Introducing "Campaign Chronicle," and Some Catching Up

"Campaign Chronicle"

I've had a long think and have finally come to a conclusion.  Running multiple blogs – one for medieval/fantasy, one for the musket era, one for WWII, not to mention a few others that were extremely short-lived – isn't the most efficient way to handle my blogging. Whenever I'm focused on one area of my hobby, the other blogs lie fallow for months. That lengthy inactivity bothers me. So after a bit of hesitation, I've decided to just do all my blogging here. With an appropriate change to the blog's title and header of course. "Campaign Chronicle" fits just about every hobby-related thing I do.

Catching Up

A lot of work and personal stuff has severely dented my blogging of late, but that doesn't mean I haven't been gaming. So here's what I've been up to.

Wednesday Night Pits & Perils

+Tim Shorts, +Ken H  and I have formed a small group to run a shared world taking it in turns to be GM. I like the way this is going. One GM and two players is a good size for this. Everybody gets to take a turn GMing without either burning out or having to wait too long to get a shot to run something. With only two PCs (but with plenty of retainers in play) no player is ever out of the spotlight for too long – there's always plenty for both players to do at every moment in the game. And we haven't bothered to sketch out the world prior to play, except in the broadest, vaguest terms. The game world is just growing and fleshing out gradually as we play. We've been doing for this a few months now, and so far it's working brilliantly.

Playing Moldvay D&D Basic with My Wife

Wha-what??  That's right. For years, I've been gradually pulling my wife over to the geek side of the force. It started small with watching various Star Trek series and Dr. Who, then moved to fantasy board games like Dungeon! and Talisman, then MMOs. But she always said she wasn't interested in playing D&D and probably never would be. Too complicated, too time consuming, etc. Then out of the blue several weeks ago, she said: "Okay, entertain me. Make me a character and write me up an adventure." And so it began. We've played something like five or six short sessions. She's survived two adventures and is in the middle of her third, and is learning the value of retainers.

One-Hour Wargames: WWII

I played another solo game of Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames, this time using the WWII rules. Americans vs. Germans, river-crossing scenario.

Two crossings, both sides have been ordered to control them. Americans aimed for the bridge while the Germans aimed for the ford. The Americans got the better of it – their infantry posted in the woods, with a little tank support, gunned down the German infantry assault at the ford, while the German armor on the hill overlooking the bridge was surprisingly ineffective. The Americans largely survived their crossing over the bridge, flanked the German positions, and mopped them up in detail. Fun little game, over very quickly.

Franco-Prussian War Toy-Soldier Style Minis

I've been futzing about with more toy-soldier style (54mm, super-simple block paint jobs with high-gloss finish) models. I've got enough now for a decent-sized skirmish, and I just ran one using a modified version of the One-Hour Wargames scenario above and a rules set called...

French Zouaves

Prussian Infantry

OMOG – One Man, One Gun

This a actually a collection of several sets of dead simple skirmish rules, with one set of rules for each of a variety of eras – medieval, musket era, late 19th-century rifle-era, and modern. You can get them for free at the Milihistriot Free Downloads Page.

I used it to run another man-to-man skirmish scale river crossing game. This time the French Zouaves tried to rush across the bridge ...

but the stone wall on the opposite side (and the dice) gave the Prussians the upper hand fairly quickly.

When the dust had settled, the Prussians had wiped out the French Zouaves, having lost about 50% of their own.


And that's all the news there is to report.