lanky316

Just realised I forgot to come back to this. The rules are available for free on the TTCombat website. Here you are!

So there was some interest in Rumbleslam when I mentioned it in the woke thread the other day so I'll do a bit of a write up here as requested. First of all, for clarity, it is a miniatures game. It is small scale so (unless you end up going down the rabbit hole!) it's not a massively expensive one. You won't need more than about half a dozen miniatures if that's all you want. At it's core, it is professional wrestling in a fantasy world. It doesn't go full on, there's not necessarily wizards throwing fireballs around and all the extra things. The players each pick a team of (usually) around 5 wrestlers to an agreed upon price limit. If you've played any form of miniatures game you know the drill. Each wrestler has a handful of statistics and special moves that decide what die you roll. There are copper, silver and gold dice which have different amounts of pips on and represent the abilities. So you'll have, for example, a wrestler who can do a clothesline after bouncing off the ropes and you'll roll a silver die (maybe with a modifier) against an opponents defensive skills and if you win you do damage and potential side effects, if you lose, you don't. There is a bonus depending on how much either side wins by either a reversal or a beatdown which will offer bonuses such as more damage, stunning an opponent, knocking out the attacker with your reversal and so on. The objective is to eliminate your opponents wrestlers by pinfall or throwing them over the top rope. That's it at the core, it can be fairly dice swingy but in it's way that kind of fits into the theme and if not taken seriously works to it's advantage. If that hulking ogre spends most of the match trying to hit a goblin and failing before falling to a flash pin because he rolled awfully... Well who hasn't seen a wrestling match like that? That's the core concept of the game, as it's miniatures I will also talk a little bit about those as that's where the rabbit hole could lead you. Obviously you can get your team starter sets which come with 5 wrestlers, they'll be fairly generic at it's core (with some more "out there" than others. From your team of generic human/orc/elf and so on brawlers and grapplers through to a bunch of masked luchadore halflings, pirates ("the booty chasers") and the team that I mentioned in the woke thread "The Knights of the Squared Circle" who are a bunch of over the top posing knights with their fine sculpted bodies that they are more than happy to show off. These sets will likely be your core. Where it really feels great to a wrestling fan though are the Superstars. These are more expensive game wise in points cost and come with a couple more special abilities and almost all of them are based on wrestlers and/or pop cultural things. This means that you've got a wrestling turtle ("Botticelli") and a rat sensei ("Toothpick"), goat versions of Tenacious D and a vampire slaying vampire alongside things like the zombie "gravedigger", goblin bushwhackers, the orc "Ultimate Waaaaarrior" and a baseball cap wearing chameleon with the ability "you can't see me!" (who they occasionally release in clear resin). Officially they're all split into various factions (casinos) but you don't really need to worry about those, the only benefit is the chance to reroll a single die at some point so you can just pick whatever miniatures you like and play without thinking about that element. The game is made by TTCombat so if people want more information you can find out from them, any other questions I'll try to help out best I can.

I know we've slightly moved on in the conversation but going back to this. I think this is also a part of the factor in why a 12 year old Lanky also didn't really gel with it. Not only had I already caught elements of the fantasy that had been "borrowed" in various forms. I'd also already seen something similar to this that I already enjoyed, even if I'm not sure that it's aged well but I'd already read "The Worst Witch" series as well as seen the TV show. Not to say they were "basically the same" but as well as all the other fantasy material that was "borrowed" and put into the Harry Potter melting pot and having already read and moved on to other things in there the idea of "boarding school for magic users" had already been and gone as far as I was concerned. I did try Harry Potter but didn't feel the need to read any more after Philosophers Stone between my interests moving on and the feeling I was perfectly happy with Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom and felt I didn't need the far inferior Dumbldore and Snape for my magical teaching faculty thank you very much. Naturally, it didn't get the international attention and fame that Harry Potter would do, in part due to the films, so to an international audience that extra setting is a factor that us stuffy old Brits would overlook and is an aspect that I hadn't really thought of in terms of how massive a franchise it all is.

For a people who are big into a game which involves buying, assembling and painting little toy soldiers, Granny certainly have an... interesting fan base when it comes to things like this. I get the over the top "rated M for Manly" type element of big strong (mainly) blokes going around and blowing things up/whacking each other with swords and so on in a way but almost any time anything out of white bloke power fantasy pops up you better believe they'll all come out of the woodwork to complain about it. They recently published a nice little converted army someone had done (can't remember if in their magazine, or website) the big problem that got people going? Rainbow colours on Space Marine armour! I know historical wargaming can have people with... worrying interests, usually fetishising the SS in some way but if anything gets in the way of their big strong white male power fantasy you can be certain that they'll come out in a rage. Games Workshop, understandably, have a bit of a past with some things that they'd rather people forget. Black Orcs - being orcs that were slaves and had darker skin - tribal pygmies, slanty eyed goblins inspired by Mongols with other shifty eastern cultures depending on mood and inevitably a whole host of other "fair for it's time" of 80s stereotypes and things that were cringe inducing at the time let alone today. The game was thrown together by a few blokes 40 years ago and is full of over the top stereotypes like orcs being football hooligans, dwarfs being surly Yorkshireman stuck in the mines grumbling all the time and can range from things that are relatively harmless to things that just don't really have a place in the world any more and even then were a bit iffy. The idea that people would get up in arms that something barely mentioned and that's only existed for five minutes anyway because there's a hint that maybe there could be a woman involved though, it's just too far! The Blood Bowl community recently had a minor bit of uproar over the idea of making sure that tournaments felt inclusive. The number of comments along the lines of "but I don't want GIRLS anywhere near my silly game of rolling dice" and who saw nothing wrong with making women feel uncomfortable in what's a largely male hobby was... well not entirely shocking anymore sadly but so disheartening. The vast majority would still be your big smelly alcoholic blokes anyway but the idea that "the other" would want to play a silly little board game was enough to get people raging. I've sort of mentioned somewhere a game that I like called Rumbleslam, it's basically Blood Bowl but with pro wrestling. How did they respond to people like that? By releasing a big bunch of burly muscly lads posing, soaked in baby oil... and giving them a nice rainbow logo just in case people didn't spot the middle finger they were giving to people who thought there was no room for homosexuality in their fantasy game about men rolling around in their pants.

