It's been a while now...

Picture unrelated to text, purely to grab your attention

A number of things have been running through my mind lately about D&D, well really RPGs in general and D&D, my favorite RPG, in particular. D&D is the 600 pound gorilla of the RPG world, and some of it's modern controversies occasionally cross my field of view. Racism has been a big one lately, between the “Orcs are inherently evil, and therefore a racist stand in for non-whites” and the “Oriental Adventures is racist and should be taken down from Drivethru”.

I think both of these arguments are wrong, but I can understand why they were made, and I also understand that my feelings on this should not be the focus here, when people say that something is bothering them, we should listen, and try to help where we can. I think WotC made a good call putting a disclaimer on the old TSR stuff, not so much with the wording as with the intent behind it, even if it was maybe just to cover their own behinds while continuing to sell “offensive” materials.

I am the Admin for the AD&D Oriental Adventures group on Facebook. I created the group years ago when I saw there wasn't a group for OA fans already. I have never really had to actively moderate this group until the past couple of weeks. I had to add rules to the group, to keep things civil, and I have still had to delete a couple of dozen posts recently. It's frustrating for me, and I am sure for the people that have had their posts deleted for violating rules. I get it, you are upset that there has been a call to remove OA from distribution. I don't think OA is racist myself, and it was pretty enlightened as a treatment for east Asian themed AD&D when it was written. The name was a bit tone deaf in 1985, but not especially so (no real defense for the 3e version having the same name in 2001). 

Having watched over 10 hours of the “Asians Read Oriental Adventures” videos, I found them frustrating, as they didn't seem to understand AD&D, and complained pretty ceaselessly about how AD&D wasn't the kind of story game they liked, and assumed that some AD&D rules were simply racist ways to play Asians in D&D. They also took serious issue with the fact the OA is a mash up of all east Asian cultures, which I found annoying, as it is exactly the same thing AD&D does with European cultures (along with elements from the rest of the world, but especially western Asia and north Africa), while they also complained that it was too Japan oriented. The Japan-centric focus of OA makes sense for the time it was produced as we had recently gotten the extremely popular Shogun novel and miniseries, the Karate Kid, and the ninja craze was in it's bloom.

Were there racist things in OA? Yes. Certainly there were. The implication that east Asians all have Ki powers, making them all more mystically attuned is certainly pretty racist, for example. Ki powers are also a pretty important part of a lot of the media we were getting from Asia at the time though, so it might have been odd to leave them out. In any case, I think Oriental Adventures was a product of it's time, and that at that time it was an American made love letter to the Asian fantasy were were getting from Asia. OA also stoked my love for Asian culture. I have studied a lot of Asian history and OA was probably at least partially responsible for that.

Now, on inherently Evil species, and Alignment in general. D&D has always had this Alignment based cosmology, and I think it's important here to note that it is literally a declaration of what team you are supporting in a cosmic struggle. In my opinion that's the more important part than the code of behavior that your Alignment dictates. I think that adding the Good/Evil axis to Alignment may have broken it a bit, mainly because Lawful was generally considered to be the “Good guys” and Chaotic was already seen as Evil; creating a Lawful that was Evil, or a Chaotic that was Good messed with the dynamic. 

Now all Orcs being inherently evil smacks of biological essentialism, and that's the sort of thing that justifies things like colonization, slavery, or eugenics; all of which are bad (and I really wish I still lived in a world where I didn't need to state that). I get where these people are coming from when they say it's racist to have all Orcs be Evil. I also have seen Tolkien's statement about Orcs being like ugly Mongols, and he really is the father of that species in modern fantasy. The issue I have with this is that I never saw them that way. At worst I saw them as a generic savage “other”, my earliest DM used Orcs basically as Viking analogues raiding and plundering against our civilization, so I really have always cast them in the light of an implacable barbarian foe, the tribes of Germans that brought down Rome, or the Huns, or the Vikings, or the Mongols, or at least a caricature of those peoples. They were savages from elsewhere, seeking to destroy civilization and plunder it's wealth, usually thoughtlessly destructive, almost a force of nature. Looking at this I can see how it could be seen as racist, but most of the named savages are white folks. 

Now we need to factor in one more thing though, the Gods are real, and there really is a grand cosmic struggle between Good and Evil (or Law and Chaos if you prefer). In my Garnia campaign this is a constant, real factor, although the struggle is referred to as one between Light and Darkness, which, apparently, has it's own racist connotations when Light equals Good and Darkness Evil. Anyway, Orcs, in standard D&D cosmology, are created beings, the minions of Gruumsh, of course they are inherently Evil followers of an Evil god. The same is true in Lord of the Rings, they are essentially slaves of Sauron, as I recall they were originally Elves that were corrupted. In my campaign Orcs are created beings used as shock troops by the real forces of Evil for use in their interplanar war. There's a lot of backstory there, but Orcs are a newer species in my game and haven't explored their full potential. 

But, Humans are inherently Neutral. They have free will to choose which side to support, but most of them will happily enjoy the benefits of civilization without ever committing to it via a Lawful Alignment, both in my world, and in OD&D. Cosmologically speaking, Humans are free agents, their Gods come in all Alignments, and they have many, many gods, some petty, some mighty. There's a bit more to it, the plane that my campaign world is on is a good aligned one, albeit only in a minor way, so it slightly shifts the Humans to favor Good Alignments more than usual, but the choice is still there.

Also, there are examples of creatures breaking free of their pre-ordained Alignments. Dark Elves are an example of this (at least it's my campaign's explanation for Evil Elves), but I also have a single culture of Goblins that have broken free of their Evil Alignment, although they are not generally speaking Good Aligned, and some choose Evil, they broke free and got a choice.

And I assume that the stated Alignment for any given species is the general Alignment for them, not the only Alignment found there. Maybe 1% or fewer members of the species shake the stated Alignment, but it could happen. I assume that's what's going on when players choose a non-species standard Alignment for their characters. Dwarves are Lawful Good, per the book, but most PC Dwarves vary from that, in my experience. Elves, on the other hand, are Chaotic Good in AD&D, and you see that pretty regularly, occasionally dropping to Chaotic Neutral for the Edgy ones, or Neutral Good for the nicer ones. D&D literature already gave us Drizzt, decades ago.

I guess what I am saying is that a certain degree of bio-essentialism seems to make sense in a fantasy world, where there are real forces of Good and Evil out there creating sentient beings to do their bidding, and if all Orcs aren't inherently evil, where do we stop on the Evil food chain? There are a lot of Evil monsters out there. Ogres? Giants? Dragons? Outer planar creatures like Demons? How about the sentient and free-willed Undead, like Vampires or Liches? 

