GMBC ep19 - Unpacking the Unwilling Recruit: Military Strategy Meets Roleplay in Sentence to War
Transcript:
Speaker A
00:00:07.360 - 00:00:36.940
Welcome to the Game Masters Book Club where great fiction becomes your next great tabletop role playing experience. This week George Krupsky, Marshall Smith and Eric Drix return to duty to take us through basic training on J.N.
cheney and Jonathan P. Brazzi's sentence to war.
The 15 book Sci Fi Military series featuring an unwilling recruit, an unknown alien enemy, AI battle buddies, genetically augmented soldiers and a very pro military agenda. All right recruits, let's fall in and get into the conversation.
Speaker B
00:00:40.220 - 00:00:52.260
Okay, welcome to the Game Masters Book Club everybody. My name is Eric Jackson and I'm the host. And today we are going to be talking about Sentence to War by Jonathan Brazy and J.N.
Speaker C
00:00:52.260 - 00:00:52.860
Cheney.
Speaker B
00:00:52.860 - 00:01:18.920
Really fantastic military science fiction book. And we have some really fantastic game masters that are going to be with us today. We are going to be talking, talking to all three of them.
And today we're going to be asking our game masters about have they ever used a military style game in their tabletop experience? And we're going to start with George Krupsky. George, tell us a little something about yourself and tell us about how you used military in your ttrpg.
Speaker D
00:01:18.920 - 00:02:16.530
Hey, my name is George Krupsky. I've been gaming for many decades, done a lot of sci fi, a lot of pulp stuff, a fair amount of superheroes.
In my experience I have not run a military style game. I feel like you're adding a special degree of challenge with that.
I feel like most of time when we role play it's for independence and freedom and making the crazy choice which a military campaign runs counter to.
I have participated in a few, I guess quasi military or at least organized campaigns primarily through Star Trek, one of the earliest games that I played in.
My cousin ran a Star Trek game and he got around the hierarchy of things by in virtually every crisis the captain was rendered unconscious almost immediately. So then the bridge crew just did whatever they wanted. It became a recurring joke that the captain just had a bed in sickbank ready for any crisis.
So we did everything we could to avoid the militariness of the military nature of the campaign.
Speaker B
00:02:16.690 - 00:02:26.610
That is one way to handle military. Marshall, would you like to go next and introduce yourself and tell us about how you use military in your tabletop role playing games?
Speaker C
00:02:26.610 - 00:03:43.210
Sure. So my name is Marshall Smith.
I've been gaming since Redbox D and D and I have a couple of writing credits and playtest credits throughout the RPG industry. One of them in particular was I did a lot of playtesting for the Spycraft RPG and have run a lot of the Spycraft rpg, which is an espionage game.
So it's not quite military, but it is very similar in that there is an overarching organization and there is a command structure.
So I solved a lot of the standard problems with it both in that your superiors, whereas they may have near infinite resources, are not necessarily willing to just give you near infinite resources. You have to bargain for them or you have them as a resource on your character sheet that you know, a limited resource you can tap into.
And the officers in charge of your unit. Whereas yes, they can give you orders. That's part of what they do as team lead.
But also the counter balance to that is that they're the ones that then have to report up to the superiors and explain everything that happened and everything that went wrong on the mission. So it's not as simple as putting one person in charge.
Speaker E
00:03:43.450 - 00:03:43.810
Great.
Speaker B
00:03:43.810 - 00:03:49.210
Eric, care to wrap it up for us and tell us about yourself and about how you'd use military in your campaign?
Speaker E
00:03:49.370 - 00:04:12.320
Sure. My name is Eric Drix, I'm from the Philadelphia area, longtime gamer. Thank you for having me on here. And ran.
I've run a military style campaigns a couple times. Only one time was it sort of successful.
And George, I had laughed because the one time was successful the captain of the ship that the players were on got knocked out.
Speaker B
00:04:12.400 - 00:04:13.200
That'll do it.
