Two Hour Wargames

I've ordered the print copies of Colonial Adventures, Lost Lands, and Lemuria, from Two Hour Wargames. When you buy the print copies, you also get PDFs, so, I'm reading the rules now.

Mythic Game Master Emulator

The Mythic GM Emulator is intended to let people play roleplaying games without preparation. The theory is that when you discover something, it doesn't matter whether the thing was already there because a scenario writer put it there, or whether you made it up on the spot. You are in essence acting as the scenario writer as you go along.

The way this works is that you start a scene, keeping track of the characters involved and their objectives. Decide what would be a logical next step or information you need, pose it as a "yes/no" question, and roll the dice. You may get an Exceptional Yes, a Yes, a No, or an Exceptional No; in addition, the dice may tell you that the scene is Altered or Interrupted.

For instance, your Noir Detective bursts into the gangster safe house. You decide it would be reasonable to ask "Are there gangsters here?" and roll the dice; your answer may be:

• Exceptional Yes: a lot of them
• Yes: one or two
• No: not at the moment
• Exceptional No: the place has been cleaned out

An Alteration might be that you meet a woman who is looking for one of the gangsters. Perhaps she's trying to serve a warrant on him; perhaps she's the gunman's wife and is worried about him. And an Interruption would be something unrelated: there's a report of zombies at Maple and Third Street, perhaps, or Nazi goons attack as you're clearing the gang's hideout.

There's a list of keywords to help jog your imagination when you're trying to decide what the Alterations and Interrupts might be.

The key parts of this are the concept, plus the Fate Chart which gives your die roll results, and the key words; you shouldn't need to refer to the book during play.


It's a $6.95 PDF, which I think is worth it.

Number of pieces

I was looking at Field of Glory Renaissance and With God and Glorious Arms, and not able to work up a lot of enthusiasm for either. The reason why, I think, is that both of them have a lot of pieces. By " piece", I mean "things you have to move on the map." It's not the same as "units", which are the elements which execute orders.

For example: in StarGrunt, you might have an infantry platoon, four squads of eight men each. You issue orders to the squads, and the entire squad carries out its order. When you move it across the map, though, you don't have one "squad" piece, but rather eight "solider" pieces; it takes longer to move eight pieces instead of one.

One of the things that made De Bellis Antiquitas popular was that each side has only twelve pieces. Compared to something like Field of Glory, where you might have sixty or eighty pieces on each side, you lose some detail; but you can reduce set up time and speed game play.

I want the smallest workable number of pieces.

Upcoming Rules

I'm looking for something in Victorian Science Fiction; must be able to deal with Colonial actions as well as steam-powered landships, mechs, aeronefs, et cetera.

I'm also looking at the Perfect Captain's Spanish Fury rules for Actions and Battles.