Now, having said this, I heard about, but have not seen or read, a 5th edition D&D supplement that separates culture from ancestry (species). I don't hate this idea, although it does lean hard into some new ideas that are popular in RPGs, namely what I call the “no humans” trend, where it seems like every player wants their character to be somehow absolutely unique. I am guessing this comes from story games, and I was a little surprised when I watched the Asians Represent videos how strongly they seemed to feel that the DM should not be able to dictate anything to the players about what type of characters they might play. As a DM I found the concept intriguing, but also annoying enough that I would have smote them for their attitude if they'd brought it to me like that.

Anyway, I am guessing ancestry (species, race) is the genetic component of your character, and culture is how you were raised. In my campaign world I have Dwarves called “Broken Dwarves” because they no longer live within their culture, they live amongst the Humans that have come to dominate the world they live in, and have relatively little tying them to their ancestral ways. Where there are communities of Broken Dwarves they tend to dominate certain trades, based on their ancestral ties to those trades, but then again they might just become sailors too.

Now that I think about it, most of the PC races available in the 1st edition AD&D PH tend to live in Human communities in my world, which isn't to say they all do. There is still an extant Dwarven kingdom (really a bunch of smaller sub-kingdoms tied together by a shared past, but with large swathes of lost territory between them). There are entirely Halfling villages, although mainly under the protection of the nearby local Human communities. Elf PCs mainly come from a background in Human communities, their empire having long ago fallen, although some “wild” Elves exist in wilderness areas beyond Human reach.

Now all of these being different species, I am not sure how the cultural part works, but the genetic part seems pretty straightforward, Dwarves are heartier, so they get the +1 to CON. Elves are quicker than Humans, so a +1 to DEX, etc. Humans are the base line, so no +/- anywhere, my guess is the -1 to CHA for Dwarves is based on their comparison to Humans, but it seems like a CHA bonus or penalty maybe should have been a cultural thing, which implies then that either Dwarves are genetically predisposed towards gruffness, or maybe that penalty should go elsewhere. Half-Orcs even more so.

Speaking of Half-Orcs, they are somewhat problematic. Orcs being inherently Evil, and apparently super fertile, they clearly go around raping everything they can, which would imply a lot about the setting of D&D that I'd really rather not have to deal with. I like to keep the level of my D&D games roughly PG-13, although pretty much every D&D game would get a R for violence. I am not squeamish, but the rape backstory of the entire Half-Orc species is pretty bad, and kind of racist. I wasn't really comfortable with that once I gave it due consideration, and it was particularly awkward when I played with my wife and kids. I included them when I created this campaign setting back in the day, because they were in the PH as a PC race, but I would give them a pass these days. 

I might consider them as a separate type of Human in a species plus culture context, essentially as Humans raised in Orc culture. I did that in another campaign with Half-Elves, I made them Elf-Karls, who were Humans raised by Elves in my Ostschild setting a couple years back. They weren't playable then though, but it makes for an interesting take on Half-Orcs, and it removes the rape background, as well as, quite likely, the racist connotations of miscegenation. Problem solved? Maybe. Maybe I'll revisit the idea of Elf-Karls for Garnia too, so it removes the “Star Trek” issue of every species being able to interbreed with every other species. 

Maybe not though. I had previously explained the genetic compatibility to the species being related, Elves essentially being an uplifted variant of human, infused by the forces of light into a new species, nigh immortal, with a greater natural affinity to both nature and magic; Orcs, on the other hand, deliberately created from humans infused with wild boar via magic (Pig-faced Orcs in my world). The benefit of Half-Orcs was that they could act as 5th columnists in Human society. The ability to interbreed with Elves just a random accident of being related. Elves and Orcs not being able to interbreed being a function of the opposite natures of their creation.

If we're pulling apart culture and species though, I think we should also consider social class. Cultural values are important and all, but I think a lot more of what makes you comes from the social class you are born into. Even today in the USA the zip code you grew up in is a better indicator of how well you are likely to do in life than any other single factor. A rural peasant's background is going to give you an entirely different outlook on life, and a different skill set, than someone born to the nobility, or even a tradesman's child.

Dun Gwyn

There are a couple of things about the setting I don't think I have adequately conveyed during gaming, so I want to clear this up, for the purposes of Blue Booking, if nothing else.

First, Dun Gwyn is small. It's the end of line line (currently) economically and militarily. The dun itself is a quickly constructed motte-and-bailey. Lord Gwyn¹, the first and current lord, has no more than a thirty riders at his disposal, although he commands a larger military garrison too. The small temple of Bel² is located within the fortified area, and has a handful of temple guards. The detachment of soldiers (about 100, it varies because of their patrols along the coast road, and expeditions to the interior) are garrisoned in tents at the western edge of town. The town is a ramshackle of rapidly constructed buildings, half constructed buildings and tents. One of the few buildings in the town is the poor quality inn, “The Lion's Den” that your party stays at while they are in town. It is lousy with fleas and bed bugs, and doesn't offer a lot of choice in it's sleeping arrangements, either barracks style shared multi-bunk room, the common room (where you just sleep on the floor (or on a table or bench) providing your own bedding, or, lastly, the one private room the inn-keeper lives in, but is willing to rent out to paying customers. The food is mediocre, but filling. Most of the merchants are just visiting, this is the last stop on their trade route, after buying and (mostly) selling here, they turn around and head back to the coast. Most of the stuff they bring is for the soldiers.

Recently an influx of a couple of hundred settlers of various backgrounds arrived, and more are likely on their way. The dun, the soldiers and the settlers are causing tension with the local human (barbarian³) population.

Second, Tirnakaur (the colony that you are in) is hot. Think Georgia through Florida hot. It also rains a lot there, pretty much every day. So it's also muddy and wet. The area is not especially well explored, although that will probably become a campaign goal as you guys level up. Levels 1-3 are traditionally focused on dungeons (and despite being largely outside, the Hill plays like one because of the magic in the forest restricting you to various paths), levels 4+ traditionally focus on wilderness exploration type adventures, or at least overland travels to more advanced level dungeons.

Third, the amazing abundance of animals everywhere. Us modern folk don't think about this much, but there are more animals than humans in any place there are humans. I went down a rabbit hole researching horses this morning and wow, are there a lot of different, specialized horses, not just the differences between riding and draft horses, but various types of riding horses for different purposes, and all of the working horses have specializations to their jobs, with very few horses being multi-purpose. That got me thinking about the other animals, almost every household has at least one dog, for instance, or cats, a necessity for keeping vermin down (although not particularly liked especially well, as a rule), any settlement or homestead is going to have flocks of various fowl, mostly chickens, ducks and geese, and cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs; with pigs being the only ones that are raised solely for their meat (although their hides are useful too).

