Monthly Archives: February 2016
Polaris Sector – First Mission, part 1
A visual AAR, from Sauron ~
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Setting up a game
Mercs: Recon Kickstarter – First Look!
The Mercs: Recon Kickstarter campaign is now shipping, in waves. What’s inside? ~
Vance Strickland, 10 February 2015
Megacon’s Mercs: Recon Kickstarter package. 1st of 2 waves of stuff. Each box is a stand alone game, but you can mix and match most all of the parts to extend the replayability.
Brand spanking new, just outta the shipping box!
Tracer Rounds – Fakin’ It ’til You Make It
How The Impostor Phenomenon Gets In The Way ~
In my interpersonal communication classes, we talk about something called “the impostor phenomenon.” (Now, let’s all just pause for a moment and marvel at the fact that they actually have me teaching a class about interpersonal communication and yes my wife is laughing her ass off right now but that’s neither here nor there.) The impostor phenomenon is best summed up this way: even well-accomplished individuals sometimes doubt their achievements and fear being ‘outed’ as a fraud in areas in which they are no way ‘faking their way’ along.
The impostor phenomenon hits me rather personally. Let’s face it, I’m here helping run a wargaming site, and some people might mistake that for having some level of expertise in the wargaming field. But my track record in the wargaming field has honestly been pretty spotty along the way. I’ve legitimately had wargames in print that I sold through conventions and mail-order, but they were entirely self-published, so I never had to polish them enough to get them through a gatekeeper. I’ve also legitimately had RPGs in print that were sold online and through conventions, and through a few brick-and-mortar stores. But again, they were self-published and self-financed, and I probably lost money overall on them before the momentum dried up and let them languish. Yes, I worked on a wargame project on for the NSA, but I was brought on to coordinate playtesting and tweak variables in an existing game engine, not develop from scratch. We had a contract with NDU to create the GEMSTONE system, but after only a few iterations in use, it fell by the wayside, and I don’t think it’s even in use at NDU anymore with any other contractor. Sure, I’ve written reviews for a bunch of places like Scrye and RPG.net and that other site, but I was never a full-time paid staffer with a regular deadline and set of responsibilities and all the trappings of the professional writing trade. I’ve put together some events and presentations at game conventions (like the GrogHeads Central Command at Origins – product placement for the win, baby!), but they were always within the broader context of someone else’s event.
The Zombie Apocalypse, Part 8: Keeping Your Sierra Together
Will you know it when you see it? ~
Jonathan Glazer, 22 January 2016
We envision ourselves in crisis acting in certain ways. Some of us emblazon ourselves with logos on our chests and capes, despite the impracticality of capes being settled by The Incredibles. Others have a more realistic understanding of how we act under fire and identify which rock we will use for shelter when the poop hits the radial cooling device. In reality, the intellectual part of our brains cannot comprehend how our emotional side will react once the hounds of hell are unleashed.
When we perceive a fight or flight situation to be upon us, our adrenal glands situated on top of our kidneys squirt adrenaline into the blood stream. This causes a cascade of hormonal and other physical changes designed to enhance our ability to either beat the living feces out of someone or grow wings and fly away from them. Our heart rate, respiration, circulation patterns, muscle response and thought patterns all work in harmony to bring out the inner caveman (or woman) in all of us.
Unless you are actually in the moment, you will have no way of knowing what our Incredible Hulk looks, sounds or smells like. Once you have been in a number of those situations, you begin to recognize the consistent patterns that are a part of this process. Seasoned combat veterans know what happens when the lead flies. Over time, they gain control over the chaos. Guys who have been in the field too long have been known to fall asleep during firefights. This is because adrenaline is like heroin in that we build up a tolerance to it. When you spend a lot of time in crisis mode drinking the hormone like Gatorade, it eventually has less of an impact. The result is Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now not even noticing mortar shells exploding nearby and ordering his men to surf amidst a hot combat operation.
Gaming Nostalgia – Atari Wargaming
#TBT at GrogHeads!
Wargames on the original Atari desktop computers? Why not?
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