Tabletop Teacher

Black library has opened up it's murky and labyrinthine gates in the webway to aspiring new talent. They are taking on submissions and pitches for new stories, and rather than complete jobs, so this could be your chance to become an Aspiring Champion of Literature. Pop on over to Warhammer Community for the details, but if you have the will to tread the literary Path to Glory then these are your first steps: 1. Your story must use Games Workshop’s Intellectual property and be based in any of the Warhammer 40,000, Warhammer Age of Sigmar, Blood Bowl or Necromunda settings. It must also adhere to one or more of the above themes but you may interpret this in any way you see fit. We’re looking for a broad range of stories and characters that capture Black Library’s unique mood and tone. To fit with Black Library’s range, your story should not include graphic descriptions of gratuitous violence, sex or explicit bad language.  2. Pitch us your idea by sending a one-paragraph su...

Here's a test I run on every single one of my first encounters with a new group of players, both in DnD and the various 40K RPGs you can get. It never fails to dictate the flow of an adventure, and is a really accurate measure of how people want to play. Ambushed by goblins, the party scrape through by slaying every single one of the little monsters. They've taken some damage, but their blood is pumping, they've found a good rhythm, and despite having only been a team for ten minutes, are working like a well oiled machine! Victory is in sight, as the rogue deftly swings around the last goblin, an arrow knocked by the back row fighter and the axe-ma at the front charging his way. It's the goblin's turn, and he... Now let's stop there, and go right back to the beginning. Yesterday I had a student come up to me asking about the Dungeons and Dragons posters I had put up around the school. It's not unusual, and in fact rather common. Ev...

Things I learned from this trip: Packing a bag is more thoughtful than you might think Dragon caves are actually hard to get to Carrying a broadsword up a mountain is a feat itself I have a new found respect for the average party of adventurers. My training as a Ranger (or Duke of Edinburgh Leader) begins with a simple hike up Snowdon, with a wild camp over night just below the summit. There is a ridge of cliffs surrounding a small lake there (very much in the theme of the Gates of Moria), and the trainers thought there'd be enough shelter there for a decent night's sleep. They were wrong, but lets not get ahead of ourselves. The simple act of packing a bag for the adventure was a learning experience itself. I had three bags in the end: Expedition back bag, containing camping equipment such as tents and sleeping bags Day back pack, containing cooking tools and mapping equipment Spares bag, containing changes of clothes which was kept in our expedition bus ...

No, I'm not dead yet, neither is the blog. I've just been on a Duke of Edinburgh training trip to Snowdonia. I haven't drawn a Chalk Ork in months! In kind of a surprise, I've been made the Duke of Edinburgh Award Coordinator for my school, with the official reasoning being I just get on with work instead of complaining about it. So... the moral of the story is just get on with your work and you'll be rewarded? I'm more than happy to do it, as it is effectively breaking a wall I never intended to on my way to building Warhammer 40K as a school tradition, and I'm really excited about multi-classing into Ranger. There's a lot of Dungeons and Dragons nerdage in my approach to this, so brace yourselves. The Duke of Edinburgh Award (DofE) is an outdoor and general citizenship programme that student neophytes can learn hiking, mountaineering, camping and how to be a decent person. It's one of a few such organisations in the UK, the other two bi...

Good morning all, and welcome to the New Year! And now a new solid project for myself, the club, and the blog. First of all is a brand new army for myself. Path to Glory: New Dawn A little while ago I did a numerical analysis of the Eldar Jetbike unit. Well I had a good reason to. I'm going to start collecting Eldar... oddly enough starting with the Start Collecting! Eldar box. You may be thinking that I'm just a power gamer at this point, having proved through maths and analysis that the scatter bike is too powerful for it's cost. In my defense, the reason I did the analysis in the first place was because I had already bought the kits, and wanted to justify the cost to myself (and to a lesser degree, my wife). As the school budget, Patreon and Paypal links below suggest, I don't exactly have a lot of disposable income for this hobby. This Eldar project had been a pipe dream of mine since the year before last year, and was actually the first codex I bou...

