Four Tet – Three (a review?)

If I’m writing a review (if this even is a review; perhaps it’s more of a reflection) of a Four Tet album there are some things, some personal and some contextual, I need to get across in the opening paragraph(s), because either a; I mention them every time I write about Four Tet, or b; every other idiot does. So rather than waste time concocting those paragraphs, let’s just bullet them:

• “Everything Is Alright” from Pause was the first song I ever downloaded via Audiogalaxy when I got back home after finishing university
• His real name is Keiran Hebden
• A cute girl in the record shop sold me Pause in 2001
• In 2010, reader, I married her, and we played “Slow Jam” from Rounds during the ceremony
• Three is his 12^th album sort of
• I saw him live in 2003 and it was a bit disappointing and I saw him again in 2011 and it was AMAZING
• Something about ‘folktronica’
• When you take his pseudonyms and collaborations into account, he seems to be releasing music almost constantly and even I, as a big fan, cannot keep up
• Skrillex / Fred Again / Madison Square Gardens / Taylor Swift remix for his daughter
• He’s never released a bad record or even a mediocre one
• All his records kind of sound the same

There you go. I’m free now to write about Three.

I loved the slow-burn melancholy of “Three Drums” when it came out last year as a (then) stand-alone single, and also the length of it (Four Tet stretching-out to 8 minutes plus is very welcome in my world). But possibly what I loved most about it was the grit in the oyster: the slow building of almost feedback-like noise amongst the layers of laconic drums, sweet melody, and plangent strings. The insertion of that noise, that edge, did what I so often love in music, pushing me away and attracting me at the same time.

When “Loved” came out earlier this year I had a similar reaction. The languid hip-hop beat and beatific, melancholy synths were similarly disturbed, this time less by layers of feedback than some jarring, distorted percussive elements that interrupted the mix from leftfield. Both tracks also featured pseudo-ambient codas, periods of vatic space after the ‘song’ proper, if you will, had finished, where the music just continued to exist, peacefully, for no reason beyond the fact that it was lovely.

A few weeks later “Daydream Repeat” did the same thing again, this time strafing sheets of noise rising and falling within the mix almost from the off, obscuring the more dancefloor-oriented beat and the harp-like chiming riff that sounds like about a dozen things he’s done before without actually being that similar to any of them. This trend of injecting some woozy, almost My Bloody Valentine-ish noise into his music, was, predictably, something I found almost impossibly exciting. I browsed his recent releases to see what else I’d missed: a chill-out-esque collaboration with William Tyler, which is excellent; an entire album with Madlib; and – oh my! – a single called “Mango Feedback”! Surely this meant Hebden was prepping some kind of shoegazing hip hop opus?

“Mango Feedback” is actually a really skippy, two-step kind of thing with a typically twinkling, reverberating melody that might be played on a kora or some kind of unusual synth that Hebden probably bought on Mars (his Instagram often reveals him playing melodies on all manner of instruments I know not what they are). But it does feature a sweeping cloud of quasi-industrial noise, more like hydraulic brakes dying than ‘feedback’, but enough to justify the title.

“Mango Feedback” didn’t make the album in the end – it’s probably 50% too upbeat and twitchy – but hip hop and shoegaze definitely do feel like the strongest flavours running through Three. Hear “Skater”, which sounds like DJ Shadow remixing some shoegaze or dreampop track, the chiming guitars and distant, muffled vocal sample deep in the mix heavily redolent of Cocteau Twins (Pitchfork made this direct comparison but damnit I’d said this out loud to that cute record shop girl before I’d read their review).

There are other styles covered, though, of course: “Gliding Through Everything” is an unexpected diversion into practically beatless ambient territory immediately after “Loved” – where the beat is SO important, from its rhythm to its texture to its sheer weight of impact when you turn it up – sets the scene by opening the album, the juxtaposition unexpected without being jarring. Because somehow – is it his melodies, his textures, his ethos, his emotional palette? – Four Tet somehow always manages to sound almost exactly like Four Tet, even as he tries on different styles, genres.

This cohesion, this gestalt, has been aided for the last 23 years by Jason Evans – https://www.instagram.com/jasonevansfoto/?hl=en – who has done artwork on, I think, every Four Tet release since Pause. His rainbow colour palette, use of circular motifs and repeating paterns, and hazy, pseudo-nostalgic use of shallow focal depth has always seemed like an absolute perfect match to Hebden’s music, for me at least. Call it synaesthetic if you like, but Four Tet’s music so often sounds how bokeh (those lush, hazy balls of colour you get with a proper camera lens when you throw distant lights out of focus) looks, the two different sensory phenomenon evoking the same emotional response.

So, then, Three. Feedback, hip hop, codas (“31 Bloom” features another beautiful ending after the drums fade away), colours, ambience, emotions, bliss. The dancefloor, the living room, the great outdoors, the inside of your cerebellum. I could make a claim about it being his best album, or my favourite, but Rounds and There Is Love In You and New Energy and Sixteen Oceans have all occupied that spot before and shuffled amongst themselves ever since. Right now Three does exactly what I wanted it to do when I heard “Daydream Repeat” for the first time and identified the trend of noise/interference and ambient codas running through it, “Loved” and “Three Drums”, the latter of which may just be my favourite single thing he’s done.

I thought Sixteen Oceans was a little slight and pretty on first exposure, before it became a balm for the collective trauma of the pandemic. The last four years have accelerated and dragged at the same time. This feels like the first real spring since 2020. Another spring, another lush Four Tet album. Three feels more substantial, more emotionally rich. After experiencing trauma (don’t I know it), you cannot ever return to the pre-trauma status quo; by enduring trauma you are changed by it, and when you emerge on the other side you will be stronger, albeit scarred, for what you’ve been through. Your appreciation of the little things, hopefully, will have grown. Your desire to live life focussed by the knowledge that it can be turned upside-down unexpectedly. Three, to me, feels like it’s a bona fide product of life after the pandemic.

On Troll Slayers in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Troll Slayers are arguably the most iconic character archetype to have sprung from the Warhammer world. With their bright orange beards and mohawks, two-handed axes, tattoos, and bare-chests, they’ve become a visual signifier for the entire Warhammer Fantasy milieu, and have spread, as Fyre Slayers, into the Age of Sigmar universe (caveat: I know next-to-nothing about AoS). They’ve even been immortalised in Lego as a collectible minifigure, under the copyright-avoiding moniker ‘Battle Dwarf’.

In fact, it was seeing that Lego ‘Battle Dwarf’ in 2017 that rekindled an interest in Warhammer that had lain dormant since about 1998, and now has me, at 44 years old, running a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay campaign and a Blood Bowl league in what little spare time I have.

Because I loved Troll Slayers when I first discovered them, via WFRP back in about 1989, and there’s something about them that makes me still love them even now. The idea of a borderline berserk dwarf, driven by shame to atone through death in combat against a much stronger foe, appeals to adolescent boys. I can’t imagine why. Maybe it’s the Freudian drive to kill one’s father. Whatever it is, it’s not by mere coincidence that each of the four editions of WFRP have featured a Slayer on the cover.

But Slayers are problematic. There are probably more questions about Troll Slayers in the online WFRP groups I’m in (from both GMs and players) than about any other career. A lot of people see them as bloodthirsty loners, combat tanks with little or no roleplay potential, who drag the party into dangerous situations and contribute little in roleplay-heavy sessions (which, as everyone knows, are the best sessions; less dice-crunching and more imagination!). Nothing more than murderhobos or dumb-as-rocks barbarians.

Others think they’re far too prominent in the iconography given how rare they ought to be in the lore. Dwarfs aren’t super-common, never mind shame-filled dwarfs with mohawks and death wishes. I even saw someone do a forensic analysis of how many depictions of Slayers there were in the 4e rulebook (a lot; but they’re all the same Slayer, because most of the illustrations follow the same core characters, so there’s the same Witch Hunter and Wizard present a lot, too).

But those people who think Slayers are problematic are wrong. Because they’re just about the richest characters for players to delve into, if you’re willing to do the work.

One of the things that marks WFRP out from the likes of D&D is that you’re not a ‘hero’. Players adopt the character of a Rat Catcher, or an Artisan’s Apprentice, or a Servant: ordinary people plucked from mundane lives and thrust into perilous situations, rather than sorcerers and paladins on noble quests. Slayers play into this perfectly by running counter to the base instinct towards heroism of comparable characters. They don’t want to slay the dragon; they want to be slain by it. They’re the opposite of heroic.

