The Decapolis survived another year without the aid of the Imperial Navy, but the situation continues to deteriorate. At the start of every year following the retreat of the Kaisan Empire, you roll for each city in the Decapolis with each having a 10% chance of losing population.  The...

Looks like 2025 is going to be the year we do a deep dive into a forgotten game. Thirty-five years ago the little game company that could, Iron Crown Enterprises, threw its hat into the miniature wargaming ring.  They had staged a bit of a coup a decade earlier...

The default game design for solo miniature wargames is “make them feel like they are about to lose, until the end of the game when they pull it out and win at the end”.  I have it on good authority that this is the case.  [llink to Rule of...

The thing about random tables – or “procedural generation” if you’re one of those midwits that thinks extra syllables makes you sound smarter than you really are – is that they are a shortcut method to operating the machinery of a game world in a way that makes you...

This blog has bounced around from various sites since 2011, and it’s been about ten years since I stopped caring about traffic.  Sometime in the late teens the bots got out of hand and the numbers stopped meaning anything.  So much so, that I’ve only had a ticker available...

It’s the year 2950 and we’re going to need a bigger army. And that bigger army is going to need some bigger tanks. The city of Damascus has been taken, after some vicious fighting, by our neighbor to the southeast, the Tillian Republic.  We know they mean to take...

The OG AD&D DMG contains a wealth of rules and guidance on domain management for dummies.  In his inimitable manner, Gary presents a scattershot approach to kitchen sink gaming, but while the bones are there, Gary leaves it to the players to figure out the connective tissue.  Or not,...

After years, my little Decapolis has lost two cities to encroaching barbarians and suffered the indignity of a successful raid on a third. When it hits, “Hellfire and the Fall of Empire” doesn’t pull its punches. In the Year of Our Lord (a nice touch) 2948 the Weallian Supremacy...

The Hellfire Campaign is dead, long live the Hellfire 2.0 Campaign. For reasons too boring to go into here, I have put the Hyde’s Reach campaign to bed.  But the Jim Webster itch has not been fully scratched, so we turn our attention to “Hellfire and the Fall of...

Like many on my side of the political chasm, I’ve enjoyed my share of schadenfreude while watching meltdowns by emotionally unstable losers. Sometimes my conscience twinges at the thought that many of these poor, lost souls could benefit from a strong and healthy dose of compassion. Many of those...