links numbering something between 4 and 6

Another Point of Singularity - a neat little minis wargamer blog

original BattleStar Galactica memorabilia - As a kid I loved the little vehicles from the toyline.

Serapio Calm Designworks - one of the artists on The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions - super fun to mess around with

The Saga of William Walker - the history of US/Latin American relations given flesh

NextWave fan art

Inspired by Chris Sims and Rich Burlew.

Have you seen this jedi?

My folks got me Lego Star Wars II for Christmas. My daughter Elizabeth and I really enjoyed the first installment but this one really improves upon the original. The one thing that's a problem is that we can't play Elizabeth's alltime favorite Star Wars character, Mace Windu, right out of the box.


Although Lego Star Wars II only covers A New Hope through Return of the Jedi, I was expecting Mace Windu to be available because of the new character editor feature. As you finish levels new character parts are unlocked for use in the creator. It seemed like finishing a level added people from that particular adventure to the editor. But I cleared the entirety of Empire Strikes Back and still no Lando parts. Purple lightsabers are an equipment option, but I seem to be unable to build the one dude known for wielding such a device.

In the meantime, I made Leia Organa, Jedi Princess:


This image was made with Mini-Mizer, a cute little Lego People graphic program that does all the work for you. My Princess Leia in the game has the traditional buns on the side of her head and a purple lightsaber. The blue pants are just cause I thought she needed some color with her traditional all-white look.

a good night

Last night's World of Alidor game was a hoot, despite the dragon refusing to get into melee range with my badass barbarian. The big lizard had some giant buddies that weren't aerial, so I did get to sword some badguys. Add the Samurai Elves to the list of local cultures my PC loathes. Those guys are jerks. Pat brought along a bunch of old comics (Including two original OMAC issues! Holy crap!) and some "how to draw" books that he's lending to me. Could the drawing books be a commentary on my last art project? Hmmm.

And Doug gave me a present, a thank-you gift for the last campaign I ran:

That was extraordinarily cool of him. I've got a totally rad bunch of players. And I'm not just saying that because sometimes they buy me stuff.

YourGamesNow

Since DriveThru and RPGnow announced they were merging I've been looking for someone to step up to the plate and offer a new PDF vending service. I really liked RPGnow but the people at DriveThru smell a bit too much of the White Wolf for me to be interested in giving them my money. (I still haven't completely stopped being grumpy over the pay to play fiasco, much less the earlier DRM debacle at DriveThru itself.) Steve Jackson's e23 remains a viable alternative, but the internet has plenty of room for some more competition. So imagine my delight when Mcrow posted this over at theRPGsite:

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

http://www.yourgamesnow.com/ Open for Business(Dallas, Tx; January 1, 2007)

Your Games Now LLC has launched a cooperatively-run web site where publishers sell electronic products designed with tabletop gaming in mind, found at www.YourGamesNow.com.

"YourGamesNow.com is a wonderful opportunity for publisher and customer alike," says Joseph Browning, President of Your Games Now LLC. "Publishers have a financial stake in the health of the site through profit-sharing, and customers know every purchase benefits not only the company that produced the material, but every company at the site. When the site performs well as a whole, every individual publisher on the site does better. This means customers are supporting publishers more-directly and that results in continued creation of exciting gaming material. Shopping at YourGamesNow.com is almost like buying direct from each and every publisher selling on the site."

Mr. Browning further explained, "There is no other site where company A makes more money on the products they sell because a customer purchased a product from company B. I think this kind of cooperative profit-sharing will result in better products. Competition is always good for a customer because it results in more products to choose from, and for the first time, that same competition is also beneficial to publishers through profit-sharing. At YourGamesNow.com, cooperation and competition are not exclusive. By providing their publishers a direct voice in the management of the site, YourGamesNow.com ensures that what's good for the site is also good for the publishers and, therefore, customers."

At launch, customers can find products from the following companies: ØOne Games, Arion Games, ComStar Media LLC, Dog Soul Publishing, Expeditious Retreat Press, Fiery Dragon Productions, Goodman Games, Hinterwelt Enterprises, Ki Ryn Studios, Majestic Twelve Games, Misfit Studios, Victory by Any Means Games, and The Le Games. If you are interested in selling product at http://www.yourgamesnow.com/, please use the contact information below.

Contact:
Joseph Browning
Your Games Now LLC, President
Phone: (214) 587-5693
E-mail: YourGamesNow@gmail.com

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The list of participants in this new venture is intriguing.

micro-review: Armistice

Each year the Friendly Local Game Store has a year-end "Dear God Don't Make Me Inventory This Crap" sale. Everything in the used section is fifty or seventy percent off the marked prices, so I usually drop twenty or thirty bucks on all kinds of crazy crap. This year I got a couple AD&D modules, a water-damaged 2nd edition MERP, new copies of Rifts and the Rifts Atlantis book, Monte Cook's Dark Space, and an issue each of the magazines Different Worlds and Pegasus. All for twenty-one dollars American.

Oh yeah. I also got Armistice. Other than the cover info, I didn't know anything about this game. So I says to the owner of the shop "Hey, man. I'm exactly one dollar worth of curious about this booklet. Whaddya say?" He took my dollar.

