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 9: Barrels out of bond.
This review contains sp...
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 8: Flies and Spiders.
This review contains spoi...
Recently, I took a blacksmithing workshop. I haven't felt the need to do any more smithing, but it did satisfy my curiosity about the process. Also, it's made me think about metal than I used to. While painting my army for Hattusa, I knew I wanted it to be very clear that they existed in the Bronze...
In previous blog posts, I've lamented the lack of historical miniatures where I live and how that forced me to use a Carthaginian army as my Romans, and an Ancient Egyptian army for my Ptolemaic army. Very recently, a local mini reseller added a proper Roman army, so I sent my Carthaginians back to...
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 7: Queer Lodgings.
This review contains spoiler...
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 6: Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire.
This r...
I read Knights of Macragge by Nick Kyme, partly because I'm mystified by Black Library's sequencing, and this is my review. This review contains spoilers.
I thought Knights of Macragge might be part of the Indomitus series, which is weird because Indomitus (I think) isn't a series but a si...
I read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Indomitus by Gav Thorpe, and this is my review. This post contains spoilers.
You know how there are episodes of Star Trek (TOS and TNG) where our heroes beams down to a planet to save a civilisation in peril, and then there are episodes of Star Trek where our...
I hear a lot about the Warhammer 40,000 skirmish game, Kill Team, and people seem to really love it. In fact, there's a significant player base out there who seem to like it more than 40k. I was curious enough to investigate, but not $145 NZD curious (the cost of the Kill Team Starter Set, so...
I have a handful of early Warhammer 40,000 Chaos Space Marine miniatures, which I purchased on TradeMe just to practise painting back when I was just starting to explore the wargaming hobby. I don't intend to play the 3rd edition of Warhammer 40,000 but nevertheless I thought it might be fun to...
I recently listened to the Eye of Night audio drama, written by Gav Thorpe for the Warhammer 40,000 Black Library. It's a pretty short production, consisting of three files that total about 60 minutes in total. It's a proper audio drama, like an actual radio play, and it's a lot of fun to hear....
Visually, you can never go wrong by adding a skull or two. I don't know what it is about the insides of our own heads, but for some reason we humans think fleshless cranial bones are pretty cool. I'm no exception, and in fact I've had a tattoo of a skull on my arm for years now. Skulls are iconic an...
Monsters attack ancient Rome! Can your legionaries defeat them? I've been playing Broken Legions by Mark Latham, published by Osprey Games, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. I picked up the book because I like alternate history, and also because this seemed like an excellent excuse t...
I recently read the Warhammer 40,000 novel Ephrael Stern: The Heretic Saint by David Annandale, and this is my review of the book, with no more spoilers than you'd get from the back of the book. I picked this book up based entirely on its title (a heretic saint? How does that work??) and cool...
Like many hobbyist game designers before me, I recently had the idea of taking photographs of beautiful fantasy-like settings, for lack of a reliable source of custom illustration, and use them in a game book. No matter how hard I tried though, I just couldn't make the photographs feel like a fantas...
If you've never read the Lord of the Rings, or you read it a long time ago, then you might not realise that there are 6 books in the series. They're sold in just 3 volumes, called Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, but each volume is divided into two books ea...