still pretty damn funny, and just when you think some kind of over-arching plot is going to run things for a while something new hits you in the face completely out the blue. Just when you start to tire of whatever random or side stories they’re telling, the larger plot comes back into focus. Oh, and lest I forget to mention, this show is completely freaking hilarious!
If you’re still in the dark about it, I summarized the show pretty well back in 2008 so I’ll use those same words again: [Read the rest of this article]
Retro Critical Hits
Greetings everyone, Danny (aka Bartoneus) here! You may have noticed that late last week and over the weekend Critical Hits was in “Retro” mode and now that our layout is back a lot of things are still messed up. A lot of the problems stem from a completely honest and understandable accident, but the end result is hopefully a better framework for the site. Unfortunately the last full backup we had was in May of this year, so we’ll be working through today and tomorrow to get all of the missing images back up and hopefully have everything back to normal soon!
It was actually pretty funny to see the site in the default wordpress theme again, which is the same layout we had back in the Fall of 2005 when we started the site (but with spiffy and cool changing banners). After the next few days if you happen to notice something that’s still broken or missing let us know! Please bear with us as we sort these things out, and everything should be back to normal and better than ever by the end of the week!
Review: "Kobold Quarterly #11"
There’s a reason every review I see of the Kobold Quarterly magazine compares it to the Dragon and Dungeon print magazines from years passed, even opening a PDF of the book and seeing the cover makes me immediately think of seeing those issues in my local book store. The comparison goes well beyond the cover, however, through the whole interior of the publication that screams nostalgia while providing tons of new content for our favorite systems. Wolfgang Bauer is the main man behind KQ and he was kind enough to offer up a review copy to many RPG bloggers for issue #11.
The editorial for this issue is a testament to the quality of KQ, discussing the one gold and three silver ENnies that were won, including a silver ENnie for Best Website which was a category filled with great candidates (haha)! Snarky bits aside, this should be enough on its own to tell you exactly what to expect from the publication. One of the elements that surprises me the most is precisely how much effort has gone into making it feel exactly like an old school gaming magazine, right down to having a letters column early on that really gives you a feeling of the RPG community as a whole when you’re reading it. It’s a shame that much of the discussion has to do with which edition of D&D people want to read about, but even despite that it’s still great to read other gamer’s thoughts and for gamers to have another platform to be heard from. No matter how prevelant blogging or forums become, a letters column in a magazine will always have its own unique flavor and associated tingly feeling that comes along with it.
The articles themselves present you with a literal truck load of interesting ideas for you to use in your games, even the system specific articles come with so much written material in addition to the mechanics that you can easily gain something from nearly all of them no matter what you play. There’s an interesting take on adding sanity and mental disorders into your D&D games, which is a concept very near and dear to our hearts (and seeing the Red Eye of Azathoth ad right beside it only increases that excitement). Another article introduces the Uvandir, a different take on the classic fantasy dwarf race followed by one that brings lycanthropy to your PCs with some very enlightening takes on it from both a player’s and a GM’s perspective. Considering the issue’s release in the fall, it should be no surprise that a werewolf article is followed up by an in depth discussion of vampires – their physiology, psychology, societies, and naturally the best methods for their extermination. [Read the rest of this article]