So I guess Dun Gwyn is mostly a smelly barnyard of an unhygienic tent city. Crossing the Shrill to the Hill might actually be safer than the impending cholera and/or typhus outbreak that is sure to occur in Dun Gwyn. Probably the only clean places there are inside the dun itself, like Lord Gwyn's hall or the temple of Bel.

1Lord Gwyn is clearly an old style lord, he keeps his own band of oath-sworn riders, most lords of Avalon have abandoned this practice.

2Bel is also known as “The Great God”, he is the most widely worshiped deity in the Avalonish pantheon.

3These “barbarians” are mostly of a similar ethnic stock to the people of Avalon, speaking a different dialect of the same root language, kind of like the difference between the English of Shakespeare and the King James Bible vs. the modern American English of today. Isolated groups are of different ethnicities, there are also groups of “wild” elves here, they constitute an entirely different “barbarian” group.

Ostschild is done

Ostschild is done. It's actually been done for a few months now. A second TPK in as many weeks did it in for good, right before our Christmas holidays hiatus from gaming. I am a little sad that it's over, and maybe I'll revisit it later. Ostschild came close to being what I wanted in a D&D game; it was set in a realistic medieval milieu; it built on actual, real world history, folklore, and mythology; and it drew all of that into a coherent fantasy setting. Some concessions were made for D&D, for the feel, or the rules, or the expectations of D&D gamers. The only difference I might make is to change the rules set to something like Lion & Dragon, although it's explicitly British setting would require some retooling to make it fit the Holy Roman Empire. Alternately I might consider running a very similar set up in the British isles, I did lament a bit the choice of central European location making the names of people and places a bit difficult for both my gamers and myself to pronounce, given our American English speaking backgrounds.

I have been running a new AD&D game set in my old Garnia setting. I did TPK the party once there already, maybe three sessions in, but they dusted themselves off like troopers, made new characters and we're on our 5^th session with new new PCs now. I adapted “Horror on the Hill” for play in my campaign world, and it's been fun so far (despite the TPK).

I do have some more campaign specific stuff to hand out to them, currently they are aware of the Celtic theme of the setting, and it's set in my “post-apocalyptic” timeline, where all of the old kingdoms were overrun and destroyed by the forces of evil. Their characters are descendants of the refugees that fled the main continent to the relative safety of an isolated island I am calling Avalon in the eastern ocean. Now their people are seeking to explore and resettle the ancient lands of their ancestors. The biggest surprise is that not all of the humans, elves, etc. were wiped out completely, so there are pockets of pretty hardy survivors there, although they have often descended into barbarism due to the circumstances of their own ancestors survival.

The humanoids and other evil forces have become extremely disunited in the centuries following their victory, and have squabbled greatly over the spoils amongst themselves, which is probably why there are pockets of survivors.

Anyway, we've been doing this since January, and it's April now, so I thought I'd blog about it. I still need to put together a list of Celtic names, they actually requested it. I need to write up documents for Elves, Halflings and Gnomes. I already had one I made last year for Dwarves when I was running my “Lost Atlantis” campaign online, it needed just a bit of editing to remove the Roman stuff, it's still the same campaign world, but the other side of the main continent. Atlantis was kind of an inspiration for Avalon in this campaign, an island appearing where none was before and all, only with Avalon it was placed there when the forces of good needed a place to retreat to.

Lost Atlantis

So I started a new (heavily house ruled) AD&D campaign, a mini-setting, part of my larger "Garnia" campaign setting. I call it lost Atlantis. I am running it as a "cloud" or"West Marches" style game. I asked all my friends (and family that play D&D) what kind of a game they wanted and they picked Exploration over Mega-Dungeon, so that's the focus.

Originally it was supposed to be an in person, local game, but it's like herding cats to get everyone's schedules to mesh, then we had bad weather cancel our only two scheduled games, so I opened it up to the possibility of online play via Roll20 and Discord, that gave me some more possible players, people I used to play with that had moved out of area and such.

I found a couple of other guys that are local through a gaming meet up.

We played a few times and I felt a little more confident. I don't use minis most of the time at home, so much of Roll20 is wasted on me, but it does make for a good dice roller and a repository for character sheets and the various documents I have written for the setting, which is, basically, the Roman empire discovers a new continent, where there never was one before. It's got a bunch of other accretions from my roughly 35 years of DMing in this world, but that's close enough to start.

I mention this now, because I am probably going to keep sharing stuff like my "Schrodinger's Adventurer" rule, which is now a house rule in the game, and also in case anyone want to check it out. We're playing tonight at 7:00PM. I'll be there sometime before 7:00PM (eastern US) to assist with rolling characters.

Here's the Discord link for voice- https://discord.gg/jYCvjPY

Here's the Roll20 link for the rest - https://app.roll20.net/join/2998862/sQwuRg

There is also a Facebook group for the game, which is used for scheduling (until I figure out a better way), as a secondary repository of campaign documents, and for talking about the game. Find it here - https://www.facebook.com/groups/260202304516526/


I still kind of consider my online game to be a beta, so I am slowly rolling it out for public consumption, but loyal blog readers should get the beta pass.

Schrodinger's Adventurer Rule

An alternate take on death and dying in D&D.

Essentially, when a PC or named NPC drops to zero or fewer Hit Points he is in a state of being neither dead, nor alive until we check on him, usually after combat. As soon as he is checked on (an action that takes a round for one PC), or the combat ends (Perhaps due to a TPK or the party's retreat from the battlefield),  the PC (or NPC) then makes a Save vs. Death to see whether or not he (or she) has shuffled off this mortal coil. The save is made at -2 if there was no one checking (this assumes that the person checking is acting as a combat medic/first responder, binding wounds, doing first aid, mouth to mouth, whatever). If the save is successful, the PC is unconscious at zero Hit Points and rolls on table A below; if not he is dead.