Speaker E
00:04:13.200 - 00:04:47.850
The incompetent second in command took over and players sort of realized they had to work around this guy. So they sort of came together disobeying the structure. So structure, yeah, heavily important who you have in command.
Command as a player can make or break things. I found a controlling player can certainly make the experience of the other players more difficult for it. But again it's about that level of control.
I think it can be done and done well. Which is one of the reasons I'm sort of excited to hear us talk about this.
Speaker B
00:04:48.010 - 00:06:03.580
Agreed. I think this book is going to be really interesting.
My name is Eric Jackson and I'm the host of the show and I've run a couple of different military campaigns.
I ran one that I think ran closer to Marshalls spy group where they were part of a detached unit and they had a lot of freedom to move around but they were also far away from the main units so they very frequently didn't have access to the materials. So I didn't have to mechanicalize why they had access to things or not.
The more recent campaign that I'm in right now involves the military, but everyone is involved from a different branch of the military or government. And so there's very often a question as to who is the ranking officer at that time.
And so given that there's some opportunity to give the spotlight to different people at different times in different types of situations. And I think as long as everyone was pretty evenly ranked, that is a good way to get around the commander tells everybody what to do.
Problem side note, I actually played one of those military campaigns with friend of Mine and immediately after we played that game he literally joined the military.
Speaker E
00:06:04.620 - 00:06:05.020
So.
Speaker B
00:06:06.300 - 00:06:49.110
So I don't know if I did a bad job or a really good job of running a military campaign. So now it's my time to tell everybody what this book is about and why we read it.
Sentenced to War is a military science fiction series of 15 Books featuring Rev Pelletier, a young man convicted on a minor traffic violation and given the choice of of hard labor or serving in a war against Earth's enemies, the Centaurs who are mighty and mysterious but not unstoppable. The first book in the series sets the rules of engagements and and introduces AI genetic augmentations and the culture of the Perseus Union.
Marine Corps Respect to fallen. Anybody have anything to add?
Speaker E
00:06:49.110 - 00:06:52.110
No, I think that was a great cover and a lot of notions of.
Speaker B
00:06:52.110 - 00:06:58.240
Found family that always a good thing that happens in military sci fi. George Marshall, anything to add?
Speaker C
00:06:58.240 - 00:07:10.800
I will say that the book read very much like a an advertisement to join the Marines. There was definitely a lot of love for the corps in there, which I've known a number of marines in my life and that all felt very on brand.
Speaker B
00:07:10.960 - 00:07:32.940
Let's start off with Marshall.
When we start talking about mechanics, we're going to go into this and we're going to systematize or figure out a way to make this military science fiction book to evoke the what happened in sentence to war. What system, Marshall, do you think is the best that. What. What do you. What system you think is going to work the best?
Speaker C
00:07:32.940 - 00:08:02.440
Well, for my personal use I would fall back on Spycraft which I mentioned earlier. It is a D20 system. In my personal opinion, the best iteration of D20. It has a lot of rules for the kind of modern combat that we see in the book.
It also happens to be high octane espionage. So it includes rules for things like psychic abilities and whatn that could handle the augments really well without stretching the system in any way.
Speaker A
00:08:02.440 - 00:08:03.080
Excellent.
Speaker B
00:08:03.080 - 00:08:07.440
Eric, do you want to talk about your choice next? I understand you're bringing us a classic.
Speaker E
00:08:07.440 - 00:09:09.310
Yeah, they're going to be maybe a couple considered classics. But I was looking, when I thought about the game systems, I thought about we need rules for engagement in modern combat. We need high tech.
We need a good listing of weapons because weapons and what equipment they carried was made was in the story. Their armor, the ships and gear was all sort of like integrated into the environment.
So first theory game system was looking at Traveller with the Mercenary Handbook and the High Guard book. It just felt like a really good fit. The second was a system I hadn't played in a while.
But when I thought about military and some of the resources, the Palladium Rifts, which is their system, but they have a lot of military source books also and lean heavily on that sort of equipment, ships and things. But not to leave out my love of D20 and D&D, it's the Esperagenesis 5th Edition.
