Where to begin (again)? My *Humble* Return?

 Wow... so this thing is still on, huh? Feels weird, posting on my RPG Blog again. I honestly didn't really think this site was still publicly viewable, but I guess it's still active. Shocked to see that I somehow got a content strike on my post homebrewing the Vierna race from FFXII for DnD 3.5 that I made in 2010...  how'd anyone find that here in 2023??? It's been 13 years. There's been like at least 4 final fantasy games, and a few remakes since have come out since then.

But I digress.

On a personal side, if you're reading this, and you used to follow me from the RPG Blogger Carnival, I guess I should update about my life, since I used to do that once in a while.

In 2015, I moved back to the United States. My marriage ended, fucking me up pretty good, and to top it off, I was pretty much terminally ill (one of the main reasons that the marriage ended as one would have it). I had what ammounts to basically 1 HP and was rolling negative on all my saving throws. There was little hope I would last through the end of the year - doctors gave me about 2 weeks to live in November when I was being processed at a University Hospital in Tokyo.

Fast-forward 8ish years and now I'm pretty much fully recovered. Remission baby. Oooooh yea!

Thank you modern medicine and suck it Japanese doctors. We built tough.

After a few very hectic surgeries where they removed the vast majority of my internal organs (don't worry they put them back again, mostly), several years on experimental meds requiring outrageous hoops to get approved, and a few years of bed rest, I'm basically back on my feet, working  *nearly* full-time again too; in what basically ammounts to my childhood dream job - a video game retail store; a pretty famous chain one too (you've definitely heard of it, though it shant be named here lest I summon the HR).

Sadly, I've not had much time, or energy to devote to TTRPG anymore. All of the friends I had that I once played with have long gone and moved onto other things. My circle has vanished. I don't have access to trusty feed reader anymore, so I've not seen much of whats been going on in the RPG community these days either. Every now and then I'll get an update sent to my g-mail, but I've not really paid much attention to the content.

But, it's a relief to find that most of THIS  *waves hands* is still here, getting at least a little bit of traffic to some extent.

So now I'm left wondering if this is something maybe I want to come back to, here in the latter half of my thirties. I've been getting sentimental about DnD lately, so maybe it's something I'll want to dip my feet into again. Anyone gonna go see the new movie? I'm hearing pretty good things... also heard something about an update to the OGL??? What's that about?? 

The one source I do check regularly for hobby related news... well, more like SALE news, is Humble Bundle, specifically their book bundles. They have some really good ones every once in a while for manga [ my newly revitalized obsession since about 2019 ], so I'll stop in there and check to see what they've got going on each month.

Oh, wow! March is pretty loaded.

46 Item Warhammer 40K RPG Bundle

$25. Woah...

LINK HERE

Not sure I'll pick this one up unless Henry Cavill's gonna RSVP to be the GM since I'm not versed enough in the lore.

But wait...

There's more...

There's also a 17 item Shadowrun bundle for just $18... not bad, not bad.

LINK HERE

This one is actually pretty appealing to me tbh. The whole Shadowrun mythos is fascinating to me, and we're basically living in a dystopian cyberpunk hellscape these days anyay...

Wait, maybe this one's too real.

And a third one... this one's for Castles and Crusades. $18 for 37 different books. Woah. That's a ton of content.

LINK HERE

This is some serious classic TTRPG action right here. Troll Lord Games publishes some of the most old-school RPG books I've seen in forever. May go down this nostalgia trip and see where it takes me.

But, not to leave their software bundles out in the cold, Humble also has a great map making software bundle this month too, coinciding with the trio of book bundles. Almost like they planned this... 

LINK HERE

So, I'm not exaclty sure which of these I'll buy, if I decide to buy any of them. Right now, I've got no group to play with, and don't really see myself having the time to actively search for one, but if one happened to fall into my lap I'm not about to turn them away. But, in the event that one DOES find me, and I find myself falling back into old habits, perhaps I'll be picking one of these up.

If not, you can find me at my new blog, where I write about Anime and Manga!! YAY! 

Post Japan I went through major withrdrawls, so now I've devoled into being a complete and utter otaku. All hope is truly lost.

So, If you've made it this far. Why? Why read to the end? Are you nutty? Do you remember me? If this was YouTuber's I'd tell you to like, comment, and subscribe, but instead, I'll just ask you to reply with which of the bundles you think you'd like to pick up, or if you grabbed one already, what made you decide on that one?
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Anyways, may your dice always come up 20's. 

