Bamboo Biscotti

I've held off on opening my mouth about this mostly because there's been enough Angry White Guys opening their yaps and sounding off without much thought as it is...but a couple of years back, I wrote something about an argument that was going on in the overall gaming community at the time (and has flared up now and again since) that left me scratching my head.  Thanks to certain recent revelations, I now kind of get what was going on behind all the fuss, the person who had kicked things off into a  state of high dudgeon, and a few other things that were involved.  (I'm not naming names because That Guy has already had his ego stroked by bad publicity.) My feelings on the utter absurdity of the entire exercise haven't changed.  For the sake of some self- important jerk's ego, an entire community threw itself under the proverbial bus.  Not the first time we've ended up living down to our worse reputation.  Our track record on this is not something in which...

Many many years ago I wandered into the bookstore at the Palouse Empire mall in a little town with a big name.  The manager at the time, who was a fellow member of the Palouse Empire Science Fiction Association, spotted me, grinned ear to ear, and said something along the lines of "wait here!  I have something for you!"  She disappeared into the back room for a few minutes, then emerged with this green softcover book. She thrust it into my hands.  "I just played this for the first time last night and thought of you.  I will sell you my personal copy of the game on the condition that you run it!" That was my introduction to Al Amarja*, and to this day it remains one of my favorite games.  I still have that old, battered, dog-eared first edition copy, and a copy of the better organized and slicker second edition as well as the special hardcover twentieth anniversary version of the second edition with some additional asides. (OtE is part of what gave us the ...

Apropos of nothing and in no particular order... = = = = = Of all the kerfuffles in the hobby right now, there are two that make less than no sense to me.  There's the rather curious bulldada about inclusion (read: having people of color in illustrations and women wearing something that isn't bikini battle armor) that leaves me scratching my noggin, touched on in earlier posts now and again.  Of late, this has been joined by some odd feud between OSR and 'story' gaming, which is really odd...and over which I have ceased following certain people simply because the rhetoric employed got a bit too excessive. Let me sum up.  I am very fond of OSR.  It's part nostalgia, since if you tell me that a game has 6 stats generated by rolling 3d6 for each, uses a d20 to hit, and has Armor Class involved, I have a fair idea of how this is gonna play out.  There's something comforting in knowing that I can enjoy this without having to dedicate what free time I have to le...

On a gaming forum I frequent, someone decided to do a freeform Zootopia sandbox game.  No worries there, but...well, once some of the other characters were posted, I found myself coming up with Story and Role combinations for them.  It being the height of Bad Form to post another game on that particular forum built around the same general lines as that first one, I've held off even though our original GM has vanished.  (The game is doing just fine, by the by, in the hands of the co-GM.) So right now, this is one of those semi-hacks that I wanna run if time ever permits! ZOOTOPIA '77 Basically just straight Spirit of 77 with an all Furry cast: because the visual of a jive-fluent Tiger in a white leisure suit and an Afro boogieing on down to the disco on a Saturday night amuses me.  Khan!  Just talkin' about the Tiger.  Can you dig it? If you must, imagine Zootopia as written and directed by the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Guy Ritchie. ...

This is one of those facepalming moments of D'OH! that happens to me every other day or so.  The circuits go 'click', the proverbial light bulb flickers on, and I'm left going "oh! So that's why..." I am a big, big fan of Vince Baker's Apocalypse World system.  I'm also a big, big fan of Ed Texeira's Chain Reaction family of miniature wargames.  And it finally occurred to me that they have one interesting feature in common...independently derived, and not entirely identical, but surprisingly close. They also have a certain tone in common, being fairly narrativist in feel.  (I know, I know, 'how do you write a narrativist wargame'?  Ed's done it. Trust me on this.)  They achieve this by abstracting a whole lotta stuff that most of the gaming industry tries to define to a fare-thee-well and seventeen decimal places, letting you focus on the important stuff*.  This is more apparent in the 'light RPGs' that Ed has publishe...

No Thank You Evil My deluxe copy of No Thank You, Evil! arrived Monday evening.  Tomorrow we're going to give this baby a proper try-out under fire now that we've all the bells and whistles to go with it.  One of her cousins, who is a terrifically talented budding artist, has been asked to draw my Cub's character for her as well if and when we can ever get together and get the kids around a table for about an hour so Unca Harry can show 'em how this works.  Better yet, she's got a couple of friends who may well be willing to join in! Spaaaaace Opera Alas, the Black Box Traveler game hit a snag and so my space opera jones is roaring back in full force at about the same time I'm hoping to free up time to playtest another fine historical hack of Apocalypse World by the clever, talented, and patient D. Pignedoli, whose City of Judas I also tested. Can't tell you what this one's about just yet, but it's pretty awesome.  Like Wield, though, it's ...

Too many games, too many ideas, too few players, not nearly enough time. (ahem) While my aforementioned jones for Uncharted Worlds is likely to be getting satisfied by a certain black-box game of Traveler, I still have plot bunnies that sink their nasty, sharp, pointy fangs into my sensorium and refuse to turn loose.  Here is today's entry, which is the official posting of something that's been running amok like an over-caffeinated anthropomorphic little Raccoon kid with a super-soaker and easily embarrassed older siblings. An all-catgirl reskin of something Firefly-ish with a dash of Flash Gordon and Barsoom...as written by Rumiko Takahashi and directed by Nabeshin and Ralph Bakshi. Blasters, cutlasses, battle-bikinis, and a hint of fanservice along with incredible special effects and the occasional planet being destroyed by accident. Yes, this is probably sillier than most UW games would be.  That's how I roll.

