Scrum in Miniature

About a week ago we asked Peter Megginson to reprise a Blood & Plunder game for some of those in the Scrum Club who were unable to play in our recent foray with these rules . Steve Braun and Josh O'Connor both have the summer months off from work and live close enough that they joined in for a rare weeknight wargame. Peter had taken note of my earlier write-up in which I expressed a desire to try out the Blood & Plunder ship rules to see if I could appropriate and adapt them to the sword & planet skirmish game I'm working on that will feature lots of airship battles and boarding actions in the skies of Mars, so for this game he concocted a scenario that would allow us to do just that. Steve, Josh, and I each helmed a pirate ship sailing toward a Chinese fort full of spices we hoped to plunder before the other had the chance. Peter gamely played the Chinese spice hoarders. One of the highlights this particular evening occurred by happenstance: Peter brought a shor...

How do you ready yourself for an eight-player mass battle game like Oathmark ? The Scrum Club's answer is to start the day with a one-off game of  Thieves' World -cum- Traveller . Our hunger for games and camaraderie built to near bursting during the pandemic, so now the Second Saturday Scrum Club is making up for lost time by scheduling two games on the appointed date, the first at 1:00 p.m. and the main event at 4:30 (as per tradition). The day kicked off with a smaller subset of the group gathering in Scrum Hall for Rich McKee to address what he took as a personal challenge. In a fairly recent episode of the Grognard Files dedicated to Chaosium's Thieves' World , Dirk the Dice and Blythy dismissively chortled at one particular detail in the original rules: the authors included guidelines for making Thieves' World compatible with nine (!) other contemporary RPGs, including Traveller .  The gauntlet had been thrown, and Rich couldn't ignore it. As a result,...