We played Legion of Honour on Saturday evening. I put on the uniform of a Sous-Lieutenant first assigned to the Army of the Rhine.

I didn't achieve much. I stole money from my unit, spread rumours of cowardice about the character of a fellow player, spent a few uneventful weeks in the staff, got investigated for whatever reason (cannot remember). I ended up getting guillotined for treason even before the rise to prominence of the Corsican (and before being challenged to a duel by the fellow player).

The game lets us weave our stories on the frame of the rise of the First Empire and its downfall at Waterloo. After having rolled our characters, their life are dictated by the drawing of event cards. Garrison card and campaign cards. You hope for an assignment in an army that sees some action or to the reserve army, near Paris and political action.

Some event cards allow for some limited choices, some event cards impact you ostentatiously, no recourse to a dice roll. There is History with a big H, as the player you know it, and then there is history, the history of your character. There are so many threads of fate intertwined, History does not care much for you, but the game gets you to cherish that thread that is yours.

The player hopes for the character to be assigned to the Army of Italy, to get noticed by Buonaparte, the Corsican intriguant. I was happy to get assigned to the staff in that same Army, but it led me to nothing. My character probably was just a fancy messenger boy, dashing despatches between the staff and regiments on the move.

I came to dislike my character, the event card dictated that it would be spreading rumours on a fellow character, describing him as a coward. Well, you have to lean into that. Actually that character distinguished himself in the Army of the North, slashing Dutch reactionary forces and my character had no real experience of fighting at that point. The cards were drawing the silhouette of a rascal of a character.

We only played three seasons, but pre-Empire France drove us through many events. Valmy, Fleurus, Rivoli. It feels bad when a great battle happens and there is not a scrap of glory for you because you're assigned to the quiet sector.

There is a side of the game about your character and the Fair Sex. We didn't delve much into it, at least my character couldn't do much on that field, being far from glamourous Paris for much of his time.

We should have watched The Duellists as a warm up. Maybe War and Peace by Bondarchuk, as well, the officers carousing with a bear reminded me of our Legion of Honor trail.

We decided to save our characters, photographing the main sheets, and to continue at a later time. It is not as open as a classical role playing game, but one gets attached to their character anyway. Somehow, it feels right, there are great things happening and they impact you, you hope to be at the right place at the right time. Like a rolling stone.

At first I tought he had round welder glasses up his forehead, but the glass was red. What could it be. Hellboy.

Looking into Konflikt'47 drove me to Hellboy. I had heard about him a while back, but that was lost in the fog of souvenirs. I remember taking a mental note along the lines of "this comic has something special of the category C". But I completely forgot what stands behind this C.

Hellboy, are you English? No, I am American. Yes, you are, you punch your way through almost all of the situations, left and especially right, with your massive fist of [manifest] destiny.

Each evening I was happy to find the volumes near my bed. England, New Mexico, Mexico, Norway. Lovecraftian horror, vampire stories, Arthurian mythology. Jab, jab, straight, hook.

You've always seemed good. I can't remember seeing any bad in you, is it because of your mother renouncing evil in the end?

The United States of America dropped a nuclear bomb on the Nazi Germany city of Dresden. At least, they did it in the alternate timeline of Konflikt'47. That gave the Jerries a "rift" and their boffins got to work on the anomaly.

We worked through the first five (of six) missions of the Introductory Set of the game. Mutazoid led the Germans, black and feldgrau, with gleaming green eyes. I took the springy US fireflies.

The first mission left me wondering, will the evening be one-sided? My light infantry jumped in range and fell like flies, barely making a dent on the heavy german armor. Drinking the bitter Krupp to the dregs.

Konflikt'47 is a Warhammer 40K descendant, via Rick Priestley. You roll a handful or two of six-sided dice, fives and sixes hit, then the adversary's armor gets its say, roll high and it absorbs the hit. A Cover gives the target another merciful layer of dice roll. Range, line of sight, as usual.

Beware of melee, it is lethal.

The difference with Rogue Trader starts with the initiative being resolved by a bag containing one dice per units on the table. Green for the fireflies, grey for the jerries.

A die for your side is drawn, you now have to decide of an order to give to a not yet tasked unit on your side.

<Fire> stay in place and shoot at the adversary; <Advance> move and fire (with a -1 to the to hit resolution); <Run> full advance with potentially contact and melee; <Rally> roll 2d6 if it's under your morale score, shed all your pin markers; <Down> may not move or fire, gain a cover save +2 in place; <Ambush> may not move, prepares for an opportunity fire or charge.

The introductory mission go cognitively on an easy crescendo, first the basic orders, then the introduction of pin markers, followed by rift technology and its rift dice. Mission five sees a Linebacker US mech plodding along the battlefield, to be ambushed by anti-tank guns.

A unit gets one more pin marker each time it takes one or more hits. Units without pin markers readily do what they are told. A unit with them has to roll a morale check 2d6 ≤ (vet 10, experienced 9 or rookie 8) - pin marker count. Failing a morale check results in the unit getting the Down order dice (consolation lot: the +2 cover save).

Rally lets a unit pause and regroup, it rolls under its unmodified morale level (vet 10, exp 9, rookie 8) and in case of success, sheds all its pin markers.

The few paragraphs above are enough to let one play Bolt Action from which Konflikt'47 is directly derived. I'll spare you a description of the rift dice system, but be assured, it is not difficult and it flows.

I wanted to play Trench+Crusade first, but Konflikt'47 got me distracted. The order dice system of Bolt Action put the foot in the door. Also the smaller dystopian distance between the 1944 divergence and 1947 to T+C 1099 divergence to 191x is less dizzying. The terrain I am almost done building for T+C will also find its use with K47.

I love the order dice and the pin markers. I like the openness (the whole world of WW2 28mm miniatures is fair game), the Bolt Action rules and lists are usable if your opponent agrees (though a bit underpowered).

It was an excellent evening of gaming, and now I want to play again, with the full rules, in this rift-powered extension to the second world war.

(Update 2026-04-09: excellent Alessio Cavatore on Bolt Action video)

Mutazoid was explaining to me that, as he was using regular six-sided dices to track the current gear of the cars in his Gaslands Refuelled games, it often happened that the dice were grabbed and rolled when attacking, losing track of the gear unfortunately.

I started designing a gear shifter in my head. After a few sketches on paper and some reverie, I hit printables.com to find out if someone had already designed such a tool.

My first search was specifically about Gearlands and did not yield much. I defocused to "gear shift" and came across this fidget toy that I quickly downloaded and printed. It came out nice, but unfortunately it sits on its spring, it doesn't sit flat.

On Printables, it is worth exploring for "forks" of designs, they are called "remixes" and successful design yield many of them. I was not disappointed and came across this three parts redesign that looked and is probably more robust than the original item.

Since it is a multipart design, it gave me the opportunity to switch color. I opted for black for the box and the knob and silver for the lever itself.

One last thing was missing, the actual gear numbers. Unfortunately, I only had some medium acrylic permanent markers lying around. I tried my best to write the numbers with as thin a line as possible but I failed miserably.

I packed nine of the artefacts and the acrylic marker in a box that I got delivered (Thanks Anthony!) to Mutazoid, trusting him with the number marking. The prints made it to the table on time for Mutazoid Sunday's game. They performed well I've been told.

To indicate what is the current gear phase, I had printed a twice bigger instance of the item. Its PLA lever broke at my second interaction. I reinforced its axis with tootpicks and PVA blue on the inside and sealed the outside with cyanoacrylate glue. I should probably print the lever and spring in PETG. PLA is sufficent for the encasing.

I don't think Mutazoid made use of this big one, he used a big dice with roman numerals it seems. I guess noone had the urge of rolling it.

We played Nemesis. What a solid game!

I came unprepared to the table, thinking that it was a riff on Aliens, it isn'it, it's a riff on Alien. So far, my favourite game on Alien had been, well, Alien, which is a simple and efficient collaborative game.

