The legendary Thuloid's gold

If you're reading this, you might be interested in a solid and fairly wide-ranging batch of discussions going on at Thuloid's latest post at the House, all assisted by that gleaming new Disqus plug-in.

The post looks at what makes a game interesting and the comments cover D&D and old school art, the aesthetics of GW's Age of Sigmar, the Iliad, Vampire, The World's End, Frozen, roleplaying the life enlisted, milking in the industry, and character history tables.

If you don't already know and you're a blogger, the House is a network you can join here.

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Dragons as dungeons and titan diving

My post at the House this week got a bit out of hand, trying to cover just a little too much. I did manage an approach to going inside the big kits, a look at character infection as a way to offset combat, and the idea of living delves and spaces.

But I had a lot more, so as a start on it, here are three related tables, for weird infections to replace more ordinary ones, for living landscapes, and for wargaming inside creatures.

Old Stuff Day - For the love of Spock

It's Old Stuff Day today, for bloggers to highlight a post or two deeper in the archive, that might not otherwise be seen.

Leonard Nimoy passing makes me feel mine could be this:

'The glad lightness of a far future and alterpluristemics'

The video also has Mr Nimoy giving some thoughts on the nature of Spock as a character, and clips from the episode.

Thanks to Miniature Musings of a Bear for the memory jog, and Rob at Warhammer 39,999 for setting it in motion four years ago, not to mention Nimoy for helping make old stuff like Trek some of the newest we've got, even decades later. Per The Secret Sun, where are the moon bases already?

The rot might have set in even while the original series was being prepared, if it is true it was Mariner-4 that rattled our confidence, showing us a Mars different than in the fiction.

And if you're a blogger, for any tabletop space, and want readers for newer posts too, maybe join the House.
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Rock-Paper-Scissors-Evolution

If you've been reading long enough you might well remember the old growing a tabletop posts. That's a thinking I've taken in other directions since, but this is a closely related idea, if a bit more general.

It's an underlying rock-paper-scissors system for this brave new world of rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock. I've been thinking about statless rules, the tile-based tabletop game Hive and 40K's Tyranids.

How it works

The meta-part kit and character corporealisation

If you've followed the discussion on kitbashing at the House, now moving on to Lego, and the one at Tenkar's Tavern on using miniatures in roleplaying, you might be interested in the set of posts going up at Iron Mammoth's Studio showing a miniature being made up from scratch.

On the subject I have a question, and a thought about character creation, or generation.

In the House, or hanging out in the shed for now...

Not content with one sporadic gig here, I have a first post up over at the House, probably the start of a weekly series looking at what the member blogs have been up to, and going off on tangents.

This one covers basing miniatures and how it can be seen as an element of roleplaying, plus a potentially hobby-shaking development in the understanding of what miniatures might be, then representing low gravity in games. There's some interesting discussion in the comments as usual.

It's also worth saying that if you're a blogger and not a House member, but you want a bit more traffic, have a think about joining up. The info's all here. There's no widget to add and the essay is just a joke, but you can play along if you feel like it. You don't even need to link back to the House or put up the network logo, but it might be neighbourly.

This could be especially relevant to your interests if you're primarily a roleplayer and the blog is listed with the RPGBA, which looks like ceasing operation in a couple of months.

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Dragoncrawls and behavioural deployment

Still here. One of the posts I put up ahead of the lull was Dragons & Dungeons, on reversing the standard emphasis, and since then Red Orc and Jens D. have given the idea a bit more thought.

Suggested reading order would be the original post, Red Orc's follow-up then the latest.

I'm still wondering how it might work in wargaming. Maybe the forces would be set up based on likely unit activity, and the terrain simultaneously? Each force could be divided into a few categories, say Special, Scout, Column, Support and Patrol, which already happens to some degree in various games, with organisational charts, special rules etc.