Table A-

1. Nothing happened, just got knocked silly somehow.
2. Roll 1d6 1-4 Gnarly scar, cool story, maybe a free drink every now and again, chicks dig it. 5-6 Gross scar -1CHA.
3. Head wound, make a Saving Throw vs Death for ½ effect, save at +4 if wearing a Helmet,  roll a d6 1-2 lose 1d4 INT, 3-4 lose 1d4 WIS, 5-6 lose 1d4 CHA, save again in a week, failure makes it permanent. Can be fixed with a Restoration spell.
4. Picked up a limp -25% movement rate, Save again in a week to see if it gets better, then again in a month, if it isn't better then, it never will be.
5. Broken limb, Roll a d6, 1-4 arm/hand, 5-6 Leg/Foot. Roll a d6: 1-4 dominant side, 5-6 off side, takes 2d4+2 weeks to heal.
6. Lost a body part, roll on table B.
7. Never heals right, -1 CON, natural healing is at 50% of normal from now on. Can be fixed with a Heal spell (50% chance), or a Regenerate spell (100% chance). Either way a rest of 2d10 days is necessary before full function is restored.
8. Mortal Wound, PC may be healed magically, but health will continue to decline losing 1d4 CON per day until 0 CON and death, or a regenerate spell is cast. Some kind of organ damage or internal bleeding or something.

Table B-

1. Fingers (or toes 10% chance), 1d4 fingers lost (75% chance on dominant hand side).
2. Hand (or foot, 5% chance), 75% chance on dominant side.
3. Arm (or leg) 75% chance dominant side, 75% chance below the elbow (or knee).
4. NOT THE FACE! Eye (50%), nose (25%) or mouth (25%), All of these leave a scar, with the eye it's got a 50% chance of being gnarly. Eye leaves you with a loss of vision to one side and a lack of depth perception (-2 to all ranged attacks until a Saving Throw is made, thereafter -1), loss of the nose always is gross, as is the loss of teeth from a mouth hit until the teeth can be regrown or false teeth are acquired.

Vikings and More!

I started the Vikings game with the PCs arriving on the mystic isle of Dvergrholm and presenting themselves to the Dwarf-King of the Northern Clans, Frodi Jarnhamar, and then accidentally accepting his commission to be protectors of his people; essentially to become members of his warband, his Huskarls. One of the PCs had died in a random encounter on the way there, the party's only Wizard type, a Necromancer whose name I don't remember; he was killed off the coast of Norway by a small band of pirates that the rest of the party managed to kill, but he died well.

I ran the One Page Dungeon "The Dodsbakken" by Bard, which was one of the submissions for the contest I am running; with some minor changes for flavor - "Ivar the Boneless" became "Andvari I", because I set the burial mound outside a Dwarven settlement, but other than that it was unchanged. I had eight PCs enter the Dodsbakken, Grimhild the Gentle and her sister Ingebjorg the Kind (both Fighters), Sjolf Skullsplitter the Berserker, Dagvaldi the Doomsayer (a Runecaster with the "Seer" gift and a horrible attitude), Ragnhild Red-Tresses, Brynhild the Swede, Aesa Fjoradottir and her brother Gust Fjorason, all four Fighters. Viking campaigns are a Fighter fest.

I won't give away spoilers, in case you guys are players and have GMs that might want to run this adventure, but it was fun and it was fast and for all the fighter heaviness of the party, we could have used a Cleric, which the 2nd edition Viking Campaign Sourcebook specifically prohibits, or a Mage of some sort in the party. There were three near deaths and one death in the party, poor Ingebjorg, she died during the final encounter. I guess if you have to go, that's the way to do it.

Everyone who has submitted a module and sent me their postal address, I missed the Post Office on Saturday with the Magnets because my son John had a Cross Country meet and my wife decided to do some original artwork on each envelope, so enjoy, you all get a Mona Dowie original as well as a cool refrigerator magnet. Anyone who HASN'T submitted a dungeon yet, there are still a LOT of magnets left. If you DON'T want to submit a dungeon, but still want a magnet, I'll send you one if you volunteer to judge the competition with me and the other volunteers, ultimately I'd like to get up to ten judges for the contest so every judges personal opinion doesn't carry overwhelming weight. I'd also like to thank everyone again who mentioned my contest on their blogs and, lastly, point out that you aren't limited to a single submission for the contest; if you don't mind competing against yourself, I don't have a problem with extra entries, so that answers that question.

Now, also going on in my gaming world, I've been a little busy working on 43 AD, actually working on the game with Paul Elliot, the game's designer. 43 AD will be going to print soon and it should be my first print RPG credit, although mostly as an editor, since the print deadline didn't give much of a chance to do much else; but if a revised edition ever sees the light of day my buddy Darryl and I have a lot of ideas we'd like to see incorporated into it.

I have also been working with Darryl on OUR project- The World of Garnia, a home-brewed, Celtic themed campaign world that we have been designing for the last thirty years together (and apart), that we have decided to actually put together for real, down on paper and make available for other people to use if they want. He has finished primary cartography for the new world map as of yesterday and I have been piecemeal presenting things on my other blog for months, go check it out. He posted some pictures of the maps with continental outlines drawn in, the blog has some timelines and other cool bits of our process. The idea here is to get other people interested in this too, so we can make this creative endeavor more crowd-sourced- get some short fiction set in the world, have some people that can convert stuff to other game systems, just have other creative people join our design team.  

Only 10 RPG books and a few other things

I have been meaning to jump on the OSR bandwagon meme of picking out which 10 RPG books I would take with me to a desert isle, presumably with a group of fellow gamers, and I realized that if I am limited to hard copies of books I actually own, while I have an extensive collection, it's going to be mostly, if not all, TSR (A)D&D books; and thus, a pretty boring list. Essentially it's the books on my desk- 1st edition AD&D DMG, PH, MM, OA and module OA1 Swords of the Daimyo, Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, Cook/Marsh Expert and modules B2 Keep on the Borderlands and X1 Isle of Dread. Now, if I get to assume that the last 2 modules are part of the boxed sets they come with, I'll pick James Pacek's "The Wilderness Alphabet" and the D&D Cyclopedia. I'll also have an extra copy of B2, unless I am allowed to switch out and put my copy of B1 in the Holmes box. There's only one non-TSR product on the list, and it's an alternate; it is an excellent book and I picked it over every other OSR product because of my preference for DMing wilderness adventures. More people should buy it.

Next, I have been doing a lot of reading. Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition RPG stuff, because I am GMing a campaign of that now apparently. I didn't think this one would take off as more than a one-shot, but everyone seems pretty into it. Roman & Celtic history and historical fiction because I am GMing a 43 AD campaign too, and I like to be both well informed and able to steal ideas from real history and from good authors. This game is off to a good start, even if some of the rules range from a bit to extremely unclear. Anyway, I have got more long days and nights of reading ahead of me, I just got these books over the last couple of days-

The First Man in Rome is actually a replacement of a replacement copy, it's one of those books I keep lending out and not getting back.

