Spider Queen

Bit of a change of pace from usual programming, but fun nonetheless. I recently completed a project that's been brewing for a while: Scratchbuilding a science fiction desert settlement out of junk. Making your own Mos Eisley facsimile seems to be one of those bucket list items for sci fi wargamers - a project everyone wants to get round to eventually. And 'eventually' is the key word here: I've had some of these cardboard boxes and yoghurt pots sitting around in my materials box for years! Reading up on Chris McDowall's The Doomed  and trawling Magpie and Old Lead  gave me the inspiration to finally sit down and start gluing and painting. Witness some of the results below. Some quick notes on methods I used: I built all of this in 15mm scale. I actually started collecting sci-fi in 15mm specifically so I could more easily build terrain like this. And it is a lot  easier - I don't even know how much time and effort it would have taken to try to churn out the same

Intro An era has just ended. For two full years - since roughly September 2022 - I have been running a regular open table sandbox campaign in Swords and Wizardry. We aimed at meeting weekly, and probably averaged a game about every 2-and-a-bit weeks across the two years, taking into account small periods away and substantial periods of regular attendance. This was, without qualification, the best campaign I have ever personally been involved with. Testimonials from players confirm this. The core group was made up of a mix of 5e veterans and completely new players, all of whom had an amazing time right up until the end of the last session - 7.5 hours of continuous play - and the final folding up of the GM's screen. All things must come to an end (credit: Nicolas Delort ) The campaign represents a honing of my own techniques for running games, and the culmination of a process of refinement, of setting up a campaign to reflect what I personally want out of a game, and what I view as

I recently changed my mind on the big tentpole dungeon. A dominant (if not necessarily the dominant) playstyle in the OSR is the wide-open sandbox. Players usually start as nobodies exploring a frontier beyond which is an unknown, depopulated wasteland, usually brimming with adventure sites and treasure. Taking a cue from Keep on the Borderlands, a lot of these homebrew campaigns seem to feature a dungeon that stands out from the rest. It's usually bigger than other adventure sites, and accordingly features hallmarks of megadungeon play, such as faction interaction (although it doesn't strictly have to be a megadungeon). The idea is that, while the party might discover other adventure sites, this is the one they keep coming back to and chipping away at little by little, as a mainstay of the campaign. This is the tentpole dungeon. I've been aware of the concept of the tentpole dungeon for a while, but I never really got on board. It felt more organic to me to have lots of a

 Musings I was having today: It's pretty well known that Gary Gygax was a stickler for detail when it came to dungeons - the name "Gygaxian naturalism" is used to refer to the approach to dungeon design that foregrounds the dungeon's "ecology", and demands a level of realism usually regarded as absurd in the context of a fantasy game. There's a lot to unpack here that I'm going to try to skip over. For one, the idea of realism being opposed  to fantasy is, in my view, an irritating fallacy. The response "Well it's fantasy, it's not supposed to be realistic" misses the point: An immersive and engaging fantasy requires at least some level of consistency, and a certain amount of relatability to anchor the players' interpretation of what's going on. If one nitpicks a detail like a character's being able to shrug off a stab wound, or goods in a shop costing more than anyone could possibly afford, the response "Well why d

Something my players did in this week's game made me think. They trekked several days out from their home village, completely of their own accord, to visit a repository of lore (aka a library) and learn about... well, everything. History, people, places - lore stuff. It set me thinking, because you see a lot of GMs on the internet asking how they can get their players to care about their lore (and how to deliver it without "Lore dumps"). I've long had a pet theory on this, and in my mind this experience confirmed it. It basically amounts to the following principle:     Action Principle: Players fundamentally care about stuff that affects their actions in the game. Specifically as regards information, this gives us the principle that players only really care about information that is actionable . And this is a big problem for lore, because the word 'Lore' has effectively evolved into a bespoke game term referring specifically to the information players receive

Sometimes you have an interesting exchange on Reddit that sets your mind working. I had such an exchange recently regarding the concept of being time-rich, and how classic editions of D&D, right back to OD&D itself, assume you have a lot of time on your hands - something that, in the modern world, is increasingly not the case. 🕷 A lot of things in the old systems only make sense when viewed from a certain point of view. Here, the point of view is that of a young wargamer in the mid-70s. You're fairly affluent, and your job doesn't impinge too much on your leisure time - apart from fantasy and sci-fi paperbacks, and the occasional late-night movie marathon, there aren't a lot of demands on your attention. This is the perfect environment within which to become obsessed with the brand new game of Dungeons & Dragons that someone just came up with. The old editions assume a similar environment for their players. OD&D in particular assumes that you'll have a

A very short one today. I've been continuing with my open table sandbox in The Black Hack, and wanted to share my process for handling death and dismemberment when characters drop to 0hp, because I think it's been working really well at the table. I'll first explain the ritual very briefly, then explain why it works , and why I think it finds a good middle ground between the old and new schools. 🕷 First, allow me to introduce  The Dice That Will Kill You . The Dice That Will Kill You My brother bought me these as a Christmas present - they are cast in metal, and very heavy, like little angry sea mines. They have already scored and dented our dining-room table. Note the skull, barely visible, on the bag. The Dice That Will Kill You are what give the procedure its special ritual tone. These are the special dice that only come out when a character is near death. On such occasions, I hand their player the bag, and recite the exact words: "<Character name>, these ar