19th Level

I am currently working my way through Mary Beard's SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. She covers Rome from its legendary founding to the point where all free people of the Empire were granted citizenship. She closely examines the legends of very early Rome such as the founding by Romulus and Remus, the Regal period, and the early Republic. For all of these periods we have no contemporary written history, being forced to rely on archaeological evidence - any written histories of those periods were written centuries later. What I found striking was her description of warfare in the period around the end of the monarchy. She wrote: Military activity is another good case in point. Here geography alone should give us pause. We need simply look at the location of these heroic battles: they were all fought within a radius of about 12 miles of the city of Rome. Despite the style in which they are recounted, as if they were mini-versions of Rome against Hannibal, they were probably ...

“If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die.” - Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell. A Game of Thrones I'd thought about doing a straight out review of A Game of Thrones  but it occurs to me that with over 8,000 reviews on Amazon I might do better to narrow my focus a bit. With that in mind, I'm going to look at the novel A Game of Thrones  from the perspective of an RPG gamer. I'm therefore assuming someone who has read this and later novels.  We'll begin by taking a look at the world. If you or I were to visit the world we'd be hard-pressed to find much in the way of magic. From an RPG perspective, it is an extremely low-magic world. A few of the characters have encounters with the supernatural, but they do occur and are far more significant for that. At the start, a trio of rangers encounter a group of Others and Wi...

There's a player in my gaming group who gets maximum amusement out of my ability to be distracted by shininess. He's compared it to the reaction of a kid to jingling keys... So what are we playing now? Right now we are continuing our Star Wars: Edge of the Empire game. We are on our 7th adventure, though given most adventures tend to be multi-session, I'm guessing we've clocked in about 14 sessions, though the first session was actually a standalone D6 Star Wars session that we ended up promoting to an Edge of the Empire game. We're had a brief D&D 5th edition game in the middle but have been having a pretty nice run. The characters are starting to show competence and we're getting better mastery of the rules. It's definitely a more narrative-based game than one would have initially guessed from a flip through the rules - I'd consider it a fairly crunchy narrative game. One thing I did which was probably a good move was introducing certain conce...