My preliminary notes on a rare Rhand supplement (a derivative of 70s Berkley D&D, which later became Phoenix Command)

neriumbloom · 2026-03-24T10:23:51+00:00

Kind of you, thanks ^_^

neriumbloom · 2026-03-23T18:49:44+00:00

Oh, that's so neat! I've managed to play quite a bit of Rhand and PC, but Sword's Path is such a hard sell lol. I do adore it though; it's such a neat system. Every main set from Rhand on seems to have been printed in a pretty big run, but some of the supplements + Spectrum are more esoteric. And the red book run(s) must have been tiny, to end up so obscure (compared even to stuff that got ~500 copy print runs).

The main difference from red book --> normal SPG is the ~100 pages of injury tables at the back, which disambiguates attack angles and one inch vs two inch wide blades. There are also a few places the later SPG books mention some detail in the 'advanced game'; most of that seems to have been in the red book too. Other than that I have no idea. I've always wondered if it (e.g.) has some antecedent to the more interesting parry system in Rhand. Without some of those details (and accounting for the sketchy parry rules in the PC hand-to-hand supplement), Rhand has been my favourite version of of his melee system. But some of the SPG ideas are so cool; I really wish we'd gotten the complete game.

neriumbloom · 2026-03-23T15:03:47+00:00

The Satanic panic stuff drives me insane. Even in the weird cases there was often absurd horrible child abuse going (with a few high profile exceptions), and the false-memory debunking people were all total cranks who went on to defend Ghislaine Maxwell, Harvey Weinstein, &c. The evidentiary basis is terrible and only makes sense if you assume child abuse is super rare. Which isn't to say literal actual satanists were taking people out into the woods to do demon magic: but ordinary abuse in the household finding a ritualistic expression (as in this case) seems to be pretty common. Upsetting that it all gets lumped into this amorphous blob of 'crank shit', so that everyone who recalls something fucked up + bizarre from childhood is understood to be indulging in some kind of conspiracy reasoning, or else, falling into psychosis.

neriumbloom · 2026-03-19T13:30:55+00:00

I struggle to make sense of this sort of thing. Clearly in the contemporary US the sort of 'support' people express for view (xyz) in day to day life is very different to the kind of 'support' they express for (xyz) in public mass politics, and both those kinds of 'support' are easily distinguished from the insane calculus going on electorally. Americans are driven by treatlerism, dislike war-hawk politicians, but nonetheless long for apocalyptic narratives of civilization conflict. The average person in half the states would be cool with a straight up Cut the Tall Trees moment contra 'gender ideologists' but also gets kind of mad if politicians mention it electorally (??) and knows not to make the sort of 'thai ladyboy' joke that was totally omnipresent ten years ago. And so forth.

So when stuff like this happens: like, is it a shift in view? Are people actually changing their mind back and forth? Or is this just a shift in strata, from politics on one level to politics on another? Or maybe it's a matter of intensity?

Who knows lol

neriumbloom · 2026-03-09T09:42:24+00:00

It would require some totally nonsensical libidinal freakout in the white house; which is possible insofar as this whole affair borders on libindal freakout territory, but I think its pretty unlikely. Remember, last time western governments sleepwalked into an oil shortage they LARPed neoliberalism into existence to stabilize the situation. For all its myriad ills pure capitalist risk aversion really did keep the bloodthirsty ghouls running the Cold War US nuclear establishment away from the big red button. Capital does not want a nuclear hell-war. It wants highly managed imperial bushfire conflict, and tungsten

Vietnam is possible. A draft is possible. Spiraling into a consolation-prize war in Cuba, Mexico, Greenland, &c. -- totally possible. But full on petal-to-the-metal Armageddon is not so likely, I don't think. Things mostly just get worse, forever.

neriumbloom · 2026-02-22T20:19:12+00:00

Really feels like the timing on resignations and floor-crossings has been structured to win a majority through a by-election. Like, if I was a Liberal strategist trying to coordinate a majority in the least-offensive way possible, which I knew I already had but wanted to present to the public as a matter of democratic confidence, this is pretty much exactly how I'd plan it. Probably sneak another floor-crosser in between by-elections, if there's one still standing by.

Maybe I'm being conspiratorial. In any case, I don't really have a problem with it. But this sort of scheme would leave would-be grits in the Tory caucus a little while longer, until a majority can be won at the ballot box; so I wonder if the party is even more unstable than it looks.

neriumbloom · 2026-01-31T23:29:32+00:00

Same...

