SCRUM CON 2020: Registration now open!

REGISTER NOW!

Join the Second Saturday Scrum Club for a day of laid back gaming...

Gaming sessions for any taste! Play wargames (fantasy, sci-fi, and historical), RPGs, or mix it up by trying both styles of game.
Play with the pros! Meet and play with our special guests David "Zeb" Cook (writer of the D&D Expert Set and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition), Bill Slavicsek (creator of first Star Wars RPG Sourcebook), and Ed Stark (creative director for D&D, 3rd and 3.5 editions), as well as a number of other professional game designers and writers.
No hassle flea market! Bring your gaming items ready to be re-homed for our flea market area. Drop it off and go play some games!

All of this for just $15!

Expanded venue! Roll dice in a modem civic building in the heart of Silver Spring, full of natural light and contemporary architecture.
Close to amenities! Over 20 restaurants and four hotels within a one block walk. Ample free parking, and a less than 10 minute walk from the Silver Spring metro station.
Want to add some sartorial splendor to your wardrobe? Order a limited-edition t-shirt, and we'll have it ready for pick up at the show!\
Feelin' like a V.I.P.? Get the new Scrum Con convention tee, your name in the printed program, and admission for $40! By Grabthar's Hammer, what a deal!

Registration opened on Sat. Nov. 9: Space is limited. Purchase your badge and immediately reserve a spot in the games you want to play!

REGISTER NOW!

Here's one of the two limited-edition t-shirts we'll offer...

...and here's the variant edition!

Scrum Con 2020 gets a nice shout out from the fellas at Little Wars TV.

Comments

Well-thumbed posts

Take the High Road: Making Cheap and Easy Dirt Roads

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As the year crawls to an end, I'm looking through this blog and noticing a couple of posts I started and never finished. This is one of them. Back in July 2019, I placed the photos on the page, jotted down a few bullet-point placeholder notes, and then never actually went back and wrote anything to post. The post was meant to be my informal review of Rangers of Shadow Deep after my first game of it with Josh O'Conner, who set it up for us to try in his basement. I think I never finished this post because I was not very impressed with the game but I knew Josh was, and we hadn't been gaming together long enough for me to be sure my candor about the game wouldn't hurt his feelings and sour a budding gaming friendship. I consider Josh more than a gaming friend these days, and so I'll go ahead and post this with some very short notes fleshing out the bullet points I had left as a reminder for myself back in 2019 (at least the one's I can still decipher the

Candid Photos From "Conan the Barbarian" (1982)

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Lost Art of D&D No. 2: Games Workshop's Holmes Basic (1977)

After Games Workshop attained the license to print a co-branded edition of TSR's 1977 Dungeons & Dragons basic rules book, they set about putting their own stamp on it, designing a new cover and replacing a number of the illustrations they deemed too crudely drawn for their U.K. market. The cover art was by John Blanche at the very start of his career as a fantasy illustrator. Blanche went on to be a mainstay at Games Workshop, producing countless illustrations for them. His fannish enthusiasm for the material--as an artist as well as a lifelong gamer--has deservedly made him a favorite over the decades. I first encountered Blanche's work in the David Day compendium, A Tolkien Bestiary (1978), to which he contributed five illustrations that sit comfortably alongside the book's chief illustrator, Ian Miller. I have a special fondness for this book, having coveted it as a child during my incipient Middle Earth fixation. My parent's procured an out-of-print copy of t

Scrum Con IV: In Your Face!

The Second Saturday Scrum Club rejoined the fray on April 8, organizing and hosting Scrum Con IV in Silver Spring, Maryland. Although we ran a surprisingly successful virtual convention in 2021 that took advantage of its online format to invite all sorts of participants we couldn't have otherwise (Dirk the Dice of Grognard Files in the UK ran a game, and I interviewed wargame/RPG historian Jon Peterson via livestream ), Scrum Con IV marked our return to an in-person format. Because Scrum Con 2020 ducked right under the pandemic lockdown on the last weekend of February that year, we were anxious to see if anybody would remember us. Turns out any fears were misplaced...because Scrum Con sold out again this year! In fact, every in-person convention we've organized has sold out, but this year's Scrum Con IV was almost 70% sold out of its 225 badges in the very first week, a pace that frankly caught us off-guard. About a week before the show, we had sold enough badges that

Chainmail: Battle of Emridy Meadows

In my imagination, Chainmail has always been that shadowy precursor to Dungeons & Dragons that I was both intrigued by yet leery of. I loved the idea of a game involving mass battles in a fantasy setting akin to those depicted in the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , but I also had a sense that Chainmail , released in 1971 a mere year after I was born, was likely a clunky wargame that would be too frustrating to bother mastering. It also didn't help that my first inkling of its existence was around 1980 or so when I could never dream of amassing the miniature armies needed to play out these massive conflicts. No, back then I was pretty sure Chainmail was the province of grizzled old grognards who had started wargaming before I was even born. Even after my gaming rebirth decades later in 2016, I was fine with letting the dim past remain so, and was more than content during my first couple of years back in the hobby exploring rules of a more recent vintage and managea

Scrum in Miniature

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