Andy Singleton has been modelling and painting most of his life and has been a professional commission figure painter for some years now. Here he shares his experience and tips of the trade with those collecting figures for the North African campaigns in WWII. The four main sections of the book cover British, Italian, German and US troops, as well as tips on assembly and painting camouflage uniforms. Each section is divided into three levels of complexity, 'conscript', 'regular' and 'elite', allowing the reader to build up an array of techniques as they gain confidence and experience. The emphasis is on achievable results and practical advice that is applicable to painting units or whole armies for wargaming purposes in a reasonable time frame, not on spectacular individual display pieces. Most of the figures featured in the numerous illustrations are sized either 28mm or 20mm but the techniques described are easily adaptable to smaller sizes and both plastic and metal figures are covered. Andy's clear, step-by-step guidance takes the reader through the process from the initial preparation and assembly of the figure, to finishing and basing.

An avid gamer and sharp media critic explains meritocracy's negative contribution to video game culture-and what can be done about it Video games have brought entertainment, education, and innovation to millions, but gaming also has its dark sides. From the deep-bred misogyny epitomized by GamerGate to the endemic malice of abusive player communities, gamer culture has had serious real-world repercussions, ranging from death threats to sexist industry practices and racist condemnations. In The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games, new media critic and longtime gamer Christopher A. Paul explains how video games' focus on meritocracy empowers this negative culture. Paul first shows why meritocracy is integral to video-game design, narratives, and values. Games typically valorize skill and technique, and common video-game practices (such as leveling) build meritocratic thinking into the most basic premises. Video games are often assumed to have an even playing field, but they facilitate skill transfer from game to game, allowing certain players a built-in advantage. The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games identifies deep-seated challenges in the culture of video games-but all is not lost. As Paul argues, similarly meritocratic institutions like professional sports and higher education have found powerful remedies to alleviate their own toxic cultures, including active recruiting and strategies that promote values such as contingency, luck, and serendipity. These can be brought to the gamer universe, Paul contends, ultimately fostering a more diverse, accepting, and self-reflective culture that is not only good for gamers but good for video games as well.

Welcome to the obsessive world of Fantasy Football, where managers will do anything to succeed. Every Saturday afternoon, 5.8 million people around the world settle down to see how their team will get on. But this isn't the team they support. It's THEIR team. They have spent hour after hour assessing injuries, swapping subs and tweaking formations. Because when the day is done and the scores are in, they want to be able to look in the mirror and say, 'THAT TRIPLE CAPTAIN CALL WAS AN ACT OF GENIUS!' David Wardale - writer for the UK's number one Fantasy Football site, Fantasy Football Scout - meets previous winners to discover how they beat millions to the crown. He reveals the leagues where failure involves outright humiliation and discovers just how low some managers will go to claim a psychological advantage. Along the way, he finds Saudi sheikhs, stats professors, most of Norway and a member of one of the biggest pop bands of all time, all of them united by their unflinching desire for Fantasy Football greatness.

Grab your katana, ready your best kung fu, and prepare to discover a whole new world of exciting adventure! The mysteries and wonders of the Dragon Empires are finally revealed! The continent of Tian Xia stretches from the polar ice in the north to well south of the equator - a realm where honorable samurai, devious ninja, martial artistry, strange spirits, and imperial dragons rule. The Dragon Empires Gazetteer also presents five new player character races - the birdlike tengus, reptilian nagaji, shapechanging foxlike kitsune, reincarnted spiritualists known as samsarans, and the shadowy masters of trickery called the wayang. An overview of life in the Dragon Empires offers a look at a new core pantheon (including more than a dozen brand-new deities), several new factions, and the challenges faced by a land recovering from the recent fall of a continental empire.

With annual gross sales surpassing 100 billion U.S. dollars each of the last two years, the digital games industry may one day challenge theatrical-release movies as the highest-grossing entertainment media in the world. In their examination of the tremendous cultural influence of digital games, Daniel Reardon and David Wright analyze three companies that have shaped the industry: Bethesda, located in Rockville, Maryland, USA; BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; and CD Projekt Red in Warsaw, Poland. Each company has used social media and technical content in the games to promote players' belief that players control the companies' game narratives. The result has been at times explosive, as empowered players often attempted to co-op the creative processes of games through discussion board forum demands, fund-raising campaigns to persuade companies to change or add game content, and modifications ("modding") of the games through fan-created downloads. The result has changed the way we understand the interactive nature of digital games and the power of fan culture to shape those games.

