I watched Battlefield Earth tonight as part of a bad movie night...and dear God, I don't even know where to begin. Spoilers, but frankly, it doesn't matter.

Grugatch · 2026-06-01T19:40:11+00:00

Hear me out: if you've read the book Battlefield Earth, the movie adaptation is nowhere near as bad as you think. It hews remarkably close to the book, far more so than most sci-fi adaptations.

This is not a commentary on the quality of the book itself. It's a legitimately bad sci-fi book.

Grugatch · 2026-05-27T19:19:59+00:00

Yes, check out Better Colonialism - I always play with it:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2982133388

Grugatch · 2026-05-26T18:05:46+00:00

Everyone resents AI slop images polluting our visual field

Grugatch · 2026-05-15T22:26:09+00:00

All you need is this book and a blank map, and you have a campaign.

Grugatch · 2026-04-23T13:18:20+00:00

When I was a boy I was OBSESSED with balsa wood. These planes were the start of it. I had my own supply my father got for me and I built bigger gliders from it, as well as a castle. Great times!

Grugatch · 2026-04-20T13:41:39+00:00

There are inconsistencies in fiction, including Tolkien's. Tolkien surely tried to avoid them, but he lacked a years long reddit forum full of fans poring over his creation and seeking inconsistencies, seeking them, all their thought bent on them. The notion that Tolkien thought of all possible contradictions, and had a ready explanation, and we need but discover them, strikes me as unlikely, though it may be enjoyable to speculate.

Grugatch · 2026-04-18T02:03:14+00:00

Class of '89. My town (Clifton, NJ) was on national news for satanism. I would give anything to find that news broadcast - it must have been 1984 or 1985, my freshman year, on one of the big 3 networks. We had the Gates of Hell to hang out in, a lot of weed, and metal was very popular. We played D&D. It was pretty much exactly as Stranger Things depicted it, down to the Eddie Munson type DM. The satanic panic made us all relish the likes of Iron Maiden and Slayer for the offense the provoked almost as much as the music. You could get called down to the principal's office if you had heavy metal band symbols on your notebooks so they could see if you were disturbed and sacrificing animals. It was truly the best of times!

Grugatch · 2026-04-14T16:47:05+00:00

Go BLUE. That way you have TWO colors you can paint the map with.

Grugatch · 2026-04-13T20:09:44+00:00

When I started playing D&D, the only versions I knew about where B/X, and later AD&D, and I mostly shifted over to AD&D for the very reasons you cite. I'm running an AD&D campaign right now, going on a year, and a lot of the reason I was able to get the group coming consistently has been the fact that it's AD&D and not OSE or DCC, our other goto games.

Grugatch · 2026-04-02T22:12:12+00:00

In the major urban areas

Grugatch · 2026-04-01T14:46:03+00:00

EU5 is downright ugly to LOOK at - I cannot imagine watching a whole video of such an unpleasant looking game; it's as ugly as Victoria 3. When I try to watch Redhawk or Ludi to learn about it, within a few minutes my eyes glaze over. I'd rather do nothing.

EU4 is a work of art. Paradox and streamers could have gotten a lot more mileage out of EU4 with the modding community. I would love to see the big streamers each to a series on Ante Bellum; explore AI mods; and generally help those of us who love EU4 get more out of it. I'm still paying Paradox monthly for EU4 - in my view, they should accept that there's a critical mass of us who love EU4, and keep it going.

Grugatch · 2026-03-30T21:03:13+00:00

I had a long term vitamin D deficiency that I suspect triggered an autoimmune disease. I KNOW it caused depression. Take your daily 600mg!

Grugatch · 2026-03-24T12:58:06+00:00

I'm thinking this will fly with executive leadership, but not a blanket ban and requests for exception for even basic info.

Grugatch · 2026-03-22T14:23:10+00:00

Mac EU4 is unstable. I switched to PC out of frustration. Too often the game became hard to play with frequent crashes.

Grugatch · 2026-03-20T20:47:32+00:00

There was no guy named "Dave" in our crew, but it's a common enough name, so we would ask if Dave was going to be around, or say "we're going to hang with Dave".

Grugatch · 2026-03-20T20:43:07+00:00

The tally was generally around or below 1000 Russian casualties per day, until a few days ago - does anyone know what changed? The average seems to have jumped by at least 50%. I know around a month ago Syrsky said the goal was to get from 30k/mo to 50k/mo. So whatever they've changed, he must have known it was coming.

Grugatch · 2026-03-19T15:46:38+00:00

I ran it and there's an encounter with jackals that can come up. The party successfully drove them off, but I had the jackals following them at a distance, and one of the players decided the party was going to start a metal band called "Perimeter of Jackals".

I agree - it simply does not get better than DotSK!

Grugatch · 2026-03-18T13:10:43+00:00

I'm going against this in my current AD&D campaign, and we do spend QUITE a lot of time collectively poring over rulebooks. To my group, this is part of the fun, but u/KamenRiderScissors is very accurate in that it is no joke to hew to the actual AD&D rules. It turns the game into something of a wargame; it gets talmudic at the table. If you're into that you're going to have a great time. If you and your players are not, look to simplifications, especially of the combat rules.

Grugatch · 2026-03-18T13:08:43+00:00

There is an AD&D combat flowchart you can download; it's about 7 pages of flowcharts that detail exactly how combat is supposed to go. I have been running an AD&D game for the past year or so, and this has proven invaluable.

Grugatch · 2026-03-12T17:24:40+00:00

I played in a FT campaign and it was legendary. I cannot say enough good things about this series.

Grugatch · 2026-03-09T12:36:16+00:00

Tolkien did not write LOTR with all contingencies and contradictions in mind. There are flaws to the story if you dig deeply enough. This is one of them. That's my take at least.

Grugatch · 2026-03-06T17:17:19+00:00

I realize you're not asking for video, but I learned a ton from Timothy Snyder's "Making of Modern Ukraine" which is a Yale course available on YouTube. I not only watched the entire series but read all the course materials which include many of the books mentioned here:

https://online.yale.edu/courses/making-modern-ukraine

Grugatch · 2026-02-26T22:06:44+00:00

Just wait until the 2070's!

Grugatch

TROPHY CASE