What further marks a Slayer out from their adventuring colleagues is their backstory: most other characters will be human, and young, and at the start of their ‘story’. The Slayer, by necessity, has a backstory, a shame, that has caused them to take the Slayer oath, and it’s up to the Slayer player and the GM to make sure that this is represented in how the character is portrayed.

Because Slayers are not murderhobos or barbarians. They carry deep emotional scars and trauma. In fact, the dwarf species as a whole carries generational trauma; this is what ‘grudges’ are. Dwarfs are not warlike or violent creatures like orcs or ogres; they’ve been forced to defend their ancestral homes for thousands of years and that’s left scars on their collective psyche. They live long and remember longer, and they use storytelling as a living historiography; they’re loyal, driven by family (clan), they love to drink and talk and sing and tell tales. Slayer players can and should use all of this because they are still dwarfs. It’s not a mistake that ‘Entertain’ is in their 4^th edition skills.

If there’s anything wrong with the Slayer career scheme in 4^th edition WFRP (and 1^st, to be fair), it’s the lack of skills from their previous life, because unlike every other career in the game there is always a significant ‘before’ for a Slayer. To some extent the species-specific starter skills and talents for dwarfs address this but it’s perhaps not quite enough. As a GM I’d be working with a Slayer PC pre-campaign to help them understand the mindset and dynamic of a Slayer, and maybe allow them to pick a couple of skills and perhaps a talent from another career to represent the vestiges of their former self that may still come out once in a while. I don’t think this would give them an unfair advantage, and it should help with their roleplay by giving them more context and tools.

It’s also important to remember that Slayers, despite their oath, don’t ‘want’ to die: they feel obliged to purge their shame by dying in combat against a worthy foe, which is very different. They didn’t choose to take this oath and walk out on their past life, their family, their home; they were compelled to do so by some terrible event (of which they will never speak, especially to a manling) that has caused them immense shame. There can and should be massive conflict in them, and fear of what lies ahead. They’re stoical, not insane, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t regret having taken the Slayer oath.

When we started our WFRP campaign just over three years ago I let the party choose between rolling their careers randomly, or choosing to be a Slayer or a Rat Catcher, which I consider to be the two most iconic careers of the setting, because I wanted us to embrace the clichés and the archetypes of Warhammer. Two chose randomness (a physician and an outlaw), and the other two acquiesced to my desires. We’re very lucky that our Slayer player is very good (the whole party is, to be fair, or we wouldn’t still be here three years later, eager for every session), and gets the dynamic of his character. He wrote up a backstory but never shared it with the other players or their characters, and occasionally lets things leak out; he seems to really dislike halflings for some reason, and has some kind of trade-based background. He is, clearly, a combat tank, but he brings an awful lot more tha that to the table. He’s also taken other careers mechanically when appropriate (we’re playing The Enemy Within, and he accepted Josef’s Boatman offer, for instance) while maintaining Slayer as his vocation, and I’ve allowed him to move freely back into the Slayer career path when it’s narratively suitable to do so.

His interactions with other dwarfs are necessarily strained at points (he is a massive signifier of shame and guilt to his entire species, and some dwarfs will, of course, find that very uncomfortable) and he’s used that well. At the end of every session (we play in short-ish, 2.5 hour bursts) I allow my players to each award one of the others 10 experience points for roleplaying, and our Slayer is a regular recipient of these. In fact, in our last session (which was largely combat-free), he received a full house, in that he gave his to someone else but all three other players gave theirs to him. Proof, if it were needed, that there’s no reason whatsoever for Slayers to be left behind in the roleplaying stakes.

On Blood Bowl Star Players vol. 2

Here are some more amateur thoughts…

Cindy Piewhistle / Bomber Dribblesnot

Useful for: Cindy: Flings / Dwarfs / Norse / Humans; Bomber: Greenskins / Skaven

Useful at: causing chaos

Star Player bombers are a pain in the arse to play against, and their low cost to hire has significantly altered the game’s meta for the teams to whom they are available (try facing an Ogre team with Cindy AND Bomber); everybody recognises this.

Slower and far more fragile than Bomber Dribblesnot (7+ down from 8+ is only 1 difference, but statistically comes up far more often on armour rolls), if Cindy is worth 50,000 gold pieces then her goblin alternative ought to be more like twice the price, but actually they both come in at a the same ridiculously low price.

Cindy’s special move – chucking two pies/bombs at once – is also arguably less effective than Bomber’s – being able to explode one that someone catches automatically – especially as it gets her sent off immediately rather than at the end of a drive. That said, if your opponent is about to score and the opposition are bunched up, chucking two bombs before she’s likely to be sent off anyway is a good way to go.

The main boon to Cindy is her availability to teams who otherwise couldn’t access bombers: humans, dwarfs, halflings, Norse, etc etc, especially those who often don’t have low enough team value to gain inducement money but who might have a bit spare in the coffers to spend as the overdog without inflating the opposition’s budget too much. All of a sudden the chaos of bombs on the pitch is available to lots more teams.

 

Glart Smashrip

Useful for: Skaven / Greenskins / Chaos

Useful at: blocking / blitzing

Giant rats don’t exist, obviously, especially corpulent ones with nasty claws. Glart adds muscle to a skaven team, and for my money is a more interesting and useful purchase for them than the most famous rat – after all the other rat is just VERY fast and agile, and doesn’t really offer much more to a skaven team than a bunch of gutter runners already bring. But a ST4 piece with Claws and Grab, who can frenzy blitz you once a game, and who you can’t push away from you? He’s a nasty, crowd-surfing roadblock, a rat-faced dwarf-killer. I saw someone describe coaching skaven as being like “coaching a panic-attack” once, which made a lot of sense; Glart adds a bit of pitch-control to that otherwise unpredictable experience.

 

Hakflem Skuttlespike

Useful for: Chaos / Greenskins / Skaven

Useful at: scoring (lots)

Hakflem is a freak, obviously, the best scoring-machine in the game. BUT, skaven coaches, think twice about spending your gold on him: is there anything he can do that a couple (or four) skilled-up Gutter Runners can’t do? And do you really want him hogging your SPP? Rats really benefit from numbers advantage, so wouldn’t Glart Smashrip be a better purchase?

No, Hakflem comes into his own when playing for teams who wouldn’t ordinarily have access to someone this fast and slippery: namely chaos teams and greenskins. Dodging practically everywhere on a 2+ with a built-in reroll, snatching the ball off his own teammates and then sprinting for the endzone: he can absolutely change the game in those circumstances. Imagine facing down a wall of chaos blockers and beastmen, only to have this insane heart-attack of a player burst through your defensive lines with the ball and score.

Deeproot Strongbranch

Useful for: Flings

Useful at: blocking / (Fling) throwing

First choice on many a fling coach’s roster, Deeproot is the strongest player in the game, has Block and +2 Mighty Blow for removing people from the pitch easily, never takes root like other treemen, and can chuck a fling better than anybody else. Alongside two other trees he makes an absolutely formidable frontline.

But he’s really expensive, and really slow. For the same price you can get Griff – a hyper-mobile blodging touchdown threat – or, for 10,000gp more, Rumbelow AND Puggy, giving you two Block players, one with Tackle and St4 on a blitz, and the other a blodger with a built-in personal reroll. I’m playing flings this season and have only taken him a couple of times; he’s formidable at what he does, but I think I value mobility more.

The Swift Twins

Useful for: Elves
Useful at: blitzing / throwing

The Swift Twins are great fun, and can really bolster a beginner elf team or a tournament build – what elf coach doesn’t want a Mighty Blow/Tackle blitzer and the best thrower in the game? – but, and this is a BIG but, they cost 340,000gp. No elf EVER has that amount available in inducements, and if you’re the overdog and have that in your treasury to fritter away then you’re basically also hiring Morg for your opponent.

So the question isn’t what The Swift Twins are useful for (their roles are very clearcut), but, rather, when the hell do you get to use them? And the answer is pretty much never, sadly. If they were split up and cost 150,000 (blitzer) and 190,000 (thrower) each I could see them appearing much more often. As it is they suffer from the usual elf Star Player problem: if you spend all your treasury on replacing dead players and your team value bloats quickly, you never get to use any.

On Blood Bowl Star Players, vol. 1

I’ve been playing a lot of Blood Bowl over the last couple of years; I used to play 30 years or so ago, and picked it up again when visiting Matt (best friends since we were 4) in late 2021. Since then we’ve run a few leagues, playing games in person, via a crazy webcam set-up, and using Fumbbl.