Has a little bit of the that supernatural to it, but it is acor D and D and easily playable for a lot of people.
Speaker B
00:09:09.469 - 00:09:13.110
George, would you like to give us your recommendations for sentence to war?
Speaker C
00:09:13.110 - 00:09:13.390
Sure.
Speaker D
00:09:13.390 - 00:09:45.570
I would probably go with Fantasy flight games, relatively recent Star wars rpg. The game has three strains. There's. I think it's Age of Rebellion is their military one, which obviously would be good base.
They also Edge of the Empire for Smugglers and Force and Destiny for Jedi. You know, mirroring what Marshall said, I think the.
The fact that you've got Jedi and Aliens in Rules for Jedi and Aliens can accommodate a lot of the crazier stuff in the campaign setting. So I would start with the foundation of Star Age of Rebellion and layer other stuff in.
Speaker B
00:09:45.570 - 00:11:58.520
Those are all great choices. One of the games that I thought would be interesting to pair with this is Stars Without Number.
Like all the background stuff you'd completely have to throw out. It takes place much further in. There's been a couple of destructions of the Earth. This is a definitely a post apocalyptic game.
But I like the mechanics on this because Stars of that Number is part of that old school revolution with the potential to like roll up random characters in that it's not so much of a build in that way. Which I thought would fit well with like the genetic lottery that they talk about when they assign the Marines their augments. That was a first click.
And then secondly they only have four, four classes in their class system which is psychic, expert, warrior and adventurer. The last of which is just a mix of the first three.
Definitely what I suspect Rev will be in the future where he's got like a little bit of psychic and he's a little bit of an he's a warrior. So I think something like that would be a great class system for this book.
And then finally, the thing that I like about this system is that it has a difficulty ratings for things that you're going to do and you have skills and you have combat and they're done with two different sets of dice.
If you're doing skill checks, you're checking against a number that's like 1 to 10 or something along those lines with 2D6 or I think, actually I think it's 1 to 20 and you add in your skill point. So the 2D6 makes skill rolls way more dependable, whereas the combat is done with rolled with a single D20.
So the combat tends to be swingier and more based on luck and the chaos of battle. So it gives that feeling. Whereas your technical expertise or the things you're really good at really just happen.
So all of those felt a lot like what we were trying to portray in the book. Right. We have certain type. We have definitely classes of people.
We have this swingy combat system, but our skills are better and we have a way to do the augments and psychic stuff. So which we could throw the AI in on top of that with all the psychic powers.
Speaker E
00:11:58.520 - 00:11:59.240
That's cool.
Speaker B
00:11:59.320 - 00:12:41.460
That one I thought was particularly good.
If that didn't satisfy, if that was just too simple or you really wanted to build and you weren't satisfied with this randomness that the old school throws in there, you could go with Star Heroes, which is part of the system that brought us champions. This way you could detail out every stat and effect as well as deeply define the centaurs.
If you like numbers, number crunching, which the number crunching might be a bit much for beginners, but if you want real control and crunch in your military game, this system can handle anything throw at it. So my secondary recommendation would be start the Star Hero system.
Speaker C
00:12:41.620 - 00:12:58.680
I find it fascinating that none of us went for one of the classic military RPGs of Twilight 2000 from GDW. Yeah, no, it's not one I've ever played, so I'm not. I'm not super familiar with it, but I just find it interesting that that wasn't on the list.
Speaker B
00:12:58.680 - 00:13:46.110
There are some good military RPGs out there like Twilight 2000, but I think I was focusing more on the sci fi and so I didn't. That one I think is more of a semi only a very recent post apocalyptic. So it felt more modern and less future. But yeah, you're absolutely right.
There are Probably a whole bunch of great games that we missed. Which is always the case, right? Like we always. We do our best. There's only four of us, so we do what we can.
It would require an army of gamers to get it all, literally.