Creating an impromptu, original character every time the heroes meet a contact on a crowded space station or chat with a local on an alien planet can be a challenge, but the Starfinder Deck of Endless NPCs makes it as simple as drawing four cards from the deck.

These cards combine to form a unique NPC, each with their own role, motivation, personality trait, and secret agenda! With over 100 million different combinations, you are sure to get an interesting new character to add to your story every time!

The Starfinder Deck of Endless NPCs contains the following:

• 104 NPC cards, plus 6 rules cards explaining how to use the deck. The front of each card has a portrait of the NPC, featuring characters from dozens of species.
• The back of each card explains the character's role, goal, traits, and secret agenda, along with symbols to help determine some of the specific details.
• Includes species from across all Alien Archives, sourcebooks like the Pact Worlds, Starfinder Adventure Paths, and more!

Landscape science tells fascinating stories, whether in fiction or a role-playing game. Earth's varied terrain provides many examples of scene-specific challenges and resources for story characters, with distinctive land features, compelling locations, and intriguing traits. Landslides, floods, coastal erosion, glacier movement, and volcanism can deliver fresh plot points and alter the social character of an imagined region. Characters traveling different river types encounter very different puzzles, opportunities, and combat environments and the same variety awaits within other classic settings, such as caves, mountains, deserts, shorelines, and volcanic zones. Atypical landscapes such as tundra, karst, and vast glacier surfaces can breathe fresh air into any stories. This handbook is a reference source for creative writing and game world building. It delves deeply into many landscape characteristics that help set the tone, shape character behavior, and drive the plot. Chapters are divided into diverse geographic environments, from rivers and shorelines to caves and volcanoes, and show how knowledge of the terrain can deliver plot points, add veracity, pose key problems, establish conflict, and lead into the next scene. Discover how authors and game masters effectively weave land and terrain into their stories.

Today, it seems as if everyone from heroic-yet-angsty teenagers, to giggling schoolgirls, to middle-aged businessmen, to bored moms are finding themselves whisked away to save distant worlds from some kind of unspeakable evil. But how do you prepare for such an amazing adventure? And, more importantly, how do you make it through without getting horribly maimed or killed along the way? Fortunately, this handbook has analyzed the accounts of numerous heroes who have traveled to magical lands and returned to tell the tale in order to create the definitive guide to survival and success no matter where in the fantasyverse your adventures may take you. In these pages, you'll learn how to increase (or, if you prefer, decrease) your chances of successfully being chosen, what types of preparation and training you should undertake beforehand, and how to hit the ground running on arrival and become the legendary hero that you were always destined to be.**Makes no guarantees of destined heroism and cannot be held liable if it turns out that you are instead destined to be eaten by a giant toad.

Constructing a functional system of magic that helps readers suspend disbelief is a crucial part of worldbuilding in the fantasy genres. Yet creating a believable, compelling and original fictional universe can be daunting. To help inspire writers, this guide provides an overview of how magic has been understood in history and used in myth, legend and modern fiction. Different forms of magic are explored and a broad range of stories-from Nordic myths to modern novels-are described and referenced. Discussion explores how magic as a concept shapes, and is shaped by, fictional worlds and societies.

With annual gross sales surpassing 100 billion U.S. dollars each of the last two years, the digital games industry may one day challenge theatrical-release movies as the highest-grossing entertainment media in the world. In their examination of the tremendous cultural influence of digital games, Daniel Reardon and David Wright analyze three companies that have shaped the industry: Bethesda, located in Rockville, Maryland, USA; BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; and CD Projekt Red in Warsaw, Poland. Each company has used social media and technical content in the games to promote players' belief that players control the companies' game narratives. The result has been at times explosive, as empowered players often attempted to co-op the creative processes of games through discussion board forum demands, fund-raising campaigns to persuade companies to change or add game content, and modifications ("modding") of the games through fan-created downloads. The result has changed the way we understand the interactive nature of digital games and the power of fan culture to shape those games.