Blood Bowl, if you don’t know, is the ridiculous bastard child of chess, Lord of the Rings, and American Football, wherein team of dwarfs, or elves, or orcs, of halflings, or lizardmen, or whatever, try to kill each other / score touchdowns. It was great fun, if infuriating, when we were 12, and it remains pretty much the same now. You pick a team, coach them through a league, and develop your players as they become more experienced via scoring touchdowns, making passes, or murdering goblins. You also chuck dice across the room in frustration when you fail to pick up the ball on a 2+ roll and cry out to the gods at the unfairness of it all quite a lot.

There are loads of resources for coaches to help them improve their ‘coaching’ online – podcasts, tactics websites, YouTube channels, etc etc – but one thing that I’ve found frustratingly lacking is written advice on Star Players. Star Players are, obviously, really good, famous Blood Bowl players, who you can hire for the occasional game when you have enough gold or are a facing a strong enough opponent that the imbalance requires you to pay for inducements to help balance things out.

But who to choose? What are they all good at? Some are obvious from their statistics, or else just infamous after 35+ years of the game existing, but others are less so. And I wanted to know who I could make most use of.

So, in the absence of other people having written about them (there are videos and podcasts etc, but I prefer my advice silent and readable most of the time), I did what I used to do (about music), and wrote it myself…

I’ve not played enough with every Star Player yet (or even half of them) to be anywhere near an authority, and there are many, many, many, many better coaches then me out there, but I have used (and faced) a bunch of them (and I still think I can write, blog-style, about just about anything reasonably well), so who knows, this may help some people…

So, here’s vol. 1 of my thoughts about Star Players in Blood Bowl (PS. if you’re still here looking for music recommendations then the James Holden and Mitski albums from this year are absolute masterpieces)…

Zolcath the Zoat

Useful for: Wood Elves / Elven Union
Useful at: blitzing / being a safety

Zolcath is a tough one in more ways than one. All Elf teams lack strength, so to have a reliable (no negatrait) St5 piece who can move 5-7 squares a turn (MA5 with Sure Feet) is a big boon. For woodies, Zolcath is a mobile threat completely unlike a treeman, who basically sticks to your line of scrimmage and hopes enough people stay close enough to batter; Zolcath on the other hand can maraud around the pitch and lend muscle where needed.

That said, like a lot of Star Player big guys, he’s not got Block, which means you need to be careful with him. He does have Juggernaut, so Blitzing is fairly safe, and if he ends up near your opponent’s ball carrier he’s likely to freak them out enough with Disturbing Presence that they don’t want to pass, while his Prehensile Tail makes dodging away tricky too. Ag4+ means his special skill (basically a one-off use of Hypnotic Gaze) isn’t something you can rely on to change the game. He’s pretty expensive too, at 230,000gp, and elf teams often have high Team Values, so he’s a bit of a luxury. Maybe he’s an option when you need to burn some of your treasury down.

So what is he on the pitch? I’m not 100% sure. A safety/sweeper, perhaps, or a blitzing cage-breaker. Or perhaps someone who can chase down and Blitz / Mighty Blow an opposing thorn in your side off the pitch, or clear a path for a Catcher to run through.

Just don’t waste Zolcath on the line of scrimmage, where he’ll get stuck and likely ganged-up on (because that’s what happens to St5 stars). Although Regeneration means there’s a 50/50 chance he’ll come back even if they do manage to really hurt him. All things considered, he’s such a spectacular model on the pitch, visually, that he’s likely to take a lot of your opposing coach’s attention, even if he’s not a game-winner or changer in his own right.

Wilhelm Chaney

Useful for: Undead (any)
Useful at: killing the ball carrier

Werewolves are some of the best starting players in the game; brutal blitzers who can burst through a shield to score on offence, or lurk at the back as a vicious safety on defence, especially when paired up with a side-stepping wraith. And Wilhelm Chaney is the turbo-charged, bestest-boy werewolf of them all.

St4, Frenzy, Wrestle and Claws have him pulling down, crowd-surfing (or just murdering) the ball-carrier with alarming regularity. I assume GW gave him Catch as a visual joke so they could sculpt him with a ball in his mouth; who on any team likely to hire him is going to throw him a pass? Useful for hand-offs and catching kick-offs I guess, but you don’t want him hogging SPPs by scoring, so you’re best off putting a Ghoul under that High Kick. No, keep him back, keep him free, and watch him eat catchers and runners for breakfast.

Rumbelow Sheepskin

Useful for: Flings / Dwarfs
Useful at: blitzing

Rumbelow is a vaguely comical figure – a halfling! riding a sheep! wot larks! might as well be the mythical badger-rider from WFRP – until you actually use him on the pitch. Then, it quickly becomes apparent that – AV8+ notwithstanding – he’s actually just about the most (cost) effective Star Player in the game if you’re after a blitzer / safety. Block, Tackle, and Juggernaut make him pretty formidable, but add in Horns for that lush ST4 blitz, and all of a sudden he’s dumping people off the pitch with relative ease. And then you realise that he’s also got Leap, so the possibility of cage-diving with a two-dice block to choose from is real!

He is, however, only Ag 3+, so not quite dancing into a cage like a wardancer. And that low AV – though higher than his halfling brethren – makes him more than a little glass-canon-esque. But! He’s only 170,000gp, meaning fling teams can probably take him every game. And they should; I’ve had more success with him than Zug or Ivar, who cost a lot more. I can see him adding serious value to Human and Dwarf teams, too. Keep him out of the scrum so he doesn’t get hit back (and never follow-up unless you Pow), and he can be worth his weight in pies. I’m playing halflings this season and have induced Rumbelow four times: he’s got six casualties in those games.

Puggy Baconbreath

Useful for: Flings / Humans
Useful at: unexpected touchdowns / being thrown

People sometimes refer to Karla von Kill or Ivar Eriksson as ‘mini Griffs’, and I can understand why, but in actuality on the pitch they both behave in quite different ways: Karla the big guy blitzer, Ivar the team-player who elevates those around him. Puggy Baconbreath, however, kind of is a mini-Griff, in that he can do a bit of everything, and do it much better than his teammates…

Stronger than a regular ‘fling, and blessed with Blodge and Nerves of Steel, he can credibly knock down players much bigger than him (admittedly with an assist for safety) and is also incredibly difficult to get the ball off. Plus, like Griff, he has an inbuilt reroll once a game. There’s no one better at being thrown across the pitch, landing safely, and scampering home a touchdown. He’s been the difference that’s won games for halfling teams I’ve used, but he can also add tactical options to dwarf or human teams: a genuinely agile, cheap ball-carrier for the bearded ones, and, in tandem with an ogre, a credible one-turn-threat for humans. For 120,000 gold pieces (and a massive sandwich), he’s a steal. Just never, ever let anyone hit him; even with Blodge he’s still only AV7+.

Akhorne the Squirrel

Useful for: Everyone
Useful as: blitzing

I’ve never used Akhorne on my team, but I’ve faced him enough times to know that he can be a pain in the bum – he’s fast, he’s got Claws, he gets two goes at every dauntless roll, he’s got Frenzy and Jump Up AND Side Step, and he dodges everywhere on a 2+, which all adds up to a very effective blitzer, for only 80,000gp! But he’s also St1 and AV6+ with no Block skill, so if you can catch him and stamp on him, he basically dies.

The trick with Akhorne is that, because he’s a squirrel, it’s easy to overlook him in favour of bigger targets, leaving him free to run amok through your team removing linemen from the pitch left, right and centre. So, you need to deal with him, but doing so can very easily distract you from doing what you ought to be doing (trying to win the game), leaving people out of position and opening up holes for bona fide scoring threats to run through.

If 80,000gp is all you can afford for inducements then he’s a brilliant irritant, especially against well-armoured, slow-moving teams, where his agility and Claws come in very useful (I imagine him basically getting stuck in your helmet and slashing your eyes out).

Eldril Sidewinder

Useful for: Wood Elves / Elven Union
Useful at: scoring / cage breaking

Despite the Mohawk (and the description) Eldril isn’t a Wardancer in the Wood Elf sense: he’s actually a fancy, dancing Elven Union Catcher. No Leap and no Block means he’s not going to dive into cages to steal the ball back; instead he’s intercepting opposition passes (on the rare occasions they happen) with On The Ball, catching passes in insane situations thanks to Nerves Of Steel and Dodge, and, most crucially, disabling key players with Hypnotic Gaze.

