Archive for the ‘Wargaming’ Category

Ragnarok Issue 58 is at the printers according to the SFSFW blog so my Bare Belly Coast article for Wessex Games’ Strange Tydes will soon be available in lovely print form. Time to finish off the Strange Grogge companion article.

Now a few years ago a famous game designer pointed out that all successful RPGs include zombies.  I think it was Robin D Laws but I could be wrong.  This was extended by others to suggest that a game could be made a success by including zombies.  Back then zombies were the preserve of horror and fantasy fiction, TV and budget horror films.  They were niche.  They were cult.  It wasn’t too many years before that time that rail adverts featured Jimmy Saville and the only undead on a train were the British Rail sandwiches.  We were told it was the Age of the Train.

Now British Rail and British Rail sandwiches don’t exist anymore. The fried breakfasts have been replaced with croissants and a full fat, ethical, posh coffee from a franchise on the renovated station.  You don’t have a brief encounter in the door with a woman as you’re both wearing backpacks and you’d get jammed in place if you tried to pass with a flirtatious smile.  Pretty soon new University students will have been born after BR was broken up.

The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Resident Evil and Shaun of the Dead have happened.  Zombies (along with Vampires and Werewolves) have become more and more mainstream.

Every day on my way to work this week I’ve faced by a Virgin Trains advert on a big screen featuring zombies…

Its now the Age of the Zombie.

So my question is are they now too main stream?  Are zombies past their sell by date?  Have they sold out  like an aging punk in an insurance advert with a million pounds in his back pocket?

What cool monster will fill the niche left by zombies?  Will it be another undead or something else?

Just sent off an article for Ragnarok a group of desert countries for Wessex Games’ Strange Tydes.  Along with details of each nations navy there are also new ship options including Lateen Rigging, naptha projectors and early cannons.

The last bit of work tonight was to draw a map to go with the article.  I modelled it as a terrain in Vue and rendered it from a high angle.  I took the render into Expression and used it as the basis for the map…

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…