-ShinobiCow 

Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective - How my Hobby Died, and was Reborn

At some point, I think in my senior year of High School, the one person who I played the most 40K against, lost interest in the game.  He moved onto other stuff, mostly World of Warcraft and other video games.  He was playing a lot more competitive CCG's and having more fun with the big payouts he was getting with those.  I wans't as competitive as he was, but as his interest teetered off, so did mine.

I stopped playing in tournaments because I had to run them every week.  That was right about when I started working for the FLGS as the assistant manager; I got a promotion and that promotion meant having to run weekend tournaments.  Having to run tournaments for the only store that really hosted them in town was pretty much the death sentence for my experience with actually playing the game.  I still bought lots of minis, and painted them at work when the place was slow, or when somebody wanted a painting lesson, etc., but I never really played anymore after that.  In fact, I don't think I played a single game of 40K after they changed the rulebook from 3rd edition to 4th.  It was like the edition war with D&D except with wargaming instead of RPG's.

The last thing I bought though, before quitting my job, and leaving the store, pretty much for the duration of its ownership under its owner at the time, was a small, but potent, force of Space Orks.  I picked up 2 Battle Boxes, several boxes of Storm Boyz, and some bikers.  After I quit, I never even opened up most of the boxes, and one of the Battle Forces went missing.

But, this last summer, before moving here to Japan, I went through some of my old hobby stuff, and tried to find some things I could sell off.  Warmachine was growing in popularity again, so my Old Khador Minis got picked up really fast after a guy found my listing for them on Craigslist, but the Orkz didn't move as quickly and I got to thinking that maybe I didn't want to sell them in the first place.  I held onto them.  They are all still nicely boxed up, some still in their packaging, all locked away at my house. Someday, they will be unboxed and I'll have to time begin my hobby again...

But... that someday might come along a lot sooner than I thought.  When I decided I was going to revitalize my blog this year (and started blogging heavily again in September of 2010) I did some looking around and found the Warhammer 40K universe RPG's.  They looked beautiful, at least from all the preview images over on the Fantasy Flight Website.  I was intrigued.  Over X-mas, this year, I picked up Rogue Trader.  What a massive Space Hulk full of win!

TL,DR for like this entire Retrospective.  I'm going to start covering a lot about the Fantasy Flight RPG's as I try to buy up all of their books.  I loved Rogue Trader and I'm dying to bring some information on those games to my site.  You can bet that when the new game comes out, I'll be playing it, with somebody, even if it has to be somebody I have never met, and can only play with, through an online forum.  PbP, whatever.  Look forward to it.

    

Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective - Expanding to other Armies

After getting my feet wet with one army, it came to the time where I was ready to expand.  There are lots of people that never end up building up another army and instead just focus solely on a single army for the entire life of their 40K career.  I'd imagine though that folks like that are pretty rare.  For people that really, really get into 40K hardcore, you can't help but want to try out all those armies that lay the smackdown on you in your various match-ups.

So, where did I go from my days playing Space Marines...  well, I went all over the bloody place.

I expanded into a lot of different Space Marine armies to start, but that wasn't enough of a change for me.  I needed more.  The first non-Space Marine army I went with to start was ironically not all that different.

Iron Warriors - Chaos Space Marines

I ran into these fellas at a number of tournaments and I was always brutally destroyed by the sheer quantity of heavy firepower that these guys could lay down.  The army was not so fundamentally different from real Space Marines just in terms of stats.  As far as Chaos goes, they were also pretty Vanilla.  The army I ran didn't run any Demons, and didn't really go into all the wildly "chaos" units that the army employs.  I ran tons of heavy support, a Vindicator, and at one point I had myself one of those wonderful Chaos Death Engines, which I happened to scratch build from some other minis that I had laying around.

For those players interested in getting a touch of Chaos in their 40K armies, these guys were great.  I loved them and they loved me back.  My army never got up to tournament standards (which happened to be a problem with most of my other armies) but it was a ton of fun to play casually and it was a blast to finally lay the deserved beat down on my sworn Necron enemy.

Tyranids

I got into Nids for a very, very short period.  Back when Wizards of the Coast still had games stores, they actually had a small area where they sold Games Workshop stuff.  I happened upon one of these stores right when they were in the midst of closing out.  Their closeout sale had most of these products marked down like crazy.  Although most of their 40K stuff had already been picked clean by the time I found the store, the Nids had been left virtually untouched.  I managed to pick up a sizable army for not much cash and played it probably two or three times before I got tired of it.  I just was not cut out for playing 40K's zerg.  They are a lot of fun, but they just didn't do it for me.

