Gaming and other Nonsense
“Just the place for a Snark!”
Welcome to a collection of random pages about tabletop roleplaying and wargames, with a bit of science fiction thrown in for good measure. It contains campaign notes and chronicles for various games I've run and played it, design notes for game systems, and designs for armies and characters. Since some of the material dates back almost 30 years, the style may be inconsistent.
Though there is material here for both Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, it also includes Ars Magica, Traveller, Star Wars, Legend of the Five Rings, Pendragon, as well as various home brewed game systems.
Products I sell are available on DriveThruRPG.
Frequent updates on the games I'm currently playing can be found on my blog.
Campaigns Roleplaying Wargaming
Most of the content on here is entirely original. Some of it is based on material published by other people - e.g., game content for published RPGs or Wargames.
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
News and Updates
2020
So 2020 is finally over, so time for a look back at the games we played over the last 12 months.
Traveller
Given the amount of Traveller I've been running recently, I've completely restructured my Traveller pages. This may result in some broken links, but the content is still around - just moved. Previously the content focused on ideas for my 'Traveller-like' campaign. These have now been moved to my YAGS rules site where they can be unambiguously centred around my YAGS rules.
The content here is focusing on actual Traveller, mostly Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition and focused on the Third Imperium during the Golden Age, which is when my campaigns are set.
Islands in the Rift
A few weeks ago I started running a Mongoose 2nd Edition Traveller game on Roll20. It's set in 1105, in Reft Sector, in the Islands cluster, and involves the players locating and trying to recover a ship left behind by a failed Imperium intelligence mission. I'm putting some background notes and various resources on this site for future reference and general use.
Sessions are being blogged about on a weekly basis.
I'm also playing in a Zweihänder game.
Blender Renders
I've had some free time recently, some of which I'm been putting into watching YouTube videos on how to use Blender. It's a very complete 3D modelling package, but also quite complicated to learn how to use.
However, I've started to figure out the basics, and in the process have started working on some 3D models of various spacecraft designs for my various SciFi RPG initiatives. I'm very much at beginner level at the moment though, so anything I produce is very basic. I'm making everything I do available under open source licenses, and available on GitLab.
I've also tried some crude scenes as well, though drawing natural stuff is a lot harder than engineered objects. Hopefully things will improve over the coming year, and I may try using it for fantasy related things as well (such as buildings and ruins).
Spacecraft Recognition Guide
The main content being worked on at the moment is the Spacecraft Recognition Guide, where I'm putting together a collection of spaceship designs for my YAGS SciFi rules. Starting at the plausible near future, and then working forward in time with an ever increasing level of technology.
I'm making heavy use of Blender to model what the starships look like, and coming up with a starship design system that is reasonably detailed, but hopefully simplified enough that it's usable.
There are more details over on my blog.