Oof. I really let the fire rush to my head on that last post. Let's forget all that for a while, and maybe we'll circle back in a while. Maybe not.
So many things have changed since the end of 2019, it's taken this long to really see the impact on how we do gaming in our area. The very nature of the hobby has changed quite a bit for me personally since our activities have been limited. Now that we've spent some time in the 'new normal', I think it's time to shift gears. We've come to see how things have matured and how people have begun to interact. Now, it will be easier to create engaging content instead of having 'false-starts'. With the Beer Koof returning in force, it might be some time before we see larger scale organized gaming...
Anyways...seems a good a time as any to overhaul the site!
I've been thinking this over for a while and it's time to prune old articles, as well as update a few. I've been fighting with the mobile display code for a while since I'm stubborn and used an older template style, but I think I finally have it licked. You should have a much better time navigating the site on mobile, but this is just the beginning. I have been building a better organization for everything than what I have now, with a much better presentation.
One important change will be my publication days. Due to the way our schedule has developed over almost two years of Beer Koof, my original publication days of Sunday and Friday are no longer workable. Starting now, publication for Iron Seer Wargames will be Wednesday and RAWRPG will be Saturday. That should help me with gathering up time to maintain the site much better than my trickle of posts would show.
I also have content from old, defunct blogs that I keep finding myself referring to over time. The answer here is obvious, so I'll begin to update and integrate content from those places as well where it's relevant. There are a few gems out there I'm proud of and I'd like to see renewed for a new decade. Yeah...I've been at this a while...
During this maintenance time, some parts of the site may become inaccessible for short periods...or may become replaced by a new section entirely. Don't worry - it's being put back together in a nice package. This will be a slow process for me, and I expect it to take me at least a week as I'm going to go through all the content piece by piece. I'm considering a lot of actions here...from merging the subdomain to a 'soft' relaunch of the wargames section. I'm not sure exactly what I'm going to do, but be advised there will be some changes to organization and display.
If you have any suggestions for changes you'd like or features that might be cool to integrate, let me know by dropping a comment here on the blog or on social media. Give me your suggestions!
If you haven't already, take a moment and sign up for Disqus. It's a fantastic comment system you can use across the blogosphere, most notably (and most importantly) right here on this site! Just click 'comment' below and tell me why dark UI sucks, or why I'm going to hell for cursing last week...
It's on the rise in our county, and even though we've been on lockdown the last few months - we just battened down the hatches for the next few.
In fact, I wanted to take a moment and go ahead and talk about the future Iron Seer Gaming. Specifically, that I want there to be a future for Iron Seer Gaming. Consequently, our lockdown here will most likely persist until 2021.
While this means that new campaigns will most likely not occur (unless they are online), it does not mean I won't have content for the site. Actually, quite the opposite.
We've already lost half the year. Why not take the rest and try to finish some of these projects? Maybe 2021 will be a banner year for cool battles and awesome terrain displays.
Inspirobot knows how to display lots of information at once.
Word.
So, image galleries have been split up and are waiting. You can access them from the top menu under the title of the site, or you can click here.
I've split the galleries into Miniatures, Terrain and Battle Reports. Going forward, these sections were going to balloon a little bit, so like other sections of the site I'm making it easier to find what we need and add a little flair in the design of the overall site as well.
We've got a lot of photos coming up for 2020, so watch this space - and check the galleries regularly!
Also, any feedback you've got for the site / network design, I'd be thankful for. We're getting it going, one ratty sail at a time!
Inspirobot knows what sort of paperwork to put through.
I'm back on this High Horse again, ready to blog in style for 2020. Did you miss me, blogosphere? Can you hear me wailing?
Ugh...so long since a post on this blog. It's embarrassing, but what happened to my rhythm last year? Just look at my post history, you can tell something went down.
The good news is, there is no bad news to tell about why I flaked out. I just wasn't sure where I was going with Iron Seer, and I thought I really needed to do some layout changes as well. Since we use the site a lot for reference in games, I tried a lot of different builds last year for the user interface and ran a lot of tests of various things on social media and this site.