We woke up in the middle of the ship, exiting our hibernation pods, we notice a corpse lying on the floor, and none of us can remember the layout of the ship. The engines are at the back, and the bridge is at the front. Why the corpse? It seems it died a violent death. Are the engines on? Where is the ship heading?

I was handed "The Scientist" as a character. I like that genericity, I am in a wheelchair, I look a little bit like Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park, but the name of the character is left for me to choose, or not.

We somehow forgot the layout of the ship. There are three rooms between us and the engines, and four other rooms to the bridge. Being the first player, I went towards the engine and the first room I came into was the nest for something. And my wheelchair got pretty slimey. I rolled the "noise dice" and the corridor I just had used got a noise marker.

Let's stop, I will not reminisce all we did in that ship. My fellow shipmates escaped by getting back into their escape pods after having turned the ship signal on, pointed the ship at Earth, and checked that the three engines were on. Matt got killed by an intruder right before entering his pod. Too bad.

You have to choose one objective, one personal or one corporate. I had chosen the corporate objective which required me to use the laboratory and determine two weaknesses of the intruder species. Since I spent most of the game fooling around and firing parthian shots at the monsters, I was late in caring about realizing my objectives. I understood the search mechanism a bit late and was a mistake. I needed chemicals and lab tools to do my job. I ended up outside of my hibernation pod as the ship engines fired.

We were heading back to Earth. Kaori and Tony were the winners, having performed all the steps before reaching back the safety of their pods. But Kaori was infected by an intruder. And the ship was full of intruders. I guess that the engine kicking back in meant the death of any life form not an hibernation pod (me included).

As I wrote on top, it is a solid game with great replayability. My friends had said they had never succeeded at it. Yesterday was a first for them. I was surprised by the number of fiends that jumped at us after a few turns. It felt like a lost cause, helping each other did the trick.

It lacks the space truck feeling conveyed by the original movie, but it has its own charm. I want to play again.

God is absent from battlefields and the dead from the beginning of the war, those poor little rookies in garance-red trousers forgotten in the grass, dotted the pasture in stains as numerous but not as consequent as cow pies.

My first read of "La Main Coupée" (the severed hand) was a little bit more than thirty years ago. Between pages, at the back of the book, I found my marching order for my first troop service in 1996, so maybe it is thirty years ago.

My French teacher was and is probably still fond of Blaise Cendrars. His dream was to come across a copy of "La Prose du Transsibérien" illustrated by Sonia Delauney.

Incidentally, I played a record of this transsiberian the other evening while setting up the table for the Fellowship of the Ring. Could have Cendrars and Tolkien met under the vast sky of Northern France? There is no mention of Cendrars' foreign volunteer bataillon ever meeting British regulars.

What made me appreciate Cendrars and look for his poems and his prose is "Les Pâques à New York" (Easter in New York). Reading it felt like dancing, slowly. Is the God described there the God in Tolkien's faith?

"Blaise Cendrars" is a pen name, it is a pun name, it twists to "Ember Ashes". But Cendrars did join the volunteers in 1914 under another name (his real name?). "La Main Coupée" is one of the two books that describe his trench life.

He was at first in a foreign volunteer bataillon which was later incorporated in the Foreign Legion. It is noteworthy that the Legion keeps as a sacred relic the prosthetic hand of Capitaine Danjou. Cendrars lost his right hand, while Danjou had lost his left hand.

Cendrars' trench life comes as a mosaic of people and places, anecdotes, fights against sergeants. He seems to have had a natural leadership that was resented by the regular non-commissioned officers. Cendrars could speak French, English, German, and Russian, in a foreign volunteer unit that would count.

From my first read of the book, I remembered Blaise complaining about the Germans being better equipped than them, being always one step ahead. I also remembered Cendrars working and helping the snipers in his team, he writes about Bykov, a Russian volunteer that scored many hits on enemy sentries.

Most of the people met in the book die after a short or a long while. There is no over-dramatization, probably because Cendrars had already had a life full of adventures and people. Grief is not a stranger, grief is not a foreign volunteer.

He wanted to defend France against German Imperialism. He had co-signed a call to foreign artists residing in France and cherishing it to join the the fight. Fight he did, and, after having lost his hand and being discharged, he was granted French nationality in 1916.

During the Second World War, witnessing a column of German progressing through Provence, his heart felt a pang of hope as that place was not far from where Marius had defeated the Teutons.

Imagine a big six-sided dice on the table. A game turn starts on 1, then 2, until 6. When on 1, the cars in gear 1 to 6 activate, when on 2, the cars in gear 2 to 6 activate, and so on. Thus, a car in gear 6 will have activated six times.

An activation brings in three decisions: a choice of move pattern (straight on, swerve, veer, turn), a choice of "handling" dice count, and weapon usage.

As seen in the image, the choice of a move pattern is intuitive, as long as the pattern "gear range" encomprises the car's current gear. The intersection, selected pattern vs gear, yields "shifts" or "hazards". A shift lets you shift one gear up or down, while hazard tokens accumulate. At six hazard token, your car might topple.

In a turn, it's entirely ok to start in gear 1, shift up, move again in the gear 2 phase, gear up, move again in the gear 3 phase. Except that you accumulate hazard each time you gear up (can't remember if you accumulate a hazard for gearing down).

Hence the second decision. How many "handling" dice will you roll. My main car yesterday evening had a handling of 4. It meant that I could roll up to four dice. Those handling dice are faced shift, shift, slide, slide, spin, hazard. A shift result can be used to gear up (and incur one hazard) or to negate a non-shift result. It reads difficult but after two instances it comes naturally.

The shooting is reminiscent of other miniature (war)games, you check the range and fire a handful of six-sided dice hoping for 4 to 6, and then the target car has 1 save dice (six to save) per gear it is currently in.

That is all there is to it for the core rules. Pardon the dryness of my exposé, I felt it necessary to thus frame the game.

Mutazoid just had a Zona Alfa phase, he played it solo a couple of times and suddenly he jumped on kitbashing cars for Gaslands Refuelled.

I had the book on my shelf for the last two years. It had piqued my interest, but I had failed so far to set a game up (heeding the call of so many other games). I was surprised to see the bug reach Mutazoid and take hold of him. He sent me a few set of STL files, asking me to print them and also if I would be interested in playing a game. I immediately said yes to the two questions and here we were.

The printing had gone well on my side. I tried to use complementary colours to get fancy patterns and templates that would look good on the track.

Kudos to my friend for kitbashing twice three cars, black and yellow cars vs punks with pink hair in green rusted sport utility vehicle adjacent mounts. We did two games, using the core of the game (no audience votes, no sponsors). After two gear phases I had the move/handling/shoot decision mechanisms locked in.

Our first game was a one vs one, and in our second game we aligned two cars each. I lost the two games, but much fun was had. I am looking forward to the next session. I am tempted to kitbash something on my side. I have a Hilux from Tomica, what will it become? I should rather focus on my trench warfare terrain.

• The pleasure of playing with small cars, like you did in the corner of the dining room;
• Making the cars your own by customizing them;
• Intuitive patterns that you lay in front of the car to guide it yo its next position (or its next collision);
• A system of "handling" dice (and hazard tokens) take allow shifts, slides, spins, and overheats in toppling;
• Rear facing mortars, missiles, oil kegs, caltrops, lasers, machine guns, ...

96 models on each side, 192 in total. That must be a lot of paint, that must be a lot of hours of painting. Gary organized a Dragon Rampant game pitching 96 Iron Hills Dwarven models against 96 Gondor infantry with Rohan cavalry.

Gary not only painted the 192 models, he also printed and painted the pieces for the terrain where the fight took place.

43 army points versus 43 army points, whereas the standard Dragon Rampant game goes with 24 army points a side.

There was a bit of grumbling because why blue on blue? Personally, having avoided the Hobbit movie (and whatever came afterwards), I was surprised to meet dwarves on goats (I need to re-read the Hobbit).