Actual play is a movement within role-playing gaming in which players livestream their gameplay for others to watch and enjoy. This new medium has allowed the playing of games to become a digestible, consumable text for individuals to watch, enjoy, learn from, and analyze. Bridging the gap between the analog and the digital, actual play is changing and challenging our expectations of tabletop role-playing and providing a space for new scholarship. This edited collection of essays focuses on Dungeons and Dragons actual play and examines this phenomenon from a variety of different disciplinary approaches. Authors explore how to define actual play, how fans interact with and affect the narrative and gameplay of actual play, the diversity of gamers (or lack thereof) within actual play media, and how audiences can use actual play media for more than mere entertainment.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the bestselling and most influential video games of the past decade. From the return of world-threatening dragons to an ongoing civil war, the province of Skyrim is rich with adventure, lore, magic, history, and stunning vistas. Beyond its visual spectacle alone, Skyrim is an exemplary gameworld that reproduces out-of-game realities, controversies, and histories for its players. Being Dragonborn, then, comes to signify a host of ethical and ideological choices for the player, both inside and outside the gameworld. These essays show how playing Skyrim, in many ways, is akin to "playing" 21st century America with its various crises, conflicts, divisions, and inequalities. Topics covered include racial inequality and white supremacy, gender construction and misogyny, the politics of modding, rhetorics of gameplay, and narrative features.

A lot of work has been done talking about what masculinity is and what it does within video games, but less has been given to considering how and why this happens, and the processes involved. This book considers the array of daily relationships involved in producing masculinity and how those actions and relationships translate to video games. Moreover, it examines the ways the actual play of the games maps onto the stories to create contradictory moments that show that, while toxic masculinity certainly exists, it is far from inevitable. Topics covered include the nature of masculine apprenticeship and nurturing, labor, fatherhood, the scapegoating of women, and reckoning with mortality, among many others.

THE WICKED WIZARD OF OZ is a brand new nightmarish gamebook - a multi-path book, very much in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, in which you choose the course of the story - inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum, and the Dieselpunk aesthetic movement. Anybody who has read and played Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland will have a very clear idea of what to expect!

Since the release of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, role-playing games have spawned a vibrant industry and subculture whose origins, characteristics, cultures and player experiences have been well explored. Yet there has been little attention devoted to the meaningful ways RPGs have shaped society at large over the last four decades. RPGs were influential on video game design and have been widely represented in film, television and other media. They have made their mark on other areas of society, as well, including education, social media, corporate training and the military. This collection of new essays illustrates the broad appeal and impact of role-playing games. Topics range from a critical reexamination of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, to the growing significance of RPGs in education, to the potential for ""serious"" RPGs to provoke awareness and social change. The contributors discuss the myriad subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which the values, concepts and mechanics of RPGs have infiltrated popular culture.

Science Fiction Hobby Games serves as a history and guide to tabletop gaming franchises set in original science-fictional milieux. Its subject is the pen and paper role playing games and model and counter based wargames that preceded modern videogames and still evolve alongside them, as well as the gamebooks, board games, card games and postal games that are their less famous cousins. Included are detailed critical overviews of more than a hundred fantastical universes published between 1969 and 2013, along with essays on popular types of tabletop game and the natures of their settings and stories. Throughout, sf games are treated as an integral part of the long history of science fiction, and as a new way of enabling its explorations of the future and other worlds. Based on the author's contributions to the Hugo Award winning third edition of the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this book contains an extra 20,000 words on additional games and other topics, specially written for this new version of the text.

Science Fiction Hobby Games serves as a history and guide to tabletop gaming franchises set in original science-fictional milieux. Its subject is the pen and paper role playing games and model and counter based wargames that preceded modern videogames and still evolve alongside them, as well as the gamebooks, board games, card games and postal games that are their less famous cousins. Included are detailed critical overviews of more than a hundred fantastical universes published between 1969 and 2013, along with essays on popular types of tabletop game and the natures of their settings and stories. Throughout, sf games are treated as an integral part of the long history of science fiction, and as a new way of enabling its explorations of the future and other worlds. Based on the author's contributions to the Hugo Award winning third edition of the Clute and Nicholls Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, this book contains an extra 20,000 words on additional games and other topics, specially written for this new version of the text.

