More Miscellaneous Rambling

 On the one hand, the last week at work has been INSANE.

On the other, my number of followers has doubled since I got featured on the Palouse Wargaming blog. (Thanks, Jon.) 22 followers may not mean much to the more accomplished bloggers out there, but now I feel obligated to write something.

The teens at work are becoming excited about trying Dungeons and Dragons. They're not following rules-as-written, but they are expressing a lot of creativity! I was so busy prepping for a Halloween event (successful despite a brief downpour!) that sadly I never had a chance to sit in and maybe even run a session. The interest level is high enough, though, that I have high hopes for next week.

The teen tech lab has a lot of cool things to teach;
this young man is using the tablet to sketch his character.

The Adventurer's Guides by Jim Zub have no rules,
but are attractively presented
and getting those creative juices flowing!

I did get a brief set of free-kriegspiel demonstrations in, sadly with no camera handy. 

• A roleplaying session. The player had already built a Paladin character. "So, your dragonborn Paladin comes upon a fat businessman-type beating a slave. What do you do?" He ended up buying the slave to set free, but spending the last of his coin to do it.
• An example of skirmish combat using cardboard standups from an ancient starter set. A kobold and a skeleton, using a book for cover, faced off against a knight on foot.
• And a quick wargame using 3x5 cards marked with NATO symbols for unit markers, again with free-kriegspiel "rules." A regiment of knights and another of footmen, ordered to march through a forest near a hill, were ambushed by goblins. The knights split into two units and tried to flank, while their infantry underlings were clobbered by a downhill charge.

The exhaustion from the Halloween event has also meant I'd rather rest with cats when I get home than play solo games. I've been working slowly on the US Regular Paperboys, and reading Chris Peers' The African Wars. There is a blogpost coming up on the latter, as I'm getting a lot of education and ideas from this book, and itching to run The Sword in Africa. Have been taking notes for possible scenarios.

Also have read three period US Army monographs on Vietnam, and currently a hundred pages into The Hunt for Red October, one of those "classics" I never got around to. Wargaming is actually mentioned here and there! I hope to try DBN soon, using my eraser ships.

Hopefully this whets a few appetites, and lights a fire under my butt. Wish me luck!