New life on the blogging front

"A bit political on yer ass!"- my alternative blog about society and stuff. Enter at your peril. Enjoy. Oh, don't forget to update your bookmarks to follow. ;)

Guilty pleasures and morbid imaginings

A guilty secret

The oft-mentioned mellowing effects of age are a true fact, well observed in the case of yours truly. A phenomenon which began with my increasing squeamishness in my mid-30s, the most extreme example of this effect is the case of one of the most hated figures in recent times here in Britain- the late Margaret Thatcher. I shared this hatred quite viscerally, to the extent that, back in the early/mid-80s I used break out into fits of apoplectic rage at the mere sight of her on the TV, and the sound of her in her prime still sends shivers down my spine. And yes, I went to the local party on the day of her death. I didn't sing, I didn't dance, but I'd promised myself I'd turn out and that was a promise I could not but keep, but that's another story.

"Who's got the last laugh
now you mad old bat?"

I blame ex-Chancellor and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown for spoiling my party (no, no, not the Labour Party- that had stopped being 'my' party 20 years before the moment in question). No, Brown spoiled my Thatcher's 'death-day' party when, on the occasion of becoming prime minister in 2007, he followed his predecessor Tony Blair's lead by inviting Thatcher for a photo opportunity on the steps of 10 Downing Street. The moment was truly pathetic, this one-time demented ranter cut down by senile dementia and rolled out for all the world like an old-time mummified Soviet Communist Party General Secretary to give her doddering seal of approval to the latest simpering heir to her so-called 'revolution'. And in that moment I couldn't help myself, I felt sorry for her.

Combat Commander: RSG radio variant reprised

This is just not on chaps

I wrote back in December 2008 about my frustration with the way that Combat Commander: Mediterrean’s updated Random Scenario Generator allows only the attacker to start with a radio. This just didn’t work for me at a basic level of historical authenticity. My general reading has taught me that the German army used their company and battalion 81mm mortars as immediate on-call defensive artillery fire. And George R. Blackburn’s monumental The Guns of War is chock full of examples of British and Commonwealth forces in Europe in 1944-45 using artillery directed by an attached Forward Observation Officer to break up attacks in progress. So I just can’t go along with the idea that defenders can only get access to radios via the Reinforcement event, which has a mere 3% chance even with the Americans for whom it is most likely.

“Give me fire for effect!”

All that said I could see that the essential issue was simple enough: while it was plain that either the attacker or the defender starting with a radio worked well enough, making radios available to both sides risks turning the game into a rather uninteresting exchange of big guns: the choice being mutually available, escalation would be very tempting because why not, after all? The idea that the points cost alone of selecting a radio would be sufficient disincentive just didn’t add up for me. More important perhaps is the fact that most of the ‘Artillery Request’ cards are also prime ‘Defender Only’ actions; eg. 6/9 in the American deck, including the 2 ‘Hidden Wire’ actions. On the other hand though, 6/9 ‘Artillery Request’ cards in the American deck are ‘Dig In’ or ‘Hidden Entrenchment’ actions. It is easy to imagine how keen a defender with a radio would be to use these for the artillery strikes. So the alternative uses of the defender’s ‘Artillery Request’ cards strike me as little more of disincentive for artillery escalation than does the points cost.

Analogue gamer finally grokks digital? #2. In which, getting neither rules nor manual, I am confounded

Analogue and digital: opposing skill sets?

Fundamental property
or fleeting perception?

Far from original, my closing remarks last time echo truisms familiar from many online discussions of, eg. how to get more younger people to play wargames (a common enough theme on the BGG Wargames subforum). Once this notion rears its head in any thread it won’t be long before someone observes that the ‘plug-and-play’ nature of computer games’ has ‘spoiled’ younger people when it comes to reading rules for a game, especially those more-or-less complex ones you’ll find in ‘heavy duty’ wargames. And these are games like, eg. the 32 pages of detailed case point of Unhappy king Charles or the similar 28 pages of Twilight Struggle — ie. average complexity medium-sized wargames with clear and concise rules — not ASL’s legendary monumental tome or some such monstrosity.

