Tetsujin no Llama

A while back, I made a Barad Dur case for The Kid's Xbox . And then he got a PS5. So...   The first possibility I looked at for a way of dressing up the console was Minas Tirith, but there's no way I could make that fit in any reasonable space. Then I hit on the Argonath, the twin statues marking the northern border of Gondor on the Anduin. One statue on either side? Doable.   There are a bunch of free versions of the Argonath out there, but they kind of suck, so I shelled out a few bucks for a much better model , and I do not regret it. Much like Barad Dur, I went through the simple process of scaling up and dividing into printable parts and then the multi-week process of printing them all out. After gluing together, I put on a coat of sandable primer. The thicker paint helps conceal the print lines a little bit.   Then stippling to give a natural stone look.   I wanted the unsculpted parts to look like they still had natural ground cover on them, so I masked the st...

For a long time, I’ve maintained that GURPS, despite its reputation for complexity, is actually pretty simple in play. I was thinking recently that I should see if I can express the fundamentals of playing GURPS in a short, easily digested form, and so here I am.   This does not address a more general “how to play rpgs” for those who know nothing on the topic. How to approach GURPS, at that level, isn’t necessarily a lot different from how to approach D&D or TFT or any other RPG system. It doesn’t get into optional and campaign-specific sets of rules or equipment. Rather, this is stuff applicable to playing GURPS no matter what the campaign is. It also doesn’t address how to build GURPS characters, which is a vastly more complicated topic. Rather, this is about how to engage GURPS rules when you’ve already got your character sheet and are sitting at the table to play. It’s a trifle over 1000 words, which I think isn’t too bad.   How To Play GURPS Most of what you’ll need t...

omeone made the mistake of asking me to expand on some things I'd said about writing historical rpg material, so you all must suffer for it. I write a lot of historical rpg stuff as well as entirely fictional setting material. So why make historically themed games rather than just making stuff up? Well, because it's an effective way of achieving the purpose of writing settings and adventures in general. The purpose of settings and adventures, I would aver, is to give players things to do in a convincing context. Convincing context doesn't necessarily mean realism. Players have different levels of understanding of what's "realistic" in different situations and are more or less sensitive to how closely those situations adhere to reality. For example, I'm a history and culture guy. Put me in SF campaigns (which happens with some regularity) and the specifics of how reaction drives, orbital mechanics, and subatomic physics work entirely escape me. I don't,...

I love dice.  It's a common affliction of gamers, but it's a particular thing for me. They're interestingly shaped, emblematic of my hobby, and modern ones are tiny works of art which appeal to even people like my non-gaming lovely and talented spouse (who has gotten me a great many of these over the years, because she knows what I like). I was recently asked about my dice collection, which has been accumulating for rather more years than I like to think, so here's a more or less historically guided tour. Back in The Olden Days (tm) of the first tabletop roleplaying games, polyhedral dice weren't easily available, nor were they initially sold as gaming accessories. They were originally sold as scientific equipment, used by people like statisticians and mathematical researchers who needed to generate random numbers (there's a fascinating paper here on the history of dice as randomizers in scientific work; the dice we use owe a lot to the reconstruction of post-w...