The table is six feet by four and each side was given a six feet by five inches band to set up. Dragon Rampant wants us to have at least three inches between units, unless they are in contact. 10 units were difficult to place. Gary allowed us to start with less than 3 inches for the setup, we'd then have to move away.

What was nagging me as I was preparing stats for the 20 units is that if you run the numbers for move or attack on 5+ and as soon as an activation roll fails the hand goes to the adversary, on average, the fifth roll is a miss. You move 4 units and your turn ends. Granted there is one reroll if the unit is within twelve inches from the leader, good luck on the wings.

In our last game of Dragon Rampant, I saw my elite riders camping out, inactive, once they were away from the leader. Elite riders activate for moving on 7+. That did not help.

We had asked Gary to relax the activation rule, no sudden death, each unit gets a chance to activate. He refused. We asked him to have two captains a side (we were already two players a side). He refused again. We got back at pushing miniatures and squeezing our way to the center of the table.

The objective was seizing and holding the central building set up by our game master. It featured a balcony whose stairs was barred by an obstacle with twelve hit points.

Gary had also disseminated event markers on the table. We found a regeneration point, any unit getting back there could revert all its losses. We also found a troll next to the central building and he wiped one unit almost immediately.

If I remember correctly we avoided tripping the event, but Gary triggered it for us because he deemed us too slow in our progress. Sorry, the garage door was only large enough for one car.

My side took the central building initially, but with the intervention of the troll we were denied it. First turn of holding, 1 point, second turn 2 points, etc. We conceded after our adversary reached 6 points.

We had trouble moving our armies outside of the setup zone because of the number of units and of the three inches rules (our game master refused to relax it to one inch only).

I would have preferred:

• 2 captains a side, with clear delineation of responsibility
• 3 inch rule relaxed to 1 inch rule (as the rule suggest)

Also placing the captain in the elite riders was a mistake since they move on a 7+. But that mistake is entirely mine. Gary asked me to prepare the army list and simply said "one unit of riders including the captain". With the captain almost stuck in the back, our army slowly lowered its probability of activation reroll.

We had a beautiful table full of models (thanks Gary!) but our armies were difficult to handle. That was somehow compensated by our armies being identical.

I had printed holders for unit stats and Mutazoid immediately moved them out of the table. I was admirative of his memory capacity, remembering who was who. As the session ended, he admitted to me that he hated having those holders on the table and that it broke immersion for him. Sorry!

Congrats to Karl and Bernardo for their victory. Gratitude to Gary for having organized that game!

My Trench+Crusade terrain, although unfinished found its way to the tabletop. Devilish hordes did not stampede it, Space Marines and imperial troops confronted thugs and criminal hobbyists over it.

Mutazoid proposed we play a game of Rogue Trader, the first edition of Warhammer 40 000. I said yes.

Rogue Trader was published in 1987, I remember riding the train to Geneva with my friend Dennis to explore a game shop there. The main piece of loot was a copy of Rogue Trader, probably the first printing. I was a bit torn, because my level of English was insufficient at that point, but I bought the book anyway, because it was and still is an awesome gaming artefact. But what had I acquired?

In my foggy understanding of the thing, it was a skirmish game that could be used as a role-playing game. The lore was thick, dark, and felt like a hall where all kinds of guests could gather, and stories be told, and games played.

There was "Rogue Trader" on the cover, the concept was described in the book. But the Space Marines stole it all, supported by the Emperor. A trading stub of a rogue, but at no point would I feel cheated. Much meat on the many bones.

I had purchased eight beaky lead Space Marines. We cooked up a scenario, Marines vs Xenos in a cave complex, and that was it. The only game I played. I still have the book. Its spine is weaker, I had lent it to a graphical designer friend who avidly photocopied pieces of art out of it. He was not a gamer, but he certainly enthused over the cornucopia.

Maybe it was a bit too grim, my deciphering leading me to understand the toll exacted by the emperor, or maybe I didn't want to buy and paint miniatures, at that point I became more interested into hex and counter wargames. Why did I say yes in 2026? Because I'm back to miniature gaming thanks to Gary and Mutazoid.

In the grim darkness of far future there is only war. I'd much prefer leading a cavalry charge to elysian fields after having coordinated my center and my wings, on a beautiful summer day. Ancients, knights, balearic slingers and grassy green.

I said yes, because I wanted to experience the game under the guidance of a veteran and see, technically, what it is about. If I'm to play its grandsons Trench+Crusade and Konflikt'47, I need a grasp on Rogue Trader, a point of reference, a beacon.

Mutazoid described our first game in a post. I lost to the blue-skinned Xenos who stole some piece of hardware after hacking one or two of my squads with following fire.

Oh well, I felt like a deer caught in the headlights. How could I hit the ground and fire back? How to flank? Am I supposed to run by four inches increments towards death? Here is my charge into Elysium.

I felt like I had the words but not the grammar to weave sentences. I wanted to says "fix and flank", but could only utter "move and fire". The second game, yesterday evening, went better. Our sessions are turning into a campaign, so I'd better revise weapons and ranges, consider the terrain and reserve moves.

Mutazoid mentioned that there is an "Overwatch" rule, Remain on alert and fire during the opponent’s turn if a target appears says the AI, what page do I ask, "page 30", well, I don't see it there, I can't seem to find it, in the whole book, but what a trip down memory lane, what a piece of lore. No, I did not see any illustration of any Space Marine taking cover. I remembered Mutazoid saying something like "the ruleset has its origins in Napoleonics, lines of men standing and firing". Please give me french columns slamming into those lines... Vive l'Empereur!

Very grateful to my friend for having brought all his miniatures, having prepared a scenario (now turning into a campaign) and teaching me the rules. I'm looking forward to the third session. (Also kudos to Gary for having restored a Space Hulk set, I need to write about those sessions too).

Trench+Crusade has you place blood markers on models that took hits. Once your adversary models tries to do something you can convert a blood marker to a disadvantage. The resolution mechanism in Trench+Crusade lets you roll 2d6, you succeed if you do 7 or better. So converting a blood marker on a model, to a -1 DICE, you roll 3d6 and keep the 2 lowest.

There are also blessing markers, mostly granted by field priests, that can be used to grant +DICE to a resolution check when consumed.

I developed a dial for FDM 3d printing. It's composed of two pieces that snap together. I hope it will prove useful for Trench+Crusade and for other tabletop games. It's available on Printables.com.

Bernardo lead me through a learning game of The Old King's Crown. We did two years while a standard games goes to four or five. Not bad for a learning run.

In the spring, you prepare for summer, in the summer you resolve the clashes, and in the autumn, well, you fight in the councils. Winter, I don't remember.

There is a handful of games that come to mind. Maybe at first, Levy and Campaign for the "seasons and logistics", but the map here is symbolic, there are three regions, "the Highlands", "the Plateau", and "the Lowlands". Each region is divided in two locations, hence "the Castle" and "the Wilderness", "the Harvest Field" and "the Battlefield", finally "the Shrine" and "the Necropolis".

Castle - Harvest Field - Shrine... "bellatores", "laboratores", "oratores"... Those who fight, those who work, those who pray.

Then Oath and Arcs come to my mind. TOKC is not a legacy game like Oath, and it's way less dreamy, and its locations are static, but the cards remind me those of Oath, and the quest for power too. What about Arcs? Maybe it's the cards too. Probably it's just because Cole Wehrle and Leder Games helped Pablo Clark designing and building TOKC.

I have the impression that TOKC is "tighter" than Oath and Arcs. It's "wider" than Pax Pamir. When Bernardo architected and unleashed his second year clashes against me, I told myself "better not drink while playing this game", sat down and took the blows. Three or four players, that will be a crossfire hurricane.

In Arcs, the map lures me, it makes me want to control the nodes and sail my ships. TOKC is basically the "Battle" game I played when a kid. French cards meet in pair and the highest wins, same thing here with Faction Cards and what is won is not the cards but the regions. Now add spring actions and leverage effects before resolving.

Do I even have remaining faction cards to journey or to send sit in a fall council? After the first year, I had the impression that my hand was exhausted, that my posture was too static and leaking potential.

