In The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books, Tolkien manages to cultivate a gravity around many of the fictional items and creatures he's invented. In retrospect, it starts with the titular ring itself, The One Ring as it's notated in the RPG and wargame derivatives, but it includes famous creat...
The Dark Imperium trilogy is a series set during the Cicatrix Maledictum era (which, at the time of this writing, is the "current" time of Warhammer 40,000). It's notable because it features Roboute Guilliman, the primarch of the Ultramarines, risen from a centuries-long coma. This is my review...
I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 2: Roast Mutton.
This review contains spoilers....
Buying miniature kits has been an interesting learning experience for me as a newcomer to the wargaming hobby. There are lots of miniature designers and vendors out there, and I don't know of an easy way to get a feel for each one without buying a box of models to find out. I don't have the time, mo...
It's easy to look at a wargame and think that it's essentially "just" the combat system of an RPG. All the G without the R or the P. Similarly, it's easy to look at the original RPG (the fabled Chainmail supplement by Gygax and Arneson, I mean) and notice that the RPG was meant to be all the stuff b...
Wargames are usually big, meaning they're physically large. They're about wars by design, so they're meant to evoke the epic scale of great historical or fictional battles. You play a wargame on a big table, with terrain so elaborate that it qualifies as a diorama, with thirty or sixty or even a hun...
While I was painting a Warhammer 40,000 Genestealer Cult army and an opposing army of Adeptus Mechanicus, I decided to listen to the book Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work by Guy Haley. This is my review of it, and it contains no spoilers. But I'll cut to the chase and say that this is one of the...
I recently realised that reading Tolkien is a solo RPG. You read his work, you piece together the scraps of lore he sprinkled thnoughout the books and left to us in the form of letters, and you ponder it and map it out until you understand Middle Earth. If he'd been alive today, he'd have just got...
The best experience I've had in wargaming so far has been with Games Workshop and Warhammer. I don't trust the company any more than I trust any company (which is not at all, due to the authoritarian power structure of corporations) but I do recognise that the '20s version of GW has been able to, so...
This month, I decided to design a game based on what I think fantasy football is. I don't actually know what fantasy football is. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, it's "a game in which participants assemble an imaginary team of real life football players and score points based on those players'...
In the Battle Companies expansion for Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game, pages 104 to 111 provide a map-based campaign for the game. It's an elegantly simple and fun system for tracking the progress your army or warband is making through any given series of battles. The book suggests that a map-...
I used to think wargames sounded unimaginative and overly strategic. I pictured players obsessed with military history reenacting, with miniatures, old battles exactly as they were described in the history books. How is that even a game? I couldn't understand how a great game like AD&D could possib...
I grew up with The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as bedtime stories. Those books have been part of my life literally for as long as I can remember. There is no beginning, they were just always there. When I got out into the real world, I was surprised to learn that there were people who knew way...
If you design even just one game, it doesn't take long for you to realise that a game is mostly a maths exercise in disguise. You have a random selection of cards, and you compare numbers to see who wins. You roll dice, and the number you roll changes the state of the game. You count spaces on a boa...
Taking a break from the 31st millennia for a while, I just finished Cadia Stands by Justin D. Hill. Set solidly in the 41st millennia, this novel is about the planet Cadia, a sentinel guarding the massive Warp rift known as the Eye of Terror. This review contains major spoilers. You have been...
Good storytelling is usually about the process of achieving something. That's the story part of a story. A character wants something, but can't have it. The character goes through some transformative trials until the thing is "earned", at which point the character gets the thing and the story is ove...