It’s that latter aspect that’s perhaps key to understanding Eldril. Yes he’s an amazing Catcher and a huge scoring threat, but the fact that he can run up to the corner of a cage and cause someone shielding the ball to lose their tackle zone and thus let one of his teammates (be they Wardancer or Blitzer) to get in and punch the ball carrier, and do that EVERY TURN, is massive.

Eldril does suffer the typical Elf problem of being quite expensive, and thus not available very often, but he adds something significant to any flavour of ennui-laden, pointy-eared show-offs he plays for. Just avoid being hit, and don’t try hitting anyone else either.

Griff Oberwald

Useful for: Flings / Dwarfs / Humans / Norse
Useful at: hogging the limelight

Clearly, Griff Oberwald is awesome, and his reputation precedes him. With St4, Ag2+, Block, Dodge (and Fend these days too), MA7, Sprint and Sure Feet, and his own personal once-a-game reroll, he can basically run anywhere and do anything. Steal the ball? Yep. Blitz a TD threat? Absolutely. Slug it out on the line of scrimmage? If he has to. Catch on a 2+ and sprint 10 spaces to the endzone while dodging through tackle zones? Easy peasy.

The downside is that he’s likely to hog SPPs by scoring all your touchdowns (and maybe even clearing the opposition off the pitch, too). And he’s expensive, obviously, although nowhere near as much as Morg ‘n’ Thorg.

Also, bizarrely, Griff seems to have a habit of being hit hard and dying, at least in games I’ve been part of: more than once I’ve seen him removed by freak dice rolls early on, including an epic self-casualty double-skull reroll into skull, 12, 12 in the first block of the first turn when he was hired in by an Imperial Nobility team. Obviously that’s a fluke of the dice, but if Nuffle doesn’t want you to take Griff then Nuffle’s going to remove him…

That said, though, gold piece for gold piece, Griff is the most effective player in Blood Bowl. Stick him on a dwarf team and he changes the entire meta and will win games almost single-handedly. Put him with halflings and all of a sudden you have a credible TD threat and ball-winner. Put him with humans or Norse, and, well…

As agile as an elf and as strong as a saurus, in the same way that the basic Human team does everything quite well, Griff does everything brilliantly.

Ivar Eriksson

Useful for: Flings / Norse / Humans / Dwarfs
Useful as: blocking, enhaning the team

Statswise, Ivar looks a bit like a Happy Shopper Griff Oberwald (see also Karla von Kill), making him a very useful St4 addition to lots of teams, but his skills make him a very different proposition on the pitch.

Tackle and Guard together – plus AV9+, one better than most of his Norse brethren – make him arguably the best lineman in the game. Stick him on the line of scrimmage or a corner of a cage and he makes everyone around him better. Even more so when you realise his once-per-drive special play is to be able to reposition a nearby teammate, allowing you to bring that yhetee back into base contact for a Block rather than using up your Blitz, or moving someone to give a much-needed assist or exert a tacklezone on a TD threat.

If you need him to grab the ball and run with it, he can; if you need him to Blitz someone out of the way he can, but he definitely excels by directing the action from the thick of it.

Norse can be rather unsophisticated bashers, but Ivar gives them a serious degree of tactical subtlety. St4, Block, Guard, and Tackle make him a very reliable safety or sacker, AV9+ means he’s not a glass cannon, and while he’s nowhere near as flashy as Griff he’s also not going to hog SPPs either. In fact, he’s going to help everyone around him play better, which is a really valuable thing for a Star Player to do.

Karla von Kill

Useful for: Flings / Dwarfs / Humans / Norse
Useful at: blitzing Big Guys / sacking the ball carrier

Karla von Kill is a very appealing Star because there’s nothing remarkable about her: she’s just very good at hitting people, and decent value too.

At St4 with Block and Dodge she’s tough to knock down, and having Jump Up means that, even if she does get knocked down, she’s going to stand up on a 2+ and hit you right back, and hard. Dauntless also makes her a very effective Big Guy killer – on a 2+ she’s one-dicing even a St6 treeman, so if you can set her up with an assist she’s two-dicing anyone but Deeproot easily, and her Indomitable skill means she can even three-dice him once a game if you’re canny.

Dodge also means she can get into position well to break a cage, and if you’ve marked the corners then she’s potentially two-dicing a ball-carrier. She’d be a very effective ball-carrier herself, actually, as long as you’re prepared to risk a hand-off or else have her hog all your SPPs.

AV9 makes her fit very well with a Norse team (as does her Valkyrie-esque winged headgear, aesthetically), where she becomes a very reliable, very accomplished blitzer who’s not going to Frenzy into danger or suffer from being a glass cannon. For Humans and Imperial Nobles, she’s a Happy Shopper Griff Oberwald in some ways (that’s in no way a pejorative), and less likely to overshadow your Catchers in the TD stakes.

For Dwarfs or Halflings, she offers manoeuvrability and strength together, both of which are things these teams need. She’d make a very good safety/sweeper, though lack of Tackle and Wrestle prevent her from being truly great at that, so she’s probably best thought of as a pure blitzer, making holes in the opposition lines for ball carriers to run through.

210,000gp isn’t cheap, but it’s not exactly expensive either – Karla is well worth spending your inducement money on, and maybe dipping into your treasury too. So, is she just Zara the Slayer (a Star Player from previous editions) without the knives? Yes, but given that this makes her cheaper and therefore more accessible, that’s pretty awesome.

Lord Borak the Despoiler

Useful for: Chaos / Skaven
Useful at: blitzing / fouling

Lord Borak isn’t just an Agony Uncle, he’s also a monster on the pitch; very strong, reliable, tough, and surprisingly mobile and agile, too. Like Griff and Varag, he’s the essence of his principal team (Chaos Chosen) turned up the max.

Although it’s tempting with St5, AV10+ and Block, you don’t want to get him caught up on the line of scrimmage, because he’ll just invite people to gang up on him and trap him there. Instead, to get the best out of him, use him as a roaming blitzer/fouler, punching holes in defensive lines or kicking prone players off the pitch.

But be careful with the latter part; although Lord Borak is very good indeed at fouling, with Dirty Player (+2) and Sneaky Git increasing his chances of removing players but also meaning he’ll only get sent off half as often as anyone else, I’d still never commit a foul early in the game with him. You have to balance the risk of fouling with a 260,000gp player in any turn before number 16. Blitz people off for the first 10-12 turns, and then think about fouling.

Don’t forget the extra re-roll he brings with him, too; like Ivar Eriksson and Grombrindal, the White Dwarf, Lord Borak makes your entire team better while he’s on the pitch. That extra re-roll, deployed at the right time, can win you a game.

Varag Ghoul-Chewer

Useful for: Greenskins / Skaven
Useful at: blitzering

Varag likes to fight, and he’s very good at it. He’s fast (MA6) for a Black Orc, and St5 with Block and Mighty Blow makes him reliably dangerous. Factor in Jump Up and Ag3+, and even if he does get knocked down, he’s probably going to hurt you back next turn if you don’t run away (and maybe even if you do).

He’s not going to dance through your defensive lines like a greenskin Griff Oberwald, but if the dice go well for him, he’s likely to take someone off the pitch practically every turn if your opponent isn’t careful. In much the same way as Griff is the uber-Human, taking everything that characterises that team and turning it up to 11, Varag is the uber-Orc: strong, brutal, unsubtle, and effective.

He is as expensive as Griff, at 280,000gp, and I’m not sure he’s as much of a game-changer. You could get a wizard, Fungus the Loon and Bomber Dribblesnot for the same price. But if you need fast muscle, there’s only one person better than Varag…

Morg ‘n’ Thorg

Useful for: Everyone (except Undead)
Useful at: blitzing / throwing team-mates

Challenging opinion alert! Morg ‘n’ Thorg is rubbish. Or, he does something to my dice that makes them rubbish. Any time I’ve induced him he’s done NOTHING other than roll double skulls and get kicked off the pitch. (When he’s been induced against me, on the other hand…) He’s an absolute gang-block magnet and even more of a gang-foul magnet. Coaches go insane trying to remove him as quickly as possible.

But that’s because no one else is as effective at removing people from the pitch as Morg ‘n’ Thorg is. No one else is as effective at blitzing through defenses like a wrecking ball and scoring, either. (Obviously Griff is great at blitzing through and scoring too, but not like a wrecking ball.) And because of this, no one else is as expensive as Morg ‘n’ Thorg, which means that you’re unlikely to ever see him deployed for anyone but halflings or snotlings.