After all that, I came to find that I don't really care about a lot of it. As far as all the internet stuff to keep up with. SEO's and hits and all. I'm going to lean back on just making a neat blog to look at.
I had to do some soul-searching as far as the hobby goes. It's been a rough few years for me and all my plastic soldiers. I've been pretty well a hermit, and a very crotchety one at that. Blogging was taking up too much of my Adventure Time.
So, I just had to take some time away from the keyboards and really just get back into my hobby. For a while there, it felt like the website here was the main hobby I had. So I stepped away for a moment, and I wasn't sure I was going to continue with Iron Seer in it's current form. Even so, I kept writing. I have a ton of articles to get published, but I got tired of backdating them.
I keep two blogs here on Iron Seer Dot com for different aspects of my game groups. It seems like the best answer to keep our games easy to find and for visitors to peruse, but I update them both irregularly. I'd like to keep a rate of one post here on Iron Seer per week about hobby stuff and wargames, and one post per two weeks on RAW RPG. It's just I'm more into wargames, and I get to hobby a lot by myself so I can create more content for Iron Seer's main blog.
I wasn't sure what was going to happen last year. I didn't know if I would even return or run games anymore. However, toward the end of last year, we made a fateful decision that brought me back into the hobby and ready to organize games at full force. I'll talk about that decision in another post very soon, but for now just note that once it was made almost every gamer I knew asked me when they should be showing up. The CLUB rears itself from the sump anew.
We all have choices and options. My Lady tells me that's all anyone ever has. After last Summer, my outlook on a lot of things has changed, boiled down and left me to be ok with it.
I realize that I was asking myself the wrong question. I kept asking "what would be best for my local community" instead of "what's the best time I can get out of my hobby". We all have a limited amount of time to do this kind of thing. We all have work and responsibilities, and we all have the same amount of time. If you're not into it, then you're out of it.
I've been trying to accommodate all the folks for far too long. You have to be having fun, and you have to think of yourself first. You can't run a good game and make a good time for a community of people if you're chewing sour grapes all the time. So, I let go of a lot of notions I had that carried over from other clubs and experiences I've had with various game groups and decided to shake it up and see what new 'notions' would wend their way to the top.
That brings us to the subject of Iron Seer Campaigns going forward. Undoubtedly, this is one of my major strengths and I will definitely continue running campaigns. However, the focus of said campaigns may shift from a general "grand melee" vibe and will run the gamut of things I want to try. We have lots of games to play, lots of new things to try out.
Currently, we'll be looking at games in three and six-month competition windows, depending on the game. We'll also have year-long competitions, beginning this year with a massive Frostgrave campaign.
For 2020, our Wargames Schedule will be available on our social media. You can check out the Ada Oklahoma Tabletop Gaming Guild here on Facebook, or follow Iron Seer on Twitter. Be sure to join the group if you're close enough to game (that's pretty much anywhere in Oklahoma, North Texas or even Arkansas) and give us a shout out! If you want to get your group in a joint-campaign with us, send us an email at contact@ironseer.com and we'll start working out the narrative.
So remember next time someone asks if you want to join a game that they may not ask a second time. Be kind to your game buddies and treasure them for all their worth. Above all, remember the one other thing that applies to your gaming that you must absolutely accept as an adult human: You'll never have time unless you make it.
It's all on you if you game or not. Only that which you manifest lies before you. Jump the hurdles, and get to the game...or admit defeat and surrender your models to the nearest Iron Seer.
The newly revised section compiles all our current campaigns in one space for easy tracking. It's now more of a forward-facing launch site for our players to get all they need from one stop without having to search through the archives. The Wargames and RPG Portals will lead to all information relevant to game lines, but the Campaigner keeps everything up to date in an easy to parse format.
Previously, this section was another blog, but we really needed a better user interface for this information. It's on Google Sites for the time being, but we'll probably be switching to a more robust display system in the future after I get around to re-jiggering some hi-def backgrounds. It could take some time, though - I'm currently forging myself a new helmet.
So if you've got a hankering for games, check out the Campaigner section to see what's going on. This is especially useful since our current campaign formats allow anyone to play for any side at any time, so don't feel bashful about asking to get into one. That's what it's there for. Whether you're into wargames or RPG's, all the info you need for each ongoing battle will be readily accessible from the Campaigner.