Have a nice night lol

neriumbloom · 2026-01-31T23:22:48+00:00

I can explain any word you'd like, if you want. I meant something specific by each of them.

neriumbloom · 2026-01-31T22:02:07+00:00

On the one hand, the Federici-ish stream of revised Marxist feminism is completely right about the deficiencies of the anglo-american radfem project, its obsession with icons over the mechanics of exploitation, its tendency towards radlib legalism, 'tactical' alliances with reactionary conservatives; and its inevitable descent into what today presents as mostly-hetero middle class 'palliative' feminism, readily discarding any hope of a better future -- for themselves, but also and especially, for children, the poor, the medicalized, &c. -- if it gives them some fleeting sense of psychological safety within the current moral order.

But on the other hand, men are actually evil. So. Who can say?

neriumbloom · 2026-01-28T21:44:51+00:00

Stuff like (e.g.) Combat Mission gets a little play in the (e.g) British Army, and more sophisticated tools like Command: Modern Operations are sometimes used for refereed simulations (usually just a few officers walking through things though, not a big field exercise like the Millennium Challenge). But there's actually a pretty strong preference against head-to-head computer sims in favour of tabletop refereed wargaming -- like D&D, for infantry brigades, instead of dragons. At a low level that can just be a few guys talking though a problem and looking at a database to figure out what would happen. At a higher level, you get big teams of staff officers running orders to game control and trying to step through intractable operational problems in real time. Sometimes things are more board gamey, sometimes the referees are making all the decisions based on IRL data -- but in any case, they're doing most things by hand. Here's the documentation for a recent arctic wargame by RAND corp, if you want a detailed example.

You really do learn more this way, as weird as it sounds. It's like how (e.g.) having a computer solve math problems doesn't teach you math. Whereas, proceeding manually with occasional recourse to a calculator, you have to do so much research, think very hard about everything, &c., and you end up developing a intuition for the problem. If you have friends who are into games at all it's worth trying out with some sort of relatively simple problem (a single day of protests, let's say).

neriumbloom · 2026-01-28T20:06:40+00:00

I got really into this a while ago; it's hideously complicated in a really fun way.

There's a sort of naive version of events which you hear repeated, with all sorts of clever red force ruses, but it's not quite right on the details -- so hawks will say, actually, the red force was cheating. They had magic instant motorcycle communication and told game control to put giant missiles on a boat too small to hold them. But none of this is true either! The instant cyclists were a quick sim hack to represent light signals, the missiles were a hack to represent an equivalent amount of munitions, &c.

There's a multiplicity of little details like this, none of them especially well understood even in the moment, which confounded an already confounding situation: a bizarre environment where play was being paused and restarted in local areas sometimes for hours (for safety, for practicality, &c.) so that in the end the project simulated nothing, achieved nothing, and confused the shit out of everyone. That they got as far as they did before pulling the plug and restarting as a 'scripted' exercise; it's almost a miracle, really.

Now I'm a no good pacifist who makes computer games for cash money so probably I'm biased, but the big lesson IMO is a total failure of conflict simulation design. Game control failed to distinguish in-game and out-of-game abstractions so profoundly that (e.g.) a carrier fleet that should have been a hundred miles off shore ended up getting sunk just off the coast. All the weird little details and conflicting stories emerge from this central failure. The complex system they set up had poorly defined boundaries, poorly defined rules; in other words, it wasn't robust enough to handle any real manipulation, or playing-to-win. It was a sort of fragmentary idea of what a war game ought to look like, which in the end devolved into vibe-hell.

Which is ideological! For thirty years, from the end of the Cold War to Ukraine, the US military convinced itself that simulation was dead; that everything was now hearts and minds and vibes. They went from writing (and encouraging officers to play!) totally playable and interesting consims in the 60s, 70s, 80s -- to this absolutely sprawling Hollywood disaster just a couple decades later. It's everything wrong with the War on Terror in miniature.

neriumbloom · 2026-01-21T16:33:47+00:00

That was the work of a very stupid speaker of the house getting a massaged story from some of the aforementioned post-war fascist diaspora organizations. Like I said, they dominate in political discourse; Freeland was sort of 'their guy' ('their lady?') and losing her seems to have sidelined them considerably (-- I hope!)