What a great game, what a difficult ship to steer. Thanks Bernardo!

I got two boxes of Prussians. The assembly of those big miniatures was quick, the mould lines were easy to remove. A breeze.

Look at the field chaplain, isn't he glorious? His wings join in supporting his crown.

By their sides march the Feldkaplan, knightly chaplains clad in the finest warplate crafted by the Prussian Institute of Metallurgy, wrought as winged angels and wreathed in holy smoke. Their burning blades light the way for their fellow soldiers, and their booming prayers fill the hearts of all who hear them with righteous hate for the enemies of God

Field chaplains? +10 morale and Holy Smoke for fifteen ducats.

Made of a mixture of frankincense, agarwood, and secret chemicals from the Mendelist Order, this burned incense is inhaled by Prussian Feldkaplan before battle. It is highly addictive but grants great physical and mental resilience.

I don't like the Prussians.

The first reason is the confusion they bring. 1939 Stahlhelm bad, 1914 Pickelhaube good. It feels like an exception, a design error that cannot be taken back.

The second reason is the image of the huge tank in the cathedral. It appears in the Prussian PDF. It jumps tanks like the Mark I, the Renault FT-17, the A7V Sturmpanzerwagen and goes directly to the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus. A battlefield where the grunt digs the earth to shelter from the artillery rain. Planes came later on, tanks came later on, attempting to nullify trenches, not quite successful at it, at breaktrough, not even thinking of exploitation. Any rupture of the front? No, leave that to Brusilov, our front had no rupture, but our crankshafts did.

The big fat tank fantasy is for world war two moustaches. The world war one tanks have their own flavour and were strategically surprising. Don't ditch them.

Maybe, the easiest fix would be to avoid Stahlhelm for the Heretics and let the Prussians be. If the Heretics somehow derive from the Templars, let's use their iconography and keep away from the Wehrmacht shadow.

Anyway, I now need to find a way to get paint on those plastic miniatures. They're gorgeous.

That's the famous Trommelfeuer, the drum of fire that was announced. The Germans, with their words in bundles, are equal to what they inflict.

(...)

Nothing to do for now but to wait, to take the blows, to let them pile in with no prospect of striking back anytime soon. The order is not to move and to hold the ground at all costs. And there's every chance that the instructions will not change. Getting out alive no longer means anything: Simon sees the men aound him taming that idea as best as they can.

Still no news from the front lines. In what state will the infantry assault, it won't be long before it arrives, find them? The dugouts, there as elsewhere, are not meant to withstand such a lengthy bombing. Company commanders like Vigneron, Robin, and Seguin are remarkable men, Simon knows it, but how many of them will still be alive?

It is a little after four in the afternoon when the bombardment seems to slacken, and then it dies down. A lookout shouts at the top of his lungs: "Les Boches !" Simon's platoons quickly move into their positions. With the lenghtening of the trajectories, one can hear a little better. Corporal Vuillamy calls out: "At last, the real battle! Face to face, man to man!" Simon doubts it. What is coming is rather a murderous game of hide-and-seek, a rats' war in which every hole, every ridge, and every tree stump will be fought for.

I was scanning my shelves for first hand accounts of the first world war. I was looking specifically for La Main Coupée de Blaise Cendrars, or for Les Croix de Bois de Roland Dorgelès. But I could only find Les Grands Jours de Pierre Mari. My copies of Cendrars might still be in my parents' house, while I know The Wooden Crosses is on my shelves, probably behind a first wall of books.

Les Grands Jours relates The Battle of Bois des Caures where the troops of Colonel Driant held the Germans for two days. It is a beautiful short book, where real characters cross fictional characters in the trenches.

It is my second reading of Les Grands Jours. I have to admit I had forgotten most of it, but since I read it on a red-eye flight, it is to be expected. I am pleased by this second travel there. The Driant figure has its own attraction, he was a writer too, under the nom de plume "Danrit", I ordered one of his book, it should reach me soon, I am sure it will be good.

The cover of Les Grands Jours features german troops in Stahlhelm. Wikipedia tells me that the first version, M16, of this helmet was distributed to some of the units fighting in Verdun. The book says nothing about it. As a miniature gamer, I am interested in the transition from Pickelhaube to Stahlhelm.

I needed and still need sandbags. The first videos I found taught me how to make them out of milliput, that must be expensive and the context was that of a diorama. Then I found a video telling how to make them out of folded hard paper bathing in PVA glue (need to try that)... The final video, the winner, was about making them out of air dry clay.

My first forays were tedious, it was self-inflicted, I was not following the video. I tried to make a 3d-printed gutter for easy cutting... The clay was sticking to it. In my second try, I limited myself to the silicone mat and made the long cylinder and cut it, with the spear tool I had found. That spear being pointy but not very sharpy, the cutting was not great, and with wet fingers, the bit almost torn away by the spear was shapen back into the bag. The point of the tool was used to draw the lateral sewing. It was time-consuming, but ok.

I was producing fifteen bags per sitting. It's not much, a single layer of the outer "v" of a trench hex taking around twenty bags...

Then I hit cruise speed by just drawing out my Swiss Army Knife. It is sharp, it make definite cuts. Then with fingers barely wet, I simply squeezed the bag into shape, left sewing line, small vertical line at the bottom, mirror on the other side. I was making thirty bags per sitting.

My first, wetter method, was taking two days to dry. My cruise speed method only takes a single night to dry. I can make two-hundred bags a day (half a jam glass jar). Wet fingers are only good for the initial clay cylinder making, after having cut into segments, wet fingers bring disservice.

I prepare many such small pieces (bags, trench posts, corrugated sheets, boards, ...) in repetitive sittings, they let me do the trench hex assembly sitting in one go, no need to set aside to prepare any missing small pieces. It feels like playing lego (not making legos).

My sand bags look a bit like those paper cement bags left under the rain. They are a bit big for a 1/56 scale, but it will do. They are satisfying to make too.

Ill and Jinxed, almost in that order. Karl let me follow him in his quest for vine seeds in the 7th Citadel world. Vine seeds? I guess growing the seeds will help us secure our buildings against earthquakes. Earthquakes? I am sure they are linked to those worm attacks that occurred in the past, before the necro-druids showed up and thwarted their attacks. Narco-druids? No, necro-druids.

I played Denhom and even before falling sick and getting jinxed, I had the matching face, grey skin, and hair scared white. Denhom lost his family to the worms and clings to a fragment of hope, a necklace he had offered to his daughter and that re-appeared, this time circling the neck of a traveller from the south.

7th Citadel certainly inspired Vantage which we played a couple of times, a few heavy stack of cards await us, revealing blade by blade, sunlight beating fog, a world of greenery (beware) and lakes. Since we started the session late, we only managed to find an herbalist lady in her shack, a whiff of civilisation. I got myself a hound — a hournd — with a discerning nose but couldn't put it to good use yet (on a roll of 1 it'll abandon me).

There is this Baald guy, he smiles a lot and sports too many hair, that must be the extra "a". I can't remember where we found him, it was probably on Karl's action, and he appointed him to me, to alleviate my lack of inventory.

When our respective card stacks went empty, we did recover, we converted hit points for extra cards, for our quests to go on.

We "saved" the state of the game in its box and shall continue on Tuesday evening. I like the maps and the fog of war. I like the dual use cards, hand versus stack, and the stack as a battery, an energy gauge. I have the impression of being brought back in a 1990s game. I didn't see much yet. I don't like this Baald guy, if he could stop smiling.

Still jinxed and ill still, it must be the wine.

"I made those wattle thinggies…"
"Do you think that it will stop a horde of heretics?" asked Karl
"No, these aren't meant to pen in sheeps or pigs, they are reinforcements for trench walls"

When looking at images of trenches, I noticed that wattle reinforcements were not rare. I would guess that they were more common at the beginning of the conflict, and got supplanted later on as supply and the war effort took on and timber and corrugated metal sheets became available.

