The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Signs of Life

Yeah, ok. Not dead yet. Not much to talk about, but I'm not dead.

Pretty much accept that I've been doing a bit of reading, a bit of gaming, and a bit of random other stuff, like torturing myself on the hill out front.

So, the reading. Omar Bradley's book isn't bad. It's not like you didn't know all of the stuff he says already, but it's interesting merely because he's saying it. By contrast, Hans von Luck was a Wehrmacht officer who, amongst other things, was with Rommel a bunch, which is pretty interesting. He also had the misfortune to get captured by the Russians, where he spent 1945-1950 working in POW camps. Which sucks for him, but is interesting to me, because you don't hear about these things much. As it happens, treatment of POWs varied a bunch. The Americans and British released theirs soon after the war (say, 1946), while the Soviets and French weren't really all that interested in doing so, and kept their POWs around for years. Huh.

Having Mom take me to Borders is not conducive to shortening my reading list. We'll just leave it at that.

As to gaming, well, I'm still on the last level of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. There's a reason why Pacific Assault is a much better game, and that has a lot to do with a completely lack of one shot kill snipers. We'll leave it at that.

Speaking of one shot kills, Cole and I played some Mechwarrior/BT the other night, as part of our ongoing semi-RPG campaign. Previously, Cole's mechwarrior character passed his Trial of Position from the sibko, killing two mechs and gaining the rank of Star Commander. Then he got sent to the planet of Tokasha, where Clan Goliath Scorpion (him) and Clan Hell's Horses are fighting over mech factories. His very first mission is to take a cobbled together star of mechs out to delay the Hell's Horses advance. Keep in mind that everyone in the Hell's Horses 666th Mechanized Cluster has a heavy or assault mech versus Cole's mediums. So Cole ends up losing and falling back after inflicting fairly serious damage on the enemy. We then followed that up with Cole's cluster and the 666th going head to head over a factory, wherein Cole is responsible for pretty much the only things that went right for Goliath Scorpion. The remnants of Cole's cluster fall back and get incorporated into another cluster.

Which brings us to the latest game. Goliath Scorpion is pretty much getting run over by numerically and technologically superior Hell's Horses troops. The answer the Scorpion commander comes up with is to send Cole's mech star and a star of elementals to go take down the 666th's command elements. So Cole gets his guys together and goes. He starts by going under a river that bisects the front lines, which saves him from having to fight the entire Hell's Horses cluster. An elemental gets washed away, and some mechs get dinged up by falling, but ok. Cole then makes his way through the plains and hills into the mountains where the Hell's Horses base is. He gets spotted once, but he's able to take down the VTOLs before they can radio him in.

And then, almost directly in front of the base, he gets spotted again, powers down to hide, and they spot him anyway. The whole things ends up being sort of a mutual surprise thing, where Cole has to power his mechs up and blast his way into the base, and the Hell's Horses have to power their mechs up and keep Cole out. The battle itself is pretty routine, except how it came down to a couple of Cole's mechs versus the Hell's Horses commander's Warhawk. Which has a gauss rifle. Which proceeds to head shoot Cole three times in a row, forcing him to spend Edge points to make me reroll. As it turns out, Cole doesn't die, but he's only got 2 of his 5 mechs at the end of the day, and not a whole lot of Elementals. So he loads everybody who can't fit in a mech onto some flatbed trucks, pirates a couple of Gnome suits, and heads off to his lines. He almost makes it, except when a patrol catches him right before his front lines. He manages to ambush the patrol, kill them, and flee to his own lines.

So that was pretty fun.

On yet another note, Tonto came back from the dead, which prompted me to delve into the forum archives and salvage some of the stuff I wanted to save - namely all my Medival: Total War posts. So the Kings of the French, the Holy Roman Emperors, Philippe III's Guide to Rulership, and some pictures are now up on the MTW page. I encourage you all to read Kings of the French, because I think it's some of the best stuff I've written, never mind that it's game fiction. Maybe had Holy Roman Emperors finished, I'd be saying the same about that, but it never did finish, so. Go read that too, if you want. And then read Aethelstan, because I like it too.

Maybe one of these times we can get an RTW succession game going.

Posted by Dwip at January 11, 2005 5:59 PM