The basic disconnect

These displays of condescension leave me feeling a point is being missed, somewhere. I mean to say, as wargamers we seek relaxation in a hobby predicated upon higher-grade English comprehension overlaid with standard grade mental arithmetic. If you don’t enjoy exercising these skills then you’re hardly likely to enjoy games which put a high priority on them. This surely goes some way to explain why Eurogames are far more popular than wargames: their rules are simpler and they don’t emphasise the traditionally ‘studious’ skills to the same extent as wargames. Consequentially, Euros are social and cooperative in their conflict- eg. Settlers; if not indirect in their actual competition- eg. Alhambra. In this respect analogue wargames remain the niche of a niche dominated by educated aging geezers which Jim Dunnigan outlines in his Wargames Handbook.

To tweak perfection?

Old news is good news

That cover, the true
story of which can
be found here

Word broke on the internet some weeks ago of news that at first sight seemed almost too good to be true: Valley Games have acquired the rights to Up Front and are working with designer Courtney Allen on a new edition, to be funded via Kickstarter later this year for a planned publication date in 2013. The initial excitement felt by fans of this all-time classic will have been quickly tempered by healthy scepticism upon all-too-immediate recall of the vapourware that was MMP’s ill-fated Up Front 2000. The lapse- in March 2011, of MMP’s licence with Hasbro was nothing less than a mercy killing. No one really believed anymore that MMP were going to bring this one home, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s ultimately relieved that some of MMP’s more esoteric suggestions for their new edition of Up Front (first announced in an ad in ASL Journal #2) didn’t see the light of day.

In the lair of the White Bear

A chance encounter

A studious White Bear

I first met the White Bear last summer, in the guise of her secret identity (who shall remain nameless, naturally enough). For the purposes of this article though, I can tell you that the White Bear hails from Copenhagen, which is why, on my asking what had brought her to Glasgow, she told me that she was working on an art project funded by Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA). Intrigued but wary- because of my philistine tendencies when it comes to modern art, I soon warmed to the White Bear’s theme when she explained to me that it had been inspired by a quotation from Fyodor Dostoyevsky (who regular readers will remember is my favourite writer from the pantheon of 19th century Great Russians):

“Try and set yourself the task not to think of a white bear, and the cursed thing comes to mind every minute"
Winter Notes on Summer Impressions 1863
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Listening to the White Bear explain how she had escaped from inside the head in which she had been trapped by Dostoyevsky’s thought-experiment; and how she was now travelling around the world to “examine the ideas and consequences of the dichotomy [between] inner beast and shallow surface, and [to] investigate the profound impact [that] the idea of a true inside and a merely representative exterior has on all kinds of fields”, I found any lingering prejudices melting away.

Wargames, politics and ethics #2: Politics? You can run, but you can't hide

Broad-brush polemic ruffles feathers

A book I picked up on sight from a recommendation on the WW2 SS Counter Colours thread, Ronald Smelser and Edward J. Davies II's 2008 scholarly study, The Myth of the Eastern Front: the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture was going to become an article even as I first read it – avidly – over xmas last year. Researching for this series- in which The Myth of the Eastern Front was going to feature centrally, I found the military hobbyists' inevitable internet hot flushes in its wake. Inevitable? In response to an academic tome?

The biggest invasion of the
biggest war in history:
a lot there to forget

Yes, because The Myth of the Eastern Front is part analytical historical deconstruction, and part broad-brush polemic against the 'romancers'- promulgators of an idealised vision of the Wehrmacht and the SS as honourable soldiers fighting a 'Lost Cause' against the Red horde. Smelser and Davies root this mythology in the Wehrmacht's 'last campaign': the ex-generals' postwar years of networking and spin aimed at rehabilitating the image of the German armed forces on the Eastern front.

Wargames, politics and ethics #1: Ah, that old bugbear

Reality bites

They're just games, yes?

