Hump Day Dump Day #6

It's hump day, so I've got to include a picture of a camel...get it?  A sopwith camel?  Eh? EH?

Ahhh, who am I kidding, I was just looking for an excuse to post the cover of this great game. In high school, my game crew bought a cheap second hand copy of this and played the heck out of it for years.  Well worth a look if you ever cross paths with it.

Traveling Set (BattReps): Due to the popular request, I am presenting here my traveling wargaming set. If you are like me, and you spend better part of the week in hotels on business trips, out of home, you would like to take your hobby with you. Here is the way I am doing that.

Lost Mines of Phandelver (Dungeon of Signs): Forgotten Realms was the worst thing to happen to D&D, honestly, it's just a terrible setting that reeks of bathos and takes itself far to serious. It plunders everything cliched and overused from Tolkien but abandons all the strangeness and mythological references. It fills the land with huge civilized bastions of good like Waterdeep and exhaustively defines their systems of governance, but allows these nations to be plagued by trifling enemies like goblin tribes. Forgotten Realms embraces a pedantic faux-medievalism, but then uses a contemporary positivist understanding to explain magic that allows for cutesy magical technology to gloss over the inconvenient aspects of the pre-modern. Most offensively, most objectionably, Forgotten Realms is a dense, full world, so steeped in cliched lore and laid out so extensively in dull gazetteers that there is no room for a GM's creativity without excising some of the setting's existing lore and map.

Mixing Mass Combat with RPG D&D (ChicagoWiz's Games): I went back and forth through a number of mass combat systems - Chainmail, Battle System, the OD&D Swords & Spells supplement, HOTT/DBA... none of these really seemed to scratch all the itches I had. They all had their good sides, but the biggest downfall was how to realistically include the players into a combat situation where they weren't going to stride through the fields like Super Heroes (until they hit 8th to 10th level...) but they could make a meaningful contribution and have some chance of survival. Then enter David Collins of Delta's D&D Hotspot blog. In September of 2011, he released a small set of mass combat rules called "Book of War."

Star Wars, Gendered Sci-Fi, Slave Leia and Reiterating Why I’m Not Stoked for Star Wars (Cirsova): Now here’s a cultural Ouroboros. JJ Abrams is saying “Star Wars was always a boys thing,” because today’s culture is so obsessed with the notion that until the recent diversity push of today, entertainment was hopelessly gendered and probably really racist. Abrams is just saying what he’s being told, and what he’s saying is he’s trying to right the ancient wrongs of sci-fi past. Of course now he’s being dogpiled for suggesting that Star Wars was a ‘boys thing’. Look you guys, don’t you see, he’s just trying to make it less problematic for you! He’s got a boring looking lady in drab clothes to be the hero who will be teamed up with a non-threatening man who will not make aggressive passes or snark at her!

40K Bad Guys in 15mm (KJdidt on TheMiniaturesPage): Pic Heavy! 15mm Chaos – Iron Warriors, Cultists and Daemons (with a Reaver Titan to boot). Necrons, too.