The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

 'The state of man dois change and vary, Now sound, now seik, now blyth, now sary, Now dansand merry, now like to die;      Timor Mortis conturbat me. '          - William Dunbar, 'Lament for the Makars' (c.1450) *** Yesterday morning, I walked to the shops. I listened to a short fifteen-minute podcast, released on Wednesday, written by Terry Robinson of Mage: the Podcast and performed by an actor, since he was - he said - recovering from a short illness. Yesterday morning, Terry Robinson died. I didn't know the man in the least, had never even exchanged a message despite lurking on the M:tP discord for years at this point. As such, I'm going to try to thread a needle here: His works meant a great deal to me, and I don't have any angle to approach a eulogy except from the perspective of what those works meant to me. However, I don't want to get too parasocial with it, or to do what Dunbar did and turn the deaths of those I respect into ...

Disclaimer: I wouldn't normally review a game I haven't played, but in this case Christopher Peter, the designer of Shadow Ops , reached out and asked me if I'd be interested. I could hardly refuse a free PDF of the game, so I agreed to do the review. I'd like to think I've been as honest as possible and acknowledged where my perspective is limited, but grain of salt etc. Prologomenon There are, as far as I can see, two main types of person who read a TTRPG review. THE USER: You want to see if you should get a copy of the book. Main (overlapping) subtypes: THE PLAYER: You're interested in running the game, or persuading somebody else to. Probably interested in how well the mechanics will allow you to do things that you want. THE READER: You're interested in reading through the book and going 'huh, cool!' then putting it on your shelf to gather dust. You may think you're 1.1 but 'never get around to it.' THE DESIGN NERD: You want to know h...

Somehow I have only painted (i.e. finished painting) THREE THINGS (minis, I painted some actual paintings too) in Autumn (i.e. September-November). The first of those was mostly done in August, too, and the last was done entirely on November 31st. I'm slow, what can I say, but at least I make up for it in quality   the number of games played  with the models  imagination I guess. 1: A Dark and Rainy Night Upon the Bay... (32mm, presumably Ricardo Andreis, Bestiarium Miniatures) Beneath lowering skies, a light can be seen far away. Surely, it is some safe harbour? (It is not). I don't have a name or much of a story for this guy. He was inspired by my love of the coasts of pretty much all of the western UK, from Cornwall up to the Hebrides (and the Orkneys can be included too) but especially around Morecambe Bay, a place which is very much not ideal for wreckers but with some deeper water would have had a lovely landscape for them. He's a wrecker, clearly, with his little l...

 Patrick Stuart recently announced that there's going to be a remastered edition of Veins of the Earth, and asked for comments, suggestions, and reviews.  For those who don't know Veins  but somehow do know my blog, it's the one book I would point somebody to who said that the OSR was all a tired aping of the 70s-90s editions. (Not the only book proving that by a mile, but the easiest proof for sure). You should probably read it before this review? Unless you're one of my player, in which case don't worry about it you'll learn one day. My micro-review it goeth thusly: Veins is a sourcebook of (mostly) monsters and environments for OSR campaigns taking place underground, replacing or supplementing any previous 'underdark' setting with a hellish nightmare-land of scarcity and darkness filled with creatures that will, if you're really lucky , kill you. It's a very modernist setting in many ways (contra stupid ''artpunk' OSR is postmode...

 Good LORD that last post took it out of me. In fact, the last several have been pretty humungous. Time for something a bit shorter... my houserules for sorcerers and chiminage in Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition, which should be readable in about 5 minutes. Obviously, sorcerers, static magicians who can't do mage magic (and mages can't do their magic) have rules. Several sets , in fact . But it always irked me that those sets make them follow fundamentally different rules to mages, such that if a sorcerer becomes a mage you're left awkwardly converting their Paths or whatever into Spheres. It's this, I think, that leads so many people to become frustrated and ask r/WhiteWolfRPG 'why can't mages just use sorcery, anyway?' to snippy responses. If one set of mechanics felt like it flowed more naturally into the other, if sorcery felt like limited sphere magic but without paradox rather than an only semi-related system, it might happen less. Or not,...

My players in one of my ongoing games are about to attend a tournament, in classic mediaeval jousting-and-melees style. This tournament has been foreshadowed for the entire campaign thus far and I now need to come up with some structure for it. If you happen to be one of those players, you can skip these preliminaries and go straight to the section where I lay out the procedure, below, or read it all to see my working if you want! This post isn't getting an edit before posting, so apologies if it's more verbose than usual (and doesn't have many pictures). It's been written up around various tech issues, and I'm tired of it and ready to get on with using this material at this point. Expect later heavy revisions if/when I find some of it lacking. It's a first experiment in blogging my process in making up a janky improvised system for a specific niche thing, which I'd normally make then discard once it was no longer useful (I have done this with warfare system...