At some time or another, many wargamers will have found themselves pondering the political and/or ethical implications of their passion for revisiting the past, present and future battlefields of the world with their maps and little counters. This reflection leads some to create boundaries and/or preferences: periods they won't game, sides they always prefer to play, and so on. For me this began in my teenage-tankie youth, when I drew a boundary at 1945. My reasons for this were twofold:

• In the late 70s and early 80s- with Thatcher and Reagan's 'second' Cold War at its height, modern warfare was too closely linked to the spectre of global thermonuclear holocaust for it to have any appeal to me.
• I felt uncomfortable with the idea of playing games about wars the casualties of which would be actual people living in my own time.

I abandoned this boundary as I grew older. That's not to say that I 'grew out of it', because that would be to imply that there's something immature about the choice to draw and to exercise such boundaries. I've no wish to be so insulting to others who've made these choices.

Of GW, the lure of Chaos, gribblies, and stuff

Space Hulk wins 2 Golden Geek Awards
My recent visits to the pages of Black Library novels: Graham McNeill's Heldenhammer- which I picked up at Conflict 2010, and Nathan Long's Bloodborn- which I reviewed last month; these visits to the world of the book have revived my interest in tie-in fiction set in two of my favourite gaming universes. And so it was that last Saturday saw me dropping in to my local GW in search of new reading matter. Also available was the new issue of White Dwarf. I confess I'm in the camp who finds GW's house magazine to be of limited utility in terms of adding value to my GW gaming interests- namely 40K, but I always like to read interviews with the creative types at the Design Studio. White Dwarf #368 features two, so I bought it.

One mighty game; two well-deserved awards

Skimming through the pages of news and new releases, as you do, I was pleasantly surprised to read Jervis Johnson's grateful acknowledgement of the two 2009 Golden Geek Awards the BGG community had awarded Space Hulk, whose 3rd edition was released amid great fanfare last year. The awards were:

• Best 2-player game.
• Best artwork/presentation.

Pleasant: because it was good to see that Space Hulk had received these accolades from the BGG community, and because it was nice to read Jervis' appreciation of this in the pages of White Dwarf. Surprising: because, regular BGG user that I am, I had no idea of these awards- the official awards ceremony was in November last year, until I read of Space Hulk's 2009 success in White Dwarf.

Q-workshop STRIKE!!!!

Journey to the unknown land of dice manufacturing
Remember that mention I gave back in June to Q-Workshop, the novelty dice company? I thought I was just honouring my side of a bargain made at UK Games Expo 2010, when I wangled a small discount on some dicecups in return for a promised mention here at RD/KA!. Little did I know then the ancient emnities- as long as beards and as sharp as ears, with which I had become involved for the sake of those two quid. What am I talking about? Watch this video and you'll see.



It seems then that the introduction of new design and manufacturing technology means that big changes are afoot at Q-Workshop, including:

• New cheap classic RPG dice sets.
• New premium 3D dice.
• New deluxe metal dice.
• New box packaging.
• New lower prices for older dice sets.

"New" and "lower prices": phrases which are bound to delight dice geeks everywhere, especially those who are already fans of Q-Workshops' wide range. But is this really good news all round?

"Trapped in the netherspace, the void between the worlds"

WARNING!

- MAJOR Doctor Who season 5 spoilers ahead -
WARNING!

Oh. My. Goodness!
I may only have written about Doctor Who once before here at RD/KA!- at the end of David Tennant's first season back in 2007, but everyone who knows me knows only too well that I am a devoted fan of the show, albeit not a Whovian geek as such. As I set to writing this I've just come from watching for the 3rd time the 2-part finale to Matt Smith's first season as the inimitable Doctor, to refresh in my mind what made this season so striking as to prompt me to give vent to my enthusiasm for what has been 13 weeks of truly matchless television.

Brace yourselves dear readers!
In light of what I said last Sunday about the pointless sound and fury so often aroused in geek culture by clashes of tastes driven by blind partisanship, I want to begin with a warning and a clarification. If you don't like Doctor Who, or you do but don't share my high appreciation of the merits of this season: that's all well and good, but I don't care. Mule headed blind partisanship? No. I simply can't. This is just the blunt end of my critique of what I was hinting at last Sunday when I referred to how "personal tastes are justified against other people's by being raised to the level of intellectual generalisations".

