Another month down. At the start I had a big event which feels so long ago now. The weather is finally turning here and I’m glad to see fall arrive.

A few notes first - I have an email subscription set up now; please sign up if interested! I also added footnote support to the blog and will be abusing that. Finally, I’ve started a new blog. It’s going to focus on various media; this will stay for tabletop gaming but my thoughts on movies, books, comics, manga, and video games will end up on the other site. I’ll probably keep mentioning some video games in these round-ups.

What I Ran

A Matter of Mustaches

I covered this pretty thoroughly here and if you’ve not checked that out, please do. But it was a lot of fun and I was very happy for it to be finished so I feel like I have more time to work on other stuff.

We’ve started planning for next year and I’m already looking forward to it.

Desert Moon of Karth

I ran the second session of Karth (in Monolith); you can read about the first session here if you want. This session picked up right after. Our players had found some things out about the planet’s governor, but they were a little hesitant to confront her. To put that off they spent some time exploring town. While they were doing that I rolled on the random town encounters table and they met a mime. The mime was honestly pretty helpful in responding to their questions (me, miming on camera) and was recruited to the party. Next they checked out the karaoke tavern. It was a little dead at 7am but after a rousing success at singing Space Oddity to a mostly empty room¹ the party decided to head to the Silver Spire.

At the Spire the players found a cult-like group living there. Some of the party decided to join. We spent a few days with the players learning more about the strange nature of the cult, and ended the session with night starting to fall on the moon. Karth’s day/night cycle is 20 days of light followed by 10 days of night. This will be their first night and they viewed it as a good chance to try and infiltrate the Spire.

My favorite bit here was the players being very suspicious of the food, two of them not eating the cult’s food at all. That did not save them from the very not-food-related mind control after a couple failed saves.

What I Played

Wartnose Jousting

I talk about this in the Matter of Mustaches article, but Wartnose Jousting is a variant on Hairfoot Jousting, a game of small creatures on strange mounts jousting. It’s by Joseph McCullough, author of Frostgrave and Rangers of Shadowdeep, but it hews more closely to Gaslands. Like Gaslands, your models are moved via template. However, here you roll to see what template it is.

It was a lot of fun. I don’t think it’s quite on the level of Space Gits but I think it’s a fun filler game if you have the models and a little time to kill. It also has pretty extensive campaign rules so a one-day campaign could be fun.

Legions Imperialis

Toward the end of the month I got a Legions game in with my frequent opponent and friend Ben. We’re playing in a 4000-point event soon. Because of that wanted to start ramping up and took 2500 points, his Solar Aux versus my Solar Aux with a few Blood Angels.

We were playtesting a rules tweak I came up with - planes have to move first. In Legions, planes arrive on the board each turn with their movement, then fly off. However, as air-to-air fire is very important there is often an incentive to move your planes as late as possible so you can pick their position. Moving planes to the start of the order limits some of this, and also gives ground units a chance to respond to planes.

I think that tweak worked pretty well here. The fact that I had extra activations didn’t help me win the air war, which I think is good given that extra activations help in other ways too.

The early game saw me take a pretty commanding lead in models killed, but not on objectives. I did lose the tank duel on my right flank pretty hard; he had fewer Vanquishers but some hot dice wiped out one of my units before it could fire and that flank never recovered for me. Contributing were my Stormhammers doing basically nothing thanks to some bad orders and the threat of a Shadowsword.

My Rapiers were all stars; the unit of 12 quad launchers would do its thing and devastate a unit per turn. I wasn’t sure about the las Rapiers but they worked out really well. They spent all game hopping in and out of their building, picking off tanks.

The score stayed even until the final turn. With my lead on the table, he’d need to keep me off both objectives he’d controlled all game. With only a handful of units left he had no way to do that and I took it on turn 5.

Pirate Borg

This was my first time playing a Borg² and I’m glad it was Pirate Borg. I’d looked through the book and found it easier to read than Morkborg or some others I’ve looked at. Something about my brain and the text in Morkborg do not agree and reading the pages is literally painful. Pirate Borg, on the other hand, is much easier to read. Character creation is mostly great: roll a bunch of dice to see what your stats, class, and hat are. I will ding the game for having a character sheet without things like inventory slots, but overall getting into the game was breezy.