I liked Pompeii, so I am giving this one a chance too.

Miranda Green is just a great scholar when it comes to the Celts. 

Obviously the Yurt book and the book on Khubilai Khan are not for the 2 currently running RPG campaigns, they are for my Yurt building project and my long standing love of Mongol history respectively; I just felt that I should add them for completeness' sake.

I have also been working on my Garnia campaign world, I have two different areas that I am detailing right now. One area, I am waiting on art for from my wife, I forget from time to time that I usually fall to the bottom of her priority list for art projects. I want to strike while the iron is hot for me, while I am inspired to write about a particular topic, she needs to wait for the inspiration to strike her to illustrate that same topic. When we are in sync, things are great, when we aren't it is an agonizing wait for me; because it's always me waiting on art, I can't ever remember a time when she was waiting for my writing. The other area I want her art for too, because I want to move away from using public domain art or just pictures I found on the net; I figure if I ever get around to publishing any of this stuff it should have it's own illustrations and she's a great illustrator. She just doesn't appear to prioritize my projects over her own, which annoys me.

So while I have been cooling my heels and NOT working on those projects and NOT reading for 24 hours a day, I have fallen off the wagon and indulged in a few games of Civilization. I say a few games because I haven't played in a couple of years now and I apparently am not the Civilization powerhouse I used to be, that's a humbling experience. I had to drop down two levels of difficulty while I get my Civilization bearings back again and I am still not doing great, just not getting trounced. I used to play the game all the time heavily modded, I tried that and couldn't remember what all the mods did, other than make the game harder. I had to switch back to vanilla Civilization IV + Warlords + Beyond the Sword. I used to create mods for this game, I made an awesome Scotland Civilization, now if I make it to the modern age I am likely to be a 3rd rate power.  

As Requested, My Curriculum Vitae-

Pictured - Mona and I at our big SCA wedding with the kids, Ash was had turned 12 then and Em had just turned 7 earlier in the month, John was still 9.

My name is William Dowie. I am a 43 year old white man from the rural northern edge of central New York state, on Lake Ontario. I am a giant history nerd, in college I majored in history with a focus on Classical Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, I minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I also took a bunch of Anthropology courses, but not enough to count as a second major. I am 6'6" tall and I have worked as a substitute teacher, short order cook, bouncer, machinist and convenience store clerk, just to name a few. I speak French passably well, Spanish slightly less so, and can usually guess my way through written Italian or Latin. I have tried to teach myself Scots Gaelic, much less successfully, but can pick out a number of written words on sight and sometimes recognize words when I hear them. Oddly enough I can pick out Welsh words now just as easily when they are cognates to the Scots Gaelic words I know, I see patterns in language easily.

I am married to a wonderful woman named Mona and we have three children; Ashli (19), John (17) and Ember (14), who were literally left on our doorstep when they were 11, 9 and 6 respectively. We live on a small, mostly forested plot of land in New Haven, New York - which is north of Syracuse and east of Rochester, nearest to the smaller city of Oswego, NY - where I continue to scheme ways to homestead and get off the grid, mostly because I hate the high cost of electricity in a county with three nuclear power plants, and I want healthier food than I can buy from the store, with the bonus that it'll be cheaper too. I have been frustrated in my attempts to clear my land because it's a lot harder to do than you would think, I have a lot more respect for pioneers now, especially since they did it with no power tools at all. I also have some valuable lumber that I can't seem to get anyone to harvest because my lot is too small and the presence of my house and the power lines along the edge of the road make it too difficult to be worth it, so apparently I need the price of Cherry to rise back to the level it was before our economic collapse to attract loggers.

I have been playing board wargames and D&D since 1980, when my friend Chris introduced me to both the week that we went to see Excalibur together with my dad. We played SPI's Sorcerer that weekend, because he had brought it over to my house and played D&D with him DMing before the week was out using the Holmes Basic rules. I went out and bought a set as soon as I could save up the money, maybe a month later. For a long time after that pretty much all of my money went into my D&D habit in some way or another, books, modules, Dragon Magazine, "official" Grenadier miniatures.

I found the SCA while the local group was doing a demo at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY back in 1983 when I was 14, I have drifted in and out of the SCA ever since. I am currently missing Pennsic for my 41st time in a row. Something always comes up. Not that it matters anymore, I have passed my fighting prime and I don't think it's coming back no matter how hard I try. I keep resolving to make it to fighter practice more often and get back into my "Crown Tourney" rhythm, but that just isn't going to happen at my age anymore. I don't heal quick enough to fight six days a week anymore. That and I can't afford the gas money for the hundreds of extra miles per week I'd be putting on my minivan to go to all of the extra fighter practices and events. Still, I have made a lot of good friends in the SCA over the years and some great memories, I am happy to have been there for what I did and I wish I could do more still.

1985 was the year of the release of the 1st edition AD&D Oriental Adventures book, it's one of those books that you either love despite it's warts or you hate because of them. I love that book and it's probably because it's the only AD&D book I ever pre-ordered at Twilight Book & Game Emporium in Syracuse, NY - a sadly long gone FLGS. Despite the fact that the glue cracked on the binding causing several pages to become loose literally the first time I opened it, I was determined to get my money's worth out of it. Before my friend Tim left for Basic training in the US army the next year I took over DMing duties from him, which I had only rarely done before, and we played an epic OA campaign. I have played in one pretty epic OA campaign, as a Steppe Barbarian named Chanar Ilkhan, and DMed a few more since. One of my current projects is rewriting the OA book as I think it should have been.

As a side note, I was really anti-Rokugan because they changed the default setting in the 3e version of the Oriental Adventures book to Rokugan from Kara-Tur, and that made me, by default, anti-Legend of the Five Rings. I had been strongly attracted to the setting through AEG's Clan War miniature battle game prior to that, but hadn't bought into it at the time because I could not find at least one other person that was willing to also jump on board with me and had been burned by miniature games that way in the past. Now I am happy to say I have come full circle because I started buying old Clan War miniatures on EBay for my OA campaign and ended up getting the rules, which made me interested in the setting, which made me interested in the RPG, which got me to buy the new board game, which led me to buy some CCG cards too. I have even read through some of the published fiction, and, until it was shut down recently, was playing in a Facebook app version of the RPG called Emerald Empire. I really hated the 3e version of Oriental Adventures.

