Previously in Chatty’s game… Our new band of heroes are hired by the Burgomeister of one of the City Within’s agricultural burgs to investigate the tainting of its water supply. The search lead them into an old Elemental Water temple guarded by spectral water wraiths. After defeating the guardians, our heroes explored further and discovered […]
Archives for 2009
Critical Bits for the week ending 2009-05-02
Cool article about Werewolf, but shouldn’t they be playing iPhone werewolf? Winners of the 2009 Mensa Mind Games Free, D&D, 4e DDI May Editorial Calendar Games Are Art, Eurogames is an Art Period Best. Resignation. Letter. Ever. I don’t know where this came from, but it’s clearly the most powerful Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitar ever […]
New 4E House Rule: Channel Arcanity
Developing from my post over the weekend about the new Tome Implement presented in Arcane Power and how it adds more options for the 4th Edition Wizard, several comments were made that a larger selection of spells makes the Wizard better but that the class as whole is still underpowered. Our experience is that even […]
One-Page Dungeon Contest Update 2: Four on the Template
After 2 weeks, the one-page dungeon contest is revving up nicely. Entries have been coming in at a steady pace from all over the world. Seriously, this week we got entries from Australia, Italy and Germany just to name a few. The dungeons are also very very diverse showing off various genres and themes. I […]
Free 4th Edition
GURPS Lite: “GURPS Lite is a 32-page distillation of the basic GURPS rules. It covers the essentials of character creation, combat, success rolls, adventuring, and game mastering for GURPS Fourth Edition.” Ars Magica: “The fourth edition of Ars Magica‘s core rulebook introduces improved systems in several key areas such as combat, character advancement, and covenant generation.” Shadowrun: “Shadowrun, […]
Random Thoughts Table: Sounds of Free D&D with new Tools!
Here’s a mix and match of some of the things lying here and there on my blogging desk. Worlds of Sounds Earlier this year, I got a complimentary set of 3 CDs from reader Giorgio Vezzini. Giorgio runs a studio in Italy called World of Twillights where he produced 4 CDs of sounds to use […]
Origins Awards Nominees 2009: Picks and Commentary
icv2 has published the list of Origins Awards nominees. The nominees are decided by retailers at the GAMA Trade Show, and then attendees of Origins vote on the winners, and are announced at a ceremony on site (which we’ve covered two years in a row now). Here’s the relevant categories to the Critical Hits audience, along with my favorite from each category, and my guess of what will win.
Video Game Design – an opinion piece
LeBreton is the lead level designer for Bioshock 2. He gives a pretty good opinion piece on some of the issues surrounding the past and future of video game design. Here is an excerpt: As of 2009, the game industry seems to want two fairly contradictory things: – Make games, using proven mechanics from the […]
Primal/Within: Some Factions, Sectors and (one) Citizen
You might notice that my empty speech bubble in my blog’s header is no longer empty. Thanks to Eric Maziade, I now have a little plug-in that lets me write quotes! This week is session #2 of my new campaign (if we don’t count the awesome prequel session in the Crypt of the Thief-Prince). My […]
The Subtle Empowerment of the 4E Wizard
I’ve been reading through Arcane Power for the last couple of days, and I am pretty sure Wizards has tried to pull a fast one on us! What’re they trying to pull? Making the Wizard class just as powerful as the other classes in 4th Edition. It’s not really a crime, I know, but I really don’t think many people have noticed yet and I’d like to open up some discussion on the topic.
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