Death becomes them all

Again with the old pals routine
My old pal Rob- whose job regularly takes him to Sweden for weeks at a time, was back in town last week so we decided a trip to the cinema was in order. We chose to go see Black Death, a film which has been on my 'would like to see' list ever since I noticed its release. Regular readers should have no difficulty in guessing why a film set in plague-ridden medieval England should appeal to me, but I'll come back to that later.

The critic's eye
There is a lengthy review on the IMDb Black Death page in which I think the reviewer is quite quite wrong. The IMDb page correctly tags Black Death with the horror and mystery genres. These features of the movie are nowhere addressed in that review; poor form and a shame, because these were the movie's strengths.

A welcome return?

Sometimes we just can't help ourselves
Geek culture can sometimes be less a cultural panorama than a minefield for the unwary. I'm talking of course of the irrational passions and prejudices which can be oh so easily aroused by our own version of 'brand loyalty'. Sure, so-called 'mainstream' culture is no more free of blind partisanship than any other social sphere in which personal tastes are justified against other people's by being raised to the level of intellectual generalisations, or just by plain mule headedness. Mainsream culture though lacks the wide spectrum offered by edition wars- RPGs and miniatures games; new writers and/or artists- comics and books; the full range of cross-media adaptions (which rarely stray beyond prose into movies in the mainstream)- most any geek medium into most any other; Euros versus Ameritrash- boardgames; 'old-school' versus 'indie'- RPGs again. And this is just a selection. I'm sure readers could easily add to this list.

The recent Black Library Warhammer novel Bloodborn is a case in point for yours truly. Its author is Nathan Long, of whom I first heard- as I imagine would have most of my readers who recognise his name, when he took over writing the Gotrek and Felix series from Bill King, with the novel Orcslayer. You can imagine then, dear readers, that the geek spasms so induced meant that this was hardly the best introduction a reader could have to a new writer. This misbegotten mentality was only encouraged when I heard that Nathan Long was going to be writing a Gotrek and Felix spin-off series featuring Ulrika the Vampire.

"Alas, I am undone!"

Sieze the day?
I said last Thursday that I wanted to get Dominion to the table up here in Glasgow "at the earliest opportunity". That opportunity arose when Badger appeared for Friday night gaming. I'd been touting for a game of Conflict of Heroes- what with the upcoming demo tour, but the lure of Dominion proved too much to resist. A Euro-style cardgame that can keep this grognard's favourite treadhead's game off the table? Regular readers will realise that this must make Dominion something really special.

What went down
The rules of Dominion include a few recommended sets of Kingdom cards to give beginners balanced games which demonstrate different dynamics of play (you only use 10 of the 22 different kinds remember?) so- knowing what I was looking at and for this time, I was quickly able to get the game set up using the starter game cards (all shown in the illustrations left and below). Five minutes later we were playing. Five minutes after that Badger was playing his cards like he'd been playing Dominion for ages: grinning all over his face as he surveyed good hands; grimacing at his hands of shite.

First grand "Roll dice and kick ass!" prize draw!

Spring is here and we're all celebrating long days and bright sunshine. As RD/KA!'s small contribution to these annual festivities I'm announcing my first ever prize draw.

Late extra!
Bill King's return to the Black Library to write a Warhammer Fantasy trilogy about legendary Elf heroes Tyrion and Teclis will be news only to those of my readers who don't follow the Black Library blog or other F&SF news sites, where the news broke back in February.

Bill is of course best known for his 7 Slayer novels, featuring dwarf slayer Gotrek Gurnisson and his human poet companion Felix Jaeger; and for his 4 Space Wolf novels, featuring Ragnar Blackmane. He may have 2 major characters to whom the phrase 'pointy ears' is simultaneously a term of abuse and a target designation, but writing about elves isn't new to Bill. He co-wrote with Andy Chambers the 4th edition Warhammer Armies: High Elves, in which he created most of what remains the canonical account of Tyrion and Teclis. And he wrote about the 40K Eldar in the novel Farseer.

Mad March roundup #2. Grand geek gathering!