I think one of the problems I had with this army is that 40K to me means a lot of awesome Tanks and Vehicles and they simply didn't have it.  Though the army had lots of cool Big Evil Creatures, they didn't have any land raiders, they didn't have any predators, and they didn't have any bikers for that matter.  Sure, they had stuff that was similar, in game mechanics terms, but visually, the army to me, just wasn't right.  I ended up taking all those pieces that I had painted and assembled and traded them off for a different army, one that I thought might give me a bit of the Vehicle feel back.

Dark Eldar

When I made my trade for my Tyranids, I had thought very hard about getting into the Eldar army, but my buddy, who always played with me, was very serious on picking up the army himself.  Up until then, he had never shown much interest in playing anything but Necrons, so the chance of him setting those aside to play something else, was very, very enticing.  I agreed to play something else, cus Mirrror Matches are never any fun.

Dark Eldar still had that whole "Space Elves" feel, but their twisted side was more akin to Chaos and my experience with Iron Warriors was enough for me to be on board.  I liked the look of the models and the fact that they had bikers, and fast vehicles, made me really, really happy.

I managed to take my Dark Eldar army pretty far, even though I was playing with the army in one of their weakest incarnations.  They weren't very strong, and I got laughed at a bit at tournaments, but I managed to bring down some hate with my hard-hitting wyches and bikers and I always ended up having a good 'ol time.

Although building up those armies was a lot of fun, and playing them was a blast, all good things come to an end.  My love of the hobby didn't last forever (though it's come back now) and I ended up quitting 40K for quite a long time.  Next time, I'll talk about why all those armies went away and how I broke my 40K addiction.

Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective - Developing through Tournament Play

40K was a lot of fun starting out, but it quickly got pretty tired.  Playing a game like 40K requires that you really have a good group of people to consistently play it with, or else, you're likely to get burned out pretty fast.  I happened to start the game playing with only one other person - we were never really able to turn any of our other friends to the hobby, which meant that we were constantly running the same armies against each other. After you run the 20th game of Space Marines vs. Necrons, you're also pretty likely to get burned out.  So, we were pretty much forced to find better, more interesting opponents to play against outside of our circle of gamer buddies who refused to join the miniature game revolution.  

That's pretty much how I started playing in 40K Tournaments.  Our FLGS held Tournaments, like I mentioned earlier in this series, on most weekends.  The cost was only $5 to enter, but you had to field a significant number of points in order to play.  After a few months of saving up the cash, buying the minis, painting and basing them, I finally had enough Tournament-ready models to bring my Space Marine army down to the local tournament.  

My first experience with 40K tournament play was pretty bad.  Having only played against one other person who was interested in the game/hobby I had become incapable of fighting off anything other than Necrons :P  I found myself getting destroyed pretty quickly most of the time, but after several months of play, I start developing as a player.  I never won a single 40K Tournament, but I came close a few times.  Playing against other, more skilled players, who had interesting and distinct armies, was reward enough - though I did pull down a few solid victories during my time playing the game on a competitive level.

Going to one of the Games Workshop Games Days clinched it for me.  After that I would become hopelessly enthralled with the game and would end up building a number of different armies to play around with.

    

Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective - Birth of an Addiction

Ah, the memories.  Today, I continue my 40K Retrospective and move on to actually getting into how I got into the game and where I started in the hobby.

I got into the game during 3rd Edition (think that 6th edition should be coming down the pipeline soon now).  After playing Mage Knights for a while, Warhammer 40K was a big step up, and it was going to take some serious cash to get involved in.  I picked up the rulebook and the Starter Set (the one with the Space Marines and the Dark Elder) and convinced my buddy Exist to get in on it with me.  We played a few games using the stuff in the box and we were both hooked in really fast.

Every once in a long while, Exist and I would make a trip down to the semi-local Games Workshop store and check out all the cool minis and all the awesomely painted new stuff coming in.  We were still very unsure about what armies we wanted to play, but after seeing a couple of their game nights and watching people game, we started to get more sure of ourselves and each developed an idea of what we were interested in playing.  The same FLGS where we picked up all of our Mage Knights was also a Games Workshop retailer and held 40K tournaments on Sundays every week. Usually the tourney's were about 1500 points or so, and managed to pull in the requisite 8 people every week.  We checked out those games pretty frequently before finally settling on our individual armies; seeing people play 40K tournament style only further accelerated us into the hobby.  We soon finally settled on our armies.

