Rascal walks The Longest Road

Episode Nine of the Rascal Radio Hour features the return of both Caelyn and Thomas to discuss such intellectual heights as what a Catan RPG might look like, tiny flank-and-rank wargames, and being a Jorden in a world full of La'Theal Voidhearts. Thomas is preparing to attend a very dangerous theater performance, and Caelyn was on her "old person medieval historical shit."

The crew discuss the anticipatory blow of tariffs on tabletop publishers, even though who is affected — and by what percentage — changes every single day, as well as the prospect of Paizo and R. Talsorian Games bringing smaller projects under their wings. Licensed RPGs continue to draw eyeballs and dollars, but Chase is strangely taken by that new Dungeons & Dragons beginner box...

You can find Rascal Radio Hour on Apple, Spotify, and all the other various podcatchers. Leaving a five-star review helps us climb the charts and convinces The Dice Mother to send us more of her sumptuous polyhedral eggs so that we may hatch her random percentage-based brood.

Here's an excerpt:

Caelyn: All Warhammer is scenario play now that there isn't just a version where you're encouraged to just be like, my guys are going to kill your guys. and whoever's left standing wins.

Chase: Fascinating. I thought that Warhammer was mostly just bashing across a big field.

Caelyn: No, no, because that's generally quite boring. That is not a fun game. It's very objective based. Spearhead is just a condensed version of that. And it's been great to say to people, "hey, you can buy this box and play a game rather than once you've bought this box, and you've bought this other box along with this thing and then you can play a game. This is much better, and it is genuinely good. I've seen a lot of people who are big Age of Sigmar players already who are playing a lot of it.

So King of War: Champions is quite a big deal. The thing that makes it really, really interesting is that it says explicitly that they've kept in the rank-and-flank style, which for those who don't know the lingo is where your units of little guys are in orderly ranks, and the positioning with those units is very important because basically you get a big advantage if you attack the flanks.

Chase: Isn't this what Warhammer: The Old World recently brought back?

Caelyn: Yeah, absolutely. The idea of a small, fast-playing, literally small– it's literally a smaller footprint so you can play on your coffee table or what have you. A game that size still using rank-and-flank is quite interesting. I'm quite intrigued to see what they do with it.

Thomas: What is the perception of rank-and-flank, aesthetically? Does it feel like an older way of playing games, or is there no kind of association like that?

Caelyn: I think it is, yeah. You look at Warhammer specifically, it was a big divide: you have Warhammer Fantasy and that's the rank-and-flank game; you have 40k and it's not a skirmish game, but it has guys on round bases that aren't all lined up because obviously, in a sci-fi setting, you're not gonna have guys lined up. It's not big Napoleonic blocks or pikemen. When they got rid of Warhammer Fantasy and brought in Age of Sigmar, then their fantasy game was in that style as well. At that point, they just got rid of rank-and-flank stuff altogether. As Chase brought up with The Old World, they just brought back Warhammer Fantasy, basically. A lot of historicals fall into the rank-and-flank style because it is a better sort of representation of that sort of style of warfare.

Chase: Sorry, I don't want to denigrate the sort of fantasy that Mantic Games is selling in Kings of War: Champions, which sounds like a mobile game title, I'll just say. It's a very sort freemium shovelware kind of name. But in the trailer, they're showing off these characters with names like The Bloody Cardinal, Alanus Sallustis, La'theal Voidheart, and then the last guy is named Jordan.

Caelyn: But spelled with an E!

Chase: Yeah, that's fantasy Jordan. You know, sometimes these game companies are just on their bullshit 100%. I love when there's no pretension about trying to be something other than what what you are.

Thomas: Okay, he's still Jorden Talensen. He has a last name. It's not like his name was just Kyle because that that would have been funny.

Chase: Sure, he's not Steve Johnson, the dwarf. But when you're Jorden in a world of apostrophized names and soubriquets like The Bloody Cardinal, you're still gonna feel a little out of place.