Not Even Joking

Inspired by a deeply cogent comment left at "The Joy of Wargaming":  Tabletop role playing games, properly played, ARE wargames.

Let me take my troll face off and address your comment with more sincerity.  When RPGs branched out from the wargame hobby, they left a lot of money on the table.  Some solid scholarship is being done today to work back to that fork in the hobby road and see what happens if we take the path less travelled.  I am gearing up to run another solo campaign in this same style, but using a more Classic Gygaxian approach.  Not just the same campaign but with orcs.  We're talking about something much deeper.  An exploration of how Silvestri's work might help us understand how Chainmail can be used not as an addendum to RPGs, but as a foundational framework.

Exciting stuff, but we have to be patient.  Our forefathers left us very few guidestones, and what we have are occluded by years of overgrowth.  It will take some time to clear the vines and get a better look at the road.  

There is a deep and abiding power lurking in those time-shrouded woods.  This is no slight against today's gaming culture, merely a recognition that much of what we think we know about the Time Before just isn't so.  The only way to sort the history from the revisionist history is to go back and walk that ground ourselves.

Wargaming is for...

 

It would be nice to have one hobby that wasn't sacrificed on the altar of the moral panicky crowds.

Rogue Stars Eye Candy

 What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good infiltration mission.  Here, the crew of a tramp freighter have snuck into Starport Moai to re-clone a couple of forcibly infected crewmembers.  This looks like a job for Gold Cross.  Not even an mRNA scrambler shot of nano-trackers can survive the cooking up of a full-blown clone.

Here, the crew of the Blackraven have to sneak two crew-members from the front door, into the Gold Cross franchise, and make their getaway before the alarm is sounded.

Spoiler alert: They don't make it.

The guy watching the camera feeds (lower left, above) was not fooled by Marion's hack for quite long enough.  Once the jig was up, he managed to race back to the main office and alert the guards, who promptly set out to stop the crew from making good their escape.

Here's one more shot, in the moments before the storm broke.  In the end, the alarm was raised too late.  Not early enough to leave the crew unscathed, but too late to stop them.  The sole injury was a wounded arm, and Lt. Dayne losing his favorite blast rifle.  All in all, not a bad trade to keep the crew healthy and untrackable.

You can watch the full action here:

Hawaiians Rise Up

Looking to give Tribal a shot, and scratch pre-contact Hawaiian warfare off the bucket list.

These fellas are 15mm, and ordered from Eureka Miniatures.  They are clean sculpts, perfectly proportioned, and near as I can tell, historically accurate.

The figures are looking good but I don't have enough of them. No one would tell me how many figures you need. Let me ruin the mystery. You need a leader, at least one hero, and 15 to 20 guys per side. You buy warriors in groups of five, and one group, or one leader, or one heroes, all cost one army point.

Get the game here.

Centaur For a Friend

A good buddy, regular guy, not a gamer, asked if I can get him a centaur figure.

Oh yeah.  I can do that.

Modern Warfare: Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Guys

Welcome to plus-ultra mega-elite modern day wargaming where we feature stories ripped from the headlines.  Which naturally means stories that are as fake as the Piltdown Man.

To do that we'll need some modern terrain (working on it), some rules (Osprey's Black Ops), and a matched pair of forces.

In one corner, weighing in at several trillion dollars and dressed all in black, we have the SWAT forces dedicated to protecting the Modernist World Order:

In the other corner, weighing in at a couple hundred bucks and a few thousand rounds of ammo, we have this ragtag band of *ahem* Freedom Fighters.

 

Looks like a gross mis-match.  Let's go down to the sidelines and see what our roving analysts have to say about the coming game.  Take it away, Minh and Walid!

Nightwatch - Spawn Matrix

 Nightwatch: Terror and Treasure in the Dark Corners of the World has proven to be a delightful little solo wargame that has kept your host occupied for hours.  Almost four of them so far, and I'm finally starting to get the hang of all the basic rules.  One thing that I have found helps me need to remember less stuff is to prepare a 'reinforcement' table before the game begins.  Rather than refer to the table in the book and have to remember turn number and what my current difficulty rating is, I can just grab the next batch of baddies and go to town.

Take a look:

The numbers at the top are the turn numbers, the letters down the left hand side represent "Terrors", "Hordes", and "Vermin" from top to bottom.  Now, once my little Guildsters have completed their four actions on a turn, I can just reach over and grab the next column of reinforcements.  This also gives me a solid 'turn counter', because I can just look at the blank columns and know where I am at in the current game.

Here is some tabletop eye candy showing a scrum as four heroes defend the bones of a fallen saint against the ravages of lizardmen:

And if you want to get your hands on a copy for yourself: