Tetsujin no Llama

They say it's a poor craftsman who blames their tools. Is it a poor craftsman who gives them credit when things work out? If so, I am that craftsman. After my first round of not-great miniature painting, I ran off some more CW minis and tried more painting, this time digging up my well-hidden actually-for-minis paints (as opposed to the standard craft store acrylics I used the first time around), which I had more than I thought I did, and limited myself to my tiniest brushes. I also watched a few more YouTube videos about painting minis just to get a better feel for what it looked like when people did that. How did it come out? Still not great, but better. The first of batch #2 and by a considerable margin the worst. Involved some ill-advised dry brushing and the metallic paint I used for the weapons and I didn't thin the metallic paint I used on the weapons and side windows, losing all the detail in the process. This one...is actually OK. The thinned blue and purple paints gi

I'm old enough to be a player of Car Wars from Steve Jackson Games from the Pocket Box days. Old enough, even, that I've got a copy of Sunday Drivers (clearly a superior title), not Crash City . But it became much too complicated a game to keep playing after a while, or rather my ability to take the time to deal with complexity declined markedly. But I've been delighted by the new, much faster edition of Car Wars which came out not too long ago. My one problem with the game is that instead of tiny cardboard counters, it uses Matchbox/Hot Wheels-scaled minis...no, that's actually not a problem. That's excellent. They look great and make the game more fun to play. The problem lurks inside of that. They're great minis and they invite painting. Indeed, SJ Games as a series of videos about painting car minis on their Youtube channel. The problem, then, is that I want to paint my car minis, but I suck at painting minis. Like, I'm the worst at it. And while I

Some time ago, I wrote about one of my early significant influences, the Judges' Guild Ready Ref Sheets . But recently I was reminded of an even earlier influence, The Book of Weird , by Barbara Ninde Byfield. Or, to give it its full title as it appears on the cover: The Book of Weird, Being a Most Desirable Lexicon of The Fantastical, Wherein Kings & Dragons, Trolls & Vampires, to say nothing of Elves & Gnomes, Queens, Knaves & Werewolves are made Manifest, & many, many further Revelations of The Mystical Order of Things are brought to light.   But yeah, The Book of Weird is much easier to type .   The book has had a somewhat complicated publishing history. It was initially published in 1967 under the title The Glass Harmonica . There being but a single passing mention of that instrument in the book, it was reissued in 1973 under the title given here in a large (9x11-ish) format, and reprinted yet again in a somewhat smaller format in 1994, which happens to b

A few days ago, I dropped this random gag:   I shall make a character for an RPG who has powers related to artistic creativity, but instead of music and song, they come from arranging cheeses and cured meats. A charcuterie bard. — Turhan's Bey Company (@turhansbeycmpny) December 21, 2021   But then I remembered that there's absolutely precedent for food-based magic:  So, then, obviously we can have food-based bards in GURPS, right? The best approach I see is modifying the Enthrallment skills (p. B191). However, rather than requiring Public Speaking at 12+ as a prerequisite, a charcuterie bard requires Cooking and Professional Skill (Food Stylist) at 12+; see Ferrous Metal Food Fighting Guy for a bit on the latter. The skills are used by preparing and feeding an audience with tasty, tasty foods. The elements of food in question cost a minimum of 1% of COL per target, though higher quality ingredients provide a bonus (use costs and reaction bonuses for styling, GURPS Low-Tech

In his review of GURPS Action Adventure 1: Templars' Gold, Mailanka introduces the charming phrase "action documentaries" to describe adventures which also contain interesting educational content. You play a fun adventure, but you also learn stuff you didn't know before. And that's a marvelous idea, particularly for a game as frequently entangled in history and real world concerns as GURPS . So naturally I started thinking about how one would write such a thing. To start with, it's probably best to attach such an adventure to some existing product line. For the 20th and early 21st century, that's clearly the Action line. While I wouldn't write it, there's room for such things around more obscure corners of WWI (the war in Africa, for example), some of the less European, more Asian parts of the Russian Revolution, events around the end of the Qing dynasty, the settlement of WWII ( The Third Man or intrigue around landing Trieste as part of Italy

A recent review of Spies of Venice (largely fair save for a crack about Wikipedia) noted that it didn't talk a lot about using the material in a game. This is true, and not surprisingly it's for reasons of space. Spies of Venice is intended largely as a tool for world-building, providing ideas and information on actual historical practices of intelligence gathering and counterintelligence, whether for use in an historical campaign or, more likely, an historically flavored fantasy campaign. However, since word count is limited, there has to be a focus on stuff which can only be provided by specialized research (into sources well beyond Wiki-freaking-pedia) rather than things the GM could plausibly extrapolate on their own. But if I were to talk more about adapting the material to other campaigns and settings, it might look something like this: Intelligence Agencies One of the things Spies of Venice underlines is that there weren't intelligence agencies as such in its day