Been doing some cleanup and review of the blog recently. A few of you have doubtless noticed that I've begun posting again, though a bit irregularly. I'm trying to pick that up and get back into a routine. To that end it's also time to start moving away from calling out the assholes in our culture on their douchebaggery, and get back to talking about old school games. After all, there's always going to be jagoffs, and calling them out on their crap isn't going to make them change. It's really best just to sigh, roll your eyes at them, and move on. So, I originally started this blog to post thoughts and notes about a house sandbox setting I was putting together called The Wasted Lands. While I never got for with an actual campaign of it (it was supplanted by my Age of Conan Hyborian Age game), there were some really cool ideas in there and I'd like to revisit it. To do that, however, I had to make it easy to sift through these posts and find the stu...

So there's been a lot of talk lately about the racist and sexist assaults on cast members of the new Star Wars trilogy. In particular, one witless coward who runs a Star Wars hate page on Facebook (but of course claims to be a "true fan") has taken credit for driving Kelly Marie Tran off of Facebook, and for orchestrating the bot hacks and review bombs on Rotten Tomatoes that subverted the ratings for The Last Jedi. Of course, he doesn't have the balls to post under his real name, because that's how Social Media works. Say whatever you want and hide behind a false name so you don't have to suffer consequences for it. He also, incidentally, stated that John Boyega and Kathleen Kennedy were next because, "it's time to restore straight whit males to prominence in science fiction and fantasy," and that "We will force Kathleen Kennedy and her feminazi agenda to step down," and "...force Disney to restore Legends to its rightful place...

Sabacc I've done a couple of blogs recently about the official version of sabacc that was released as the Han Solo Card Game by Hasbro/Disney, how it's actually the Corellian Spike variant, and how it can be slightly altered to better reflect the betting nature of the game. This led me down the rabbit hole of securing a "full" sabacc deck, and exploring how to play the complete version of the game.  In doing so, I discovered that the rules that are all over the Internet are (perhaps unsurprisingly) confusing, arcane, and in some ways just don't make sense. This is particularly true in the area of "calling a hand." I strongly suspect that the people who wrote these rules (which I believe to originate with the West End Games Crisis on Cloud City RPG supplement) had no idea what calling is because they've never played poker.  Quite frankly, the rules make for a gambling game that nobody would really want to play, or one that would lead to a s...

My last post, put up just this morning , was about adding full betting rounds into the new Hasbro/Disney Han Solo Card Game, which is actually our first official release of Corellian Spike Sabaac. It also outlines the basic rules of the game, how it works, and clarifies some of the differences between Corellian Spike and standard Sabaac . A friend of mine, the esteemed Aaron Einhorn, mentioned it made him want to bring it into a Star Wars RPG session, just to add that element into the game. Here's a few thoughts on how that could be done. Sabaac in a Star Wars RPG The biggest trick when incorporating gambling or games of chance of any sort into a tabletop RPG is it in many ways removes the players from their characters. After all, your character might be an ace card sharp, but you may actually be kind of crap at cards. How do you model this?  The easiest way to do this is to tie in the character's gambling roll to the actual hand of cards, granting extra initial ...

First Things First First things first: Someday I'll get back to updating this blog at least three times a week. I appreciate everyone who's stuck with it through the lean years, and I'd love to see some more comments and discussion rocking. Bear with me if it takes a day or two for your comment to get approved until I get back into the swing of things. Like a lot of old blogs there's a TON of spam comments that come through, so I'm curating them for that reason only. Okay, now onto the topic of today's blog... Official Sabacc Exists at Last As you're aware unless you live under a rock, Solo: A Star Wars Story is in theaters, and you should absolutely go see it. It's probably my second favorite of the new canon films, after The Force Awakens. It's galaxies better than Rogue One, and I won't mention Last Jedi because quite frankly, the butthurt over that one is too controversial to bring it into this discussion. In any case, Solo gave us...