So marshal your forces and dig your pc's graves early.
It might surprise you to learn that I actually try to have my writing schedule set up a fairly long way into the future. I have a schedule, and I try to make my deadlines...though that seldom ever actually happens. In this way, the site will have a rhyme and a reason; moreover, as time goes on we might be able to make use of the resources we're building here.
Several months back, I wrote about Edition Purges. Around that time I drafted two more articles that I wouldn't get to for months because I was doing other things. I guess I didn't realize that everything I had drafted would change from the time I wrote the drafts to the time I would actually publish. So, the two follow ups to that post will be markedly different than their original form.
I'll start by saying that once, I looked forward to new editions.
Once. When there was nearly a decade between editions. I even supported the 4 year grind with Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000...that is to say, 2 years between full-on upgrading editions. That's how it used to work - every four years, staggered like Winter and Summer olympics. It's a big deal when you pretty much collect every army.
In those days, the rules were raw...but after four or five...eight (?!?!) editions you'd think they'd get it together. The rules used to evolve...now they just change for no apparent reason except monetary gain by the companies. I'm not against that...I want to give my money to these people. I'm even compelled to sometimes...but we can't incentivize this changing of rules.
This post was supposed to be about Fantasy Flight Games, and how they had been rolling out rules updates to X-Wing. I was going to rant about how all the cardboard accessories they used had pretty much put them in a position that they couldn't really pivot out of, sort of like how all Magic cards have the same stats on them whether they were published in 1994 or 2018. Changing any rules in a major way would see them asking players to throw out 90% of what they had collected.
I was going to talk about how updates are rolled out for X-Wing, as there had just been a FAQ update. I was going to talk about how introducing new cards like Chardaan Refit have changed the meta in a low-impact way and yadda-yadda-yadda. I was going to talk about how awesome that course of action is for customers and fans.
Of course, just a few weeks after my first drafts X-Wing 2.0 was announced. Shortly after, we learned that the only thing we could carry over was the plastic ships, stands and dice. ALL the cardboard and cards are now totally worthless, and looking at my collection that's literally MOST of what I bought from FFG.
You can imagine how stupid I felt - but this isn't about X-Wing or FFG. It's about me and the games I get to play while I'm on this earth. The move to X-Wing 2.0 jinked me off the X-Wing hype train...but I'm still going to play X-Wing.
Just not X-Wing 2.0.
I left this article on the draft board, and when it came time to write it for real I knew what I had to write about. No matter how you slice it, this opinion comes off as greybeard grognard, and it probably is. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to react to this, but I already knew what I was going to do about it...I just didn't know how much I wanted to tell everyone, since your feelings are protected animals these days and anything I say can and will be used against me in the court of public opinion.
So instead, I'm going to talk about how the X-Wing 2.0 pretty well killed it in my area. The casuals FFG gathered were driven away by the tournament scene 1000 miles away. I'm going to talk about how we as a community need not be bothered with this any further, since we can play any game we want at any time. I'm going to talk about how you kids need to be willing to play older editions if you're going to expect us to play your newer ones.
Firstly, I get why the change occurred. It's just a little too drastic for my taste, this pivot away from what we already had in material investment with FFG. Kind of like Primaris marines. I don't think I can see it as anything other than a blatant grab for the wallets of the gamers who "they've got" through this investment - but this is just the sad state of the industry right now. More and more companies are doing the edition grind, and it's just coming off as...bad. Bad quality games churned out, over and over.
If the tournament scene is what drives these, then the games need to be designed for that from the beginning. Instead what we get is half-assed in both directions. It's not designed for tight tournament play. We know this because it's expressly said that it's for casual play and because every wave there is a multitude of ridiculousness as holes in the design cycle became apparent. When the casual players are informed all their crap is junk and the edition is changing, they are told it's because the tournaments got out of hand.