I'm not going to waste your time telling you a lot about Armistice's rules. This is bog standard tin soldier stuff: you push figures around the table, check some distances with a measuring tape, and roll some dice to ruin the other guy's shit. No big whup. The interesting bit of this game isn't in the workmanlike system, it's in the effed-up near future setting. My admittedly brief read-through couldn't find what year the game is set in, but the text references past events in 2050.

Whatever the year, the setting is a future where both the political and physical world have been seriously altered. Earthquakes and global warming and junk like that have changed the globe. The south half of Central America is underwater, cutting the new world in twain. The Arabian peninsula and Japan are simply gone. Scandinavia is now a couple of islands. Spain is free-floating too. The world map is recognizable but also radically weirded up. There's a cool skull and crossbones where Russia used to be and I have no idea what that is meant to indicate. Radiation? Pirates?

Politically there are four major powers. The Romanoff Empire controls much of North and Central America. South America is the domain of the Vulgariad. I love that name, BTW. Western Europe, Iceland, and Greenland comprise the Triskellion Island Alliance, another great name for a faction. A broad swath of the world stretching from Western Africa through India and central China now belongs to Ti-Zing Confederacy. That last one's just a little too Yellow Peril for my tastes.

Also on the board are four minor/mercenary factions. The minions of Warlord Haung Chu control northern China. Colonel Sterling's Black Widows* are based out of northeast America (Maine & Quebec & places like that), which is yet another new island. In the future you can sail an ocean-going vessel from Hudson Bay and plot a southerly course to get to the U.S. eastern seaboard. The African Resistance is led by Commander Horatio Collins, no doubt a Great White Hunter. And Princess Magdalen commands the "Aborigines terrorist" faction down under. Don't ask me, I'm just the messenger here.

These various factions go at it with infantry, armored personnel carriers, four sizes of tank, and choppers (including tank busters). They're armed with sci-fi sounding weapons like the 'Plazma Cannon' and the 'Vulcan Mega Cannon'. And there's also the WASPs. No, I'm not talking about Blackie Lawless's band or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, scary though they both may be. In Armistice WASP stands for Walking Artillery Special project. Yeah, we're talking about giant battle robots, but it's pretty low key. They're basically tanks with slightly better guns and the ability to walk through thicker terrain.

Still, it's kinda cool because this world is just on the verge of the BattleMech revolution. In the sample campaign game only the Romanoffs and Triskellions get to start with WASPs on the board. And the WASPs aren't fetishized to nearly the same extent as they are in many other giant robo games. All in all it almost looks like a legitimate attempt at speculative gaming, with WASPs treated as the slick new technology that everyone needs to adapt to in order to win the next war. I don't think Armistice is that deep, though. I think this is mainly a game about playing with little metal tanks and robots and making explodey noises when the dice go your way.

The sample campaign is ludicrous but playable. Australia, it turns out, is chock full of uranium, which in the future powers everything. So two or more powers fight each other and Princess Magdalen's Aboriginal Terrorists** for control of the island continent. Aussie-land is divied-up into a bunch of random-looking blobby areas, each with a point value from one to four. The number rates how much uranium is in the region and how many troops the Princess will muster for defense. It's all rather silly but a good minis campaign is nothing more than a framework for building individual tabletop encounters, so I can't get too worked up over the situation.

Despite the flaws, I find Armistice rather charming. I'm not rushing out to play it or anything, but I'm glad I spent that buck. Since the mechanics are nothing to write home about, I could see using the setting info for an alternate universe BattleTech set-up. Another intriguing possibility would be to keep the world of Armistice around for RPG purposes. In a game where the PCs occasionally find themselves hopping dimensions I could see some fun in dropping the party into the middle of the Great Australian Uranium War.

Finally, I gotta show you this picture. The rest of the art in the book is acceptable, but this fullpage piece by Paul Roosa is simply fabulous.

*BattleTech called. They want their mercenary company back.
**Someboady really ought to use that as a band name.

The Dungeonpunk Question

One of the things in 3E that hit me out of left field was the dungeonpunk art. Understand that I'm officially over bitching about dungeonpunk. I'd even be willing to admit that some of the things done under its aegis have been wicked cool. Case in point: the warforged. But I'm still left asking myself some questions about dungeonpunk. Who came up with the idea? Why was this design ethic selected over, say, an anime look or the traditional Elmore/Easley/etc. "photo-fantasy" art approach? Here's one possible clue I came across recently:


To me that looks kinda proto-dungeonpunk. And on the cover of a Monte Cook work, no less. While I am not ready to point a finger at Cook and shout "J'accuse!", I am intrigued by this find. Dark Space dates back to 1990 or so. These days I tend to think of the early nineties as the Time of the Vampire, but the World of Darkness was not the only thing going back then. Another big factor in the world of RPGs was the re-convergence of sci-fi and fantasy. In talking about things like Rifts, Shadowrun, and Dark Conspiracies. This grim-n-gritty science-fantasy trend is where dungeonpunk might have its beginnings. Think about it this way: Before D&D 3E where else could you get away with a leather jacket, a faux Maori tatto, and a sword?