I owe, I owe, I owe an update to this!  And Aledys is probably sick and tired of being stuck at sea by now. A bit of news, though--I recently backed a thing called Uncharted Worlds, which is  a space opera game that uses Vince Baker's Apocalypse World system.  About five minutes in, I was reminded of one of Ed's many, many projects...and so I'm also now looking over my copy of 5150: Urban Renewal because New Hope City is a perfect setting for something like UW. (Another fifteen microseconds of fame...here I am in the credits along with all the other Kickstarters: (Credit where it's due--my current fanboyish blather about Apocalypse World is at least a little bit due to a fellow named Delos who writes stuff like this:   Ramblings of Jacob and Delos     Just don't ask him about Sin and her tendency to make heads explode!  The special memories of that first game may not yet have faded.) Also, the good folks at Hero Forge have been adding to thei...

More steampunk swashbuckling goodness that Bishrook would have loved to bits.  It's still under development and playtesting, but rest assured that when it IS published, it's joining my library.  (I've got a couple of Mr. Roby's other games, like Full Light Full Steam, and I backed his supplement for Houses of the Blooded, so I admit a certain positive inclination toward his work.) Steampunk has a problem, although the degree to which it impacts your game depends on a number of factors such as which rule-set and setting you are using, the composition of your play group, and whether the GM is prone to pettifoggery on certain historical details.  Namely that the 'default' group is generally European (thus white) and tends to be middle-upper or upper class to one degree or another.  To be fair, there are exceptions!  In my (somewhat limited) experience, that's how things turn out--diversity, should it arise, is more likely in settings where you have Elves and ...

I'm leveling up tomorrow, going from 42 to 43, and for various reasons haven't had the time to do another month in Aledys's exploits.  Next week, though! In the meantime, as my birthday present to myself, I added two more of Ed's games to my collection, one of which WILL be showing up.  I already had Larger Than Life and Adventures In The Lost Lands, and now I have Motor City BC to go with them!  Because nothing says furious pulp action like dinosaurs and Caddy convertibles!  So far I think my favorite thing in Motor City is the "Where's the Yum?" table, which comes into play when Mister T-Rex realizes that chomping on the outside of an M4A3 Sherman Tank doesn't taste very good. Motor City is, by the by, an excellent example of why I like Ed's work so much.  According to the author's notes, it came about because Ed posted an AAR about a T-Rex meeting a Sherman Tank and the author (John Cunningham by name) asked if that was really how thing...

After a good night's sleep on the thought, I'm going to move ahead with a few other projects here as well.  Steph liked a good bit of pulp action as well, so from time to time there will be Larger Than Life AARs to add. Not to mention that one of her long-running characters, a PI named Octavia Butler, would do well in New Hope City.  So there's room for 5150 New Beginnings as well. And while the only kind of undead I hate more than vampires (twinkly or otherwise) is zombies, she liked a good bit of impending zombie-pocalypse.  So FFO and the rest of ATZ it will be.  Plus it'll be fun to get some mileage out of that City Card Deck from the High Rise to Hell project.  Not to mention that Steph would really have loved the addition of vampires, werewolves, and spellslingers to the mix. This will still mostly be about a Frisian Tomboy running amok in Colonial Lemuria, but there'll be some other stuff mixed in from time to time. (Maybe I should tease Ed about...

Full credit where it's due.  Some technical assistance for this project will be provided by the Crown Princess of Trans-shipped Goods. My Cub likes pirates almost as much as she likes cowboys and princesses.  She has the pink-ribbon'd skull and crossbones temporary tattoo to prove it, although for now she's more Jake and the Neverland Pirates than Pirates of the Caribbean. She's agreed to help Baba with his project--mostly rolling dice and maybe posing next to the table once in a while for the fun of it.  She gets to spend quality time with me, I get to find out if my horrendous luck with dice is inherited, and the project will get updates that much faster because I'll have someone pestering me to let her play with my toys.  Sounds like a win-win-win to me! If someday in the future you end up across the table from a cute lil' Asian kid in a Molly Roger tee shirt whose Space Marines use a Hello Kitty pink and white paint scheme, you'll know who t...

This project exists because of two people.  Let me tell you about them really quickly. I have a friend who writes, designs, and sells wargames for a living.  He's awesome.  His games are awesome.  He is one of the coolest adults it has been my privilege to meet here on this little blue and green marble.  He is the man, the myth, the legend... Ed Texiera of Two Hour Wargames.  You can learn more about Ed's handiwork here: http://twohourwargames.com/ Ed's motto is "just play the game".  He doesn't have official miniatures, official terrain, stuff you have to have to play one of his games (outside of the rules).  The play's the thing. I first met Ed ages and ages ago, out here in the Great Green Northwest, back when he was putting the finishing touches on something called Warrior Kings.  I got to play in one of his demos at a small local convention and was hooked on the concept.  Warrior Kings begat Warrior Heroes, and then he did so...