Empire Ain’t Easy
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 ‘Mother May I’ DM
An older video with some responses that flew under my radar because I don’t follow boring OSR blogs any more. They are all stuck in the old model of play, and just don’t have enough to contribute to the advancement and evolution of the hobby. They also very rarely...
How PvP Increases Role-Playing
When every player is actively engaged with every other player, this opens up the possibility for role-playing well beyond the conventional model of play. In conventional play, meaningful role-play is limited to player-GM interactions. Sure, you can role-play conversations within the party, and those in-character negotiations can influence the...
Towards A New Model of Adventure Gaming
As this post goes live, the IP holders for D&D are doing their darndest to rip conventional play away from the hobby approach of “anything is possible at the table (as long as you adhere to story-arc driven narrative games)” and into a consumerist approach of “gatcha driven subscription...
Hyde’s Reach: A New Campaign
There’s a new wargame campaign in the House of Wargaming, and it’s in a genre that I’m not too familiar with. Luckily, you don’t have to be to get started. You can learn on the fly, which is a lot easier when you’ve got a guide like Henry Hyde...
By Semi-Popular Demand
First of all: big new project in the works. Expect a busy July. Second of all: Hitting the five-thousand subscriber mark over on the Wargame Channel marks a significant milestone. The interest is there, and growth continues at a steady pace of a thousand new subscribers every seven months...
Classic Traveller: Brief Update
We’ve got our first space princess! Okay, so Queen Carrere Tiadime (“tee-uh-dee-may”) isn’t technically a princess, but she must have been at some point. Today, however, she serves as the current head of the largest polity on Blaine’s World, which is ruled by a hereditary oligarchy, and how does...
Traveller: Chad’s First Freelance
The people have spoken, and the Blackreef Syndic needs our hero, one Chad Solo, to recover some very important and hush-hush company materiel that they quote misplaced unquote somewhere out in interSyndican waters. The Blackreef Syndic, in the person of mid-level Admin named Joan Alice, offered Chad Solo a...
College Football, We Hardly Knew Ye
Having discovered the pleasures of ten-minute game summaries on YouTube, few of which spoil the ending, I made something of a reacquaintance with college football in 2023. It proved to be a good year to do so, as a former Michigander, it gave me great pleasure to watch from...
Site Upgrade
It’s not a huge improvement, but it should make everyone’s life a little easier. I kicked up a new page that has links to the most commonly requested resources on this site. It’s more sparse than I expected it to be after all these years. We’ll add to it...