"Please roll a Basket Weaving skill check... Success!" I got a +1 DICE since I had made a basket for my Mom in primary school...

The vertical pieces of wood were easily to select, double-ended toothpicks. I pinned them upright in discarded pieces of XPS foam and started weaving strips of light cardboard. It looked alright, but I could get no satisfaction. At scale, they looked like planks roughly a hands' width, sturdier than the coppiced sticks they slalomed.

The horizontal thread should be thinner than the vertical posts. I was fortunate to come over a great video about a WW1 diorama, that was using broom bristles. I put on my coat and went to the dollar shop to get a broom and here I was, weaving bristles from one toothpick to the next.

Now that I have rewatched the diorama video, I realize that the result of my efforts is plain. I like how the youtuber alternates vertical posts of different diameters, my toothipick game needs to be upped with the help of chicken skewers.

Need to dig more trenches before the Boche arrives…

Goddman this War! is a comic by Jacques Tardi, and historian Jean-Pierre Verney.

Tardi for me was initially Adèle Blanc-Sec. I was a kid, reading comics sitting on the floor of the book and comics section, while my mother was shopping. Tardi's style was immediately recognizable, but I avoided Adèle, it looked like it was meant for grown-ups. Maybe it is, I'll have to check again, I am drawn to Steampunk now, and I grew up.

I remembered having read Tardi comics about the Great War, I was also happy when I saw his work used in Steel Inferno.

When I started making terrain for Trench+Crusade I turned to photographs of the Great War available online, for example Images Défense for photographs in the archives of the French Army. I meanwhile ordered the two comics Tardi made for visuals and narrative line.

I want to have a french slant on the Great War, because T+C comes out of an american mind. The Heretic troopers have ww2 german helmets. Why? "so you immediately know that they are the bad guys". A bit later we're fed with Prussian stosstruppen, with spiked helmets. Okay.

There are zero Adrian Helmets in the T+C rulebook (did not check the warband book). Russia had 9 million casualties in the Great War, France and Germany each 6 millions, Austria-Hungary 5 millions, the British Empire 3 millions, Italy 2 millions, US 300 thousands.

We see ww2 german helmets, ww1 Pickelhaube german helmets, one or two images with british Brodie hats. Some yeomen look like ww2 soviet troopers. Nothing french, nothing austrian.

I understand that room is needed for penitents, giant flies, and other niceties, but the Great War Ghost has been invoked. Blood was spilled and that Hell is of our own industry.

It's alright because the game is supposed to be miniature agnostic and is loose, still some wonderful clay in our hands. I have a box of poilus on the way, maybe I could use them as Avignon heretics.

On the right is an alternate cover for "Goddamn this War!". The two french soldiers in it are in their 1914 uniforms, no steel helmets, still in their "garance" trousers. Note the firing port as a box between the sand bags.

The "Grande Guerre" has exacted a large price on France. It is massively present in its bibliography and iconography, so many items to take inspiration from.

General Orders "Sengoku Jidai" is a fine game. It feels tighter than its father game, General Order "World War II", and the box is even twice more compact. You can put the game in your backpack and play it with a friend on the road. It's easy to teach and easy to remember.

There is just enough randomness (dice for combat, effect cards, and three random locations) and plenty of planning involved. I wonder if it'll tease and please chess-oriented friends.

Maybe, after a few games, the excitement will have vanished, but it doesn't take much room on the shelf and can be brought back to the table with minimal pain as it's well designed and matured.

I just wish the map hexes were a bit roomier.

Have you ever played Britannia? The Welsh flee to their tall hills and leave the plain to the Romans. Then things somehow repeat, Roman grip suddenly relaxes and Anglo-Saxons come in. Then 1066.

Paul Kingsnorth, what a grand name, you trapped me in the mind of Buccmaster, or was it in a fen in Anglia? "Fugol, Fugol" You say I see "Fugol" — "Look up!" — "Ah, Vogel!" — "Ja, you bird brain"

I have spent a whole book in the savage pride of freely holding three oxgangs, followed by a dane kid and a cottar. Surrounded by Esels, the only other emotion I knew was ire.

Madness exposed in asymmetry by the wisdom of servant woman, by the determination of a man fallen from his horse. My old gods are thy deofol, is thy world simpler than mine? When did my Anglo-Saxon panoply went out of fashion, how could it ever wipe thy smirk away?

The stupor in The Buried Giant was kindlier to awaken from. Dankvoll for the punch in the gut, thankful for the escape to the fen, the Waldgang.

Septentrion King, I'll read "Against the Machine" next.

Firing ports, loopholes, embrasures...

On some of the WW1 trench pictures I consulted, I saw firing ports in sandbag walls in the form of wooden boxes. That was easy to design for 3d printing and I integrated those loopholes on top of two of the trench hexes I made.

The German picture on the right sports one of those "boxes". My build lacks a bit of flat space for laying one's elbow when shooting. It seems the picture lacks it too, the Hussar in the picture has his two elbows floating.

The picture is dated 1916, the soldiers aren't wearing helmets. That made me look at the M1916 Stahlhelm that was introduced, well, in 1916. The soldiers are light cavalry — 11th Reserve Hussar Regiment — probably infantry units were given the priority in the distribution, or they were just posing for a staged picture as they were resting in a rear trench. The vegetation on the top of the trench looks well-preserved.

The picture below also shows the application of Sculptamold (tinted with calligraphy ink) to represent mud. I placed too much of the admixture in the mixer and it failed to break it, hence the big clumps one sees on the western side. The eastern side is alright, I poked holes with my fingers in it to make small craters.

I went for wattle fences with corrugated metal sheets at their feet. So far I had used Amazon envelopes corrugated paper and it looks fine. I had tried a toothpaste squeezer with thicker aluminium but was not happy with the scale. I finally ended up using some of the output in this trench hex. I think it looks okay.

The picture is from before locking and priming with caulking latex. The magnets in their PLA boxes stand out in their lodgings in the XPS foam. I used a hand drill to prepare these nests and I filled them with PVA glue before inserting the magnet boxes.

I always trace a runoff drain in the middle of the bottom of the trench. I hope it will turn out right when covered with duckboards, I'll manage some space between the wooden slats so that the drain is visible. I still have to make those boards, along with firesteps.

Note the firestep in the picture above, it's literally a bench. It makes me even more suspicious that it's a photograph staged in a former trench.

Still five hexagons to go before reaching twenty hexagons, then four half hexagons and I'll have four feet by four feet of terrain... to paint. Well more since the non-trench hexes are usable on both sides.

The first game of the year was a trek on the Vantage planet. It's the fifth time I venture there, and each time has been different.

I like that each player has to describe where he is, instead of simply showing his location card to his companions, a mechanism of immersion. I like the two negotiations around the dice rolling: before the roll, when you offer skill tokens to control the dice count, and after the roll, to absorb the cost of the action.

All the actions succeed, until your gauges reach zero and the game ends, unless you decide to probe further.

Yesterday evening saw us wander without a mission or a destiny. I was a bit puzzled, did I miss a step in the instructions? Maybe the red wine, or the heavy snow outside. Curse of aimlessness.

The game waits in its heavy box, you drop it on the table, flip 3 stack of location cards at the vertical, head for page 000 and you are playing. Time to table is short. Replayability feel high, you won't remember it all, you'll forget it and it'll fragment, and then feel new.

Yesterday evening was devoted to Dragon Rampant second edition.

Mutazoid had challenged me a few days before, stating we shall fight with 30 points armies. I have only played Lion Rampant, the non-fantasy father of Dragon Rampant so far. I accepted the challenge. My Norman host, assisted by some Viking raiders would take the field.

I was tempted for a while to use a Trench+Crusade War Wolf as a Warbeast, but my miniature is not painted and I didn't have the time to read up the rules for it. So I stuck to a non-fantasy army.

Ah the thrill of humanity versus faery.