I remember talking to people early on when people were talking about how Spurs without Kane would practically be relegated and all sorts of hyperbolic predictions. He'd be a miss, obviously, but I thought that the way the team would be playing would create more but also that Spurs would be exposed. My initial thoughts were that it'd be similar to that team of the mid 90s where they'd get into ridiculous goal fests one way or the other (was it the first Klinsmann year? Ardilles in charge and they'd basically play loads of attacking options without much else?) and we've sort of seen that. Some times it works, others it won't and when it goes wrong, like at the weekend it could be very bad. Of course that does mean with the run in, the title race could be interesting as you just don't know what Spurs will be turning up and they're playing all three. Either way it doesn't matter, I'm going to just quietly enjoy mid table obscurity down in League One.

Yeah, it's not something he uses often and in this case it's to give a contrast rather than a descriptor. It does pop up elsewhere in a way that does show the world Shakespeare inhabited (or whoever really wrote the plays conspiracy fans!) could be a bit more multicultural than people think. One of the main lovers in Midsummer Nights Dream for example is told to go "away, you Ethiope!" which while it could be just a Shakespeare flourish rather than saying "clear off, bitch" could be a reference to her skin colour and is one of the characters across the works where there is a fair amount to go on with vision as she's also referred to as being short several times - this led to further controversy when the Globe (or RSC?) used a little person (forgive me if wrong terminology I'm brain farting momentarily while thinking of this post) in that role due to lines referring to her as a dwarf. We sort of get a picture on some, we know that his usual clown for example was tall due to the number of times fool characters are referred to as gangly, lanky and put down with height based punchlines but usually it's a blank slate and assumed white English unless, as Loki said, it's to highlight an "other" element. There's a couple of characters alluded to being black but again, it's usually highlighted in the text. There's a couple of lines across Shakespeares' work along the lines of "I'd love them, even if they were black" which - usually cut or edited these days - turn up in a couple of comedies as a bit of a punchline. Overall though you've got a few names, most of whom have no real descriptions in the text to work with for most things and the strength of that is that you can play with the settings and characters to tell a story. Especially for something like Romeo and Juliet which is ultimately a basic plot carried by some of Shakespeares best speeches and poetry. Of course it's all just typical overblown nonsense, getting upset over a fictional character with little to go on as far as descriptions is typical of how things are these days but when you've already had Romeo and Juliet with seals, MacBeth with Samurai, Hamlet avenging his fathers death with the help of a meerkat and the million other adaptations it's just rage over nothing. It'd be one thing if it was a history play - as most of the racial casting controversy seems to be - but it's not. I for one have loved people trying to compare it to Baz Luhrmann's because Shakespeare had written it to take place on a California beach with handguns (longsword brand pistols!) and that's before we even get to that interpretation of Mercutio!

Short answer is no. Closest we have is “Oh, she does teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiops ear, beauty to rich for use, for earth too dear. - Did my heart love till now? Foreswear it sight for I never saw true beauty till this night.” which is basically "she's well fit she is" with no real description apart from her being 13. Shakespeare understandably couldn't necessarily be certain on who and where his stuff would be performed and rarely gave much of a physical description of people. There are exceptions of course, but essentially there's a fully blank slate for casting. Thing is Romeo & Juliet is essentially about pettiness. Literally nobody actually knows why the families keep fighting each other, it's never explained and they do it more out of tradition than any real animosity. There's no reason you couldn't say that Romeos great great grand-father had issues with Juliets great great grand-father who was a mercenary or immigrant (the idea that 15th/16th century Verona was full of white people is pretty funny as a starting point - especially when a couple of years later we have a play about a black Venetian general, also taken from an older Italian work) and the feud has gone on ever since. It can and always has been able to work in almost any way, set in Liverpool with rowing Liverpool and Everton fans, two farmers from Kentucky, New York street gangs and a million other ways. The whole point is that some old people are too stubborn and set in their ways and two kids ignore all that. I guess that makes it quite fitting that in the end the bottom half of the internet are raging about something they've clearly never actually paid attention to. It feels "cheap" to say, yeah lets just do it as being a bit of racism (and I'm not saying this production is doing that aside from this casting I know bugger all about it) but it's no less valid and perhaps more pertinent at the moment a take than any other.

I did like George Graham saying "of course we're taking it seriously, I'm naming (5ft 5) Jose Dominguez as goalkeeper" in the run up to the game though. Fact is they're professional footballers and a desire to win is, or should be, their number one priority over fan based rivalries. Especially as the case could well be one that both Spurs and Manchester City will need the win. I'd assume as much as a lot of Spurs fans won't want Arsenal winning the league they'd be happy enough with getting into the Champions League to overlook that for the time being.