The end of the 23rd century. Earth lies in the grip of a new Ice Age. Famine, cold and fanatic cults threaten what is left of civilization. Humanity is on the brink of extinction.

Nine of the strongest heroes of the age come seeking the ultimate prize: the Heart of Volent, an object with the power to reshape reality. All are ruthless, powerful, determined. To succeed they must work together. But only one can have the Heart.

Choose your alliances with care. Weigh up who to trust. Be ready for betrayal. When the moment comes, the future of mankind will rest on your judgement.

* * *

Critical IF books are interactive adventures with a difference. You can be a mutant with the power to warp reality. A soldier whose combat skills are a match for any foe. A stealthy assassin leaping between rooftops. An explorer who can survive in the harshest conditions. Be anyone you can imagine. Choose from almost five hundred different character types, each with their own unique skills.

Strong stories, vivid settings and compelling characters make Critical IF the game-changers of the interactive fiction genre. Put yourself in the heart of the story.

Do you want your critical hits to deal more than double damage? Want your arc rifle to have options beyond arcing to a new target? Think setting things on fire should be the beginning of what a flamethrower can do, rather than the only possibility? After you score a critical hit, draw a card and apply one of four different effects based on attack type.

These cards are designed to work with the Starfinder Roleplaying Game and can be used by players and GMs alike.

Even if your weapon already has critical hit effects, firing off that perfect shot has never been more fun!

For Johan Huizinga, play is the motor of humanity's cultural development, and it has accompanied us through history. However, since the late 20th century, its influence has been more pervasive than ever before, and gamification has become a buzzword in social and cultural life. Hand in hand with this cultural turn, theories of Postmodernism emerged, also privileging interactive playful behavior. If play drives culture, understanding it is therefore understanding culture in Postmodern times. Many of the core concepts of Postmodern thought also inform the new medium of the pen&paper role-playing game that coalesced at about the same time as Postmodern theories, a symptom of and feeding into the processes of cultural change. Analyzing these language games beyond their entertainment value shows how current socio-political conditions affect the shifting dynamic and mutual relationship between individual and society. A deep exploration of the complex interrelationship between narrative, game, players, and society raises questions of authority, agency, and responsibility that provide insights into the crisis of engagement that we see in our societies, while at the same time offering a new and original appreciation of the socio-political potential in games as the leading medium of the 21st century.

Digital role-playing games such as Rift, Diablo III, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning help players develop skills in critical thinking, problem solving, digital literacy and engagement. The author examines both the benefits and the drawbacks of role-playing games and their application to real-world teaching techniques. Readers will learn how to incorporate games-based instruction into their own classes and workplace training, as well as approaches to redesigning curriculum and programs.

This book explores video games as important cultural artifacts and as sources of powerful, compelling storytelling. It begins by considering the fundamental structures of video games-including immersion and player agency-and deepens the exploration of such elements by considering how each plays a role in storytelling. The book moves from the theoretical to the practical by considering numerous modern games and the stories they tell through careful, considered analysis of each title's story. Games considered at length include the Mass Effect series, BioShock, The Last of Us and many more. The book also explores genres like the visual novel, which are less frequently considered in video game study. What emerges from this book, which appeals to academics, game enthusiasts, and the general public, is the importance of considering video games as serious and important sources of storytelling exploring complex thematic subjects like identity, morality, and the impact of player choice.

Through classroom activities, wizard rock concerts and organizations like the Harry Potter Alliance, Harry Potter fans are using creativity to positively impact the world. This collection of essays and interviews examines how playful fandom - from fanfiction to Muggle quidditch, cosplay, role-playing games and even Harry Potter burlesque - not only re-imagines the canon but also challenges consumerism, questions notions of identity and fosters participatory culture. The contributors explore issues applicable to fan studies and performance studies at large, such as the role of performance, the nature of community, and questions of representation and ownership in the digital age. Presented in three sections, the essays discuss discrepancies between sanctioned versions of Harry Potter and fan creations, the reenactment and reinterpretation of the original narrative in fan performance, and collaborative and participatory performances that break down the boundaries between actors and audiences.