On the rare occasions you do get to use him, he makes a terrifying cage front-corner, especially if paired up with Black Orcs or Chaos Blockers (although it’s very unlikely he’ll end up playing in teams with those types of players often). But I think his best role is as a roving killer; partner him up with a lineman to make ganging-up on him tough and to enable 3-dice blocks where you can, and then just go and brutally assassinate any scoring threats.

Records I have listened to in 2023 (so far…)

Inspired by Rob (from Devon Record Club) (who was in turn inspired by Stewart Lee’s annual rund-up of his cultural consumption) I have been keeping a little list, on my phone, of every record I’ve listened to this year. I don’t use Spotify etc, so there’s no way for me to automate this process – I’ve literally just got a list in my Notes app that I update every time I put a CD on, or stream something from our own server. Which is to say that this list is as fallible as I am – sometimes I forget at the time, and then try to remember things later, or pile up recent physical choices and then add them all at once when it gets too big. I’ve also – through lack of foresight or interest, I’m not sure – not noted down how many times I’ve listened to something. I’ve just noted it the first time I listened to it. And maybe a second time if I forgot I’d already listened to it and written down. And then maybe a third if I forgot etc etc etc.

So this list is a rough record of what I’ve chosen to listen to, in full, as an album (lol 40-year-old-man) between 1 January 2023 and now, 5 July 2023. It should be noted that the single record I have listened to WAY more than any other is the new James Holden album, which I’ve basically had on repeat for the last two and a half months.

1. Richard Dawson & Circle – Henki
2. Self Esteem – Prioritise Pleasure
3. Dan Deacon – Mystic Familiar
4. Taylor Swift – Folklore
5. Daniel Avery – Ultra Truth
6. Kelly Lee Owens – Inner Song
7. Sons of Kemet – Black to the Future
8. Floating Points – Crush
9. Big Joanie – Back Home
10. Field Music – Flat White Moon
11. The Weather Station – Ignorance
12. Colin Stetson – All this I do for glory
13. Colin Stetson – New history warfare volume 3: to see more light
14. Colin Stetson – New history warfare volume 2: judges
15. Caribou – Andorra
16. The Necks – Drive by
17. Yusuf kamaal – black focus
18. Do make say think – you, you’re a history in rust
19. Four tet – new energy
20. Robyn – honey
21. Field works – ultrasonic
22. Beastie boys – Paul’s boutique
23. Bjork – post
24. Owen Pallett – heartland
25. Apparat – walls
26. Talk talk – the colour of spring
27. Ricardo Villalobos – alcochofa
28. Talk talk – spirit of Eden
29. Owen Pallett – in conflict
30. Grimes – visions
31. Nils frahm – all melody
32. Grizzly bear – painted ruins
33. Harmonia – deluxe
34. The beta band – the three EPs
35. The necks – open
36. The necks – unfold
37. The necks – three
38. Television – marquee moon
39. My bloody Valentine – EPs
40. My bloody Valentine – mbv
41. Brian eno – music for airports
42. Stars of the lid – ballasted orchestra
43. Polar Bear – same as you
44. Burt Bacharach et al – The look of love
45. The National – trouble will find me
46. The national- high violet
47. De La soul – 3ft high and rising
48. Owen Pallett – island
49. Taylor swift – 1989
50. Wayne shorter – juju
51. William basinski – disintegration loops 1
52. Deafheaven – infinite granite
53. The necks – hanging gardens
54. Jenny Lewis and the Watson twins – rabbit fur coat
55. Joan as policewoman – real life
56. Orbital – in sides
57. Oren ambarchi – shebang
58. Manitoba – start breaking my heart
59. Air – moon safari
60. Anna Meredith – varmints
61. Caribou – the milk of human kindness
62. Gillian welch – time (the revelator)
63. Jim o rourke – bad timing
64. James Holden and the animal spirits – James Holden and the animal spirits
65. Sebastian rochford and kit downes – a short diary
66. Yo La tengo – I can hear the heart beating as one
67. Orbital – monsters exist
68. Julianna barwick – nepenthe
69. James Holden – the inheritors
70. Matthew Bourne – moogmemory
71. Matthew dear – asa breed
72. Pantha du Prince – black noise
73. Mitski – be the cowboy
74. Minotaur shock – orchard
75. Shabaka and the ancestors – wisdom of the elders
76. The necks – drive by
77. The necks – chemist
78. Arthur Russel – the world of Arthur Russel
79. Floating points – elaenia
80. CAn – future days
81. Helena hauf – qualm
82. Four tet – morning/evening
83. The necks – travel
84. Weezer – blue album
85. Beastie boys – check your head
86. House of blondes – the one trip
87. Katy Gately – loom
88. Grimes – visions
89. Beastie boys – I’ll communication
90. Aphid twin – syro
91. Beastie boys – Paul’s boutique
92. Floating points – crush
93. Taylor swift – 1989
94. Taylor swift – red
95. Taylor swift – lover
96. The sounds of science – beastie boys
97. Destroyer – Labryinthitis
98. Beastie boys – to the five boroughs
99. Beastie boys – hot sauce committee
100. Four tet – sixteen oceans
101. Sarah machlachlan – fumbling towards ecstasy
102. Sons of Kemet – black to the future
103. Make-up – save yourself
104. Micachu and the shapes – jewellery
105. Beaulah – the coast is never clear
106. Orbital – brown
107. Soul jazz records / various artists – kaleidoscope
108. Portico quartet – Isla
109. Swans – leaving meaning
110. Bark psychosis – hex
111. Dawn Richard and Spencer’s zahn – pigments
112. Panda bear – person pitch
113. Gabriel’s – angels and queens part 1
114. Boygenius – the record
115. James Holden – imagine this is a high dimensional space of all possibilities
116. Orbital – optical delusion
117. Katie Gately – fawn/brute
118. Lucy Dacus – home video
119. Kelly Lee Owens – lp 8
120. Yo La tengo – this stupid world
121. The National – first two pages of Frankenstein
122. Grimes – art angels
123. Patrick wolf -the night safari
124. Yo La tengo – electro-pura
125. Disco inferno – the five EPs
126. Floating points and pharaoh sanders – promises
127. Floating points – reflections mojave desert
128. Nadine shah – kitchen sink
129. Sons of Kemet – black to the future
130. Aphex Twin – Syro
131. Big thief – dragon new warm mountain I believe in you
132. Steve Reich – music for 18 musicians
133. A winged victory for the sullen – the u divided five
134. Spoon – lucifer on the sofa
135. Low – the great destroyer
136. Phone Bridgers – punisher
137. Tim Hecker -ravedeath 1972
138. Mitski – laurel hell
139. House of blondes – time trip
140. Grimes – visions
141. Floating points – crush
142. Four tet – sixteen oceans
143. Kelly Lee Owens – Kelly Lee Owens
144. The necks – sex
145. Miles Davis – bitches brew
146. Mike’s Davis – in a silent way
147. Joan as police woman – damned devotion
148. Penguin cafe orchestra – a brief history
149. Spoon – memory dust EP
150. Aphex twin – come to daddy EP
151. Boards if Canada – in a beautiful place out in the country EP
152. Sigur Ros – Takk…
153. Sigur Ros – Agaetis Byrjun

Grief

I’ll preface this by saying straight away that we are all OK; alive, accounted for, and healthy (-ish; arthritis, asthma, cancer etc notwithstanding), just in case that title is worrying.

I was an anxious adolescent in some ways for a while, risk averse. The sensible one. At university a bunch of drunken epiphanies made me more devil-may-care: what’s the worst that can happen? If nobody dies, anything’s game. The natural boundary-pushing and identity-seeking of young men, I guess. Life catches up with you, though.

We’ve experienced a lot of tangential grief lately, and it’s brought back a lot of unpleasant, powerful, deep-seated emotions from four years ago, and ignited new ones, ones I haven’t really had to deal with so far in my life.

To give context, two people in our orbits have died recently, and died far, far too young and unexpectedly, from – as far as we understand – horribly similar circumstances, albeit with completely different histories.

The second, earlier this week, was my age, someone at work who I used to play football with, who became a dad at about the same time as I did, who I used to tease (Arsenal vs Tottenham) and joke with in the way that guys do. I didn’t know him well, but I knew him, our paths crossed in many ways and we had mutual friends. I’m searching for a profound end to that sentence, but I cannot find one: I can only describe. Now he is dead, and our paths won’t cross anymore, and it sends tiny shockwaves across my consciousness, that intersect with other shockwaves and amplify them.

