S&W House-Rules Online; The Multitudes Rejoice

I've gone and put up an HTML-ized version of my Swords & Wizardry house-rules on my website.

There are advantages to using the web for this sort of thing: I can access it from wherever I happen to be, I don't have to carry the book(s) with me, and I can update it easily with whatever terrible new ideas spring into my fevered brain.

I have an idea for improving the navigation of the thing, which I may get around to implementing sometime soon (hopefully).

Leveraging new synergies in buzzword-compliant micro-basing paradigm

From the front

From the back

I've been in the habit of basing my micro-scale infantry on 0.5mm sheet steel for two reasons: first, so that I can store and transport them easily on magnetic sheet, and second, to keep the bases as thin as possible so the figures don't loom over everything around them.

I still like the first idea, but I've changed my mind about the second, for reasons of playability. A thicker (3mm MDF) base makes the unit easier to pick up without inadvertently bending the teensy-tiny figures, and it provides an area at the back of the base to glue unit identification text.

I've moved away a bit from the idea of a tabletop wargame as being a kind of moving diorama, and more towards the figures and vehicles being playing tokens. I wouldn't go quite as far as having everything represented by cardboard squares, like in Squad Leader and the like, but  the usability of the models for gaming purposes has become more important to me than their intrinsic beauty.

And in any case, it turns out that the thicker MDF base doesn't really stand out a hell of a lot more than the old steel base.

I'm not sure what to do about the storage/transport issue, but maybe gluing some very thin steel sheet under the MDF will do the trick.

Also, cutting MDF cleanly in these very small sizes is kind of a pain in the arse.

The figures shown here are Heroics & Ros 1/300 WWII German Fallschirmjäger and Panzer Grenadiers.

So, no mo' mojo no mo'?

Ennui - Walter Sickert - 1914

My GMing enthusiasm and creativity has really dwindled away to next to nothing lately. Not just GMing either; I can't seem to maintain much interest in drawing or modelling or anything much in the creative line. I'm hoping that it will be a temporary state of affairs, but we shall see what we shall see.

The trouble is (and this has pretty much been the case for years) that to play the sort of game I want to play, I pretty much have to GM it. Hey-ho. It's not that I don't enjoy other kinds of games, it's just that I'd really like to play in an old-school D&D-style game instead of having to run one to get my fix.

Anyway, since I have vast echoing caverns of drive space filled up with D&D modules that I've barely grazed the surface of up until now, I think I might start dragging them out and dusting them off, and leech off the creativity of others for a while. If nothing else, that will cut down on the amount of game preparation that I'm not really doing anyway.