• 1 unit of Elite Riders (Norman cav)
• 2 units of Elite Foot, with one hosting my general (Norman inf)
• 2 units of Light Foot (Viking inf)
• 1 unit of Light Missiles (Norman archers)

The last remaining two army points went to turn the archers into sharpshooters.

(Thanks to Gary for having skillfully painted all my miniatures)

Mutazoid had chosen the first scenario — "Gory Bloodbath on the Plains of Doom" — each army had to enter the field by regular move activation. I chose a compact entry behind the single hill, aiming to crown it with my archers and foot it with light infantry arrayed in a shield wall.

In Lion and Dragon Rampant, on your turn, you activate one unit after another, rolling 2d6 to move, shoot, or attack. As soon as an activation fail, your whole turn ends and the the hand goes to the adversary. You can re-roll once per turn a failed activation for a unit withing twelve inches of the general.

I was trusting my luck and despatched my cavalry on the left. It needed 7 or better to activate for moving. I always rolled for them as the last unit of my turn (having usually succeeded to activate the other units, close to the leader). Of course, as soon as the cavalry went out of re-roll range, they stuck there.

I managed to win the encounter... We read the scenario win conditions right after my commanding unit was wiped out, and they ruled I had just won the turn before. Oh well.

The Rampant series deserve the love it gets. Time to table is short and time on table is just right.

Read the battle report by Mutazoid himself.

I "subtracted" dugouts from some of my trench hexagons. I didn't give them a bottom and they're big enough for a 25mm based miniature to fit in.

I've seen them in many of the diagrams about World War One trenches. They seem to have been used to protect soldiers from the rain and from artillery blasts. I wonder how they played out during an enemy "coup de main", maybe they provided a covered fire position to prevent the adversary from progressing.

Let's hope suppressive fire and a carefully thrown hand grenade did not turn the dugout to a grave.

I'm looking forward to see how it plays out with the Trench+Crusade rules.

The trench in the picture, as can be guessed by translucence, is straight. It's the only hexagon that got this configuration, a 12 inches long trench. As explained in the previous post, I favoured trenches taking turns, where blasts dissipate. Since this trench is straight, I gave it two dugouts.

One dugout on the left hand, and another one on the right hand. The modular fire steps will be placed at setup depending on the direction of the enemy.

The dugouts have no bottoms of their own, the miniatures in them will stand on the table itself, covered except for their heads.

I don't know yet how my terrain will turn out. I hope it will be okay. It should not steal the light from the miniatures my friends will choose, paint, and field. I think that by sticking to the 1914 I know from pictures and books what I build should play nicely with the hellish madness of the Trench+Crusade factions.

And, after all, the Great War was hell. You were a farmer and you joined the workers in an industrialized, not yet mechanized, slaughter.

Demons are easier to draw.

Modular terrain for Trench+Crusade in the making.

My friends are preparing and painting their warbands. I am making terrain, I asked a friend to print and paint a vanilla Heretic warband. He is a demanding and talented painter and I have no experience in painting miniatures, terrain and geometry are what I prefer. I am looking forward to see the result of his work and field the warband.

My friends chose the Sultanate, the Red Brigade, and the Trench Pilgrim. We needed a bad guy, so I chose the Heretics, the lesser evil?

Why the hexagons ? Because, well, hex and counters, ... Not entirely. Another reason was the easy "traversing" it offered. Trenches are traversed because that limits the effect of artillery blasts and it limits the range of direct fire along the trench. Zig zagging.

I did not want to go into "Wedding Cake Crusade", I wanted to go "Trench+Crusade". Granted, the scenarios presented in the rules are all except one set in landscapes devoid of tranches. The boards seen in the FB group for the game are all very complex and vertical. Anything that blocks the line of sight and makes for small tactical fun. I am going for something flatter, something where the top of your trench doesn't face a wall.

Something bland can be made richer with scatter terrain and random buildings. From the flattness of the fields of Flanders to the three-dimensional maze of Mordheim, I trust my modules can deliver.

The post-trench building period will probaly devolve into studying western european cityscapes and make hexagons for a western 1915 Stalingrad. That'll do for the Mordheim ADN in Trench+Crusade.

The XPS foam at my local DIY store was cheap. I even bought pieces that were a bit damaged and heavily discounted. I bought 1.5 cm sheets as a base layer and 4 cm sheets for the feet of the trench to the top of the trench layer.

I chose an inclination angle (1.5 cm horizontally for 4 cm vertically), a trench bottom width (5 cm, roughly almost two "normie" miniature bases), and started cutting the XPS foam.

Two types of hexagons emerged. Trench hexagons and plain hexagons. There will be half-hexagons as well, but that's lower priority.

Trench hexagons contain a section of trench and are single sided, while plain hexagons are double-sided. A flat side and a depressed / craterized side. I experimented with craters made bit hammer hits, by brush cleaner liquid corrosion, heat gun attack, and lastly, with the impact of a 24 kg russian kettlebell 1 meter fall.

The XPS cutting was easy thanks to a hot cutter table. I tried to be efficient, but I'm still left with two full Ikea bags of XPS offcuts, it will be useful for scatter terrain and other fancy trench+crusady stuff. The important thing was to prepare jigs for the hexagons and half-hexagons, and jigs for the "negative trenches". I also had a jig to set the trench angle on the hot cutter table.

The six sides of each hexagons have been implanted with up to 10 small plastic boxes each containing a 5 mm diameter magnet ball. It is sufficient to help the hexagons sticking together.

The magnet boxes are printed on my FDM printer. Each has box has 3 anti-rotation fins (small wings) that prevent them exiting the foam once plugged, along with PVA glue. I choose ball magnets in boxes to let the magnets decide on their own what polarity they present.

Trench+Crusade advocates four feet by four feet terrains. I chose 16 cm (6 feet) for the side of an hexagon, so a table requires 25 hexagons (plus four half-hexagons).

For the sides of the trenches, I collected Amazon paper envelope, since their inner side look like corrugated metal sheet, yes, that'll require some paiting. I also tried wattle weaving, at first with slices of light cardboard slaloming toothpicks, then I replaced the cardboard with the bristles of one dollar broom.

My thinking is, when trenches are first dug, there might be enough small wood for wattle fences, then local supply ends end planks are made available, later on corrugated sheets are supplied. Each hex has different pattern. I also experimented by logs and more vertical walls. The logs are round chopsticks while the vertical poles are skewers.

I cut the Amazon envelope paper in 47 x 13 mm sheets, a lot of them, and progressed by this 47 mm width to panel the trenches. I went with corrugated on top and planks at the bottom. The planks are made of ice cream sticks cut loosely in half, for a pleasing irregularity.

For the plain hexagons I went with caulking primer directly. For the trench hexagons, I added a layer of Sculptamold tinted with calligraphy ink for the mud. I added a central drain in the middle of the trench, I'll try some AK Puddles in the drain.

I made a lot of sandbags out of air drying clay, they look okay. I tried glueing some of them on one of the trench hexes I prepared and primed it all, but my current plan is to add the sandbags on top of the trenches afterwards.

Firesteps are currently missing. They will be modular as well, depending on the facing of the trench, and to get communication trenches simply abstain from setting up firesteps in them. The trench at the bottom have a 5 cm width, I'll give 1.6 cm width to the firestep and the rest (2.5 cm) will be for the duckboard.

(Trench+Crusade demands that for a miniature to stand on an element, half of its base must be supported by that element, so a 1.6 cm wide firestep should be okay for 25 mm and 32 mm based miniatures)

On the last picture, dugouts are visible. I made them big enough for standing 25mm base miniatures. They are a bit too deep, but well, I don't want to ask my friends to provide standing and crouched versions of each of their 25mm based miniatures... We'll see.

I made a single trench hexagon with a straight trench, I made two non-facing dugouts in it, a bit more blast-safe somehow.

So far, I primed 11 hexagons, still 9 to go and then I'll start the painting work. I am aiming for 30 hexagons so that I have more variety for a 4x5 hex and I can go to 5x5 or even 6x5 (2 on 2 matches maybe).

