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Second Saturday Scrum Club









Est. Dec. 2017 / Scrum Hall in Silver Spring, Md.  
Motto: Voluptas supra victoriam!

The Second Saturday Scrum Club was born of my desire to establish a regular gathering with a group of fellow miniatures gamers of a certain disposition. Below are the core members and a bit about each of us. We also maintain an unofficial auxiliary of like-minded folks with similar gaming proclivities who we invite for role-playing and miniatures games, when time and seating allows.

Joe Procopio is the founder of the Second Saturday Scrum Club. He went into a deep gaming freeze after an adolescence mildly obsessed with role playing games, only to re-emerge in middle age to discover the joys of miniatures gaming. His gaming blog is Scrum in Miniature (miniaturescrum.blogspot.com), and he launched a small miniatures company named Above the Fray Miniatures in 2018. His other passion is Picture This Press (LostArtBooks.com), a publishing venture that preserves the work of under-appreciated illustrators and comic artists from earlier in the 20th century.

John Sears is a long time wargamer, role-player and board gamer. He recently released his  Star Schlock miniatures, inspired by sci-fi of the 1970s and 80s, with a Kickstarter for further figures as well as a tabletop skirmish game launching in 2023.



Jared Smith has been gaming since he was six, and plans to keep doing so forever. His Cthulhu Mythos RPG magazine, Bayt al Azif, can be found at BaytAlAzif.com. He also publishes comic books as Retrofit Comics (retrofitcomics.com) and sells comic books at Big Planet Comics (bigplanetcomics.com).




Rich McKee has been running a persistent Stonehell game across several groups and many conventions for almost 10 years. He intends to destroy the dungeon this year and move on to something else.







Zach Howard entered the dungeon in 1982 with a copy of the original 1977 D&D Basic Set, now known as “Holmes Basic” after its editor, J. Eric Holmes. Since 2011 he has blogged at the Zenopus Archives (ZenopusArchives.blogspot.com) about Holmes Basic and the early history of D&D. In recent years Zach has contributed material to the gaming zines Dungeon Crawl, Fantastic! Exciting! Imaginative!, and Bayt al Azif, and the book Tales of Peril, a collection of Holmes’ D&D-based fiction published by Black Blade Publishing.


Walt O’Hara is a charter member of the Second Saturday Scrum Club. As a callow youth he was introduced to a relatively unheard of pastime that was still very new—role playing games, which became one of his fixations. Later, he started his long involvement with skirmish and naval games. His gaming blog is the Third Point of Singularity, and his audio blog is Airy Persiflage on Podbean.



Steve B. began wargaming when he first got little plastic army men and has been exploring dungeons since there were just three little books to tell you how to do it. He loves gaming because it fosters creativity, builds cooperation, and challenges critical thinking skills. He has been helping other kids become gamers for over 20 years in an effort to repay those that got him into gaming.



French the Unnamed Gamer is willing to play just about anything as long as someone else is running it.







Josh O'Connor's Terrors of the Secret War (Modiphius) won two ENnies in 2015 for "Best Monster/Adversary" and "Best Cover."  He is also the creator and host of Tankard Talk, which produces professional-quality, interactive videos about the tabletop games industry for Twitch and YouTube.




Joey McGuire is the President and Head Janitor of World’s End Publishing, and is the author of This Is Not a Test. A geek and long-time gamer, Joey got into the miniatures hobby after entering a gaming store in 1997 and discovering the Games Workshop product catalog. Since that auspicious day, Joey has been modelling and painting miniatures, building terrain, and writing his own rules. This Is Not a Test was his first solo publication, but he has also worked on several other projects, both personal and for Rattrap Productions, as well as the game Reality’s Edge for Osprey Wargames. He joined the Scrum Club in 2022.

Peter Megginson has been playing with toy soldiers since he was little. He started playing D&D in 1977 with his good friend Mike Chabon. He played until he started college but then became very interested in punk rock and girls. He started playing GW games in the mid-1990s, and then branched out from there. He is interested in lots of games, but is primarily a miniatures wargamer, gaming in a variety of eras, including games et in the Viking, Medieval, and Renaissance periods, games set in the 20th century (SCW, WWII, Vietnam), as well as kung fu and post-Apocalyptic games. Recently, he has been designing and running a game based on Mad Max: Fury Road, which he enjoys running at conventions.