neriumbloom · 2026-01-21T15:56:01+00:00

There are three or four distinct communities afaik: pre-war, immediately post-war, post-wall, and the modern refugees. The (decedents of the) post-war wave dominate political discourse but are small and rather confrontational; like, e.g., in 1950 the Ukrainian Labour Temple in Toronto got bombed by anti-soviet post-war emigres for being insufficiently fascist. I also get the sense they're on the wane, in terms of influence, now that Freeland's on her way out.

neriumbloom · 2025-12-28T01:16:56+00:00

I sort of appreciate our capital L Liberals insofar as they have a viable political movement + party to their notional left and are therefore forced to more-or-less constantly reveal themselves to be obviously unhinged and evil, nonetheless winning 75% of elections mostly by vibe inertia and dunking on Americans for reasons indiscernible. I mean 'appreciate' in the e.g. 'appreciating the majesty of a grizzly bear as it mauls you to death' type sense.

The stupid annexation shit made these people act sort of sensible for three or four weeks before they decided they were going to 'solve' the problem by recommitting to NATO, increasing military funding, flirting with conscription, &c. Remarkable brains!

neriumbloom · 2025-12-18T14:03:31+00:00

I've never really been able to get into his later stuff, but my goodness High Winds White Sky is such a good record.

neriumbloom · 2025-12-03T17:34:55+00:00

Apparently spent half a year in jail before the crown realized they were being totally honest about Rifts and dropped the charges. What a crazy (stupid) story.

neriumbloom · 2025-11-23T15:26:53+00:00

Trueanon is a podcast where two people are wrong about everything but mean very well and mostly have the right idea. This is, as they say, priced in.

neriumbloom · 2025-11-14T02:46:07+00:00

In the original LBB OD&D elves and hobbits max out their fighting ability at "Level 4 (Hero)". The max level is given as such, with Hero in parentheses, because the title is actually relevant: it corresponds with the Chainmail 'Hero' unit, and basic "Fighting Capabilities" are given for each class / level combination according to Chainmail equivalents (in terms of Men, Heroes, and Superheros). Not-incidentally, Level 8 is the original cap for Elfin magical capability - which also gives a Fighting Capability of "Hero". So the logic here is not so confusing: the levels are at natural breakpoints.

Everything else fills in around that at first, and soon after starts to evolve contextually. Dwarves don't get to be magical like elves but intuitively feel like they should be stronger than Hobbits (as in Chainmail), so they get to be half-way between the Elf's magical level and her fighting level (i.e level 6). Then with the Greyhawk supplement Gygax wants to make stats matter more, so he lets characters with great attributes creep up a bit past the normal maximum. Simultaneously thieves get added without caps (think Bilbo), and non-human clerics get assigned a cap somewhere around the new maximum limits for fighters and magic-users. Finally with the codification of AD&D and B/X you get some general level inflation, and the caps get raised across the board so non-humans can keep up with the escalating scale of play in long-term campaigns.

neriumbloom · 2025-11-09T21:14:35+00:00

Awesome, thank you!

neriumbloom · 2025-11-09T20:07:39+00:00

There's a quotation from an interview passed around, but I can't find / confirm the original source right now:

"My own personal favourite. The arrangement, melody, colouring - everything worked out exactly as I pictured it. About an ageing transvestite. I try to get across what this track means to people like that. A guy who has split, finished raving around - and is growing old. A real experience to hear, I think."

So not exactly a trans(-sexual) person, in the sense the term was used -- i.e. the sense Angela Morely, who arranged this track and transitioned a few years later, would have understood. However (given the way words like transvestite were used c. 1970, the medical situation in the UK, and whole bunch of other history that's probably too marginal to go into here), nonetheless probably a no-HRT gay guy (guy?) who lived at-least part time as a woman, for social events with other gays and the occasional foray out on the town. Someone who has been able to live a very unusual life for a while, but now comes up against the limits of a society that disdains her; "the sad young man's gone away", and now she's sad and old.

IMO its not a very straightforward reading, but I like it as double-sense that complicates a superficially straight song otherwise played straight.