I have already prepared three Nissen huts, printing their vertical walls with my fdm printer along with their curved roofs, and pasting Amazon corrugated paper on them. They look good, but that'll probably be for non-trench tables.

I am a bit in awe of the paint work that is facing me. It should be okay, I will make a mess of one or two hexagons and hope to succeed with the third one. It's all modular, and with jigs and technique I can now easily prepare new hexagons. I'll have a few ugly ducks for now, but that won't damp the excitement of the fight.

Learning by doing.

I hope to recycle this blog. Why "recycle"? Because I'm a moving away from the table top role playing game focus, towards writing more about board games and miniature games.

My current group of gaming friends is very heterogeneous in taste and open to try various games and let them spread their wings in memorable sessions.

I am having fun building terrain for Trench+Crusade these days. I want to write about this endeavour. The picture adorning this post is of a fdm-printed yeoman I am using as a kind of land surveyor for the terrain pieces I am putting together.

Trench+Crusade has found me via Blanche, The Rise of Grimdark. The availability and practicality of the rules, the miniature agnosticism, and the anchoring in History convinced me. Three friends are preparing warbands and I'm focusing on terrain building. Our objective is to play our first games in January.

One of these trench friends suggested we go directly with a campaign. I suspect the fertile ground of the T+C timeline gets his imagination going and he wants to tell a story, as should be.

There is a role playing oneshot project on the backburner, I'll write about it, hopefully next summer. For now, bear with me, boards and miniatures.

Resolving with a d20 against a DC (Difficulty Class), AC (Armor Class), or TN (Target Number) is a bit flat.

How about granting 3d6 or 2d10 instead? If it's routine, grant 3d6, if the character tries to go beyond her or his limit, grant 1d20. A d20 might give a 1 or a 20 (critical failure or critical success), 3d6 yields neither 1 nor 20, safe from failure and grandeur.

I have included 2d10 as well. It might be easier for some addition challenged players. It yields no 1 but may yield 20, and it's less "successful" than 3d6 when the target number is 9 or below.

There are the numbers for Advantage and Disadvantage. For 3d6, I let roll 4d6 and take the 3 best (or the 3 worst). For 2d10, roll 3, take 2.

It might be interesting to go with 9 possibilites (3d6 | 2d10 | 1d20 ) × (disadvantage | plain | advantage). What is granted by the referee? What is selected by the player?

"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is not iteration 108.

For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.

Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.

← last week links

 

I have to focus on other things, I am putting the "End of Week" links on pause.

About the OGL? Others already explained to us that the trolls tunnelled out of the dungeon long before.

"Eow" for End Of Week. TTRPG Links I gathered during the week. This is iteration 107.

For more weekly links, head to The Seed of Worlds Shiny TTRPG link collection.

Most of the links below are found via the RPG Planet that Alex Schroeder built and maintains. If you have a TTRPG blog, please consider joining the conversation.

← last week links

My favourite for this week is For RPGs, storytelling will win, "story is the only thing unique to the medium of the role-playing game"

The posts about OGL have been moved to the bottom of this list. The week has posts from before and after Friday 13th...

---

Dan Reviews Conlangs

I feel like it should be mentioned that, in the work considered the poster child of Euro-fantasy, nearly all of the characters are speaking something explicitly modeled on Semitic and Mesopotamian languages. No Greek or Latin to be seen. That seems like something a lot of people miss.

---

The Secret of Wealth (plus Bonds, Arbitrage, and More)

Bonds could have at least one gameable element: as treasure

Ezra Bloom in the comments

---

Your own random generator app

The “app” is a HTML file that you can save on your computer and open in your browser. It contains some CSS to make it look good (well… taste differs, of course), some HTML for the buttons and the title, all the tables you need, and some JavaScript to generate the actual output.

---

Random Generators

Alex Schroeder, over at RPG Planet asked for any random generators that people have built, well here's my contributions.

---

Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying — Here We Go Again

Because a lot of the FKR relies on sometimes implicit culture of play, we over here in the FKR cult try and make as many social and game processes transparent and explicit, although because in my case it is all I've ever played and all I play or run, it can be tricky to see things from another perspective without seeming preachy or dismissive.

Free Kriegsspiel Roleplaying — Old Manifestos

with some regain of interest for FKR shit and a recently emerging next hot thing born out of the OSR, NSR and FKR - the Free Rules Movement, I decided against my better judgment to indulge in theory rants a little bit before I burn out again. So here's two texts from the Before Times.

An Example of FKR (near-)diceless combat

We are playing using a framework common to Sam Doebel's Skörne, my various home games (Dreamlands, Shadowrun, etc.) and Cosmic Orrery's Pernicious: there are no attack rolls, no damage rolls. Instead, Hits are either traded (ala "trade harm" in PbtA) or used as part of a Dilemma (cf. Hits as Dilemma on Dreaming Dragonslayer, follow the thread of blog posts from there onwards to learn more).

---

Good Men Don’t Need Rules

Madame Kovarian: The anger of a good man is not a problem. Good men have too many rules.
The Doctor: Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many!

---

Natural-language game design

Not Naturalistic: I have 1,000 experience points. I am level 1.
More Naturalistic: I have 1,000 gold. I am a veteran.

---

On No Artpunk II

In my perfect world, we have craftsmanship, fantastic new gygaxian building blocks, evocative writing, brilliant art and layout. In the world of limited time, single creators, limited budgets and massive competition, that perfect storm seldom occurs.

---

Don't Use AI Art (Except for Fun)

while there's no harm in playing around with AI art for shits and giggles, we can't and shouldn't countenance its deployment in serious creative endeavours. Art is our domain and needs to be defended as such. It's for humans. Not robots.

---

Becoming Borg

Generations who grow up knowing nothing other than these mediated mediocre media come to accept them as the norm, which will shape their own expectations, thoughts, and behaviour

---

Our Mother, Her Seven Arms

This is me starting to build on the idea of a TTRPG ruleset designed around inventory / capacity.

I am a very reluctant writer of rules. I’m tricking myself by starting in fiction.

The idea is that this ruleset is diegetic; its abstractions represent the cosmology and worldview of Azza Amma’s priests. Your soul has seven parts, like the seven hands of the mother goddess.

---

Puzzle Do's and Dont's

Puzzles are unreliable. Sometimes players get frustrated and walk away. Sometimes people don't want to do puzzles. Sometimes the answer is simply outside of their reach.

If you need the players to get to the final boss room, don't put the boss room behind a puzzle.

---

The Lo-fi Online Gaming Manifesto

Technology can only enhance a game so much. At the end of the day, sound effects, cool visuals, music broadcast over your VTT, the fog of war, and buttons to execute complex die rolls aren't that much enjoyable than a game simply played Theater of the Mind over voice while players roll real dice on their desks.

---

For RPGs, storytelling will win

The tools of wargaming are where everything gets confused; this has arguably been the case for the last fifty years. Wargaming mechanics provide challenge, they provide mathematical rigor (or the perception thereof) to our make-believe. There are definitely some people who engage more with the math of role-playing games, bench racing Pathfinder builds or figuring out how to break Exalted charmsets. The problem is not and has never been that people are interested in these things or that they can do them, it’s that RPGs are, among all the options for strategic gaming, kind of a mediocre one.

---

Welcoming 2023

There are several points where the player can instantly win or lose the game, with one spot “Eternal Hell” that the player is unable to escape for the rest of the game.

---

Games Are For The Playing

However! With the passage of sufficient time comes the hour of all things - my friends had aged sufficiently that their kids in turn were old enough to be playing things like this and it being the Christmas season families were gathered. A happy coincidence saw one of those friends already booked to visit and they were convinced to take it off my hands in a very stereotypically Irish - "please take this thing" "I couldn't possibly" "You would be doing me a favour" "But you could sell it" "Just take it so I don't have to deal with it" etc. etc.

And then happily, not two hours later, I get action shots back.

---

Beef! A simple session zero tool

They got beef with you. Something you did has upset them or made them angry! The idea is this helps provide an immediate antagonist or villain, even if only short term...

