Mixed Signals

Straight-forward gaming

When you hear the term "wargame", you probably think "big" because a war is big. It's not a skirmish, it's not a battle, it's not an operation or a sting or astrike, it's a war. Because a war is big, there's a general admiration and excitement in the wargaming community for an expansive game board...

You don't have to see many games of Dungeons & Dragons in movies or TV shows to know that media doesn't understand how D&D works. But with the innovation of homemade videos and podcasts distributed over the Internet, we've all gotten access to "live play" shows of real people actually playing tabl...

In the second battle report of the Tran'Lo Tribute campaign, the Adeptus Mechanicus team escaped from prison and made its way into the secret archeotech vault of the Vo family.

Having gained access to the vault, the Skitarii have discovered access back to the surface. Through this access port,...

I'm playing through all the Mansions of Madness scenarios I own, and reviewing each one as I go. Shattered Bonds is the third adventure listed in the app, and it's rated 5 stars (the highest rating in the game) for difficulty. This review contains spoilers.

I've already said in previous review...

In August 2024, a rulebook called Boarding Actions was released for Warhammer 40,000. As an expansion for the game, Boarding Actions provides missions inside the corridors of vast space ships, which means that having terrain to build walls and doors is essential to the game. Without walls and...

I was shopping at my favourite local used bookshop recently and stumbled upon A Guide to Tolkien by David Day. Originally published by Mitchell Beazley of Octopus Publishing Group in 1979, and then republished by Chancellor Press in 2001, this 260 page book is an endlessly useful reference book fo...

My introduction to miniatures was through D&D. When I started out, miniatures weren't generally found in board games (or at least, not any I'd been exposed to) and I didn't know about wargaming, so miniatures were a thing for "pen and paper" RPGs. By the time I started buying them for myself, the ea...

In the first battle report of the Tran'Lo Tribute campaign, the Adeptus Mechanicus were defeated by loyalists to the heretical Family Vo. In the actual game all but 1 Fulgurite Electro-Priestess died. Through the magic of the limitless storytelling that can happen between game sessions, however,...

I've been playing a lot of Mansions of Madness lately, and I've noticed that I spend way too much time sorting through game assets. A character gains a clue, and I grab the container of interaction tokens instead. A character uses a spell and has to draw a new one, and I grab the Conditions deck i...

Tran'Lo is a forge-world in the Macharian Sector of the Imperium of Man. It gets but a passing mention in the Warhammer 40,000: Imperium Maledictum RPG rulebook, but I borrowed it as the setting for a wargame campaign.

Tran'Lo was originally ruled by House Vo. When the family was declared Hereti...

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 12: Inside Information.

This review contains sp...

Setting up a Gopher site isn't terribly difficult, but I wanted a setup that allowed my to manage my posts using Git and to essentially mirror what I have on the web. I'm documenting my solution here mostly for my own future reference.

Here's the workflow.

  1. On the Gopher server, add a bare Gi...

When I first saw Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, I didn't see actually see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I read a picture book in school, a sort of summary of the movie intended, I think, for kids too young to actually see the movie. When I saw the photos of Han Solo in India and t...

I recently read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Priests of Mars by Graham McNeill, and this is my review of it. There are spoilers in this review, so do not read on if you're getting ready to read the book yourself. The short spoiler-free review is that the book is good, although maybe atypical of wh...

In an effort to keep better track of what I watch, I'm writing a post about each movie I watch. This isn't a review so much as it a note, but this post does contain minor spoilers. Stop reading if you haven't seen The Mummy (1999), and go watch it, because it's a classic.

The Mummy is a remake...

I listened to the Warhammer 40,000 audio drama Our Matyred Lady by Gav Thorpe while painting miniatures recently. It stars Catherine Tate, who Dr. Who fans will recognise as Donna, as Inquisitor Greyfax. This is my review of the show, with a bunch of spoilers so don't read it if you intend to li...