Author Archives: James - Page 125
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Kings of War
Kings of War is a blog written by faculty and research students at King's College War Studies department. A very interesting blog with lots of articles on a variety of different aspects of warfare, both modern and historical. I came across it when looking for things to help develop my insurgency game. I am enjoying reading it. Related articles by Zemanta 10 Non-Fiction Books To Inspire Role Playing from RPG Musings ()
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Thoughts on an Insurgency Game
An article I read in the New Scientist on why people got involved in the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia triggered some ideas about trying to run a game about the locals caught amidst an insurgency campaign. Farming Today, Fighting Tomorrow? This is a game to explore why people become insurgents (or perhaps not). Most of the players will be tribal elders leading their group of peasant farmers and directing their decisions about what to grow where and making sure that they can feed themselves and afford to buy the things they need to improve their lives and farms. Loosely set in modern Afghanistan I've taken huge liberties with the agrarian system and abstracted it to a level that can play through years in minutes. However I want to play on an event based accelerated real time basis through…
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CLWG June 2010 Meeting
What you missed at Sunday's chestnut lodge meeting (unless you were one of those present) were some good conversations and two games: Come One, Come Eorl - another megagame tryout from Andy Hadley; and D-Day beach landing - an improvised game by Jim Wallman We started with a chat as Jim, Mukul & I watched some of the Stalingrad episode of World at War which Jim had on DVD on his laptop. This while we cut out some of the cards for playing Come One Come Eorl. Once John Rutherford, Andrew Hadley & Brian Cameron also arrived we started ; Come One Come Eorl This was another tryout of the streamlined rules using the Welsh part of the game. I found that it was relatively easy to pick up, although there was obviously come benefit to be had from having…
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A long time…
It has been a week since we got our shiny new government and already it feels like we've set the calendar back 13 years or so. The language has changed, we're now supposed to talk about 'the public' instead of 'customers' and 'operations' rather than service delivery'. Not only that but we've got a Lord Chancellor and a Department for Education back ;Also there is a very strong possibility that my performance related pay is going to be taken away, even though the year is completed and I have performed very strongly (in the top quartile). That said I'll still be better off than many of my colleagues who have been informed that they are at risk of being redeployed, for some of whom that will mean to another career. Although I suspect we'll be allowed to go back to…
Siege Engines R Us – quick build toy siege engine
Alexander got a new castle playset today, and on the front of the box were pictures of more things than were actually in the box. In particular there was a catapult (in the style of an Onager) and a few other siege engine type things. So in typical four year old fashion Daddy was asked to help with construction of a replacement. To start with we had some string and some lolly sticks, but those were just too difficult to work with, the lolly sticks were really too flat to be able to get the right sort of shape. Fortunately I remembered that we had some wood left from an ash tree that I had cut down and that some of those were about finger thickness. So I popped out into the garden and cut some of the wood up to…