And on that terrible joke, Eric, you recommended this book, so why don't you start off by telling us what you liked from this and what sort of portable items, ideas, characters you'd like to take from this and put into your tabletop.
Speaker A
00:13:46.110 - 00:13:46.670
Role playing game.
Speaker E
00:13:46.670 - 00:15:04.610
Yeah. So whenever I go into a book or listen to a podcast or anything, I think about those. What are the things I want to take to make me a better gm?
What are those things that I can do in this book? Almost like in a Zekai fantasy where a character goes into a different world, there's all these different languages used.
And it really struck home to me that language is such a great tool that I don't use enough as a GM in terms of their little lines and statements. Like you said, respect to the fallen is a line that gets uttered unfortunately multiple times in the book. But it's how language is used.
So terminology, special words, abbreviations.
I keep coming back remembering that scene from Good Morning Vietnam where Robin Williams is going through all the abbreviations, but that is part of military language. To set the environment, I would really leverage their stylistically.
I would take language and really think about how I use language when our players go into a different environment and to help set that city.
If this city is different across the country, they're going to name things differently and to really use that, leverage that to create a good environment for my players, equipment wise. I love the AI battle buddy. It feels relevant now. So I would steal that.
Speaker B
00:15:04.610 - 00:15:07.330
Excellent. George, how would you like to follow that up?
Speaker D
00:15:07.330 - 00:15:55.160
One of the things that I thought was interesting about it was the general concept of the augments and how they.
They've got a couple different classes of augmentation and everyone gets their own specified to their role, which in any game I think is a sci fi fantasy game, is an interesting way to sort of set a. Set the players apart from the common folk.
There winds up being an in story reason for why a first level character is significantly better and different than a zero level character. I could even see it in a version of it in a fantasy game where the warriors bathe, you know, a zero level fighter bathes in something and becomes.
Even though he's low level, he's a legendary warrior because he's been augmented by the blood of, you know, the blood of the past. And wizards, of course, much easier with spells.
Speaker B
00:15:55.240 - 00:16:02.520
Actually, as I mentioned at the beginning of this, I started reading fourth wing. And one of the things that happens in fourth wing is when they become dragon riders.
Speaker A
00:16:02.520 - 00:16:07.240
The dragons breathe fire on their potential riders. It doesn't burn them, but it marks them with a mystical force.
Speaker B
00:16:07.320 - 00:16:10.520
That's an excellent, you know, fantasy version of what you were talking about.
Speaker A
00:16:10.680 - 00:16:12.360
Marshall, give us your portables.
Speaker C
00:16:12.520 - 00:16:56.030
I was having a number of interesting discussions going on while reading this book that were meshed in. And one of them was one of the people I follow on TikTok posed, how would you justify swords in a sci fi set?
Because we see it in like Vorkosigan saga and Dune and whatnot. And they're awesome. And then I was looking at the centaurs use EMP weapons. So and it just ratchets the.
The technology available to the combatants down, oh, rapidly. And I thought that was really interesting.
And I would really like to work on a size setting where EMP weapons were that common and how it would impact how soldiers acted in the field.
Speaker E
00:16:56.030 - 00:16:57.150
Yeah, good point.
Speaker B
00:16:57.150 - 00:17:39.070
Yeah. That ties in pretty well with my portable, which is the centaurs themselves. I like the idea of this unknown enemy and the centaurs provide that.
One of the things I'm always yearning for when in my tabletop experience is that feeling when I first started playing and there was graph paper and we were there and every monster, monster, every trapped, every cursed item was new and exciting. I'd never heard of a kobold was and oh my God, what's it gonna do? It's super easy to get access to the manuals.
I've acquired a large amount of lore over my time. So it becomes more and more difficult for me to have that potential blank slate villain.
Speaker E
00:17:39.070 - 00:17:39.470
Right.
Speaker B
00:17:39.870 - 00:18:03.580
So one of the things I liked about the book and one of the things I'd like to bring into my campaign is the idea that we could have a type of villain, a bad guy who we really didn't understand too much about them and we could discover it as the campaign went through. Eric, I know you've read all the books. It's safe to say that we learn more as we progress through the series.
