D&D Next

D&D Next

Growing up I never played D&D, but I did look over the Red Box plenty of times. The way the game was marketed was just confusing, with advanced, normal and so on. A few years ago I had some gift money from my sister inlaw so I picked up Dungeons & Dragons Essentials, Heroes of the Fallen Lands. When I bought the book I was hoping for an inspiring story that would push me into a world I had never explored, cold pea soup was more exciting.

A few years later I learned about D&D next was having an open play test, which sounded interesting. I signed up for the play test and the first packet was ok. With the second packet  I made my first character a fighter named Ravenscream. My very first character took some time to figure out what was going on and for some reason determining my hit points was a frustrating experience. A while later I made my second character Stonewell, a Cleric. I was worried that character generation would be very involved, but once I understood how it worked it was fast and enjoyable.

In the next few weeks I'm hoping to get these two characters in a few fights and see how time consuming the combat is.

I want to play him

Knight

And storm this

Prison of the Chatelet

We will See

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Pre 1900 War Games

War games have always intrigued me, with their rules in which units move and interact with each other on a board. Growing up the most common war game played was Warhammer. I never had the money nor the time to play the game, but did enjoy reading through friends copies of the rule book. It got me thinking what were some of the earliest books that discussed rules for playing these types of war games. Google book has a amazing breath of subjects and I was able to find a book from 1880 called Strategos, which was well referenced. From those references I was able to locate two additional war gaming books.

Title: Strategos

Date: 1880

Author: Charles Adiel and Lewis Totten

Title:Tactical War Game

Date:1875

Author:General v. Verdy Du Vernois

Translated: J.R. MaCDonell

Date:1884

The Book of the War-Game, is unlike the other books where they only mention the use of dice to determine the out come of a collision between two players. For this book they have a number of tables and use dice to determine the number of men lost per collision. 

Title: Rules For the conduct of the War-Game

Author: War office

Date: 1884

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References concerning the education of officers, Mid 1800s

Years ago I was walking around the Tower of London and one of the information stations talked about the importance of the men protecting the walls that surrounded the tower. One of the sentences got me thinking, it stated that the tower was only as strong as the men and leaders defending it. Further thought on the subject, the education of the officer core is critical to the outcome of any type of military engagement.

I started to search for references concerning the education of officers during the Napoleonic Wars. I was only able to locate a number of references on Google Books to instructions and regulations for officers during the mid 1800s. The number of books available concerning the education of officers increases for the later part of the century.

Title: The Queen's Regulations and Orders for the Army: ...

  Author: Great Britain. War Office

  Published: 1844

 Title: Royal warrant and regulations regarding army services: and ...

  Author: Army

  Published: 1848

   Title: Instructions for officers and non-commissioned officers of cavalry, on outpos...

Author: Arentschildt (von.)

  Published: 1854

Title: Regulations for the dress of general, staff, and regimental ...

  Author: 

  Published: 1859

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My Red Crayons

Red Crayons

Growing up in west I played a number of games on paper at school, this was before video games. These paper games would have military themes where the players would draw their armies on opposite sides of the paper. Then you would put your pencil on the unit that was shooting and press hard. The pencil would slide out from under your hand leaving a line in a random forward direction. 

You would then take a ruler and follow that line to the edge of the paper. If the line you where drawing from the pencil mark intersected the other players unit before the edge of the paper then that unit was destroyed. The goal was to destroy the other person's army first. You would use a red crayon to cross out the destroyed unit. Playing these games you always needed a lot of red crayons.

As I grew up my games became more complex but the idea was still the same, destroy the other person’s army first. The games I played were the first edition of Shadow run, Battletech to name a few. By the end of high school I was starting to design my own games with a very good friend. Since those early years I have continued to design role playing games, build worlds and write rules. This blog is to share my ideas and some of my current projects. 

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