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Battlefleet Gothic TEASE

My question when seeing this and the fact that Total War: Warhammer is coming out soon is when will the Games Workshop IP exceed in popularity the entirely derivative work by Blizzard Entertainment. Starcraft is played out, Diablo 3 was a complete mess from the story perspective and there hasn’t been anything original from them…ever really. Warcraft 3, for all it’s awesomeness, is just a derivative of Warhammer in the end.

GW has had some strange and capricious relationships with development houses and video gaming in the past, and who knows what the future will bring. Looking at this trailer though we are reminded that while Blizzard has the copy-cat Samwise, GW has both John Fucking Blanche AND Jes HOLY FUCK THAT’S AWESOME Goodwin.

All the gorgeous snatch…

So I was in FLA last week and on the beach at Flagler and Daytona. There were a couple cloudy days and the wind was up and the waves were pretty rough, and one day there was a bit of a rip tide you could feel up to your calves. I like to try to body surf, despite my hairy body and pasty white skin on display. But, when I was out there on one of the wavy days, two girls, probably in their late teens, early twenties, were also out in the rough. These gals weren’t the skinny waif types. Since my wife and kids were there as well, I was trying to not leer at them, but being tourists to FLA: they were wearing bikinis. In the waves. You can imagine what happened multiple times.

So, being both a creep and trying to keep up appearances I constantly moved away from the area that they were while keeping close enough to witness boobs come out of the waves as they normally do in this type of situation. What was terrible though is that whenever I would body surf in and catch a wave that shot me to shore, I would invariably end up right next to them and stand up just as they were tossed and turned all over the place. I would just swim back out to the breakwater and try to move up or down the beach– but riding the wave in bam, right there again. They probably though, who is this dirty old man? While I was thinking: who stays in the waves when they have bikinis on? That’s my FLA story.

Frozen Thing

Thanks for the like SHINE.

Post about new stuff in a new Rules and Magic book for Lamentations of the Flame Princess

The Lord of Plagues and Fevers posted some ideas he’s had for a new core rulebook for Lamentations. I have the Grindhouse edition and not the newer hardcover (that steve has) and I’ve thought since reading and running that these rules for old school D&D are… perfect. This is the game I want my kids to start with (yes, I know Lamentations art and adventures are not for kids, but the rules are so clean and crisp that I can’t think of anything better to start off with). This is the game I want to perpetually run and play characters in because no matter the conditions– drunk, tired as shit, cranky players that don’t want to learn anything new (including me sometimes) this is IT. So, I approach new rules with natural trepidation. The thread mentions a couple things of importance that he is thinking about:

2 new classes – Witchhunter and Conquistador. First one I like, second one, not sure about the name.

ALL weapons do D8 damage but you might get to roll 2 and pick the best one for certain weapons

Increased effectiveness of shields. This might be really cool and simple. (and we know that’s how people fought anyway)

Anyway, some other stuff on the whole thread here:

The new Hobbit was…

…a giant battle nearly from start to finish. I’d like to coin this as the John Woo Hobbit film. I’m not sure if I liked the movie, but it did not suck goblin schwang like the second film did. Stretching a small book into three films (though including a bunch of stuff from the Silmarillion) was a tough job but in this one the writers had no choice but to grease up and get fucking.

Stuff I liked:

Huge battle with lots of crap going on everywhere. There were scenes where dwarves, men, elves and orcs were all fighting like crazy. For a fan of Warhammer Fantasy Battle and all that stuff since I was a little kid, it was sort of a fantasy battle orgasm, and it should have been. Despite the original author’s rather denuded account of the battle in the book, it was a big show down in Middle Earth, one that had far reaching consequences for the LOTR wars. This was much better than the cartoon movie…
While the tiny parts with Dol Guldor and the Necromancer were really well done, this should have been a MUCH larger part of the second film and had a massive battle going on to finish up– THEN deal with the dragon. Really since it was three films, the Necromancer parts could have been the justification for the vast length– and really it didn’t amount to all that much in the third film. Seeing Saurman and the two elder elf characters destroying the ring wraiths was pretty awesome though, but did they just come alone? Pretty odd that.
I liked the 1 on 1 battles that evolved during the fighting. Since EVERY character had the power and skill of Legolas, it was neat to see the superheroic battles between the main characters. By this film, I knew going in that every goddamn thing was going to be way over the top wuxia so what the hell…