I played (A)D&D, tried out some other RPGs and wargamed a lot through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Wargaming kind of died in the 1990s (except on the PC, it boomed there), and I concentrated on just RPGs, then just D&D. Sometime after 3rd edition D&D came out, after the novelty wore off for me, I realized I disliked DMing it rather intensely. I was a little late coming to the 3rd edition party, because my D&D group was happy with 2nd edition and we didn't switch over until that campaign died. At the time, I had grown bored with 2nd edition AD&D and welcomed the change, although several things bothered me from the beginning; the faster rate of rising in level was a big one and I missed real multi-classing. I took me a while though, and DMing for several different groups, to realize the worst part was that it neutered the DM. My original AD&D groups, who were familiar with my fast and loose, shoot from the hip DMing style were OK with me making rules calls on the fly when none of us had any idea how something was supposed to work in the new system; we'd keep the game moving and I could look it up later. We might even like my way better. The other groups had people who STUDIED the rules though; at first, every time I made a ruling I'd see disapproving looks, eventually they got brave enough to start offering suggestions as to the right way to handle the situation.

So I quit DMing and let one of them DM in each group. Neither group lasted much longer. One started a new campaign and it was just too railroad-ey, I actually started stress testing that campaign to see what would happen if my character deliberately did things that were contrary to the predestined storyline. My character got punished, he made minor alterations to his storyline, but nothing seriously bad could ever happen to us, so, eventually, as a group we got bored and quit. The other guy just took over my game where I left off and had me make a character that would take his place. He had been unlucky in my game and died several times, but I assume that was because he kept making wuss characters, Rogues and Bards. I made a Barbarian, it was fun while it lasted, we went from 8th to 11th level with him at the helm, then he TPKed the party.

I took a break for a while, despaired over playing D&D again, then picked up Hackmaster. I ran a pretty fun Hackmaster game for a while and that was what led me to realize that I should just go back to playing 1st edition AD&D. That was the year we got the kids though, so I wasn't done with 3rd edition - when they decided they were interested in learning to play D&D, they wanted to play the newest version, 3.5 at the time. I gritted my teeth and went with it, anything to get kids into gaming. I have been walking them back in home games for years now, and have only recently discovered the Moldvay Basic half of B/X myself. Back in the day I bought the Expert Boxed Set when it came out, but I never got the Moldvay Basic Set that matched it because I already had a Basic Set, the Holmes Basic Set. So we've been playing that a bit lately, but my home games are pretty much at a stand-still right now, almost everyone that doesn't live here is too busy to come over and play, and everyone that does live here doesn't want to play with just their mom and dad, brother and/or sister. John is still gaming this summer, he's in a regular 4th edition D&D game with some guys he goes to school with and I am playing Dawn Patrol semi-regularly with Darryl & his dad, John and Dalton. We also recently tried out the Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition RPG here at the house. I am trying to start a game of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, but the start has been plagued by bad luck and poor coordination of schedules.

I have always run my D&D games in my own "World of Garnia" fantasy setting as a default. It's my Greyhawk, my buddy Darryl and I have been working on this on and off for decades, we're doing a serious reboot of the entire setting and discussing it on my other blog. The primary idea for the campaign is that a group of Celts fled the Roman onslaught to this new world, the world of the Sidhe (Elves) where magic works. The main campaign area is one where their culture has flourished. I designed it originally using the core 1st edition AD&D rules, so there are a lot of 1st edition AD&D assumptions in the setting, but I am trying to make the setting system neutral so that it can be played with any FRPG system. When we have finished the maps and gazetteers they'll be released for use. Currently we're working on the whole world, then we plan to "drill down" and do specific regions. I will also most likely release the adventures that I have written for the setting over the years, it's just finding and transcribing all of the stuff, then updating it to match the current standard is going to be a chore.

By now you are probably wondering where all this "Great Khan" stuff comes from, right? Well back in 1996 my buddy Darryl and I were living most of a continent apart and wanted to play some D&D together. He had played a lot of the SSI Gold Box D&D games starting with "Pool of Radiance" when it came out and we were both new to the internet and on AOL at the time where they had a game called "Neverwinter Nights" that ran using the same engine, but was multi-player, up to 300 I think it was. I guess that makes it the first MMORPG, it was great fun anyway. Darryl was more savvy than me and figured out the best way to advance in the game was through guild membership, so we duly joined a guild together. ERS, the Explorers of the Rising Sun, who made us create new Screen Names, because that was your character's name in the game, and everyone in the guild was named ERS something. I was ERS Garn, Darryl was ERS Frodal, we were named after deities I had created for my Garnia campaign world.

But then we realized, being ambitious adventurers, that ERS was there to help newbies find their bearings and, in general, be nice; and we wanted to move up the food chain in NWN. So we decided to create our own guild, which would, even though it was a gamble, make us guild leaders and let us take charge of our destinies and how we wanted to play the game. We needed a hook though, and that's where our collective history nerdity took over, we decided to play as Mongols, because we wanted to send out a strong challenge to the status quo in all of the guilds and it was unique in NWN to play a culturally oriented guild, unless that culture was a fantasy one. Mostly I think we chose the Mongols though because I was playing them at the time in Civilization. Partly I think we picked them because we both loved the NES game Genghis Khan*, Darryl and I used to spend weekends playing that game together. We also both liked the Mongol reputation for ass-kickery and conquest. Then we studied and studied some more, at this point I think that our kids could hold their own at a conference of Mongol Medieval History scholars.

Anyway, the Steppe Warriors were born. Technically, since NWN is in the Forgotten Realms, we were members of the, at the time, recently defeated Tuigan Horde that decided to march west rather than return east. Darryl was our first Khakhan with his character SW Ogotai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan, the reasoning was that he could afford to be online more often (remember this was when you paid/minute of use) because I was in school at the time, and he was a better recruiter. My character was named SW Jagatai, also after a son of Genghis Khan. Ultimately Darryl resigned the position of Khakhan and I was elected to fill it. We've had our highs and lows as a group, and we're pretty dormant now, but I have been Jagatai, Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors since 1997 on the internet, so when I named the blog and when I created my initial Blogger account, I just naturally went with the same motif. My Yahoo email address is still SWJagatai at yahoo dot com, created in the same era. Back when I was sure we were going to leap from AOL's NWN into the expanding universe of MMOs I registered three domain names, steppewarriors.com, steppewarriors.org and steppewarriors.net; I used to joke that they would soon be followed by steppewarriors.edu and steppewarriors.gov. Clearly things didn't turn out as well for the Steppe Warriors as I had anticipated in the late 1990s.

Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with my alternate persona. In doing the research to properly play a Mongol character I have learned a great many things about the Mongols and other steppe peoples. I have eaten a bunch of Mongol food, drank Kumiss, shot arrows from a composite bow (not while mounted though), been in a yurt and made friends with a bunch of people that I otherwise probably never would have met. When I think about how it could have gone another way, if I'd been playing a different Civilization that day when Darryl and I were talking on the phone, or if he and I hadn't played so much of Koei's Genghis Khan together and he hadn't been as receptive to the idea, or maybe it was the fact that he had played in one of my epic Oriental Adventures campaigns that made him cool with the idea. If Darryl hadn't signed on for Mongols, we might have been a Samurai guild or a Viking guild or a Celt guild, they were all infinitely more familiar to both of us at the time; or maybe we'd have gone with something lame like a Dark Elf Ranger guild, who knows?

At any given time I usually have more irons in the fire than is wise, so many of my projects get back-burnered until I get back around to them. Currently I have on hold an Oriental Adventures campaign that just kind of fizzled when it was starting to get good, I had converted the Temple of Elemental Evil for OA and made it the Black Temple from OA1. I have a B/X Viking campaign that stopped when two of my regular adult players got new jobs. I have a B/X conversion for WW II that I spent a lot of time working on last summer, but my regular group, which is mostly my wife and kids and family friends, was lukewarm about play-testing it. I'd say it's an early alpha level right now. I am working on a total rewrite of the 1st edition OA book, kind of recasting it in a form I find more desirable. I just started learning the L5R RPG, I am GMing and the party is about 1/2 way through the adventure in the back of the book, I still haven't found the fumble rule. I have announced several times, prematurely, the start of my 43 AD campaign, so while that should be starting soon, I am going to not say when just in case something happens again. Mostly though, right now, getting a lot of my time behind the scenes, is the reworking of my old Garnia campaign world. We've made some interesting progress on it. I also have a bunch of OSR stuff piling up on my to read list, making me wish I had bought hard copies rather than pdfs because I mostly hate reading off my monitor, but that's where my copies of "Lamentations of the Flame Princess", "Carcosa", "Vornheim", "Adventurer, Conqueror, King", and several other major releases are sitting waiting to be read.

*Out of all of Koei's strategy games for the NES, Genghis Khan had the best multi-player play, Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms were too slow, and Nobunaga's Ambition II had the annoying "siege mode" in battle.

Spending more energy elsewhere

I have been spending a lot more creative energy on my other blog lately than this one. I am going to be starting a campaign, hopefully on Thursday, that is play-testing rules (43 AD/Warband) that I may port over for use in my Garnia campaign world, and, given the history of that world, the events of that campaign could provide some more back-story for the entire setting.

I don't have anything else to say on that topic, so here's some stuff I got in the mail over the past few days that I forgot to show you all when it came in.

These guys are just "Arcane Legions" miniatures, they were labeled on EBay as "28mm hard plastic Roman sprue w/shields no bases"; why the deception? I don't know. I got them for $1.00 though and I should have known since I actually have the "Arcane Legions" starter set, I just never found anyone to play with. I did think they looked familiar.

"Creatures of Rokugan" for the 3rd edition of the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, I'd been waiting to get an inexpensive copy of this for a while, I was pleased with the result; although it inexplicably came with about 120 of the CCG cards too. I have now got two different two-player starter decks, a couple of one player starter decks and now these loose cards, maybe I should learn to play. You know, despite my disdain for CCGs. I mean if people are going to keep throwing them in as freebies with my wins on EBay...  

Eureka Moment!

Lost.

I woke up in the middle of the night, roughly 3:00AM, and, because I log any dream that wakes me up, I was up for a few minutes typing it's contents into my dream journal, it's a new project I have going. Since I was up, I played a few turns of an online game I have going and checked my email too. I got an email from Darryl asking me what I was doing up at this hour, he's a chronic insomniac, so he just hadn't been to sleep yet and was using Stumble to entertain himself when he saw that I'd played my turns in the game we both are playing. I emailed him back, we chatted via email for like 45 minutes before I decided that it would be easier to just call him and sent him an email saying so.

We talked for something like 2 1/2 hours before he got tired and had to sleep, I was tired too and went back to bed, since I'd only gotten a few hours sleep before my dream woke me up. But while we were talking we had one of those moments of intellectual ferment that caused an epiphany about some aspect of the campaign world that we have worked on together for the last three decades. Since both of us were tired and went to bed without writing it down, neither of us can remember it. I can remember a bunch of the other stuff we talked about about the campaign world, spit-balling ideas back and forth, bouncing them off each other to see what was good to go, and what needed improvement. I remember explaining to him the significance and different connotations of the name of the Japanese empire in the world, and how it came about, what the name meant and how it's different spellings mean different things, it changed over the years from Tenchukuo to Tenchuko.

But the big, important, world shaking idea that made me say, literally "I am definately going to blog about this today.", just before I hung up the phone; it's gone. It might as well have never existed in the first place. After I woke up from my next several hours of sleep, I was like "I have to blog about that.....". When I finally got hold of Darryl again, he had no idea either, we spent some time trying to jog each other's memory's, but to no avail.

I also got these in the mail, meaning I am pretty sure I now have everything ever published for Clan War. I actually already had two of them, but these were, the seller assured in the listing, in "like new" condition. The seller didn't lie.

I paid $9.99 for the four books, I regularly see any of them go for that individually on EBay, so I intend to just resell the 2 I already had at a profit.

Some Productivity Today

My wife and I, OK, mostly her, have been more or less renovating our kitchen, that weeks long activity is nearing completion. Out of that I got a new set of shelves in my office area, which is pretty cool because I always need more shelf space. My wife may have other plans for these shelves, but I am claiming them in the name of the empire!

I also hashed out, with my chief co-conspirator Darryl, a bunch of little things that have been bugging me about my Garnia campaign world this morning; so there's a sense of achievement for you right there! The whole thing ends up changing from a more generically Celtic flavored medieval fantasy world to a really Iron Age/ Dark Ages Celts with Magic added kind of a thing; meaning that a lot of the work that I thought was finished has to be rewritten, but I think it makes for a more flavorful world.

Oh, and it's not just Celts, there are other Human cultures represented there too. Spread across one mega-continent, one small continent/very large island, and several island chains we have various ethnic groups that have been brought here to the Realm of the Sidhe for whatever reasons whichever court of Sidhe saw fit to bring their particular group over. I talk about it more on my other blog, and there's another multi-planar war aspect to the whole back story, but you get the gist of it from this.

I also got these miniatures in the mail today. I was surprised because the seller said he was going to be out of town and not shipping anything until the 7th. I must have made it in just under the wire before he left.

