Scrum in Miniature

Long-time readers of the blog will remember the adaptation of "Beyond the Black River" I started working on in the spring of 2018 for the  Sellswords & Spellslingers  rules. I ran it for the first time at Historicon 2018, and have now run it at several conventions and game days since. Sellswords & Spellslingers is designed for solo and co-op play, so to do my bit in helping the game community in its fight against boredom during these isolating pandemic days, I've decided to gather and organize all of the material I developed for my convention scenarios and make it freely available as a download via this blog. At the link further down is a 68-page PDF file with all of my player aids and notes. Of all of the major solo/co-op miniatures rules that have been released in the past few years, Sellswords & Spellslingers  is hands down the best if unfortunately not the most widely known or used. I highly encourage you to buy a copy of the rules, if...

I went in with low expectations about what this experience would be like, and I left very pleasantly surprised by how much much fun I had with fellow Scrum Clubber Steve Braun   playing a game of Battlesystem "virtually" today using streaming video via Facebook. Steve set up everything on his dining room table, and he would occasionally pick up the camera at my request (or to clarify his own move) and move it around the table so I could get a better sense of positioning in various parts of the battlefield. I'd give him orders, roll dice on my end, and we went back and forth from there. Battlesystem ( 2nd ed .) is a lot of fun, and while a clear descendant of Chainmail , it does have a bit more rules overhead that we are still grappling with. We'll have to dig into the rulebook a bit more to make sure we're getting correct the costs for certain kinds of movement and changing formations. So, though a bit more complicated than Chainmail , it also adds ...

The Second Saturday Scrum Club played another game of Chainmail this weekend, after having such a swell time back in January when Keith Sloan ran his "Battle of Emridy Meadows" scenario for us using the rules. But first we spent an hour and a half brainstorming and “blue-skying” how we might cobble together our own  Braunstein-esque  RPG/wargame campaign, discussing how we might borrow concepts and mechanics from a variety of sources spanning the entire gamut of fantasy gaming’s history, from Arneson’s Blackmoor and Gygax's Castle & Crusades Society games to a variety of RPG systems over the decades that have attempted to incorporate "domain" creation and management rules up to what we're able to glean from the blog postings for the upcoming Oathmark wargame system.  Rich brought over a slew of different RPG systems we might want to consider for the sessions in the campaign in which we scale down to that level of action. We've also revived a...