Stuff I didn’t like:

Not enough about Beorn and the bear– that guy should have had more screen time kicking ass. Just one tiny scene? That’s it??
Everyone was Legolas– this was pretty ridiculous throughout the three films that all the dwarves were as spritely and had the combat prowess of legolas… but they decided to go with the superheroic version of the Hobbit, and there we have it. If they hadn’t would we have been bored? I don’t know. This is all part of the ‘if everything is fantastic, nothing is’ issue with many fantasy films.
The armored orks. gone are the rabble-like hordes of orcs from LOTR that looked great, in the hobbit you basically had a generic but FULLY armored ork “bred for war” going on. They had little to no character compared to the LOTR versions, and it was unbelievable that human RABBLE and completely unarmored Dwarves should be able to cut a swath through them.
The dwarf/elf love story. This is was preposterous to me. Despite the fact that Evangeline Lilly is pretty and could just hog all the screen time between fight scenes for all I care, this was stretching the source material too far. A human? Yes, or another elf that dies in the battle (like NOT have Legolas there, but another male elf).
No cool Gandalf spells. He did few spells in the movies overall, I would have liked to see something other than him whipping his sword and staff around. It’s not like the film of the Hobbit fits into the low-magic Sword and Sorcery genre with all the running up falling bricks and Aerial lycanthrope transformations…
No thrush–where was the bird?
This is really on the second film– the meeting of Bilbo and the Dragon was BETTER in the old cartoon movie than the new one! How did that happen?

What this has inspired me to do is eventually have a marathon and watch the LOTR films back to back. However I may skip over the last 40 minutes of the last film– if there is any point where people look to where the seed of these Hobbit films inevitably going to shit it was the last 40 minutes of LOTR.

Xmas Vacation (sort of) begins today!

I have to work this coming Monday, but it’s just a sprint review and planning and then it’s Xmas vacation! I had a bunch of time to burn this year, so I will carry over about 4 days of vacation, but things got so busy the last few weeks I couldn’t fit any vacation in.

That said, the plan for this vacation is to play some games of BOLT ACTION for sure, an obligatory game of Talisman (my woodlands expansion is still in the shrink!!!!!!) and to get a 6-8 hour session of RUNEQUEST wherein I am converting a Lamentations of the Flame Princess adventure. We’ll see how that goes. I must say my handle on the Runequest rules are spotty at best, but Basic Roleplaying is not terribly difficult generally– but some of the specifics will be tough to remember.

Other shit I wouldn’t mind trying is some more 13th Age, POSSIBLY Numenera to try it out and likely lots and lots of the new Ascension expansion which will hold us over until SCROLLS is released on iOS.

Server poop

Not sure what happened but the server this site is hosted on pooped out and I lost about a month (which was 2-3 posts really). All seems to be back to normal but those posts are long gone apparently. I’m going to put a picture of a hot chick here for now until I make it up to my 2-3 reader while I recompose the dreck posted before.

Economic impact of murderhoboing – take 2!

Couple weeks ago I had a link to a lady anal-ysing the hyperinflation potential of murderhoboing in a serf/peasant economic model around the 14th Century. While it was interesting and certainly sparked some discussions, this follow up really takes the topic to the mat! Very much worth reading if you want to try to simulate the economic effects of that 500 GP that your characters splash into a small economy after killing a bunch of non-humans. See particularly the bits on Venal Offices– especially since 16th Century Europe has gotten a lot of play recently due to LoTFP’s influence.

Here is the link (thanks SHINE)

And here is the obligatory picture of Alice, Melissa and the Flame Princess after doing their thing: