Category Archives: War Stories

Saturday Morning Musings

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I was browsing YouTube and came across videos about Bolt Action v3, a World War II tabletop miniatures wargame, which I’ve seen before, and went into a deep dive on how to play, what you need, and what’s in the starter box.

I eventually found myself searching for the starter set, along with US Marines and Imperial Japanese Army  sets, since my interest lies more in the Pacific than the European front.

As I was searching for those, other products appeared, specifically Firelock Games’ Blood & Plunder.

Which made me stop looking for Bolt Action stuff, since I still hadn’t finished building/painting my various factions for that game.

I then remembered that if I really need to scratch that World War II itch, I do have Firelock Games’ War Stories, which is a WWII RPG, and the Pacific expansion that I pledged on Kickstarter will be coming out at the end of the year.

Meanwhile, I may create a small squad/warband based in post D-Day France, or use the pregenerated characters and try playing solo at some point soon.

I’ll probably spend some time with Blood & Plunder as well, as they’re starting their ‘Summer of Plunder 2025’ event this weekend.

Don’t touch that dial!

Catching Up

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Ha.  Never will.

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Basically I come up with great ideas but fail to execute.  Just ask my gaming group(s) who are still waiting on me to start up a D&D campaign here or a sci-fi campaign there, or all of the various unplayed/unread RPG systems or solo boardgames that are sitting around in various boxes and shelves.

And don’t even mention the multitude of sports game projects/replays that I’ve had lined up for the last decade or so.

But I digress.

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My latest idea was for the War Stories RPG from Firelock games.  It’s based on post-D-Day World War II, European Theatre, and I was thinking about playing a soldier from the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Japanese-American army unit based in Europe.  Through research I found that they mostly operated on the Italian/French border, so perhaps one soldier got separated from the main unit and ended up in the small group that I was planning to create.

I went back and forth with this idea, because the main archetypes for the game primarily come from British, US or Canadian nationalities but using the lifepath method for character creation has ‘Commonwealth (Anzac, African, Indian, etc)’ as an option, so maybe my Japanese-American could start from there.

I thought about how this character would interact with the rest of the squad, and whether his race would be an issue (of course it would) or would I just ignore that aspect, which wouldn’t feel right either.  Or I can create a small group all from the 442nd but once again I would end up addressing/not addressing their place in the game, and finally realized that I would just be doing it as a gimmick or novelty and it would take away too much from just playing the game.

In the end I’ve decided to shelve this concept and move on to trying to figure out how to play yet another soccer game that I haven’t tried to play yet.