Snarling Badger recently released Deth Wizards, a skirmish wargame in which you play a necromancer and undead minions. I've enjoyed Snarling Badger products so far, and I like the idea of playing a necromancer with a little team of wights and wraiths and zombies. I bought the physical book and th...
The board game (or is it a wargame?) Zombicide is a brutal and exciting and imbalanced fight for survival. In the game, up to six Survivors embark on a mission (usually to retrieve supplies or a special weapon) in a city infested with up to 70-ish zombies. Of course, zombies are zombies. They sha...
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 4: Over Hill and Under Hill.
This review contai...
I sometimes play the Genestealer Cults faction in Warhammer 40,000. The new Genestealer Cults codex recently came out. I already own the digital index and the physical reference cards, but I purchased the new book for a few different reasons, and I've read it from cover to cover. 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 3: A Short Rest.
This review contains spoilers....
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....
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...
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...
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...
The Internet's a funny place. You make friends you never meet, and sometimes inevitably you lose a friend, too. In June of 2024, the Internet lost Craig Maloney, a creative contributor to free culture, RPG, podcasting, and open source.
I never met Craig, or even talked to him, but I became a fan o...
I'm re-reading the Horus Heresy, and this is my review of the fifth book in the series, Fulgrim by Graham McNeill. There are spoilers in this review.
The fifth book in the Horus Heresy continues to escalate the tension while simultaneously re-telling, like Flight of the Eisenstein did, eve...