The place
Conpulsion 2010 took place last weekend in the Teviot Row students' union at Edinburgh University, as Conpulsion always does. The "oldest purpose built student union building in the world", Teviot Row is a place of which I have fond memories from the 1980s: I used to play a lot of Defender there- badly; the student wargames club used to have monthly games days there; and it was there- at a FilmSoc showing, that this lifelong fan of classic Trek first saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Teviot Row: the front entrance

You can imagine then, dear readers, that I was keen to see what Conpulsion made of this place so redolent of memory for yours truly. The short answer is that I was impressed.

Once more the culture vulture

Springtime for Glaswegians
If it's March in Glasgow it must be Aye Write!- Glasgow's Book Festival, now in its fifth year. Aye Write! had made little impression on me in previous years, despite my seeing the ads and the programmes in my local library each time. This was frustrating, so- determined to do better in 2010, I grabbed a programme as soon as I saw one and started looking for events. The first one which did more than just catch my eye was:

NEW SCOTTISH SCIENCE FICTION
The Early Days of a Better Future?

Presiding: Andrew J. Wilson of Writers' Bloc, Edinburgh

As if the due appearance of SF luminaries Ken MacLeod and Richard Morgan wasn't enough, this event was an instant choice for yours truly because the panel included Hal Duncan and Mike Cobley. Mike and Hal are old pals of mine from the Glasgow SF Writers' Circle, which featured in the first series of posts here @RD/KA!. It was this circle which drew me to Glasgow back in 1989, when I nourished active dreams of being an SF writer myself.

The pen: mightier than the sword?

But whose pen will it be?
Dave and Tony joined the regulars to give us a full table of 6 last Sunday. First choice fell to Andy. After a short swither which included a disparaging nod in the direction of my mention of Battlestar Galactica, he plumped for History of the World. This choice pleased me because I'd been hankering lately to revisit this fine old game.

History of the World and all that
Looking back from the vantage point of the second decade of the 21st century, it is possible to see 1991's History of the World as the last word in a unique moment in British games design; a moment which- though quite self contained, was simultaneously widely influential; far more so surely than anyone could really have imagined at the time.

Laughter and rage from page to stage

Yer actual culture
Thursday night there I teamed up with Gavin, Michael and Liam at Glasgow's Tron Theatre to see the Communicado Theatre Company's production of the late poet Adrian Mitchell's adaption of Nikolai Gogol's classic 1836 play, The Government Inspector. (Check the poem on Mitchell's homepage and you'll get some idea of why this man- whose name was utterly unknown to me before Thursday, has been so lamented: poems like Song in Space could conceivably finally heal the scars inflicted on yours truly- as on so many others, by poetry at school.)

Gogol: titan and progenitor
The father of one of the greatest literary movements in world history- the great Russians; of whom Dostoyevsky once said "We all came out of Gogol's 'Overcoat.'"; Gogol's works weren't new to me. A friend had lent me Dostoyevsky's (Memoirs from) The House of the Dead back in mid-80's Edinburgh. Astounded and entranced by the world I had entered, for several years thereafter I read as many of the works of these Russians as I could get my hands on. Dostoyevsky was my favourite and I also sampled Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov as well as Gogol. Later I became fascinated with the Russian revolution- whose conseqences reverberated down through history as strongly as ever back in the 1980's and 90's, and I read up on that subject more avidly even than I had consumed the literature.

Web 2.0 and tabletop roleplaying #1: the past

A big day for all concerned?
World-historical anniversaries are all very well but today also happens to see my 400th post here @RD/KA!, so I've been racking my brains trying to think of a topic suitable to highlight this latest small landmark in my bloggery. What could be more apt I decided, than a subject which has its roots in my halcyon days- the 1980's; about which I wrote right back when this blog was but a stripling; which represents furthermore one of my major unfulfilled aspirations as a roleplayer?

Phase 1: "When ah were a lad..."
My fascination with what Web 2.0 can offer tabletop roleplayers is rooted in experiences predating the invention of the World Wide Web itself. It all began, naturally enough, with Katana: Sword Against Evil™, that renegade ninja who has set out to destroy the Evil that spawned him.
(Graphic via Trends in the Living Networks)