Archive for the ‘Wargaming’ Category

Fall of the Goblin Empire (FoGE) is my entry for the SFSFW’s fantasy wargaming competition.  A game of goblins and their varigated, varied and highly unreliable flying machines. Here are a couple of the opening paragraphs that set the scene for a game of goblins going up-tiddle-ee-up coming down-tiddle-ee-down-down…

Ask anyone and they will tell you Goblins are mad, bad braggers, they have an anger in their eyes and can’t hold their drink. What most won’t tell you is they’ve good reason. When chroniclers write out the ages of the world somehow the age of
goblins gets misplaced. Yet there was a time (as any drunk goblin will tell you at length) when the little green folk ruled all the world and everyone in it for over a thousand years. Of course no one pays any attention because who believes a drunk goblin?

Yet it did exist for a thousand years. Eventually, as happens to all empires, the great goblin empire lost its grasp on the land.  In its last days the goblins retreated to the floating isles protecting their most valuable asset: the magical metal goblinic
famed for its ability to lift many times its own weight off the ground. They were fortunate that the islands also produced some iron, flax cloth, vast mounds of guano and some natural gasses. There they fell back into ancient tribal feuds and so the
goblin empire fell. Soon after that they turned to the bottle.

The rebuilding and post launch work on impworks is now pretty much done which means I can get back to other projects.  tonight I’ve taken an editing chainsaw to a 120 page text which is the core design for a game and so far I’ve cut it to 60 pages.  Now I’m at the hard part: cutting stuff I want to keep, stuff that took hard thinking or hard research.  I’ve a simple incentive.  I know that if I get this right and this text ends up in print then there is a chance I can see the cut material in print as supplements.

So tomorrow its away with the chainsaw and out with the pruning knife.

Back in August 2007 I posted a set of Miniature Victorian and Edwardian Posters which at the time didn’t really seem to get a lot of downloads or get any feedback. When I rebuilt the impworks website I almost left them out and the file got moved round late compared to some of the python scripts and what I thought were more popular pages.

A few days later I got a very nice, polite e-mail from a gentleman in Germany asking where the posters were because users on his gaming forums were asking for them. He also asked if I had anymore similar sets. I fixed the problem and I’m pleasantly surprised at the level of downloads the posters have been getting. So by way of a thank you for bringing the problem to my attention I’ve posted two more sets that I’d found the pictures for but never created the PDFs for.

This time there are a total of 130 different advertising posters from the pulp era covering dates from the 1920s and 1930s. A few may be from as late as the 1950s but I can’t be sure. I’ve split them roughly into US destinations and the rest of the world because there were roughly 60ish in each category and a sheet of Avery labels has space for 65. Hopefully they’ll be of some use to someone. You can download them, or download the original Victorian set, from my new Miniature Posters page.

Just sent off the finished draft of the The Panzerfauste Song Book to Ragnarok.

A Short Back and Sides was a scenario I wrote for Kenzar & Company’s Fairy Meat which appeared in the SFSFW’s journal Ragnarok back in issue 33. Funnily I’ve had three different people request copies of it in the last month. Its been around for years and I don’t remember anyone asking for it before. So I dug the files out, converted the ones that were in odd (by today’s standard) file formats and assembled a PDF of it which can be downloaded from my web site.

A Short Back and Sides (367KB PDF)

I’ve finished an article for Ragnarok, The Panzerfaüste Song Book, porting the shanty rules from Strange Grogge to Panzerfaüste and bringing the songs up to date. Needs a bit of checking before I send it off but hopefully its ok.

I’ve also just finished a short article for Ragnarok for the game Slag!. Three new systems and four ship designs using them. Need to make graphics for each of the designs but otherwise done. Frustratingly it would be done but when I finished the drawings last night the file not only failed to save but destroyed the earlier save in the process.

I wrote an article on heist movies, You’re Only Supposed to Blow the Bloody Doors Off!!! , for Valkyrie issue 25 several years ago. I’ve been working on game ideas related to that and to a detective based game for quite a while either as a role playing game or as a wargame. I’ve been struggling to find a way to resolve the problem of finding a clue hanging on a single dice roll. While I like Gumshoe system’s solution of no random chance to finding clues I don’t think it would work well in a wargame setting where players are pitted against each other.

Well tonight while I was watching Have I Got News for You an idea came to me and I’ve got three pages of scrawled notes. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll type them up and they’ll make some sense…

Spotted this on the BBC web site – the I-Ball – a camera for use in looking in dangerous places. How long till they adapt the idea for sport? It will make for interesting footage from football and cricket plus no more watching a blue sky where there might be a ball during golf. It might cause a bit of motion sickness for tennis.

I’ve finished the first two variations of my paper house model

Update: These models are now available free from the impworks web site cardboard buoings page.

A month ago I posted a beta version of a simple models house for wargamers and role players. I’ve had some feedback on it: a request for chimney stacks, variations of the ends and an extension for the ends. I’ve also added some assembly instructions too. I’ve posted the first of the PDFs this morning (25mm House Model) and I’ll make the other PDFs over the next few days and upload them as I do.

Update: These models are now available free from the impworks web site cardboard buoings page.