Month: November 2021

The Dice Flew Furiously — Warfare in the Age of the Machine Gun

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The Dice Flew Furiously is Ross MacFarlane’s set of rules for modernistic warfare. From his notes:

Notes: This is a simple set of rules for playing wargames in the Age of the Machine Gun. They are meant to provide an enjoyable game and to be evocative of stories told rather than an accurate simulation or recreation of experience or fact. More specifically, they aim to work in OSW fashion, not worrying about consistent time and ground scales and operating on multiple levels at once. Figures and vehicles are treated more or less as individuals so a player can get that emotional feel of being there in the midst of things while putting dozens if not hundreds of toy soldiers on the table and getting the feel of commanding a “battalion” or even a “brigade”, yet still be able to finish a game in 2 to 4 hours. The rules are intended for use with individual figures of 20mm size or larger but it should be able to be used with multi-figure bases either counting each base as a figure or by marking hits.

What Three Divisions Of A Napoleonic Army Look Like

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Here’s a video of a three divisions of a Napoleonic British Army done in 1:1 scale. Amazing.

Darker Dungeons Free RPG

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Darker Dungeons is a free RPG. From the author’s website:

Darker Dungeons is a pen-and-paper role-playing game. It is a sister game to Dark Dungeons and Darkest Dungeons.

Like Dark Dungeons, it is based on a specific out-of-print edition of a specific game which cannot be named for legal reasons. However, unlike Dark Dungeons it doesn’t try to faithfully emulate that game. Instead, it tries to bring it up to date by replacing many of the disparate game mechanics with a unified system (although it is careful to keep the probabilities of success/failure of actions the same to within +/-5%, so the feel of the game is very similar to Dark Dungeons).

Additionally, Darker Dungeons takes advantage of the fact that it does not need to stick to its source material as closely by including other changes, including:

Ability Scores and hit points no longer being randomly generated.
Changes to classes (the human Mystic has been replaced by the demi-human Lupine, the Mountebank has been added, and the Magic-User and Elf have been swapped).
Removal of Alignment.
The ability for clerics and magic-users (and elves) to specialise in one or more types of spell at the cost of being less good with other types.
Shields no longer giving a flat bonus to armour class, but instead characters spending Proficiency slots on them to get their bonuses, just like weapons.
The removal of Shield Weapons (Knife Shield, Horn Shield, etc.), and the addition of Flails and Morning Stars.

The game is self-contained in a single book which you can download for free, or if you prefer you can buy the book in printed form.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Coloring Book

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A little bit of nostalga here: There’s a Flickr set of illustrations from the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons coloring book, circa 1979

Dahomey’s Women Warriors

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An interesting colonial article in Smithsonian.

For the better part of 200 years, thousands of female soldiers fought and died to expand the borders of their West African kingdom. Even their conquerors, the French, acknowledged their “prodigious bravery.”