Club Combat Photographer

Ellen Levy has been photographing our games from the first Scrum Club meeting onward, providing most of the photos to be found scattered throughout this blog's various posts. More of her lovely work can be found on Instagram at EllenProLevy.

The Club's Extracurricular Activities

Within a few short months of its existence, the Second Saturday Scrum Club decided to organize and launch a local convention it titled, oddly enough, Scrum Con, equally split between miniatures games (the club's focus) and role-playing games (something everybody in the club also loves). Scrum Con sold out its first gathering in Feb. 2019, and then more then more than doubled its attendance a year later in Feb. 2020. During the pandemic the Scrum Club hosted an online "Summer Invitational in 2020 for all of the GMs who had participated in Scrum Con earlier that year, and then a full-fledged virtual convention in 2021 with attendance from across the United States as well as the United Kingdom. Scrum Con will return as an in-person event in April 2023 at the Silver Spring Veterans Plaza Civic Center. 


A read through our bios above demonstrates that we're a fairly industrious bunch, so it seems only fitting that we'd be tempted to add another extracurricular activity to our monthly game gathering. Launched in May 2019, Scrum Club TV will include post-game discussions, convention field reports, and perhaps the occasional interview with game designers, artists, and miniatures sculptors.




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Well-thumbed posts

Candid Photos From "Conan the Barbarian" (1982)

This post is barely gaming adjacent, but the Conan stories have informed much of my fantasy gaming since my first forays into the hobby. I've seen the John Milius adaptation more times than any other movie (probably over 50 times, though most of those viewings were on VHS or HBO as a teenager). The 1982 Conan  film was the first R rated movie I saw in a movie theater (age 12). The first convention game I ever played in was one in which I played the barbarian himself. The first convention game I ever ran as game master was an adaptation of Howard's "Beyond the Black River." For good or ill, I've spent a lot of time in that fantasy world. When I stumbled on an online trove of about 400 candid photos from various sets of Conan the Barbarian shot by somebody on the crew, it was oddly visceral for me. It generated a warm feeling getting to see these actors and sets from new angles, both in character and out, in situ and behind the scenes. Seeing Sandahl Bergman, Ge...
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Scrum Con IV: Face to Face!

The Second Saturday Scrum Club rejoined the fray on April 8, organizing and hosting Scrum Con IV in Silver Spring, Maryland. Although Scrum Con III was 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 V 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 b...
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Yo Ho! More 'Blood & Plunder'!

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...
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Take the High Road: Making Cheap and Easy Dirt Roads

I have wanted some good roads to add to my games for a while now. My first attempt was a couple of years ago when my standards were a bit lower and I wasn't sure how much I was interested in investing in this new hobby. I bought some PDFs of cobblestone roads that I sized, printed, and glued to felt. The result was okay, but the way my laser printer  produced the roads ended up being quite reflective to the point of almost being glossy looking. The combination of glue, paper, and felt also meant the roads had a wavy consistency and almost always curled at the edges. I used them once or twice but was never happy with them. My sub-par first attempt at making roads for my games using felt strips, glue, and printed designs. You can see how shiny and how wavy and curled at the edges they turned out. I never felt good about putting them on the table for our games and eventually stopped altogether. I've been meaning to take another crack at making some roads now that I have...
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All Together Now: 'Sellswords & Spellslingers' and the Pleasures of Cooperative Gaming

I've always enjoyed a good competitive match as much as the next guy, whether it was sports in high school or video games (HALO, etc.) in my thirties. But regardless of the game, I've always been partial to team play, and the best cooperative games put all of the focus on succeeding as a team. That's one of the reasons I was enthusiastic about getting Andrea Sfiligoi's latest release,  Sellswords & Spellslingers (Ganesha Games), on the table for this month's Second Saturday Scrum Club gathering. Last year I had organized a Halloween game ( recap ) to beta-test Sfiligoi's Run From the Dead , which is built atop the same cooperative mechanics as Sellswords . I was surprised when I discovered these rules were re-skinned for the fantasy genre and released last December ahead of Run From the Dead . Hopefully, the zombie apocalypse version of the rules is not too far behind because I definitely think  Run From the Dead  is the best tabletop miniatures rule s...
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Playing with Yourself: 'Rangers of Shadow Deep' vs. 'Sellswords & Spellslingers'

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 ...
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