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...
Every day of Advent in 2024, Games Workshop surprised Warhammer 40,000 players by releasing new detachment rules for every possible army, and everybody loved it. Then, just a few days ago, Games Workshop revealed 3 more detachments, completely out of the blue, and everybody loved it. The reason...
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...
In a wargame, you frequently have 20 or 30 or even 100 miniatures in your army. This can be confusing for a few reasons, not the least of which the sheer number of physical objects you have to keep track of. Each miniature generally gets to move and attack, and may also be subject to morale checks o...
I've written about roleplay and roleplaying in reverse in wargames, but the only reason I have the luxury of waxing poetic about additional options for wargaming is because it's such a flexible system. Roleplay can fit nicely into a wargame, just as much as a wargame fits nicely into an RPG (tha...
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've been playing Mansions of Madness a lot lately, which is a game I love but also one that inspires a lot of thought about strategy and roleplay. In a tabletop roleplaying game, like Tales of the Valiant or Pathfinder or Shadowrun, you often make up a strategy based on how you think your...
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...
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...
Back in the early days of the video arcade, you paid to play a game for as long as you wanted, until you lost. For whatever reason, it was pretty common for you to have 3 attempts before the game decided you had truly lost the game and the coin you'd inserted into the arcade cabinet. When home conso...
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...
About half-way through the lifespan of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, a company called Paizo was commissioned to take over publication. After the Dungeon and Dragon and Polyhedron magazines were discontinued, Paizo obstinantly continued to publish adventures for D&D. And from magazine t...
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 5: Riddles in the Dark.
This review contains sp...
Everybody has their own tolerance levels for how complex they want a game engine to be. In fact, many of us have a different preference depending on the game. The current trend, and I assume the trajectory games are on in general, is that there's beauty in simplicity. Things are more fun when they r...
In The Two Towers, Book III, there's an intriguing conversation that happens between Gimli and Legolas. Gimli is waxing poetic about the caverns and halls of Helm's Deep, and in response Legolas says:
You move me, Gimli. I have never heard you speak like this before. Almost you make me regret...
Zombies are the perfect mindless monster, a great threat for any setting. They're some of my favourite enemies for so many reasons, and that's probably part of the reason they tend to pop up in the games I play. I don't consciously favour them, because they can become tedious unless the game is, f...