My Army - Space Marines




His Army -
Necrons






When we first started playing, battles were heated and bitter.  Neither of us wanted to lose and we were pretty much willing to exploit any and all cheese we could to win.  A lot of our minis were not what they looked like.  I definitely remember playing a game, at least once, with a group of Space Marines as Terminators and a Rhino was actually a Land Raider (Crusader).  My bud, the slow guy that he was, took quite the long time to get all of his guys painted, but once he did, they looked quite nice in their black and shiny silver.  I went with Codex Astartes (most of the time), but occasionaly, my custom painted Purple and Grey Space Marines would show up with a different Codex and some cool new rules to exploit.  I often preferred to play with the Dark Angel Rules, but some times they showed up as Black Templar or even as Blood Angels.  But, for some reason, my luck always seemed to get pounded by those cheesy terminator wannabes... but, our love of the hobby only got bigger and badder from there.

  

Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective - Mage Knights... huh?

OK, so you might be a bit confused by the title of this post, but it'll all make sense once you read over this post.

After the Pokemon phase faded away, back in elementary school, I got started in miniatures gaming with Mage Knights.  I was about 10 or 11 at the time, and being the trend setter in my little group of friends, I managed to convince my best bud (Exist, who we are still waiting on for some Warmachine related posts) that Mage Knight sounded fun and would be a worthy way to spend our allowance and time.  Neither of us had really gotten into miniatures gaming yet, we had seen a lot of 40K being played, but our little elementary school hands (and wallets) weren't quite ready to handle a game of that nature.  So, we started out with Mage Knights.

We both got into Mage Knights on the ground floor.  We used to have our parents take us down to the FLGS to pick up Pokemon cards or used video games, and check out all the cool 40K stuff.  When Mage Knights came out, the store owner was nice enough to set up some demo mini's for people to try the game out with.  That turned out to be a great sales technique and sold us both on the game.  We got one of the Starter Packs and a couple boosters and went back to his house, and his kitchen table, to give our minis a go round.

We played the game through most of the starting editions.  I can't remember exactly when we stopped playing the game, but I think it must have been right around the time that the Polar Ice Dragon came out.  That was a great mini, but I somehow recall that neither Exist, nor I, was at all interested in picking it up.  That was probably when our fun with the game began running out.  But, that wouldn't be the end of the miniatures hobby for either of us.  Around the end of middle school, we both started moving into other hobbies, and other games.  We got into some CCG's and some MMO's, but our miniatures experience continued in our first years of High School when we finally got into Warhammer 40K, the game that we were probably meant to play from the beginning, but never had the guts to try.  Our love for that game goes on.  Next time, I'll talk about our first experience with Warhammer 40K and how I got into that game.

On a very interesting side note, I am informed by the folks on Twitter that Mage Knight's will be making its comeback in board game form sometime in the not so distant future.  That sounds awesome.  I'll probably pick it up out of pure Nostalgia.  I can't wait to see how they interpret the game on a Board Game basis.

Warhammer 40,000 Retrospective - 40K Radio Review

I've been very much a fan of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe since I was in Middle School.  My experience with miniatures gaming predates my RPG experience by several years, but I haven't played much since High School.  However, recently, I've been listening to the 40K Radio Podcast and my 40 K memories have come flooding back yet again.

40K Radio is a pretty good podcast in my podcast listening opinion.  I listen to a lot of podcasts (I'm going to start doing some podcast reviews pretty soon) and this is the first 40 K related podcast that I've listened to.  The guys that do the podcast are entertaining and they get into the gritty strategic details of the game in most of their shows.  They also bring in some great interviews with folks like Dan Abnett and Graham McNiell, some of the biggest names that come out of the Black Library.

The show can run really, really long sometimes, but honestly, I don't find that to be a bad thing.  Some folks dislike longer podcasts, but I love them.  As long as what's going on in the podcast is not BS random off topic nonsense, than I'm a very happy puppy.  Some of the 40K Radio Podcasts can be almost 3 hours long, but they don't stray off topic very much - instead they provide very in depth analysis of the 40K Game and Hobby and also manage to talk about the 40K RPG's once in a while (One of their recent podcasts features one of the 40K RPG Producers from Fantasy Flight Games).

If you're not really into 40K then you obviously won't find much in this podcast for you.  The show is fairly specific to the 40K game, especially the miniatures version, so if that isn't really your thing, you might not find much there for you.  However, if you are a current player, or even a former player looking to get back into the hobby and are looking for some news and discussion of the current edition of the game, you can be pretty sure to find a good start with 40K Radio.

Listening to them talk about 40K and some of the new armies that are coming out has gotten me into a very "Warhammer" type of mood, so I thought I'd take some time this week to talk about how I got started in miniatures gaming and how that entrance eventually led me to 40K and now into the 40K Universe RPG's.  I hope you enjoy it.