A couple of months ago, a user on the Juhlin Twilight: 2000 forum posted the question of whether T2k would make a good television series. The following is a mirrored post of my thoughts on implementation, lightly edited with afterthoughts.
Continue reading →Category Archives: Hobby Musings
The Appeal* of Solo Wargames
(* for me)
The Girl and I took the past week off work for our anniversary. We did some old married couple stuff and some maintenance, but a lot of the week was spent in our respective monotropic foci. For her, that was a lot of editing and gap-filling on her current fiction project. For me, it was entirely too much time spent playing, deconstructing, and sketching out house rules for Eagle Leader.
I’ve spent the past few posts braindumping on that game, and as I was wandering around the house today, I found myself considering just why it’s so compelling. It’s easy for me to lose myself in PC games, particularly turn-based tactical stuff (looking at you, X-Com and Doorkickers series), but what’s so fascinating about analog solo wargames? They’re not nearly as cost-effective or space-efficient – for what I’ve spent on Eagle Leader, I could make an immense dent in my Steam wishlist, and that wouldn’t require any shelf space.
Continue reading →The d12 Decimal System
The Girl and I moved into our current house just under a year ago. Some of our initial choices in where to put things have never been fully satisfactory. Yesterday, we began implementing a plan we’ve been discussing over the past couple of weeks.
The RPG library – which occupies approximately 60 shelf-feet of space – was previously sorted alphabetically. As part of a larger furniture rearrangement, it is now arranged by genre. This is still not entirely what I’d like, but three-dimensional bookshelves only support usable organizational schemes in two dimensions and are wholly unsuited to a rapidly-searchable multi-attribute tagging system.
Still, it’s probably more rational than sorting 40 years of RPG accumulation autobiographically.
Table Tents
Just a quick note here to give credit where credit’s due and to remind myself of a cool table hack. At CharCon 2025, GM John brought dry-erase table tents for his players to use. Requested information was character name and archetype/class, player name, and any outstanding flaws or hindrances that John might need to take into account during play.
It’s a little thing, but it helped with immersion because I didn’t have to struggle for PC names, and it helped build a sense of community when John was able to consistently refer to every player by name.
Con Report: CharCon 2025
This was my second consecutive year of attendance at CharCon, a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, WV. My 2024 report is here, and most of my observations about the venue, vendors, and surrounding area remain applicable for 2025.
As noted last year, the venue is shared with a science center. Some clever individual in the con staff made the decision to put the cosplay tables (and photo backdrops) right at the main entrance so all the kids (and their parents) coming to the science center could encounter the cosplayers as soon as they hit the doors. Bonus points to the Twi’lek X-Wing pilot and whoever brought the life-size remote-controlled R2-D2.
Continue reading →Con Report: RiverCityCon 2025
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: RiverCityCon, despite the name and host city, is not a successor to RiverCon. Whereas the latter con (and its shorter-lived successor, Conglomeration) was a general fantasy/SF con with a gaming track, RiverCityCon is a board game con that wedges TTRPGs into the cracks around its founders’ main focus. It’s a Louisville-based spinoff of the older Lexicon, which, as the name suggests, started in Lexington, Kentucky a few years ago.
Because it’s in our city of shared origin, the Louisville Gaming Mafia used last year’s inaugural RiverCityCon as a found-family reunion. We put it to the same use again this year, and as far as that goes, it satisfied our purposes adequately. Absent that, as a con fitting my own purposes, I’m somewhat ambivalent about it.
Continue reading →CCC2025 Final Thoughts
Well. That was a thing.
I’ve written 31 characters in 31 days before. In truth, I don’t think I’ve ever run a convention LARP that didn’t have a pre-gen death march as part of my prep. Those efforts were always single-system and single-setting, though. This was rough, and I know my quality was rather variable across all the entries. It was much more of a time suck than I thought it would be, too. When I’m writing LARP pre-gens, I estimate a minimum of one hour per character, and I suspect I exceeded that in this project.
Was it rewarding? Yeah, to a point. But that point was sometime in the 20s, when it turned into a slog and all the fun sort of evaporated. I had to force myself to grind out the last eight or ten. While every system I used is something I’ve played or run at least once, most of these required at least some degree of refamiliarization before I could start building.
Will I do it again? Enh… maybe? I have a limited amount of creative energy these days, and part of my rationale for taking on this project was the fact that I didn’t have any other creative projects in the hopper when I committed to this in late December. For future years, we’ll see what else I have going on.