And does it build slowly or do we find out all at once?
Speaker E
00:18:03.740 - 00:18:27.870
There is a definite reveal and a definite growth and definite, don't want to reveal too much, but definite. The universe expands out from even the centaurs. So you definitely learn about the centaurs, you learn about them.
But there's also other cultures and other beings and A lot of inner governmental conflict that happens between the worlds.
Speaker B
00:18:28.590 - 00:18:47.910
So there we go. So even more unknown enemies. This is great. It's like just a plethora of continuing upward. Unknown enemies. That's fantastic.
Yes, it's the Shark and Jaws, right? You know, you don't get so much of it and that makes it scarier. That's what I definitely liked about that.
Anyone have any other ports we haven't discussed that you want to throw in?
Speaker C
00:18:47.910 - 00:19:01.290
I'm just going to say that the Battle Buddy was an awesome concept. I have no idea how I would incorporate it into an rpg, but it was such a fun thing and such an obvious thing to give to soldiers in the future.
Speaker B
00:19:01.450 - 00:19:13.050
Do you think it would be cool if you had two players? If you had someone playing the Battle Buddy, the AI and playing the the person, I think you'd need the right players, but that could be really fun.
Speaker C
00:19:13.290 - 00:19:15.130
Yeah, that could be interesting.
Speaker E
00:19:15.450 - 00:19:27.860
I think you could put in something especially depending on the players, where each player has a dual role. They're a soldier, but they also can play someone else's battle buddy. Oh, like two characters.
Speaker D
00:19:27.940 - 00:20:00.890
I think one of the weaknesses of something like Sentence to War in a role playing environment is that there's so many different ways that war can go. And if you're in an organized structure, you're only sending your expert. So I think that would actually be a great way to double up players.
So you have half the players have an infantry player character and the other half have the Battle Buddy for those. And then the, the other half have the stealth player character. You know, you switch off.
So someone is always on the ground and someone is always in their head. But you alternate based on the type.
Speaker B
00:20:00.970 - 00:20:02.570
Getting into that troop play.
Speaker D
00:20:02.810 - 00:20:03.330
Yep.
Speaker B
00:20:03.330 - 00:20:22.280
Which I originally found in the Ars Magica games, but I know it's used in other games as well.
The idea that, okay, we're doing a this kind of mission, which means we're using this set of characters and even theoretically you could switch game masters, you know. Oh, when it's stealth missions, George is the game master. And when it's a more combat mission, then Eric is the game master.
Speaker A
00:20:22.280 - 00:20:31.400
Eric is the game master. If we do politics, then Marshall is the game master. And in each situation we switch out who is the lead officer and who are the subordinate officers.
Speaker D
00:20:31.400 - 00:20:39.320
One of the things that we never see, we don't really see in this book, at least any major battles, we see them from the edge, but you're never in it.
Speaker E
00:20:39.480 - 00:20:39.840
Right.
Speaker D
00:20:39.840 - 00:20:46.680
Which in a role playing game, of course, eventually you're going to want to be at the center of the action rather than sitting on a mountain staring at things.
Speaker E
00:20:47.090 - 00:20:53.890
Yep. And I will say later, books, as the books go on, Rev is right there in the middle.
Speaker A
00:20:54.050 - 00:20:57.490
All right, that wraps up the portables. And now we're on to media recommendations.
Speaker B
00:20:57.570 - 00:21:09.410
I know everybody's got a bunch of cool things to recommend here, so start off with Marshall. Marshall, why don't you tell us a little bit about if you were going to get more inspiration along these lines.
What books, media would you recommend to the folks?
Speaker C
00:21:09.410 - 00:21:31.910
So there's a bunch of great military sci fi novel series.
The one I was thinking of most of the time, though, was Scalzi's Old Man's War, specifically because it was about taking civilians, augmenting them, and then throwing them into combat. And so it had a lot of the same vibes to it. So that's. That's where I would go. Awesome.
Speaker B
00:21:31.910 - 00:21:36.750
Eric, what do you think? What other inspiration. You're our expert here. So what do you think relates the best?
Speaker E
00:21:36.910 - 00:22:31.950
So, growing up, I was a big fan of the Alien Marvel's Alien Legion comic books.
So when I think military sci fi, my brain always comes back to that Jugger Grimrod and that crew running around the galaxy with their lieutenant performing almost like Legionnaire, sort of military incursions and battles. Loved that series. The whole line of Halo games, books, animated films, versus that sort of military sci fi direction.
And then I sort of went to a different era when I was thinking about the structure and language. I went back to one of my old favorites that's actually historical fiction set in the 18th century following a British Navy sailor, Richard Belitho.
And that series referred to as the Belitho series, funnily enough, by Alexander Kent. And it's really, again, the ship, the language, the structure is all there. It's just, well, 18th century naval.
Speaker B
00:22:31.950 - 00:22:44.030
Two things to play off with that, Eric. First off, if you are not already a fan of the Acapella group Voice Play, they do an amazing cover of the Halo theme song.
I know it sounds weird, but trust me, it's absolutely worth it. Really great.
Speaker E
00:22:44.030 - 00:22:45.270
I'll check that out. Thanks.
Speaker B
00:22:45.590 - 00:22:53.310
And when you talk about language, if anybody hasn't read R.F. kuang's Babel series yet, that's language is magic. Ugh.
Speaker A
00:22:53.310 - 00:22:54.210
Chef's Kid. Yes.
Speaker B
00:22:54.290 - 00:24:40.540
So that. That's. That's going a little further afield. The setting, the tone to making it an actual plot device.
And since I've stolen the momentum here, I'll just keep going. The first thing that I thought of when I was looking at this was the Deed of Paxenarium by Elizabeth Moon.
Like Sentence to War, it's written as one long story. The writer Elizabeth Moon is a retired Marine, so her use of the language of war is very clear and direct. It is a fantasy novel.
It is set in a Tolkien fanfic ish world. If the fourth Age happened, but the elves just went to a different continent instead of Gaway is sort of the what's happening there.
So Tolkien fans rejoice. Paksenarrion is a raw recruit who is molded into a hero through her service in a military company.
This is one of my personal favorite books of all time. It is the best character development of a paladin of a God. So again, not science fiction, but it is really just absolutely a great series.
The first three books are put in a group of books called the Deed of paksenarrion. The first book is actually Sheep Farmer's Daughter, but read all of the first three. It's all one big story.
Paksenarrion is one of the first asexual character representations I found in a series. So little asexual rep there. Next. Next I would recommend the Valor series by Tanya Hough.
Also good military language and military traditions set in space. But our character's sergeant Torren Kerr is more advanced in her career. She is already a badass and continues to be a badass through the whole thing.
Whereas I think Rev is still working on becoming a badass. He's definitely a proto badass, at least in the first place.
Speaker E
00:24:40.540 - 00:24:55.830
Oh hey, interesting fact on Sentence to War since you mentioned the other author, Jonathan J.N. cheney did serve in the US Air Force and the other author, Jonathan P. Brazy, is a retired or inactive Marine Infantry Colonel.
So they both have that.
Speaker B
00:24:55.830 - 00:25:30.040
We have own voices there that's happening there. Yeah, just three quick ones to throw on top of that. Dark Space by Lisa Harry is a mandatory service book.
Chaos Station by Jen Burke and Kelly Jensen is one of my favorite military sci fi books books. Not as much ex military, but it's still great. Just for the title alone. Ends means Laws and An Angry Ship by Lynn Gala.
That's just a great title and a great writer. Lynn Gala. That one is also within a chain of military command, so check all those out.
George, I'm sorry, I just threw a whole bunch of stuff at everybody, so go ahead and bring us back down.