So...it's a casual game...but it's governed by the fickleness of the tournament scene. This is the essence of what we are told everytime and with every game, and it's just...plain doublespeak (which itself is an oxymoron). Stop it. Just. Stop. It. I can't bring myself to support this edition grind anymore - which kinda makes me sad, since I have more available money now that I'm old. I find myself spending that skrill on all kinds of random gaming stuff, instead of keeping up with my old favorite games.
How long did FFG go into the production schedule knowing what they were going to be selling the equivalent of selling wooden nickels? The answer is: Quite Some Time. At a guess, I'd say at minimum a year and a half - but maybe it was rushed. Look at the packaging...pretty basic. Either way, it's a rough call to make, to change the foundation like that.
It leaves one to wonder if the late stages of design in X-Wing 1.0 were deliberately created to unbalance the competitive meta and allow pretense for the change to 2.0. That's one way to garner support for the change - appeal to tournament gamers, and as we've seen across the board it's quite effective. Indeed, it leaves one with doubt.
The decision to change the basic engine so none of the paper was valid is total folly. I just don't get it, and I'm not interested in the new game. We've implemented tournament environment here that simply don't allow the kinds of hijinks we see in these published games. No longer are we going to allow this kind of thing to disrupt our games, so there is no noticeable reason for this. You'd understand if you were around for some of the original edition switches.
I'm starting to think I enjoy games that are no longer officially supported or out-of-print, because we can take the close-circuit system they provide and tailor it to exactly what we like. Just because a game is no longer supported and fresh ruleset is out means nothing to me anymore. A lot of gaming companies will not be directly supported with my money because when things go stale the knee-jerk reaction is to ask everyone to start over completely, in some cases actually asking everyone to replace their game components entirely.
I think that's absolutely egregious, and it's a trend that has to stop. Better design, longer production cycles that are PLANNED out...it's hard to believe that these huge companies do not have the resources or personnel to actually manage these projects. It's as if they don't care about the game at all, and that makes it seem like they are only interested in what they can bilk. I don't like feeling that way.
And if it's not for love of the games...
Yes I understand that it's a business, probably better than any clod whose mouth that remark falls out of. I also understand design, tournaments, the community and a lot of the other factors. Anyone who believes that this is really about the good of the game is not only misguided, but foolish and will soon be parted from what little money he has left.
I'm done with what this does to our communities, fracturing them and stopping all the games because no one can find anyone that plays "their edition". Whatever that is. The publishers may be making money with these production models, and that props up the idea that gaming is doing great. They are making money, and in the holy writ of capitalism means that everything about everything is always good.
Obviously more people are playing games, since they are making so much money (especially in fiscal years where new editions are launched). I don't know if I believe that. Of course, they say it has nothing to do with rising prices and mandatory buy-ins created by changing the entire ruleset from the ground up. No, no.
On the ground it seems like there are far less large clubs playing games and more tiny groups huddled in their own corners. Two major FLGS for the entire state I live in simply removed X-Wing stuff to the back corner and went back to playing Magic. I can't speak for the others, but when you've got a grand total of about five or six cool FLGS in your entire state that's quite a bit. At least one of the others never did X-Wing to begin with, so there's that.
Now, none of this is to say I'm against new games. You should see what's coming up for this blog. I'm all about new games, this blog is pretty much about new games. I'm just tired of having to buy the SAME material again and again. Since I was about to praise them for NOT doing anything like this, FFG's decision to announce a 2.0 version really hit me where I lived.
I'm going to stay with X-Wing 1.0 quite comfortably. Hit me up if you're selling out. As far as new ships go - well, I've already got most of them...and any new ones I really want can be bought on Ebay without any cards or other trash FFG wants to sell me...and we'll just make our own cards and errata (if we need them) to go along with it.
From now on, Time Stands Still at the Iron Seer's Hill.
Editions won't change until we say they do. I don't really care what edition it is anyway, as long as it's complete. I'm starting to favor OOP games, since most things are dirt cheap. Since there aren't any WAAC players here anymore, it's simply not going to be an issue. What is going to be an issue is $200 buy-ins every edition for every game.
I'm not even bitter, despite what you might think after reading all this. It's just hard to care. I haven't played 40k since mid-6th edition, and it's been two editions in just a short time with talk of another on the horizon. It's ridiculous. It's hip to edition skip.