Since I like indexes, here’s an index of every system and character for this iteration:
1 – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness – Kabu, California Coyote Ninja Avenger
2 – Star Wars – Anastasia “Convor” Glaux, Reconnaissance Starfighter Pilot
3 – 7th Sea – Gervais Fournier, Reluctant Porte Sorcerer
4 – Spycraft – Isak Eriksen (code name Svallin), Watcher on the Baltic
5 – Vampire: The Masquerade – Curtis Baxter, Anarch Vigilante
6 – Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Nadia Vasylyk, Dangerous Antiquarian
7 – Mage: The Ascension – Gordon Armstrong, Cryptid Preservationist
8 – Wraith: The Oblivion – Margo Vaughn, Stormchaser at the End of the World
9 – Changeling: The Dreaming – Gökhan Karga/Silver Mhachkay, Goth Bard
10 – World of Darkness: The Hunters Hunted – Neville Grimes – Eighteen Wheels, Both Barrels, and Exodus 22:18
11 – Demon: The Fallen – Tom Hartman/Viatiel, Darkness on the Edge of Town
12 – Legend of the Five Rings – Iuchi Masuyo, Reluctant Yojimbo
13 – Shadowrun – Julien Yoshioka (“Harbinger”), Nocturnal Predator
14 – Stargate SG-1 – Staff Sergeant Jared Ingram, Interstellar Weatherman
15 – MechWarrior – Sao-shao Aleksey Sokolov, Electronic Warrior at Large
16 – Blue Planet – Cutter, Cetacean Salvage and Recovery Expert
17 – Dark Conspiracy – Mercedes “Sadie” Cantrell, Two-Fisted Psychic
18 – Cyberpunk 2020 – Vera Rodriquez, Account Adjuster
19 – Adventure! – Ainsley McTavish, Heiress of Secrets
20 – Aberrant – Bánoy (Manuel Kidlat Salazar), Stormwhisperer
21 – Trinity – Inspector Ekundayo “Kunda” Temitope, Forensic Engineer
22 – Conspiracy X – Special Agent Corey Marsh, Deniable Enforcement Asset
23 – Exalted – Jarlath Shonida, He to Whom Borders Are as the Morning Fog
25 – Eclipse Phase – Hackbird (Sequence C15.5359j), Dataspace Predator
25 – Palladium Fantasy – Valpuri Savolainen, Errant Lady-at-Arms
26 – Earthdawn – K’Jal Mirrorlake, Questing Nethermancer
27 – Feng Shui – Athena Cheng, Maverick Cop
28 – Twilight: 2000, first edition – Sergeant Murray Vinson, Cavalry Raider
29 – Twilight: 2000, second edition – Corporal Václav Procházka, Everyone’s Favorite Defect(or)
30 – Twilight: 2013 (aka Twilight: 2000, third edition) – Lieutenant Commander Owen McNeil, M.D., Horse Surgeon
31 – Twilight: 2000, fourth edition – Captain Katie “Acid” Christensen, Trapped in the Mud but Staring at the Stars
Con Report: CharCon 2024
CharCon is a small tabletop gaming convention held in Charleston, West Virginia. I’d attended it once before, many years ago, but that was just a one-day trip out from Lexington with Tracker7. This was my first full-weekend trip. As the con’s web site points out, it’s within easy driving range of several Appalachian and Appalachia-adjacent cities:
The TL;DR is that I’m quite impressed with CharCon. With about 600 attendees, it’s on the smaller side, but it fits very well into its available space. The con staff did an amazing job of shoehorning a robust gaming offering into the place. I didn’t catch any of the other programming but they offered a showing of the Dungeons & Dragons movie on Friday night and a locally-produced documentary on West Virginia escape rooms on Saturday afternoon.
Continue reading →“Stand by for PC knowledge.”
As I restart Kaserne on the Borderlands, one tweak I’ve made to my GMing style is in how I provide information to my players that their characters should reasonably have. There’s little fun for anyone to find in me saying, “your character knows __.” It’s narration without player agency.
When I had in-person gaming groups, my usual solution (when I remembered to do it) was passing a note or pulling the player out of the room for a moment. Discord enables me to do the latter with multiple channels, without anyone having to leave their chair, and I do still use it for things that require a conversation. In the last couple of sessions, though, I’ve begun using Discord direct messages for shorter infodumps. This gives the player a written reference (something I’ve found is helpful when I’m imparting domain knowledge that’s more in the PC’s lane than the player’s) and lets them rephrase (or elide…) it in a manner appropriate to their character’s persona.
The cautionary note here is that I need to say, “stand by for PM,” before I start typing. Otherwise, the sudden GM silence is a bit awkward and can leave people wondering if we’re having a(nother) comms failure.
Spruance Leader
A couple of years ago, I backed the Kickstarter for Dan Verssen Games’ Spruance Leader (I’m linking to the Boardgame Geek page rather than DVG’s product page because the company… um… doesn’t have the greatest web site). We promptly adopted a pair of kittens, which are not really compatible with big boardgames that need to stay set up for days for protracted campaign play. Between that and mental health haze, the game’s been sitting around unopened for the year and a half since the Kickstarter delivered.
I’m currently living alone while the girl and the cats and I work through the phases of our cross-country move, and I had the foresight to bring my DVG solo games along with me. After watching a couple of actual-play videos, I broke out Spruance Leader this afternoon and set up a first campaign and mission.
Things were getting hot in the North Atlantic. My task force’s first assignment was to go after a Soviet ASW task force operating off the Norwegian coast between Ålesund and Bødo:
