To be eligible to win you must be a Site Supporter. This week's giveaway is pictured above - Agent Skahen, a Heroscape Poster, the printed version of the exclusive scenario that Hasbro gave out at the first GenCon they attended, a Heroscape Comic Books. This week's winner was randomly chosen from among our Site Supporters:


I have PM'd Morsbane. If he chooses not to claim his prize, the prize will be given to the next winner.

truth

Everyone loves Robin Hood, or at least that’s what I thought. I asked a few people I knew but most thought he was a foolish romantic at best and a lazy thieving coward at worst.

I’m very fond of archery, I like forests, I’m partial to green and I value my free time so I’m certain I probably would have joined his band of Merry Men. There is a precedent- I’m pretty sure that in the animated Disney version Little John was a bugbear.

Anyway, did you hear that the average American watches about 30 hours of television a week ? I told that to my kids- we don’t have a TV- and they were shocked. We seem to have no spare time and we can’t imagine devoting even one hour a day to television. We’d have to cut down on games!

I mentioned that because somebody said something about Robin Hood and about an hour and a half later we began to build our Sherwood Forest Scenario. If we’d had a TV, we probably wouldn’t have invented something new....

Sylvano the Wasabus

"I should remind the reader that a portrait made of someone when he was, say, eighteen or twenty, would never resemble one made fifteen or twenty years later."
--Giorgio Vasari,
Preface, Lives of the Artists, 1568

As one gets older, if one continues to study, connections between different ideas and events both in your own life and in history begin to show themselves, and realities beneath the surface appear. I am almost 60 year old now, and my limited reserve of both energy and money were starting to tell. And so it was time to visit the greatest European cultural cornucopia of all. Italy--it unites many things: ancient and modern history, culture, art, and science. It juxtaposes everything you learned in school with everything you learned since. The food and wine is delicious, the weather pleasant, the views superb, the architecture magnificent, the art immortal. I used to say that China was my favorite destination, as it held the splendor of the Unfamiliar....

chas

"Ah, the children of the night. What beautiful music they make!"
--Count Dracula

"After all, who else could keep order in a place like this?"
--Monty Python, The Life of Brian

The long post Napoleonic peace of Europe was shattered in 1914, when a Serb shot and killed the Austrian Archduke and his wife, and Western Civilization descended into a barbarism never seen before in the history of the human race. It lasted until 1945, when the survivors cautiously peeked out from the ruins of their cities, which had been overrun by either Russians or Americans. Many historians now consider the two World Wars to have been one conflict with a short truce in between. It was our Serbian tour guide who answered a a question of mine by saying that the Austro-Hungarian Empire should never have been dismembered.

Central Europe is the Land of the Nervous Breakdown; the hardest still affected by the Recent Unpleasantness. It has...

chas

"The savage mode does great damage to soul, earth, and humankind; we can say that through the savage man is wounded he prefers not to examine it. The Wild Man, who has examined his wound, resembes a Zen priest, a shaman..."
--Robert Bly,
Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990

"Too much fire and a man becomes rigid...Too much water and he never gets to the point...When a culture forgets that men need to go back and forth, it polarizes into violence on the one hand and passivity on the other."
--Michael Meade,
Men and the Water of Life:
Initiation and the Tempering of Men, 1993

In the early 1990s, some brave men who had been looking for a new paradigm for masculinity, began reconnecting with the ancient path of male initiation and created The Men's Movement. Publically it would only last a short time. Many people only heard vaguely of men getting together and drumming in the woods. But it would create an energetic...

chas