Our game was set in New Orleans, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, and our GM had us pick languages our characters would know. That’s not in the base rules but I really liked it, and it became pretty relevant when we realized that none of our literate characters could speak English. I strongly encourage RPG parties to have an illiterate character; it’s always fun.

We all owed a favor to Jean Lafitte³, and he needed us to recover a large shipment of zombie dust which functions as a drug in this setting. Oh, yeah, there are a lot of zombies.

Our first session was spent in town. We visited the American fort, where we learned that the American military were the customers for which this shipment was bound. Luckily, some good rolling convinced the Americans we were attorneys with Top Dog Law⁴, sent by Secretary of State James Madison, and had every right to be there.

Session two was the next week⁵ and we planned to head into the bayou to track down the shipment. Along the way we had to kill a few guys, getting a taste of the combat system, which is fast and fine. We headed out on a boat into the bayou, and eventually got to a small settlement. Here a great ritual was being prepared to raise the dead to attack New Orleans and throw the Americans out. We briefly flirted with supporting this before deciding to turn tail and run, letting Jean know what was coming. He started having us load up a ship with all his valuables. At this point we realized it’d be nice if they were our valuables so we had the ship shove off leaving Jean behind to ever closer sounds of battle.

I really enjoyed this adventure: it was short, thousands of people died, and we got rich with absolutely no possible consequences down the road. Pirate Borg is a system that gets out of your way, which is good.

Spearhead Tournament

I belong to a local gaming group that plays at a bookstore on Saturdays. Every other month one of the members hosts a Spearhead tournament. And I’d say more, but in the interests of word count I’ve written a separate tournament report.

What I Hobbied

There was a last mad dash to paint dwarves and elves but I don’t really care to talk about that more. I’m more excited to talk about being FREEE. With that event over my hobby time felt like my own again.

The first thing I did was assemble 4 boxes of the Dark Mechanicum walkers for Legions Imperialis. I then got distracted and assembled a Fusil Platoon Spearhead (pictured in action above) and was able to paint it in a couple days because I’m going with a ghost color scheme. It feels like cheating but I think the army looks really cool, and it’s painted, so whatever.

I then went back to more Legions Imperialis stuff, aiming to take Blood Angels to an event in November, and finally started building Protoss for Star Craft Miniatures game. The latter are cool models; more on them later.

What I Read

Didn’t finish any books this month but want to highlight a blog post as I’ve started to do - Dave Arneson and a New Kind of Game. Grognardia celebrates Arneson’s would-be 79th and I really liked this write-up. I think the contrast between how utterly pedestrian Blackmoor sounds in 2026 and how revolutionary it was is really captured well.

Blackmoor demonstrated that a game did not have to be entirely contained within its rules. There would always be something beyond the edge of the map, something the referee had not yet imagined, and that nevertheless would interest the players in a way no one had foreseen.

What I Played on My Computer or Switch 2

Fire Emblem Fortune’s Weave

This game is very good. I’ve actually never beaten a Fire Emblem; I’ve played some of Three Houses but didn’t get that far. Fortune’s Weave is a huge game but I’m enjoying it a lot. It has a pretty weird structure where you have 4 paths you can play, but there is no downside to doing all of them (but time), so I’ll see how 100%ing this beast goes.

What I Bought

Outgunned - Core Rulebook

I’ve heard nothing but good things about this system so I’m excited to currently be reading it. This fall I’m going to run a short campaign inspired by Black Lagoon (think pirates in South East Asia in the ’00s). I think it’ll be a great fit and I’m very impressed by the rulebook. The dice system is fairly complicated⁶ but the rulebook reads really well.

Coming Up Next Month

October is looking to be really good. Have our third session of Karth (we may try and wrap up, depends on how things go) and I’ve got a Halloween RPG cooked up. Also have my first game of Necromunda: Skirmish on the calendar for the 10th, looking forward to getting my Cawdor on the table for the first time in years.