It was occurring to me that sometime last October I had been musing about how healthy I had been. I should have known that I would be stuck down for such hubris.
As a recap I caught Pneumonia in early November, which was actually caused by contracting Valley Fever. I then had a wracking cough which lasted from before Thanksgiving to around New Years. Got back home and started feeling better. Two weeks ago my wife came down with the flu, and I felt a little peaked. This week she developed a nasty cough and my sinuses feel like they are going to explode out of my face.
Suffice it to say this has left me even more lethargic than usual.
Never the less I have done a few things.
The most significant achievement is finally having a go at play testing some mechanisms for simulating land battles in RRtK. Since the landscape of Talomir is so large the idea of fighting out all the battles that could occur is a daunting one. At Talomir tales we have gotten around this by basically ignoring the countries not involved in the campaign. So I took it upon myself to test out these rules on another subset (8) of the sixteen countries remaining that are not already involved.
So far I like the rules. They seem to capture the flavor of RRtK and give a believable end result. Defenders and Attackers seemed to split wins pretty well. I've given Mike some feed back and will try some more changes that make the battles slightly less deadly to the characters (CinC, heroes, Mages) as I seemed to roll very high for character effects.
I am also supposed to be play testing a variant of the 9Q's from Solo Nexus but have been horribly procrastinating and then feeling too awful to play when push came to shove. My solo rpg of choice for this is the old Top Secret. In re-reading the rules it struck me that the time frame was contemporary, for some reason we always felt like it was 50's or 60's in time frame. So I figured that I would set it at the peak of my rpg playing time, 1984. That seems to be a good year for espionage lots of spy cases being cracked in the US, Iran-Contra in full swing, the death of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov. So I'm setting my campaign in Central America for starters. Maybe some gun running or mining of Nicaraguan Harbors.
For Talomir Tales I need to bang out the battle and am perilously close to using some miniatures. They may be partially painted etc, but at this point I've already thrown caution to the wind and used paper counters. So I've pretty much already demonstrated that I am not a "proper" wargamer.
We'll see how things pan out. A double header of Flag Football today and the Superbowl tomorrow do not bode well for gaming progress. Wish me luck.
Another blog by a guy who came up in the 80's playing RPG's, Wargames and some miniatures.
Valley Fever! Wow, glad you are better.
ReplyDeleteYes, RRtK are interesting rules. I like the 'reaction' concept and have been trying to use them in rules since I discovered the predecessor Warrior Kings. Good luck in your playtesting. Looking forward to reading more about it.
Thanks Dale. I'll try and post a write up of the "actual" battles soon. I too like the reaction system as well. I still think that your criticism of the type of solo mechanic (play both sides) is still valid, but I can work with it on the table top. The only issue I have is that I seem to be kicking my own butt as the NPG, not sure why exactly.
ReplyDeleteAs for Valley Fever, I don't recommend it. Especially if you are in the 1% or so like me who gets the full body rash.