The Fate of us all
Lies deep in the dark,
When time stands still at the Iron Hill!
I stand alone...
no one's by my side!
I'll dare you!
Come out!
You coward!
Now it's me or you!
- Blind Guardian, "Time Stands Still (At The Iron Hill)
Challonge makes it easy to display certain information by allowing us to embed the information here on the site. For some campaigns, tournaments and events, we'll be using Challonge to track the matches and some results. Each campaign will detail how it works in the relevant campaign portal.
The Iron Seer Challonge Organization page will show basic, team and tournament / campaign organization. It's not necessary to create a Challonge account, but if you've got an online presence and want to represent we invite you to do so and send us your information in any of the normal ways. The more players, the merrier.
You can find a link to our organization page and ACTIVE campaigns in the Community tab and in the proper portals. While we won't be using it for every single game, it's too useful a tool to NOT use. The first campaign already up soon, and you can check out the rankings on our campaign post.
This blog records things from my games. That's pretty much the gist of it, slick.
I've been a game master for quite some time now, almost three decades. In this blog I'm going to share a lot of my opinions. That's just how it is.
I like to think that I've developed a certain style, as I have been GM/DM far more than Player. It's also not something I shy away from - in fact I probably enjoy being game master more than being a player, for the most part. All the prep work, reading, plotting - I love it.
I've written about a lot of this stuff before, so I'm going to skip a lot of it. Or revisit it. We'll see what's necessary.
Either way, I interviewed myself for this position and I was satisfied that I was qualified to be Iron Seer and talk about how to be an elf (or whatever) in a tabletop game.
Couple things though:
RAW
One of my favorite parts of this hobby is learning the rules and watching them interact. You can't do that if you don't play the game as closely as possible to how it is written. Where it's not possible to discern how a rule works, a house rule will be invented - but you can count on the written word here. We're not looking to find or create the 'perfect' ruleset according to a certain paradigm. Nay, I say that no such thing exists. We play all the games.
Mortality Rate
You won't be coddled. You might have a Fate Point, but you should probably hold on to that as long as possible. The old games are frustratingly hard...you should harden yourself now to the idea that your character, at some point, will probably die. Be wary - and extend that wariness to your fellow party members to your fellow party members if applicable. No magical outside force will stop them if they decide to drive a dagger into your liver and steal your potions.
High Level
Low levels are fun, but we'll probably breeze past them to take on greater challenges quicker than most other campaigns will. That's because once you've been a 1st Level Fighter more than ten times it's going to get old. You start wanting to play aaracokra wizard/cleric/barbarians and other such.
Expect the Meta
Who cares? Just don't read my adventure. As long as you don't read the adventure we're running, literally WHATEVER else your character might know about the world (through novels or game books) or himself (through min/maxing) can be written off pretty easily. That is to say, this character LIVES in this world. So it's no big deal, and probably heightens the experience for everyone. That's right. I don't care if you min/max and metagame, in fact I somewhat expect it from competent players.
I'll explore each of these points in posts at a later date. A fair number of other things, as well - including my own campaign records for official published works. For now, I just wanted to lay out what sort of game you could expect at my table, and depicted on my blog.
This project should have commenced a long time ago, but what have you.
It's me, Dave Bone...professional Iron Seer. Every so often I will transmit chaos patterns into the nether, and should you have the misfortune to stumble upon my mumblings...then you have chosen a pattern congruent with that.
On this blog I'm going to be talking all about toy soldiers. All about them. How to paint them (and why) and more importantly all the cool ways you can pretend they are murdering each other in horrible ways. Sometimes you can even make someone else feel bad about it.
I'm going to talk about scales. All of the scales, mostly 6, 10, 15, 20, 25, 28, 32 and 35mm (and their equivalents expressed in other forms / values) because that's how I roll. I'm going to be doing different types of games, ranging from modern, historical, science fiction, fantasy and whatever else I deem necessary.
I have a giant vault of models and now I'm going to do something with them. This will be a record of that folly, and perhaps a mindmap of any mental illnesses I may (or may not) express. The compulsion to hoard models is not abnormal. At least, it's not that bad.