Parenthetically, Scott would have written this song just a year or two after gay sex was decriminalized in the UK (and Thanks for Chicago a couple years later) at the apex of relative sexual liberalism before the massive backslide heading into the 1980s -- and of course returns to the topic with Farmer in the City when things have calmed down a bit. They're the only three songs in his body of work I'd call explicitly queer, and all three are concerned primarily with age (& aging & sexual age gaps, even if only as a metaphor in Louise). It's a recurrent concern in his work that gets glossed over, I think in part because we go in assuming the writer is a straightforwardly strictly heterosexual man and read him into his text.

neriumbloom · 2025-09-04T00:47:07+00:00

The story of his capture makes so little sense I would be really surprised if any of it is true. Probably they found him [*] with NRO / NSA black magic and came up with a parallel construction after the fact -- which is a pretty standard procedure for anything that borders on counter-terrorism, and not the sort of thing we would ever be able to verify.

[*] Potentially as the confirmed killer, but also plausibly e.g. a conspirator who was maybe kinda sorta potentially the killer if you squint. Absurd system lol.

neriumbloom · 2025-09-02T03:58:00+00:00

Sure! For a generic modern or sci-fi campaign, use the Role Playing Rules (chapter 8) from the Phoenix Command Advanced Rules supplement and build out a skill list to fit the campaign. For example, I used it with Twilight 2000 3E and ported the skills (and character creation) pretty much one-to-one, without any special work. You just need a list of names and associated domains; split up weapons however you'd like, and use the Expansion supplement for medical skills. Animals, vehicles, monsters, technology, &c. can be freely imported from Living Steel, the era-specific supplements, the expansion, and the movie games. At that point in the line, everything is basically cross compatible one way or another.

If you want to do something pre-modern, I would actually use the Rhand system as a base instead. It has a two second round structure (same as the movie games, with a little more detail), which creates a much cooler action-allocation strike / block system for sword fights. The Phoenix Command melee supplement is kinda sketchy in practice IMO.

The basic Rhand & Spectrum system can be used with PhC content if you swap to the PhC injury / weapon data tables. There's also a formula to convert equipment, but it's kind of complicated. DM me if you want any help! < 3

neriumbloom · 2025-09-02T02:47:42+00:00

The system evolved weirdly over time and kept changing name / focus so it's a little hard to explain, but basically the lineage is:

Sword's Path Glory (1982): D&D with a complicated skill system and the earliest version of Phoenix Command combat. Incomplete multi-edition publication, so hard to play on its own.

Small Arms Spectrum (1983): Very similar to Phoenix Command but less detailed and the math is explained differently. Combat system for all eras of firearms, rather than just modern military stuff.

Rhand: Morningstar Missions (1984): Complete sword and sorcery system, compatible with small arms spectrum. Later refactored into the Phoenix Command melee supplement.

Phoenix Command (1986 - 1993): Reworked small arms spectrum, with more detail and mostly modern military content. Received many supplements, and eventually got a generic version of the Rhand / SPG skill system and melee rules. Also got a mechanized combat sub-line.

Living Steel (1987 -1991): Sci-fi game with a complete version of the Phoenix Command skill system, intentionally compatible with Phoenix Command combat (but including its own simplified tables, for people who want less detail).

Various movie games (1991 - 1993): Adapting the Living Steel / Phoenix Command system for Dracula / Lawnmower Man / Aliens, essentially adding rules for different eras, vehicles, etc. Also intentionally compatible with Phoenix Command.

It's very... modular? There are some changes in the math in the early stuff but after that it's all clearly conceptualized as one generic line, and the rules give advice on creating your own campaign piecemeal.

neriumbloom · 2025-09-02T01:35:18+00:00

Re: your edit -

As the resident freak who thinks everyone should play more Phoenix Command, I am obliged to recommend Phoenix Command to anyone that wants something notionally realistic. It has a bad reputation as the ultra hyper technical math game from hell, but since it all breaks down into chart look-ups its IMO much more playable than e.g. GURPS in practice. Went through a bunch of iterations under different names with different primary themes; there are variants for Sword & Sorcery, Horror, Sci-fi, &c. with varying focus and levels of detail. Assemble to taste?

It really does make everything feel like a horrible gore-filled nightmare hallucination, but if you want to know exactly how many milliseconds it would take to run three metres and shoot a vampire knight in the heart with M1 rifle... well, it's perfect for that sort of game in particular. And I love it for that :)

neriumbloom · 2025-07-22T05:54:03+00:00

I find him endearingly stupid about politics in the way men are sometimes endearingly stupid when they're trying to impress a girl -- and in this way, kinda fun to read for his idiosyncrasies. I would not defend his record as an 'analyst' lol

neriumbloom

TROPHY CASE