If that death was tragic, the other is heart-breaking. Paralysing. One of Nora’s friends, only eight years old, who had been through many of the same things as Casper has but even more intense and awful. Lockdowns and circumstances meant Nora hadn’t seen them in a long time, but I still remember them, two or three years old, at Friday café, screaming at each other, the loudest, most demented thing you’ve ever heard.

I remember, in the midst of Casper’s chemo, their mum striding up to me in Sainsburys one evening, when I was disoriented and confused and struggling with the horror of it all, and her saying – I barely knew her, had met her maybe once, but Em knows her well, goes to book club with her as well as Friday café and all the other things mums of toddlers do together – and she said “you’re Casper and Nora’s dad aren’t you: shit, isn’t it” with such conviction and empathy and forthrightness that it baffled and comforted me at the same time, to know that other people understood wtf we were going through. Those few words meant a huge amount.

When your kid is immune compromised, a temperature of 38 is something you keep watching for like a hawk, in case it means infection, and possible sepsis. Sepsis is the fucking bogeyman. Horror films – Freddy, Jason et al – they have nothing on sepsis. Nothing scares me like that does. Nora’s friend was meant to be through the worst of it, was meant to be safe now. I cried again when I drove past their house today.

When we first heard, people in our mutual orbits kept reaching out to Em and me, saying they thought of us when they heard, were we OK, and we were quietly baffled. I told work and they said to not worry about anything for a few days. We spent the day drinking tea and watching Bluey and crying and being dragged through time to emotions and fears from four years ago, emotions and fears that still live, trapped, bound and gagged mostly, in the back of our heads and hearts. But that come out every so often.

I went for breakfast the next day with a friend who knows them too, much better than I do in fact, and we talked and cried and drank tea and coffee and even laughed a little at the memories we had (the shouting!). “It’s fucking horrible” I said. There’s no other way to describe it. That doesn’t describe it.

I’ve wanted to write this for a few weeks, but didn’t want to hijack someone else’s grief, another family’s pain, because as bad as what we have been through was, and still is because we’re still in it even though Casper is well (1900 hours today, running around the kitchen with a pasty in one hand and his willy in the other yelling “get to work!” wtf?), that most awful thing – that permanent, brutal ending – didn’t happen to us. It is still a spectre in our periphery, something we contemplate, and will have to contemplate more in the future in all likelihood. Broadly, I hope it won’t happen while Em fears that it will. That’s the split in our personalities. Glass half empty or half full? Let’s go to the tap and fill the glass / there is no glass to fill.

But it has happened to our friends. And it is fucking shit. It is the worst thing you can imagine. You can’t comprehend it. I have imagined it.

We talked about when and how to tell Nora. We told her that day when we got her home from school. She cried, but she’d barely seen them in three years, and at that age kids grow so fast and forget so much as their brains and hearts are filled and emptied over and over again. It affected us much more. Weeks later it still makes me cry.

A few days after we heard I had to pop into the hospital to pick up Casper’s meds. Casper and Nora’s friend share the same medical team, and we’ve come to know them well over the years. They’re an ebullient, positive, lovely bunch; you have to be, I imagine, to work in paediatric oncology. They looked more broken and battered than I’d ever seen them.

What we’ve been through changes you. Casper’s illness is the defining event of my life, the most prominent part of my psyche and my character, or so it feels. I don’t want it to be. And maybe life will unfold in other ways over the years to come. If there are years to come.

Let the ones you love know that you love them.

So, Casper started school…

Four years ago, in the midst of chemo, we didn’t know whether he’d get to go to school. But he’s just started his fourth week there, and goes in happily each morning (even if he does demand to be carried home on my shoulders if possible). His teacher calls him “Mr Smiley” because he has the biggest smile in class, apparently, and he seems to really enjoy it. We had a few tears in the first week, but nothing unbearable: a few tears here and there are a good thing, anyway.

We’ve had very, very nascent conversations with his team about thinking about exit strategies from dabrafenib. We’d keep him on it forever, given the chance, but it seems as if the trend is towards bringing them off it and monitoring closely to see if the LCH comes back. The idea is scary: the dabrafenib keeps him well and is relatively low-effort. But it’s experimental. Which means experimenting, I guess. They’ll not do anything during his first year at school.

So, life goes on for us. There are bumps in the road, and we still can’t see all that far ahead, but what we can see is alright, right now.

“How’s Casper?” “He’s a dickhead.”

The person you’ve just bumped into and are catching up with, because you haven’t seen each other for ages, because, y’know, global pandemic that’s killed millions and kept people shut in their homes in an unprecedented way for almost two years, may well go all serious and slightly lower their tone of voice and say “How’s Casper?” after a little while, because, y’know, cancer. It’s nearly three years since he started dabrafenib, and, essentially, he’s fine (with lots of monitoring), and he’s also three (AND A HALF) and cute (and also has cancer) so gets away with bloody murder, so the response is generally slightly brutal and tongue-in-cheek. “He’s a dickhead.” “He’s an asshole.” “He’s a wanker.” And then they laugh, and it diffuses the mood a little, and you explain that he’s still on the same drug and basically in controlled remission and ‘fine’, whatever that means, and oh, he was just in hospital yesterday for an ultrasound / ECG / blood test, because we’re still checking him constantly in case it comes back and tries to eat him alive from inside again in secret like it did when he was a baby.

Or maybe an older lady who I don’t know from Eve will see him in the street and comment on his lovely curly blonde hair, “where does he get it from?” she asks, while looking at my straight, grey-flecked brown receding man’s hair, and I’ll have to bite my tongue to not say “oh it’s from his cancer drugs because he’s got cancer”, because it probably is. Simon his consultant calls it his ‘dabrafenib hair’. It’s extraordinary. Golden corkscrews pointing out in all directions. He’s very proud of it. Draws strength from it, like Samson. One day we might have to explain that it’s because of his meds and ergo because of his cancer, and then there’s a whole host of identity crisis questions that come after that – who would he be if he hadn’t had cancer? Are aspects of himself that he loves and takes pride in – like his amazing hair – only there because cancer tried to kill him?

This was meant to be a quick childhood cancer / LCH / Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis update. Because I promised I’d make updates in case anyone found this blog by googling LCH etc because their kid had been disgnosed with it, and they wanted reassurance that god didn’t hate them and things will be alright, and what does LCH look like a few years down the line?

Well, Casper is kind of OK. The future is unknowable – will he stay on dabrafenib forever, will the trial want to bring him off and monitor in the hope the LCH doesn’t come back, will the drug stop working all of a sudden because it’s still an unknown quantity, is this behavioural quirk because he’s three (AND A HALF) and a boy or is it a side-effect? We ponder questions like these a lot. We don’t have answers to any of them. The low-level paranoia and dread you feel never quite goes away. The side-effects on you as a parent can be brutal – I’ve been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthiritis (at 42!), which is almost certainly brought about / exacerbated by the stress of the last three+ years (arthritis being an auto-immune condition, immune systems being ravaged by stress). It’s under excellent control with medication, but, y’know, it’s another added complication to an already complicated life.

So yeah, there’s hope, there’s joy, there’s love, life goes on, etc etc. But it will. Never. Be. The Same.

On playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

My friends and I played a lot of games as kids; roleplaying games, wargames, boardgames, computer games (starting with Bubble Bobble and moving through Sim City to Tetris, Mario, Street Fighter 2 and, eventually, ISS Pro Evolution: I pretty much stopped there), made-up games, playground games, football games (not always football itself, but Headers & Volleys, or Passing & Shooting, set-ups to try and score outrageous goals or keep the ball in the air) and more besides. I have a terrible memory for events, for things I actually did, but a good memory for ideas and facts and concepts, so I can’t remember individual instances of playing, but I know we did.

We played Dungeons & Dragons a bunch of times, enough that I recognised something in the Stranger Things kids and Pixar’s Onward, but it was only ever an enjoyable diversion, never a passion. We dallied with a bunch of other RPGs and pseudo-RPGs – Marvel Heroes, Call of Cthulu, Heroquest – and various Games Workshop products; I still love Space Hulk (and even bought a second-hand copy of a recent edition), and would probably enjoy Blood Bowl again, although assembling entire armies for Warhammer Fantasy Battle or 40k always seemed far too daunting to ever actually finish one to a point where you could play a game (though we played many half-games with unpainted armies).

