Tankpot

Let me speak to you of us. We are nine, all told, and have the grand honour of being living memory. Our brothers are dead, or have crossed the rubicon and been reborn. We have not. We cannot, or choose not to, but nevertheless, we are all that is left of a grand history that has stood against the dark for more than ten thousand years. There are those that stand with us that bear our names, our symbols, our colours, but they are not us. We stand as relics among their vitality, their brightness, their... innocence. We are the Legion's Last. The midday rush had finally petered out and, at last, the bar was mercifully quiet. He'd sent the kitchen staff and the servers to get themselves something to eat, to enjoy an hour away from work. The sounds of the street outside seemed so distant, so inconsequential. He was alone in here, as far away from the troubles of the Galaxy as one could hope to be. Teso sighed, and smiled. He walked around the room, calmly cleaning up glasses...

The purpose of these rules is to make vehicles in 8th Edition Warhammer 40,000 more interesting to play on the tabletop without sacrificing too much of the simplicity of the current ruleset. These rules will modify the way vehicles work in four key ways: Facing Weaponry Armour Walkers In the current rules, vehicle facing, e.g. the direction any given vehicle is pointing, is not an issue. While this does make the game very quick to play, it also makes traditional considerations of armoured combat, such as relative armour thickness and the way weaponry is mounted, irrelevant. As such, vehicles rarely feel like vehicles, instead feelings no different from a monstrous creature. The solution, then, is to reintroduce facing. In these rules, facing is intended to affect how easy or hard it is to damage a vehicle, and what directions weapons equipped on said vehicle may shoot in. These rules also acknowledge that the current ruleset has enabled conversions that drastically alter...

(Quick note, this is another tumblr post I've gone back and edited and put on here.) I mentioned on my tumblr, briefly, in a response to a reader letter in an issue of White Dwarf, that I had a reason for why I think there shouldn't be female Space Marines. Just so we’re totally clear by Space Marine I mean specifically Warhammer 40,000’s Adeptus Astartes, I’m not saying Pvt. Vasquez or Samus or whomever shouldn't exist. I think it is very important that the Adeptus Astartes should be male, and it isn't anything to do with the game’s fictional reason for why this is so. In 40k, only men get to be Space Marines, or rather, only boys. They are taken at a young age, in pre-or early puberty, and physically and mentally made into killing machines. The fiction justifies why it’s only boys that get taken because of some vague notion of the process requiring ‘male’ hormonal development. Gimme your trans takes on this, I crave them. But, for the sake of brevity and to ho...

I really like Warcry. I haven’t had a chance to play it for… five days? Now? And I literally can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve instantly found a faction in the Untamed Beasts: the synergies and strategies were immediately clear to me when I began to play with them, and that’s not something that happens often. The game is fun; actually sitting down to play never takes more than an hour, there is a fluidity to the game that is never overly simplistic, and the models and scenery just look great on the table. I’ve yet to get into the actual campaign portion of the game but it is fleshed out in a way that I didn’t expect. There’s a lot of character to it, and thats neat. The character, really is the key here. See, the immediate comparison one can make to Warcry is Kill Team, its Warhammer 40,000 cousin. Both are skirmish games, both take place on a small field, both are designed around a modification of the core rules of the larger tabletop war-game they draw from. Now, anyone who’s f...

(I originally wrote this back in 2017 on my tumblr blog, and am posting it again here, with some edits, because I watched ten minutes of GitS2017 last night and I found myself yelling the same frustrations I had at the time at the screen again) Ghost in the Shell 2017 is a patchwork of ransacked imagery used to tell yet another story where Scarlett Johansen gets used by the powers that be. Understand that I’m not just talking about the stuff it lifts from the 1995 anime, the 2004 sequel, Ghost in the Shell: Innocence , or even the stuff it takes from the second series of Stand Alone Complex (SAC) and GitS: Arise , although that is certainly present. The imagery it co-opts is broader, taking a story that is deeply, fundamentally about the rise of Japan as a consumer electronics superpower, about the modernisation and global identity of East Asia. It twists the core philosophy at the heart of Ghost in the Shell , a story about connectedness, society and finding one’s identity withi...

“Wot’s this then?” “It’s one of dem ‘oomie wagons innit? We’z nicked it, boss wants you to do it up.” Gobzag looked at the wreck the other Ork, some annoyingly chipper yoof called Skragalug, had dragged in. He grumbled. Aside from the huge rokkit hole in the side, it seemed in good condition. The problem was, to Gobzag’s acute mekboy eyes and teknologikal know-wots, the thing just didn’t make sense. “Deez are da wagons dat’s been zoggin’ our boyz?” he said, incredulous. “Yeah, boss sez dere ded killy,” the other Ork said. “Did a rush wiv some buggies an’ bikes and a few of deez wagons krumped da lot.” “Zog me, but how? Look at dis fing. Da arma on da side goes all da way to da bottom, got no clearance,” Skragalug looked puzzled. Gobzag rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically. “Means it’s got no suspenshun, dunno how it goes ova anyfing. Shouldn’t be able to drive on anyfing but a flat road!” “Yeah, but look at dat kannon. I can stick my ‘ead in dat kannon. Ded killy.” “Rig...