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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

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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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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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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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...
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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...
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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...
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