Hobby Dungeon

About 2 years ago I started working on a new game. I had created a handful of very simple games up to that point, and wanted to try my hand at something a bit more developed and a bit more complicated. The concept that I developed came to be known as Anomalous State, and I still can't get it out of my head.    This is not a finished game, and at this point I don't know if it ever will be, but the concept lives rent free in my head. Part of the reason that I don't think I can finish it, is that I don't think it will ever live up to my hopes and expectations - and I don't think any game can live up to the subject matter and aesthetic. This game was heavily inspired by Annihilation, the Southern Reach series, Roadside Picnic, and Stalker (the film). Aesthetically, these worlds bring me so much joy and dread and are the pieces of art that I gravitate towards again and again. They are unsettling and weird, and upsetting, and tragic, and there is so little in them which i...

My friend Dan and I are embarking one of those glorious and fabled campaigns - a multi-system and multi-layered campaign which varies in scale from galactic history, to skirmishes between warbands. Of course this is a dream of many wargamers, but the actual practical considerations have always been very daunting to me. So, today, I'll explain how we have structured our campaign, where we are right now, and where we hope to go with it.   Firstly, this is a narrative campaign - at the current moment, we don't have a scoring system or a way to "win" the campaign, but as you will see there are certainly some ways you could implement that. This whole process started because we were playing OPR Grimdark Future Firefight and found it lacking (I love a lot of OPR games - and we will actually be using a different one in this campaign - but GDFF feels pretty flat). Instead, we decided to play Stargrave - another easy to learn game with more depth and variety, and...

Do you remember Storm of Chaos, Dark Shadows, or even A Dark Conspiracy?   Well I do. Storm of Chaos came out in 2004, at the peak of my juvenile interest in Warhammer Fantasy and captured my imagination. I would have been 13 or 14 that year, and it happened right before I moved across the country and away from my friends and my local GW store. For those who are unfamiliar, Storm of Chaos was a global campaign - an event hosted by Games Workshop where players could go into any GW shop, play a game, and have those results recorded. All of the results from all over the world would be tallied up and help to decide the fate of the Old World.  The idea that I could participate in something that actually had an effect on the world I cared so much about was amazing - and groundbreaking for a pre-teen Andrew. I have always wanted to participate in another one of these events, now that I am an adult who can carve out a bit of time and energy for something like this - I wanted to do it ...

Barak Thingaz (The Forest Gate in Khazalid) is a fortress built south of the Black Mountains and Karak Hirn, in the land of the border princes. For dwarfs, it is a very strange place. Many aspects of dwarfen life and culture that do not normally mix can be found to inhabit this holdfast. In the first place, the fort is not built into a mountain - it is built around a stone tower in the middle of a dark forest, with stout palisade walls of massive timbers. Dwarfs are not normally known as forest creatures, but these dwarfs have found some advantages to living away from the mountains. The hold was founded and is currently led by an engineer named Ogam Oathkeeper, who was forced out of Karak Hirn for his dangerous engineering experiments. The king of that hold feared Ogam would explode the entire mountain on accident and exiled him to practice his engineering away from the ancient dwarf lands. Around his engineering workshop a variety of industries sprang up. A distillery and brewery we...

This post is going to be something of a ramble, as I’m working through my thoughts on the current dwarf army project I am embarking on. On a recent episode of Hive Scum, there was some discussion about coming up with lore and story for armies on the table. One of the suggestions that I really liked was having names and histories for each unit. This helped resolve a bit of an issue I have been having with my dwarf army. Most of my army has been recently acquired, and I have more models than I know what to do with currently. I wanted to develop a narrative for my army, but I’m trying to figure out how to bring it all together. I will probably be playing predominantly The Old World, so I picked up the Arcane Journal for the Dwarf Mountain Holds. In that book, they list two armies of renown (I think that’s what they were called), which are themed lists. The two lists are polar opposites, but they each get at something core to the dwarf sensibility. The Royal Clans take no gunpowder...