Scrum in Miniature

It's always a pleasure to find new wargaming friends, especially when they fall in line with your own gaming ethos and level of dedication to crafting fun games. Eric Hoffman had been scheduled to be a game master at Scrum Con in both 2019 and 2020, but family illnesses torpedoed his intentions both times. It's no fun as a convention organizer to have to scramble to find a replacement GM at the last minute, but life often gets in the way regardless of best intentions, and I completely understood his situation.   But having never met Eric, it was hard to know if it was a big loss to our con and its players who had signed up for his games. Now that I've had the chance to play with Eric a couple of times, I can definitively confirm that it was indeed a big loss, and now I'm really looking forward to him being able to run a game for folks at a future Scrum Con. Eric finally did get to attend a Scrum Con event of a sort when we hosted our virtual Summer Invitational back i...

David Wesely, Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson (l-r) I posted the below on Facebook recently, and it is a sentiment I'm compelled to express all too frequently in discussions about the creators of Dungeons & Dragons on Facebook's gaming discussion groups in response to the gratuitous Gary Gygax bashing I see these days. "Dave Arneson gets way too much credit these days. David Wesely latched onto the role playing idea from germinal variations found in early kriegspiels, and Arneson repurposed Gary Gygax’s Chainmail rules to emulate Wesely’s idea in a different setting. Arneson was no game designer and could never hope to organize and codify a rule set for publication. You just have to look at what he produced in the field to see that (try reading and using that mess called First Fantasy Campaign ). While Gygax was churning out huge hardcover tomes that became the foundational bedrock for the game, Arneson was so useless at producing anything around the TSR offices that he eve...

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...