Author Archives: James - Page 129
The library of Triamore: Mundane tractatus
Last night I joined in with Simon Cornelius's Ars Magica campaign. My character is a female Mage (aka Maga) called Lumen, she's a younger daughter of a French baron in the early thirteenth century. Blond, blue-eyed and slightly elfin like, the picture I have in my head of what she looks like is of the actress Laura Harris. Lumen is current a visitor to the Triamore Covenant and brought some books with her in exchange for being allowed access to their library. She appears to be in her early thirties and has not yet settled down and got her own lab yet. Her primary interest is in learning her arts better by reading up, followed by a little practise. She prefers Spring and Summer and gets a little sad in the winter time, being a sunshine sort of person. Apart…
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more blogging tests
Well, it looks like I can't find any other blog clients that work for me. Not even sure that this one would work if the machine isn't connected to the internet. So I think I'll just try and use this and start posting stuff about the games I've been playing recently.
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Master of Europe 3
The megagame of the 1813 campaign in Europe was played at Anerley Town Hall on Saturday 7th November 2009. My role was as General Blucher, the senior Prussian Military Commander and also the Commander of the joint Prussian-Russian Army of Silesia. We started off during the ceasefire period of August 1813, with my army in the furthest South East section of the map, in Reichenbach, near Breslau, in what I think is now Poland. The other member of my team was Mike Young, playing a Russian General. Our orders were to stay put until a general plan of action had been agreed. The initial army council of war having failed to set an objective other than to defeat Napoleon. We were up against Marshal Ney's army, which was immediately to our front across a river. We also had some distance…
Preparing For War – Onside Report
British evacuation from the beaches of Dunkirk (Photo credit: Wikipedia) I had a design session titled 'Preparing for War' at the CLWG November meeting. Preparing for War was about training an infantry company in the UK after Dunkirk. Rather than a conversational design session I decided to try and do something that was playable. I'd been somewhat frustrated at the conference with discussions of games that looked like they could have been played. I'd felt that perhaps by playing it we could have tested whether or not the perceived problems were actually real. Preparing for War I ran a sort of role-playing game about re-constructing an infantry company after the evacuation from Dunkirk. John Rutherford was the first person to arrive (after me). So I cast him as the first officer to report to the village in Devon I'd decided to put the company in. Chosen only because the OS map…
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CLWG Design Conference 2009 Reports
Onside Report - WW2 Mechanisms I lead a discussion on whether an operational research article could be used to produce some mechanisms for running a WW2 wargame with resolution ( smallest unit represented) at somewhere between platoon and battalion. The article1 in question was first published back in 1987, so quite venerable. I came across a photocopy of it tucked into an old copy of British Army Training News from the saem time period. I have subsequently found PDFs of a slightly different version of it, along with a follow-up article looking at urban combat. Offside Report - Come One Come Eorl Andrew Hadley brought back the Scottish component of this game for another try having modified some of the mechanisms from the previous playtest. We didn't really play the game as we spent a lot of time talking about…