I had bid on these before I got the first Celtos miniature that I won. I might consider more monster types like the Fomorian, but the Humans are a wee bit too fantasy for my tastes. Which I guess begs the question, where do you go for Wizard and Priest types when you are using mostly historical ranges of miniatures? Monsters I can grab from anywhere, although I have my preferred companies. But if I have a player that wants to be a Female Cleric in the setting, pretty much any part of the setting? Finding any females in armor is difficult, but not impossible. Finding one with the limited Cleric weapon set, much tougher*. Female Wizards? They're pretty tough to find too, assuming I want the females in the party to match the males in how "fantasy" they look.

*Although I tend not to be a stickler for enforcement, I'd rather do damage by class than by weapon type. For the sake of argument, assume I am strictly enforcing D&D weapon bans.

Another in a line of busy days...

I actually was too busy today to have too much gaming related to report other than what I got in the mail and what have been reading. I am nearly finished with "The Mongoliad", although it is only book one and I have already pre-ordered book two. I have been working a lot behind the scenes on my alt-Rome and Alt-Egypt areas in my Garnia World campaign, with my collaborators. Well, mostly I have been trying to bounce ideas off of them and getting a lot of "Yep, sure, that sounds cool.", when I was hoping for a little more thought provoking discussion. But, it's been mostly via email, so I guess I should have expected less.

I got home too late to take John to his 4th edition game too. He wasn't happy, but he took it well. I am definitely playing something here on Saturday, with whoever shows up, so that'll be good.

Anyway, here's my mail-

My wife insisted on this, and made me buy it on Father's Day. I told her if she's making me buy expensive miniatures from overseas it's put up or shut up time. She paints like a pro when she wants to, it's getting her to do it that's the killer; but she has a soft spot for animals and the cart put it over the top.

These guys I found on EBay, they're from the same line and I am sneaking them into her queue. Dead men are always useful as casualty markers for wargames, and I have several sets of ancients rules; plus they make for good encounter dressing in D&D games. I actually have more from this line yet to come.

This I was informed was worth it for the pictures alone, especially at the scandalously low price I got it for. It has clearly been sitting on a store shelf since it was printed, it's brand new.

This I only include to show my interest in reading actual histories and my studliness as a shopper, brand new $4.00 including shipping.

Dungeons And Dragons: Book of Vile Darkness Trailer

I am going to go out on limb here and assume that they are basing this on 3rd or 4th edition between the straps and buckles leathery S&M look and the unfamiliar spells, but the fight choreography wasn't bad, and they sexed it up some. Maybe it won't suck and it will usher in a new wave of good fantasy films, and bad ones that we will grow to love- like "Hawk the Slayer".



Anyway, I had no games this weekend, my back is still out. I have gotten a lot of thinking, research and actual writing done on my Garnia World campaign, and done a fair bit of reading; mostly about the Chinese, whose culture and history I am weak on, and the Mongols, who I am strong on, but I have a specific area that needed more study. For fun I am still reading "The Mongoliad".

I had a busy day today...

...But mostly it was spent working on my other blog and trying to decide what stuff to auction off on EBay. Check out my "20 Questions about the Mistlands" post on my other blog (button to the right) and let me know what you think of this unique area of my campaign world. I also had a Doctors appointment, and was prescribed a medication that my insurance company refuses to pay for, which is becoming all too common lately. I went back to my doctors office and got samples the drug company rep left them.

I also, of course got a bunch of stuff in the mail from EBay, almost all Star Fleet Battles universe stuff-

The non-SFB universe stuff is a copy of Heritage Models "Star Trek - Adventure Gaming in the Final Frontier". I knew they must have made all those miniatures for a reason, it's copyright 1978 though. The other two books are "Starfleet Academy Training Command- Line Officer Requirements" Volume 2 and Supplement. Pity Volume 1 didn't make it into the set. They are copyrighted to 1987 D. Schmidt, and there is an ad in the middle of the supplement to order more Star Trek and other sci-fi stuff from "New Eye Studio", lots of blueprints for ships, and some more Starfleet guides, a catalog for their Battlestar Galactica, Space:1999, Star Wars and Dr. Who stuff.

Of the SFB universe stuff I got a few doubles in there, but one of them was the Prime Directive rulebook, and if we ever play an extra will be handy. One was Carrier War for F&E, but this one is still in the shrink wrap, so I think I'll be able to resell it pretty easy. The last was a Captain's Log, that should resell easy enough too.

Forcibly being drawn back on task

I have several projects running at any given time, any regular reader of my blog knows that by now. I think it's obvious from my reading list lately that I have been mostly working on my Oriental Adventures project, but also my Garnia World project has taken a lot of my time too. You can read about Garnia World on my "Other Blog" to the right; it actually incorporates the Oriental Adventures thing too.

A week or so ago I found a couple of really excellent deals on EBay. Most of that stuff came in the mail today.

This is a Bushido Clan Warband for the Hundred Kingdoms miniature battle game from Black Orc Games. Bad paint job, and two of them are mounted on flying bases for a more Wuxia feel, but they didn't alter the models in any way to make them look right or balance. I can fix all this though.

Yes, I bought another cheap copy of the 1st edition Legend of the Five Rings RPG rules. I read a recent comparison review that said it was better than the 2nd edition and I have tons of stuff for the 1st edition.

I also got these two modules, one came the other day, but I think I forgot to post it's picture. Now I have that entire series, I am destined to GM it.

The first six Archers.

The other six Archers.

The first six Infantry.

The other six Infantry.

These were the real deal though- an entire, small Crab army and the paint jobs and basing are pretty damned sweet. Two of the heroes are unfinished, but the entire bunch only cost me $26.00+ 6.25 shipping.

Now I have been looking into converting the L5R RPG roll and keep system for at least the OA section of my Garnia world, it seems so simple and I hear it is the only game system in the world that satisfies both Hack and Slashers AND real hard core Role Players; like the kids in the theater department at SUNY Oswego. I might be able to draw them away from White Wolf.

So anyway, here I was spending the last day or two looking into finishing/remaking a Jacobite rebellion miniature battles game that I started work on when I was in high school, then this flood of Asian themed RPG and wargame material hits me from the mailbox.

I finished "Lords of Grass and Thunder", and found it to be rather good. Each of the books set in that fantasy Asia of Curt Benjamin wrote seem to get better, and it left obvious loose ends for a sequel, but it was published in 2005, so I am not going to hold my breath.

I started "The Mongoliad". Good so far.

Oh yeah, this came in the mail the other day too. I don't know how I forgot to mention it.