It was all right. Okay, it probably had the biggest political upheavals in recent memory, but lets be honest here... you don't come here for the political doom and gloom you can get from the major news outlets. You come here for the plastic soldiers. And it's been a pretty solid year for plastic soldiers. A slew of new box sets, Blood Bowl coming back, the Deathwatch series going strong, and Warhammer Quest getting an update. New models a plenty, capping off the year with a Daemon Primarch (despite some disappointing rules for his minions). The FAQ bits came out this year, showing Games Workshop was starting to take customer complaints and feedback seriously. Warhammer Community got launched as a way for people to actually find out information about new releases. In the Dungeons and Dragons world, we've got a bunch of new Unearthed Arcana, including a fix for the un-inspiring Ranger class. Volo's Guide to Monsters was released with a bundle of new playable...

I was having a conversation on the Twitters with a fellow gaming teacher ( Mike Davies ), and it sparked a little conundrum in my head: When is the best time to run your wargaming club? Most clubs I've seen run sessions during the week, and oddly enough mostly on Thursdays. Family life tends to mean that the weekends are usually out. Trying to explain to your other half you can't take the little ones to their football match because you want to push toy soldiers around for a few hours is not a conversation that ends well. Weekdays tend to be when people are free, but usually not Friday. That's the day that tends to be saved for the social events that don't involve the clatter of dice, and usually feature more alcohol. School clubs are a bit more challenging to find a good slot for, particularly if the school you work in doesn't have an extra curricular activity program. Your usual times are going to be after school. Some may tempt you into thinking a war...

As it is the Christmas Holidays, it's probably a good time to remind people of just what I'm writing this blog for. It might not be hugely obvious, as there hasn't been any club activity since the end of last term. I am a teacher, and I run the school's war gaming club. Right now that means Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, Blood Bowl, Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, and occasionally X-Wing: Miniatures Game. I am also the Alpha Nerd of the school, with all the dubious honour that title entails. Many young neophytes tremble at the magnificence of my neck beard! My poor Chalk Orks about to get it from a Riptide... Well, actually not really. I trim the neck fuzz regularly to keep the outward appearance of a professional teacher, and fool people into thinking I'm not the kind of person who regularly day dreams about dragons. I do, however, spend a great deal of time on the club. I mainly spend my time reminding the students to thin their paints, but I...

Image from here . Carrie Fisher died today. I know I deal with the table top games, and this is a little outside my sphere of geekery, but Star Wars has had such an impact on my life I want to talk at least a little about it. Star Wars was one of the movies I watched repeatedly on VHS as a kid. I wasn't old enough to see it in in the cinema, but we had all the films. Star Wars, Land Before Time, and a little known film called Flight of Dragons were regular features on our TV, and I can recite the lines from these films near perfectly. I have no doubt that a lot of nerds and neck beards can say the same thing, and establishing geek cred aside, I think we can all say how it affected us. Carrie Fisher, in her role a Princess Leia, established what girls and women were for me. You'll always hear from "socially minded" people that there are no strong female role models on screen, and that the damsel in distress is all we get. I never thought that. My impres...

Merry Christmas everyone! Nothing important to say, apart to share a bit from my buddies' Dungeons and Dragons downtime WhatsApp conversation. As a quick tip to DMs, if you can't manage regular sessions, then continuing the adventure through an instant messenger service is a great way to keep people in touch with the game. Elric, the half-elf sorceror, pauses rifling through the now dead demon gnoll to wish the rest of the party a Merry Christmas. He uses Prestidigitation to make scatter some small sparkling snowflakes around the gnoll corpse.  The dwarf appears from a pile of gnolls on the walls, tankard already in hand, singing a festive ditty in the manner of Shane MacGowan from the Pogues.  The half-ord paladin grunts. The bard heads to the nearest tavern, returning with flagons of mead for everyone. The urchin pulls some pigs in blankets from his greasy hair, and begrudgingly offers them around. The warlock takes the mead and pigs in blankets, and le...