You got beef with them. The idea is this can provide an antagonist as above, and/or a plot point where the party might need someone's help and need to get over their beef...

They owe you a favour. The idea is to set up an ally, willing or reluctant, that might be able to help the party overcome a problem...

You owe them a favour. The idea is to provide a hook for, or add a complication to, immediate or later adventures...

---

The Session Zero Agenda

Goals for Players | Goals Group | Bi-weekly – agreed | Genre | Quorum | Open or Closed Table | Absent Players | Play Style | Safety Tools | World | Character Creation | OOC Discussion | Character Sheet Update timing

---

The Hive Mind on the Hidden Genre Canon

I don’t think Salammbo can be considered a hidden classic? It’s one of the most republished of his works, especially in English. I dunno that it’s that rare, especially during the 19th century when genre divisions really didn’t mean anything, and the gap between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction didn’t really exist. Which I could go on about ad nauseum.

---

Serious war games — controversial or not

Taking a different approach to conveying the horrors of war is This War of Mine. I’ve not played the game myself, but you’re taking on the role of a civilian trying to survive from day to day in a wartorn country. The board game is based on a computer game with the same name. It deals with terrible experiences and forces the player to make impossible decisions. The age rating of 18+ is very appropriate. It’s not a game for a light games night.

---

Pathfinder 2nd Edition — Introduction

I’m not going to lie, trying to tackle a book as dense as Pathfinder is a little bit intimidating even to someone who has been reviewing RPGs for a while. That said, I was doing my best to approach this particular section from the point of view of someone who was new to the hobby, and I have to admit that from that point of view, the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Corebook manages to do pretty well.

---

Gaming in the Abstract

Initial Description: GM move. GM gives an initial description of the encounter.

Question: Player move. Players request more details about initial description or information gained from other moves.

---

The Charms of Old School D&D

1) Affordable
2) Manageable rules as player & DM
3) The oldest RPG, no claims to greatest
4) Powers that be were gamers, not suits
5) Established good time, not threatened by other games
6) No backstory or other ego crutches, PC personality came out during play

---

Mordheim: The Thronetaker Campagin

The rules are … old school: there are tables, lots of dice rolling, and rules scattered throughout the book. Warcry feels like it’s the stronger game, but people aren’t playing Mordheim for its tight game design. Mordhiem is a narrative game, and its the story of this campaign I’m looking forward to seeing unfold.

---

You Can Run Anything As A One-Shot

There are lots of games like this. “It runs better it an a campaign, I can’t see how it’d work,” people say. But how often do games like this actually get played? I want to see how a game plays before I invest multiple sessions in it, and I refuse to believe any game can’t be run as a one-shot.

---

Disconnected Thoughts on Running Medieval Settings

The world is alive. This might seem odd, since we're not used to the idea of medieval Christianity as "animistic," but the reality is that the medieval mind treated the entire cosmos as hylozoic — they describe physics, geology, weather, everything in terms we would reserve for plants and animals.

---

Do not overthink treasure placement

The point I’m trying to make is that the stocking and restocking rules are essentially an expert system that TSR employees wrote up because they felt it resulted in a good game, not necessarily that running a game by those rules on Hurt Me Plenty mode is the best game ever.

---

Religion Is Different

Agriculture, large-scale organized warfare, elites, rulers, bureaucracies, writing, and monumental architecture evolved independently in many world regions at markedly different times. These are truly universal features of complex human societies. Moralizing religion is different.

---

Dungeon23 Roundup #3: What Riches!

The tables are a lovely spin on the idea of the dungeon as a hostile space that one finds in the "mythic underworld" conception of early D&D. They're also a nice example of how, for example, you can introduce setting, lore, and atmosphere through random tables.

---

Creatures & Commoners, Barely/Explained

In this game, you play a character adventuring in a world prepared and portrayed by the Referendary (ref). They set up a situation and you act on it as if you were there. The ref tells you what happens based on their prep, their knowledge of the world, and possibly a roll of the dice.

---

The Way Ahead in 2023

Honestly, I don't know. I have to change a lot here because I rely on the OGL. Then again, I don't I am going to be sued, though I am still going to make the effort. If I made my own system (unlikely) it would be CC BY 4.0.

---

Goblins and Digging

Thinking back to tribal goblins, I still like the idea of having goblins operate primarily in the Morlock Model, hiding in underground dens during the day and then emerging to pillage the countryside at night. This makes rooting out goblins clearly an adventurer activity rather than a problem you can throw mercenaries at - you can fight them in their holes or you can fight them at night, but either way you're gonna be fighting them in the dark.

---

Theory review #93

Why it’s rude to suck at Warcraft by Folding ideas takes a look at the instrumental play culture of World of warcraft and how it affects the game and its players.

---

OGL Resources You Can Use

Here!

---

Roleplay Is Folk Art

Reason one. From my very first roleplaying experiences, cobbled together from half-understood and ill-matched books, I’ve felt no loyalty to any corporate rules-as-written game. I saw roleplay as an activity, akin to playing in a sandbox, and not as roleplay® the licensed and correct game.

---

Beware the Gifts of Dragons

My main takeaway from the post, aside from the obvious fact that Wizards of the Coast is behaving in a "rude and unfair" way, is that the existing version 1.0a of the OGL is, unfortunately, not written as clearly as one might like, if the goal is for its terms to be legally irrevocable.

---

Good riddance to the Open Gaming License

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses. The OGL predates the Creative Commons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers – rather than public-interest nonprofits – unleash "open" licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

---

The Legal Fight Over Happy Birthday and What It May Tell Us About D&D’s Rumored OGL 1.1

Intellectual property law as related to games is an unsettled subject. The general understanding is that you can’t protect game mechanics, except with a patent. As a result, a game manufacturer’s primary protection against other people using its IP is a trademark.

---

OGL v1.1

Needless to say, we are making various contingency plans in anticipation of the official release of the new OGL. Once the official release happens and we've had time to fully digest its implications, we will announce any possible alterations to our publication schedule.

---

Musings About the OGL Drama

Cleaning up the ecosystem, strengthening the already strong companies putting out good product and reducing the influence of WotC on the hobby outside of D&D seems like a good thing to me.

---

My Response to WotC's Announcement on the OGL 2.0

The "game" doesn't matter to you. You see it as a "lifestyle brand" now. You want to sell lunch boxes, underwear, toothbrushes...the game is barely on your radar. The only "risk" is you.

---

Intellectual Property for Gamers

The process by which one plays a role-playing game, as far as US intellectual property law is concerned, would be patentable, not copyrightable. That said, there has never been (and never will be) a patent on a role-playing game because by the time TSR was founded and the RPG was being productized, fantasy worlds and wargames had been around long enough that it would be very difficult to claim that such a game was novel, or even non-obvious.

---

Do better

Yikes!

Better to use Creative Commons (CC) licenses!

---

Open licenses and what not to use

Also, don't not license your work. Saying that you don't want to bother with licensing is cool until it's not. The modern world is still coming to grips with what copyright means in the digital space. Clarity is essential, not only to protect yourself but to protect the people you want to be able to benefit from your hard work.

---

The Open Gaming License and Potential Attempt at Revocation

In this time of disruption and chaos we will see a burst of creativity and invention. We’ll see an interesting inversion of “rulings not rules.” And other unpredictable things; though one thing we can predict: Hasbro in executing its sharehold obligations will seek to extract syphon all that it can from the waters of the once declared safe harbour.

---

Blast from the Past

That's the opening salvo in TSR's "war on the Internet" of the mid-1990s, when the company dubiously claimed that "any software, bet books, modules, tables, stories, or rules modifications which contain elements from our copyrighted properties, including characters, settings, realm names, noted magic items, spells, elements of the gaming system, such as ARMOR CLASS, HIT DICE, and so forth" were "infringements of TSR copyrights" unless they had been produced under license from TSR. Such belligerent and litigious behavior is what earned the company the nicknames T$R and They Sue Regularly.