City Construction
It’s the little things. With some doors and windows and signs painted onto the structures The City is really taking on a life of its own. A little ode to the bookshop that helped instill a love of gaming in ankle-biter me. A smarter man than I would have...
City Planning
You can’t take to the streets when you don’t have any streets to which to take. Before we can play the most cutting-edge and modern of wargames, Riot: From Watt Tyler to Watts we have to build a city worth peacefully burning to the ground. Here’s my quick and dirty...
Total Recall Rewatch: Random Thoughts
Still holds up, for the most part. You have to set aside a whole lot of junk science to appreciate it, but as a late-80s actioner, it works. Yeah, the feeling of the thing is very much what the 1980s thought the future would look like, complete with over-large...
Grognardia Respawns
After eight years and with little fanfare, new content is up on the site. It’s just a review of some Swedish OSR product for now, but James is a smart thinker, and I look forward to his thoughts on tabletop RPGs. Hopefully we’ll get more fresh content without another...
Always an Alternative
No entertainment product is indispensable. There is always an alternative, even if it’s just reading bible stories around the living room. The powerborkers – spelling intentional – forgot that the artificial little tribes they built around jerseys and colors mean a lot less to the public than the organic...
Getting Lost in the Wilds of D&D
I’m still hip-deep in a wargaming kick and off the D&D wagon. But I thought the following might be of interest. A friend writes: I searched the PHB and DMG for any mention of having a ranger or druid prevents parties from getting lost. It does say that if...
The Music of the Ainur
Listening to the Silmarillion on audiobook, and something occurred to me. The three themes of the Ainur presage the three ages of Middle-Earth. From the Tolkien Gateway: The Ainur’s flawless Music satisfied even Ilúvatar during this early stage. The Second Theme was “like and yet unlike” the First; it...
Wargaming Social Media
Forums represent the best that social media has to offer the miniature wargamer. I’ve been slowly accreting some solid wargaming bros on the Twitter, but the ephemeral nature of microblogging means that the pictures and tales and rule discussions held there vanish in to the void. What the site...
Riot: A Game Twenty Five Years in the Waiting
One of the projects that has been on my ‘to-do’ list for over twenty-five years is a good old-fashioned, downtown riot. Something about the asymmetric nature of the conflict, the confined corridors of battle, and the fluid nature of the fight just screams for a proper wargame. Maybe it’s...
Thumb’s Up: The Vast of Night
This was pretty good. It’s a slow-burn mystery set in small-town New Mexico way back in the lost golden age of the 1950s. The plot revolves around a technically literate high-school girl – one who feels organically smart rather than performatively so because screw you manbabies – and a...