Last time Gabriel and his inheritors went wild on wargaming, part of the reason it fell apart was that they dug too greedily and too deep. Any one of the wargames that Games Workshop makes could be your entire life - they could certainly be your entire paycheck. They were playing Kill Team and Warhammer 40k 9th edition at the same time, and it didn't help that each of these games shares some language that doesn't actually mean the same thing in the different contexts. Plus, the 9th Edition of 40k just isn't as fun as the new one - they got a taste of 10 and they're sticking with it, despite my most fervent attempts.

It's hard to say goodbye. So Silent Hill, but maybe also to Australia, parts of which clearly overlap.

This is just a quick post to mention that the Darksiders II Deathinitive edition just dropped yesterday and so far I’m really impressed.  I love all the games in the Darksiders series but I think the second one is probably my favorite. It’s always been a beautiful game with excellent combat, fun traversal and awesome Zelda style puzzles. This new Deathinitive edition makes the game run in 4k at 60FPS, adds Raytracing, DuelSense controller integration and quicker load times. I’ve spent a few hours with the game so far and the upgrades are great! If you never played it I highly recommend grabbing this new version if you’re looking for a slick hack and slash action RPG. If you already played it like me these upgrades make going back totally worth it. These days it feels like a lot of games are trying to be an HBO series instead of a game and Darksiders II is simply a kick ass fucking videogame.  

-Gabe Out

After we did the last one, we couldn't stop. Anything as serious as Silent Hill is has seeds of silliness in it! That's just how it works.

I always do a couple of these ahead of time because I'm about to enter a Midnight Realm that I feel confident will prepare me for the mind-rending terrors of Friday Night's Arkham Horror game.

I had joined the Games Workshop fandom at the tail end of 9th edition. I started out learning standard Warhammer 40k and ended up choosing the Black Templars as my army. While attempting to learn that, I was shown Kill Team which of course I also bought a rule book for and tried to learn. Around this time I discovered they had a whole nother game called Age Of Sigmar with even more armies and so I had to check that out. Then they hit me with Boarding Actions and finally 10th edition. I think I blew some sort of fuse in my brain at that point and had to check out of all of it.  I never really felt like I had a firm grasp of the rules for any of those games. It was just too much too quickly. 

I don't know if Ambien is sleep, exactly, but it's definitely not lying in bed looking at the ceiling, or pressure-sealed into a Sky Coffin, and that can be a nice change of pace. Gabe had tried it once to great success on the Australian Flight, but the second time he tried it he entered a Devil Dream that lasted almost sixteen hours - one from which he could not wake. As per usual, we tried to shape and mould these horrors into something silly, an attempt at inoculation in the form of a feathered sky serpent called J.D. that at least I found enjoyable. We made a joke about me taking it, mostly just so we could see J.D. again, but until a couple weeks ago I'd never tried it at all. I only had a couple, I mostly ran out, and I'm glad. That's the kind of shit a witch would give you in a fairy tale. I have a little left, like a few crumbs of lembas wrapped in mallorn leaves, and I'll be using it to board one of the motherfucking White Ships to the motherfucking West. I apologize in advance - it would appear Dreaded Continuity has reared its wicked and serpentine head once again.

Josef Fares has carved out a crazy history in game dev - he was a filmmaker before, which makes sense I guess if you look at his work. He started with Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons back at Starbreeze, who is making a D&D game now I guess? Brothers has a weird trick it pulls that I still think about ten years later, and I'm confident that it has the power to heal the rift.

Acquisitions Incorporated Returns To Aus - With the Brand New Arkham Horror RPG! I've been playing Arkham Horror stuff for decades at this point - and like the moist and shapeless creatures it depicts, the game itself has taken many forms over the years and has somehow, impossibly, remained good. A living card game? Absolutely. Dice, somehow? Great, incomprehensibly so, and I am forced by the disease I have to tell you that divination using dice is called "Astragalomancy." But they aren't done, they go wide with the mythos: social deduction? Also yes. Co-op adventure? This too. But!

But.

When my mom calls, I feel like it's because she has a preternatural ability to contact me right as I'm about to engage in a task. It's a skill, and she has mastered it. The moment a task is about to begin, as soon as the mise en place has been… you know, placed, a communique from my Creator bores into the proceedings. I think I have inherited her uncanny knack for auguring into otherwise useful moments, because when I call my own child - who is not a child, I must remind myself, but a legal adult - they act like I'm trying to sell them a timeshare.

A big part of reading reviews and coverage and discourse and whatever the fuck is squinting your eyes real tight and trying to divine what the actual motivation for writing something even is. There's been aggression of various kinds toward the movie from the jump, but there's some Dark River underneath the surface conversation. Even if "all" it ended up being was a hundred million dollar jobs program for a ton of weirdos on both sides of a camera, that's fine. Good, actually. It's plenty.

I am opening up four commission slots for the month of October. I’ve been drawing some really fun stuff including D&D characters, MMO characters, X-men, the family dog but like in space and I even had a commission last month to redraw our old Strawberry Shortcake comic.

These things come in seasons, I guess; they've been through a couple rounds of intense Warhammer 40k interest at Chez Gabriel. This most recent fever is almost certainly the result of Space Marine II, and as I said before, the game is so ardent in its manifestation of the brand and its lore that I think it could mint new fans just as well as repel them. But the borderline? The person who owns models, many of whom are gray, or still lie flensed on their sprues? Those who are down to clown, but haven't prioritized the hobby recently? Their minds will be terraformed by this game. Those people are well and truly fucked.

The boys and I decided to try and learn how to play 40K 10th edition. There’s a lot to learn and I figured we’d start with the basics. In order to learn the core rules we avoided playing with objective markers we decided to keep it simple and just try to kill each other's army in a straight up fight. Jerry, Kiko and Eric came over yesterday to play some 40k and teach us the rules. What they told us is that the game is not really balanced for the way we were playing and actually needed the objectives to work. This made sense because I have to say it was damn near impossible to beat Noah’s Death Guard army in a fist fight. 

Right here!

Mormons used to call the house all the time, because my dad - and his nine brothers and sisters - grew up Mormon. Mormonism has always been very normalized for me, very ordinary stuff, but I just happened to come up in a place that has a unique relationship with the faith. Until you really get into the lore, it's essentially a Christian sect that shares a lot of what you might call "class features" with Bible Classic. But in one of the most incredible flexes of all time, their founder Joseph Smith literally wrote what is essentially a sequel to The Bible. And, well, yeah. You know what they say about sequels.