In the Beginning

Hi. My name is Bill, and I am an old geek. Or nerd. Or otaku. Whatever. I am that kid that read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy in 5th grade. I have been playing tabletop role-playing games (RPG) and wargames since the mid-to-late '80s, and videogames on everything from Ataris, Nintendos, Segas, XBoxes, and Playstations to self-built gaming PCs for a similar amount of time. I used to play paintball, beat my friends with sticks (medieval recreator with the Society for Creative Anachronism), and even served in the Army National Guard for 15 years. I like watching movies and TV shows, reading comic books and webcomics, and books on dead tree husks and in a digital format. I have been there, in the trenches of the Dungeons & Dragons Satanic Panic of the '80s through the entire time that being said geek was looked down upon to now when us geeks "run this shit", per the Penny Arcade guys.

So this blog. I set this up to talk about all of my interests (see above), maybe even instruct the younger geeks (nerds, whatever) out there, and even make commentary on the world around me. As of this typing, I am DM'ing a 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons game (and should be crossposting the posts about said game I made over on Google+), setting up multiple armies for Team Yankee but in 6mm scale, have partially built armies for Flames of War in 15mm, and dabble in everything from Cyberpunk 2020, Planet Mercenary, and Champions, to Mobile Frame Zero and Gaslands, and even on to working up my own Savage Worlds setting for S.M. Stirling's fantastic Emberverse novels. I've also recently purchased a 3d printer and been printing a bunch of stuff related to gaming, plus the obligatory Baby Groot and other knickknacks, so expect to see more of that. Yes, many of my posts will probably be about 5th edition D&D, because I'm playing that more now than anything else, but don't be surprised when I skip around a lot.

Truncheons & Flagons is a reference that I fully stole from Black Dog Games' Human Occupied Landfill game (thank you Messrs. Daniel Thron, Todd Shaughnessy, and Chris Elliott) and was in that work an obvious pun and parody of the name Dungeons & Dragons. I admire that work and have long thought the name funny as hell, I freely admit that I stole it whole cloth, but since I doubt this blog will result in any earned income, merely just be a place I can rant about whatever I feel like, I fully expect that won't be an issue.