A few years ago, thanks to Matt, I got back into boardgames via Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan. But, as with so many things, I’m often dilettantish, picking things up, enjoying them, and then putting them down and moving to the next thing. (Flamme Rouge! Ticket to Ride! Pandemic… not really any further. I gather Terraforming Mars is good.)

The same goes for my approach to fantasy fiction. My dad read me Lord of the Rings when I was a kid, and I re-read The Hobbit years later, but Tolkein never really did it for me beyond enjoying the spectacle of the Peter Jackson films, and the idea of it, of some ordinary people getting caught up in extraordinary circumstances, and doing on an adventure. I never dug any deeper. I don’t really understand what The Silmarillion is, and more importantly I don’t want to. I read CS Lewis as a pre-adolescent, and then devoured Pratchett from the ages of 12 to 18 or so.

Likewise I watched Game of Thrones as a piece of entertainment, but never felt any need to read the books. I’ve only recently read the first Harry Potter book, and that was to my daughter. I have read – and loved – Pullman’s His Dark Materials, including the little offshoots and the sequel trilogy (or the two of it released thus far), and thoroughly enjoyed the TV adaptation (the film not quite so much, though it’s not without merit), but there are a million other fantasy worlds out there – in books and games and films and who-knows-what-else – that I’ve never engaged with at all. I’ve never read any Moorcock, but I had a subscription to White Dwarf from the age of about 10 (1989) to about 14 (1993), when I started getting NME instead. Probably because I thought girls were more likely to pay me attention if I was geeking out about music than about made-up worlds with elves and dwarfs.

So it’s intriguing and amusing to me that, after decades away, I’ve come back to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and for the last year have been running a weekly session with four friends where I GM (‘games master’, fyi) them through a campaign (some of us in person, some of us via videolink, all of us via video for the strictest lockdowns, and even all of us together in the garden once), which takes a bunch of nobodies from less-than-humble origins through a sinister web of plots to overthrow a realm based roughly on the early-renaissance Holy Roman Empire (or “Space Germany” as we call it).

What is it about Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay? I was borderline obsessed with it as a 12 year old and am again, 30 years later, at 42 years old. It was the only roleplaying game I played with any conviction, the only one where I bought and read sourcebooks as if they were novels rather than rules, where I dreamed about playing in campaigns that lasted years (even though we seldom made one last more than a few weeks). The only game where I would sometimes grab the rulebook and some dice and a pad of paper and roll up a random character, just to imagine their narrative, the journeys they’d go on, how they’d develop, what they’d bring to a party of adventurers, because I enjoyed doing it. I wore out the softback of WFRP 1e (and recently found myself a copy in very good condition in eBay, for nostalgia’s sake – just flicking through it and seeing those illustrations and page layouts brought back intense sense memories). I can’t remember what I did with all the old sourcebooks I had, but I can’t find them anywhere at my house or my parents’ house, which leads me to believe that someone got a bloody great find in a Dawlish charity shop at some stage.

I abandoned all this, abruptly, when I went to university, if not before. Which I suspect isn’t unusual. But some twenty-plus years later I had an imagination itch during lockdown and furlough, and scratched it via google, which lead to me finding out that WFRP 4^th edition existed. And, moreover, was ‘remastering’ some of the key components of first edition, including that campaign about sinister plots, which I’d owned all the books for and always wanted to play through, but never had.

WFRP – to use the acronym – was the roleplaying game that made most sense to me as a mechanical system, too. The way the profile worked, the fact that pretty much everything worked off a percentage chance based on your character’s abilities, which meant you could improvise almost anything you could imagine. It also – I realise now more than when I was 11 – wore its radical 80s leftwing roots on its sleeve: orc warlords called Mag Uruk Thracker (say it out loud) causing trouble for dwarf miners, adventures built around the insane, chaos-worshipping corruption of wealthy merchants and the landed nobility, the fact that the heroes start off as Rat Catchers and Pedlars rather than Paladins or Barbarians, the downtrodden realising that those in power are in cahoots with evil forces.

(It’s probably not by coincidence that Games Workshop, in the 90s, turned away from this ethos and towards a glossy New-Labour-like hero-worshipping commercialism, ditching the book-heavy roleplaying side of things and concentrating on shifting lots and lots and lots of lead and plastic.)

It’s this slightly murky 80s realism – obviously it’s not realistic in any way: there are still magic elves, ffs, they’re just very, very rare – that’s riven through WFRP’s DNA. Instead of a ‘class’ you follow a career scheme, slaving away to become a slightly more respected Rat Catcher, dreaming about working your way up from Peasant to Village Elder, or a Brigand to a Bandit King (or Queen). Adventures are what happens in between the dull tedium of your actual job. Even innocuous bar brawls can result in mutilation and broken bones, never mind sword fights. You’re not plunging bravely into dungeons with magic swords, slaying dragons for treasure – you’re stumbling into dangerous rituals you don’t understand, getting coshed by footpads for walking down the wrong alley, being ambushed by terrible creatures because you travelled down a country road after dark.

The fourth edition has solved a bunch of mechanical issues I had with the first edition. No longer will you spend round after round of combat with both assailants failing to hit each other. The careers have been balanced to benefit good roleplaying rather than a good advance scheme: which is to say that you can be a terrible Witch Hunter or a REALLY good Villager, and both can add a lot of value to a party of adventurers if you’ve got imagination. The addition of Success Levels (ie how well you pass a test) helps propel the imagination – my players love them, and ask what difference they make on even innocuous pass/fail rolls. If there’s a fault it’s the surfeit of rules to cover pretty much any circumstances you (or your party) can imagine, and those rules are spread across several books (and not always in an easy-to-remember way). But there’s also one golden rule outlined very clearly in the main book; you can ignore all the other rules if you want, as long as you have fun. This is the one we play by most, and understand how to deploy it much more now than we did when we were 13.

Because that’s the main thing – we have fun. We all laugh a LOT, and I manage to make my players look concerned and even scared for the wellbeing of their characters on a reasonably frequent basis. We can each recall different moments of the story from the last year that have tattooed themselves on our memories – the crazy dwarf fighting mutants on rooftops; the hapless Outlaw finally hitting and killing something with an arrow and it being a giant beastman just about to kill everyone; the Rat Catcher’s eyes changing colour mysteriously and freaking everyone out; the normally talk-first Physician stabbing a kidnapper down a dark alley because he’d abducted a child. It’s nonsense, of course, but it’s dramatic, perilous, amusing, and enjoyable nonsense. I hope we keep doing it for another year, or two, or three, or more, to come.

Some thoughts on Star Wars

Gosh there’s been a lot of Star Wars lately. If I hadn’t had kids just before all this Star Wars, I’d probably have written about it profligately. But I’ve been time-poor, so I’ve just watched. And built Lego.

Anyway, here are some thoughts, in no particular order, unedited, written in between making breakfast and washing up and fixing Duplo spaceships…

There will be spoilers here, obviously.