Speaker D
00:25:30.040 - 00:26:19.790
Well, my list is going to be shorter, but when I was reading it I immediately thought of the old TV show Space above and Beyond I. They're not conscripted, but it's got the same vibe. It's the soldiers who are sometimes a bit conflicted about whether they want to be there.
But they're fighting in defense of Earth against a mysterious alien enemy. So they have to be there. But the big one that I thought of was Strike Force Moratori, say Marvel comic from the mid-80s.
It's a huge travesty that it hasn't been adapted yet. Aliens are invading Earth. Scientists come up with a way to give people superpowers, but the conceit is that the process is lethal.
So some folks die before they get their powers. Some people die within a week. You're guaranteed to die within a year.
So it's about a bunch of volunteers sacrificing and becoming something other than normal human for the good of mankind.
Speaker A
00:26:19.790 - 00:26:21.790
All right, that covers our media recommendations.
Speaker B
00:26:21.790 - 00:26:27.470
Game Masters, do you have something you want to plug and tell people about? I know Eric has something, so I'm going to let him go first.
Speaker E
00:26:27.470 - 00:26:50.820
All right, so just in that spirit, we're talking about a lot of the authors we mentioned and the authors of this book are their military background. Just wanted to make a call out for the woundedwarrior project.org they're always looking for good donations.
This is an organization that supports our military folk and helps get them really necessary resources to help them.
Speaker A
00:26:50.900 - 00:26:54.260
There's a link in the show notes to get you to the Wounded Warrior Project.
Speaker B
00:26:54.420 - 00:27:33.480
I'll go next.
I don't have anything quite as noble other than I, as previously said, I'm a big fan of the Paxenarian books and I unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your view, I'm not going to get a chance to do a recording about it because Britannica Game Design Ltd. Makers of chivalry and Sorcery, the classic game from the 1970s. It's currently on its fifth edition. They just recently finished a backer kit making an RPG called the World of Paxenarian.
I, as a fan, I backed it on backer kit, but I have no doubt it will will eventually make its way to game stores everywhere. So keep an eye out for this series so that you can play in.
Speaker A
00:27:33.480 - 00:27:34.920
The world of Paksenarian.
Speaker B
00:27:34.920 - 00:27:35.320
George.
Speaker D
00:27:35.320 - 00:28:34.180
I don't have anything new, so I'll just plug what I always do. I work on the Firefly board game. Maybe relevant because this year's the 20th anniversary of the Serenity movie.
No, I just, I just saw it in the theater this week. It was very cool to see it on the big screen for the first time in decade. But if you can find the board game I worked on the expansions.
I think the core game is a great game. Otherwise I wouldn't work on the expansions. And I'd also like to stump for my good friend Will Padilla's podcast 1980s.
Now these episodes will probably be months old by the time this particular episode comes out, but wrote the script for a recent episode about a treasure hunt in England in the 1979 into the early 80s. And a couple about a month or so ago I was at a convention for Cobra Kai.
Had the opportunity to talk to the guys who did the music for Cobra Kai and hooked them up. And I know Will did an episode where he interviewed them, so I think those will be long out by the time this episode comes out.
But they're hopefully they're still good guys.
Speaker B
00:28:34.180 - 00:28:39.100
Thanks so much for being on here and anybody have any last minute things to throw in?
Speaker E
00:28:39.100 - 00:28:42.060
Just thanks for having us. This is a blast to do.
Speaker A
00:28:42.620 - 00:30:09.580
All right, recruits, at ease. That's our discussion of Sentence to War, the first book in the 15 book series by J.N. cheney and Jonathan P. Brassi.
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A 21 gun salute for our Game Masters Eric Drix, George Krupsky and Marshall Smith. Look for them to return in January 2026 when they discuss the Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.
Continued praise and thanks to John Corbett for the podcast artwork and Otis Galloway for our music. Re enlist with the Game Masters Book Club in two weeks when we venture into the sundered realms by Casey Blair.
Later gamers and to paraphrase the great Terry Pratchett, always try to be the place where the falling angel meets the rising apart.