Bloggers Down Under - A Meetup in Canberra

Just finishing a lovely month in sunny Australia and starting to digitally dust off some of the photos I took while down here.   Expect more in the not so distant future, once I get back to snowy Canada.

While in Canberra (I was fortunate to be sent on a fact-finding trip to the Australian Defence Force Chaplain College), I had the good fortune to meet up with Alan Saunders, aka Kaptain Kobold, proprietor of the quirky The Stronghold Rebuilt blog (Alan is also on Twitter - @KaptainKobold).  Besides being one of my wargaming heroes, Alan endeared himself to me with his fearless Frocktober campaign to raise money for research into ovarian cancer, which claimed Madame Padre.

My partner Joy and I (left) met up with Alan and his wife Catherine (right)at the National Museum in Canberra, to see an exhibit on Ancient Rome.  

Alan and Catherine were great company, and as transplanted English (no they didn't come over as convicts) who have lived in Australia for some years, it was interesting to compare our impressions of the place against their experience.  We found them engaging company and I wished we could have found time to game together.  Hopefully one day.

The Rome exhibit was a curated selection of holdings from the British Museum.  I suppose my favourite piece was this stone burial vessel, which depicts scenes from an imagined and happy afterlife, rather like what a religion created by Too Fat Lardies might depict.

"OK, mate, you're too drunk to ride that donkey.  Get off."

"Sod off.  Doncha know who I am?   I'm fecking Bachus!"

Finally, the obligatory Rome Gift Shop (TM) astonished me with a vast collection of Playmobil figures, including Roman legionaries, ballistae, and a giant trireme!  

Behold the glory of the fully assembled Playmobil Trireme.   

Row well and live!

I realize that Playmobil gets a bad rap from some quarters - it's not as exciting as Lego, many playsets have the same boring bourgeois European vibe that you get from a house full of Ikea furniture, etc.  However, there is a whole world of Playmobil historical sets, including ancient Egyptians, and some interesting Viking/Dragon crossovers.

It all has possibilities, especially as my partner Joy has three lovely grandchildren who are still quite young but could be gently introduced to wargaming via Playmobil.   I had better start collecting sets now, so we could do this when they get older:

Blessings from Down Under!

MP+

Gaming By Tweet: A Social Media Experiment

Back in July I posted a review here about Target for Today, a solitaire game by Legion Wargames, about the US daylight bombing campaign in WW2.   For now it suits my gaming lifestyle, which has largely had to adapt itself to my primary role as my wife’s caregiver.

In the last few months, a social media project has taken on a life of its own as I have been “live tweeting” missions using my Twitter account (@madpadre1).   It started by putting my Twitter friends into crew positions on “Foxtrot”, our fictitious B17, and seeing if they would survive each mission.   A few folks (Tweeps) seem to quite enjoy the experience, which I have gradually thickened by adding GIFs and period photos to illustrate various phases of the mission.    The cumulative effect is a kind of storytelling by gaming, but it has also fuelled my desire to learn more about the US 8th Air Force in Britain and the daylight precision bombing campaign in general.

This particular project is set in the fall of 1942, following one of the first operational USAAF bombardment groups in England.  It is the same period depicted in the film Twelve OClock High, when the daylight campaign was still very experimental.

I have started collecting the various tweets for each mission into narratives using the online tool Storify.   You can see the results for Missions Five, Six, and Seven if you like.   Now the interesting thing abut the project is to see if Foxtrot can make it through the war, which is no small thing given the high casualty rates among Allied bomber crews.   Already we have had two crew members set home to the States with serious, war-ending wounds, and on our last mission the Bombardier, who had flown six missions already, was killed by a cannon shell from an ME 110.  

In this respect the project has started to incorporate elements of role-playing, and a strong emotional investment from some of the regular players in their fates.  There is also a lot of humour and joking, so it is not a terribly serious venture, but serious enough in its own way.

After our last mission there was some talk on Twitter about adapting the Target For Today game engine to the night campaign of Bomber Command.    Such a project could be done easily enough, but the game would have a different feel, more cat and mouse as opposed to the stoic endurance of waves of fighters by the B17s, which is more like a British square facing repeated attacks in Napoleonic or colonial warfare.   It might be done using some existing titles, such as GMT’s Nightfighter, 

There are also possibilities for using social media platforms such as Twitter in other games, such as putting people into various roles in a skirmish miniatures game and illustrating the action with photos to explain the action as the game goes along.  This would not be a true gaming experience online, such as tools like VASSAL allow, but rather a type of storytelling.

At any rate, Foxtrot is scheduled to fly more missions, and you are welcome to follow me on Twitter and even fly along.  I look forward to hearing about your own experiments with gaming via social media.

Blessings to your die rolls and watch your arcs!

MP+