• The Mandalorian is the single Star Wars thing I’ve cared most about since Return of the Jedi. And maybe ever. More on why later. First, those big films…
• The Force Awakens was a great fun theme park ride of a film, that seemed very intentionally to set out to hit the same kind of big dramatic and thematic beats as A New Hope, thus rekindling a love affair for grown-ups like me, and winning a whole new audience of youngsters. That’s absolutely fair enough, and probably the correct thing to do. After winning those audiences, surely the next step – for anyone with creative and narrative ambition – is to take the story somewhere new?
• The Last Jedi appeared to do just that. If I was crazy I’d say it was a Marxist and feminist spin on Star Wars, that showed strong women making difficult but wise strategic decisions and exercising leadership, that put significant hope for the future in the hands of the ordinary, the downtrodden, and the young people of the galaxy (hope lies with the proles), which gave an honest and sensible portrayal of where Luke Skywalker would likely end up (from his first screen moment he’s been a whiny, self-interested, adolescent dreamer, and never really shown much evidence that he grew beyond that), and which raised a metaphorical curtain on the means of production (base and superstructure, if you like) that enables the Empire / First Order to exist, which was explored boringly in the prequel trilogy and touched on in Clone Wars. It set up several different and intriguing avenues that the final film of the new big tentpole trilogy could go down.
• The Rise of Skywalker then took all those interesting potential leads and threw them in the bin, giving us only the character design of Babu Frik and Zori Bliss in their place, plus a bazillion sub-aquatic Star Destroyers. (Where do the raw materials to make these things come from? Never mind the labour? Or is it all just Sheev’s enormous Sith willpower?) It is a massive, nonsensical turd, that panders to an audience that it thinks is far dumber than it actually is. For this I blame JJ Abrams, who absolutely embodies Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.
• Yes, I know I’m writing about Star Wars and citing style-over-substance and Debord, but actually you can have both. Having both is what makes things rewarding. Having narratives that make sense is rewarding, too.
• JJ’s attempt at subversive, nuanced narrative involved having a Storm Trooper clean toilets, literally a joke stolen from Clerks. He had some subversive imagery in the first film, to be fair, but that’s all it was – imagery. As evidenced by the fact that potentially interesting characters were created in the first two films, and then basically ignored in the third film, instead of having any kind of character arc. Finn was chucked in the bin. Rose was chucked in the bin. Poe was chucked in the bin. The two Caucasian characters got made into quasi-gods, scions of the most powerful families in the galaxy, hereditary Force peers, while all the working class people of colour and diverse heritage got ignored, or else arbitrarily paired-off with people just like themselves. Plus that same-sex kiss. Tokenistic. Spectacle. ‘Show not tell’ is absolutely a good maxim for filmmaking, but sometimes you need to earn the ‘show’ bit too. JJ didn’t a lot of the time.
• He also seems, repeatedly throughout his career, to come up with interesting propositions for things that he then absolutely cannot see through satisfyingly, tying himself up in increasingly implausible Godrian knots that he can’t get out of. I’ve been GMing an RPG campaign for some friends in recent months, so I understand that prescriptive, obvious, linear plots planned out fastidiously in advance are not narratively as rewarding as ones which take surprising but understandable turns, but JJ didn’t even seem to have a set of themes or goals mapped out in advance. He just had a bunch of ideas for things that would look cool on screen, and he chucked them on screen, and then he had to try and figure out what they meant later. And he fucked it up.
• For context, I’m running WFRP, not D&D. The miserable, filthy, European, low-fantasy version where you get taxed unfairly and die of infected wounds and no one ever has a magic sword.
• It would have been far more interesting if The First Order had arisen not because of Sheev’s enormous dead Sith willpower, but rather out of a very human psychological need for control, order, and limitation-disguised-as-freedom, ideas explored tangentially in The Mandalorian.
• It would have been far more interesting – and a much more worthwhile philosophical message – if Rey had been a nobody as hinted, just a desert planet scavenger with no heritage who happened to be Force sensitive. Hope lies with the proles, etc.
• Oh look, Din Djarin is a nobody, an orphan, a foundling. Not even a real Mandalorian. And is far more human, and interesting, as a result.
• “Everything the Empire touches, it improves” says Werner Herzog, reeling off a list of things the Romans have done for us. In the final episode of The Mandalorian the imperial shuttle pilot refers to Din Djarin and his motley crew as “terrorists”. These attempts to add nuance to the political landscape of the Star Wars galaxy worked massively for me. Like our own world it is complex, multi-faceted: bad people do good things, good people do bad things, and bad and good don’t actually exist – just differing opinions.
• This obviously runs counter to that whole Light Side / Dark Side thing.
• I feel like there are a few things that make Star Wars Star Wars, and these are:
  • A battered spaceship that somebody lives in
  • Storm Troopers, or variations thereof
  • Droids
  • A struggle that’s bigger than the people undertaking it
• Note that I have not included Jedi in this list.
• Or lightsabers.
• I really, really hoped that The Mandalorian would steer clear of Jedi. I was OK with Ahsoka – she’s technically left the order by this point, which makes her more interesting than most other Jedi for a start – but I really hoped that it would explore different bits of the Star Wars galaxy, and leave all that Jedi stuff for the cinemas.
• Yes I know Baby Yoda was obviously massively Force sensitive. But, like Chirrut Îmwe in Rogue One, the fact that he wasn’t actually a Jedi made him more interesting. We’ve seen a LOT of Jedi. Seeing how people who aren’t part of that (slightly sinister) church can use the power of the Force too is not something we’ve seen much of.
• Which is why I was disappointed when the X-Wing showed up in the finale, and the dude in the black cloak with one glove and a green sabre deus-ex-machina’d his way through a whole platoon of Dark Troopers without breaking a sweat.
• CGI faces on real people, whether they’re de-aging or resurrecting, always lift me immediately out of my suspension of disbelief. I didn’t like it with Moff Tarkin or Leia, and I didn’t like it with Luke either.
• I am aware I’m likely in a minority in not getting a massive Force boner when the Luke reveal happened though.
• The fact that the travails of this entire galaxy keeps coming back to this same family is just faintly ridiculous.
• Rogue One – no Jedi, telling the story of ordinary people getting caught up in a struggle that’s larger than them, no miraculous last-minute saves, diverse cast of interesting characters – is great, probably my other favourite Star Wars thing. Also some really awesome visuals – the Star Destroyer over Jedha is all-time – and some fabulous characters, who I’d love to see more of. I mean you, Forrest Whittaker.
• I’m sure the Han Solo movie had some good points, and superficially it does the diverse cast and no Jedi thing, ordinary people, etc etc, but I just can’t get past the ochre digital filter and Alden Ehrenreich’s bad impression, which is somehow worse than digital de-aging would have been.
• I haven’t watched much of Clone Wars: there’s just too much of it, to be honest. I’ve enjoyed what I have watched though. The explorations of what it means to be a clone are interesting and worthwhile. I wish the films had even considered this.
• Rebels I watched all of: it starts very much as a kids’ cartoon, but slowly morphs into something much deeper. And the ingredients are there: people living on a battered spaceship, Storm Troopers, droids, a struggle that’s bigger than they are. Yes there are Jedi, but they’re in hiding, so subtle and vulnerable.
• The Mandalorian seemed a little light at first, like little more than Saturday morning adventure fluff TV, albeit really good and fun and fabulous-looking fluff. But it got richer and deeper quickly, and repaid repeat viewings massively – the more I watched it, the more I got from it. And I must’ve watched the first season three or four times, thanks to lockdown. An unscrewed gear-knob. A barely-perceptible movement of the head. A detail in the background.
• As well as referring back to previous bits of the lore, each episode also added something new, some character or planet or nuance or perspective that made the galaxy seem richer, deeper, better. Bill Burr’s pain when confronted with the horror of what he witnessed while an Imperial soldier. Werner Herzog’s sincere belief in the Empire’s ability to improve everything it touches. The fact that Moff Gideon doesn’t really want to kill or enslave Baby Yoda, but actually does seem to just want to study his blood. Din Djarin’s realisation that the need to keep his helmet on is just mythology and not reality (and ergo a form of control over him). Cara Dune’s troubled relationship with her past. Greef Karga’s changing loyalties.
• It was great to see a gang of four women kicking ass through an Imperial spaceship in the finale, blitzing Storm Troopers and officers left, right, and centre, while the masculine ‘hero’ went after his baby. I was furloughed for a while during lockdown as Em’s workload went up and mine went down (we work at the same place), and I frankly wasn’t dealing with Casper’s health issues and a global pandemic very well. I can identify with the need to protect my son ahead of nailing the baddies. Way more satisfying than the X-Wing arriving.
• It did action, it did tension, it did drama, it did levity, it did sensitivity, and it did them all pretty well. It also made it clear that the characters could die and be badly hurt, which ups the emotional investment and ergo tension.
• I’ve barely mentioned Baby Yoda. I even quite like his real name. The adorable, egg-eating little ragamuffin.
• But Boba Fett, though. I’ve never read any Star Wars books or comics, so as far as I’m concerned he was dead, eaten by the big desert mouth thing, no escape. The eponymous Mandalorian is Din Djarin, he’s the one whose arc we’re following, who’s got this wonderful, transformational relationship with Baby Yoda; I don’t want another Mandalorian to come in and steal the glory. And to be fair he didn’t quite, but I wasn’t whooping for Slave 1 like I was rooting for the Razorcrest.
• “If you’re born on Mandalore you believe one thing; if you’re born on Alderan you believe another. And guess what? Neither of them exist anymore.”
• Oh the Razorcrest. It had a toilet! I bought it in Lego and spent hours making it more screen-accurate (I even built said toilet). X-Wings and Tie Fighters are iconic but they’re just fighter planes. The Millennium Falcon and the Razorcrest, and the Ghost from Rebels, are homes. Refuges. Safe places. As well as fighter planes. They have character and personality. They’ll always be my favourite type of spaceship.