THW just released Warrior Heroes – Warbands, the effectively squad level fantasy RPG/tabletop wargame expansion to the Warrior Heroes line.

What does that mean for you? Well, while Warrior Heroes – Legends is effectively old-school D&D with dungeon crawling, spell-hurling, questing for loot, and generally being a murder hobo, and Rally 'Round the King is at the scale of DBM, commanding vast armies, cavalry charges, and full-scale international warfare, Warrior Heroes – Warbands is about small unit operations, Viking raiding, taking prisoners, and – if I may make another old-school RPG reference – all the stuff that happened in Chainmail and AD&D when you hit 18th level and above. Oh yes, and the drive and quest to be king yourself.

Or queen. We don't judge here.

Frankly, I'm just glad to see THW developing the WH line a bit further, because there just aren't enough fantasy games which have true scope. Also games I don't have to be GM. These are good things.

Just in time for the movie reference, we have Hell Hath No Fury, a cut down, focused version of the Two-Hour Wargames' Nuts! World War II mechanics, specifically focused on tank-to-tank combat.

Given that tanks really were not something that received a lot of focus in previous Nuts books and gameplay, which is a bit of a shame because Nuts! manages tanks as multi-character-inhabited vehicles. If the tank has a crew, that is an independent crew, with tank commander, driver, gunner, and loader represented as different characters.

That means that Hell Hath No Fury is a great setup if you've ever wanted to do a set of player characters who are all members of the same vehicle crew. Combined with the infantry-focused scenarios in the original Nuts! book, alongside the Coffee and Cigarettes RPG-focus section in the latest version, you can get a lot of almost traditional style RPG character development without a GM, and often playing alone – which sounds like a crazy idea, but let's be honest. For a lot of us, playing alone or playing with one other person is our most accessible play experience. More games supporting that style means more gameplay.

It's been a while since we've had an All Things Zombie: Final Fate Out expansion, but Halloween brings out the best in everyone, especially the best zombie apocalypse game available on the planet. Tales of Dread updates the FFO edition mechanics to be slightly more compatible with the latest version of Chain Reaction, Two-Hour Wargames' house system, adds new mechanics for an expanded range of zeds, and includes 13 standalone encounters (of which we'll talk more about shortly).

If I were to sum up what TOD brings to the table for your ATZ games, I would have to say that – aside from updating a few important mechanical bits – what it does is bring support for a different style of play, one inspired less by survival zombie horror movies and more inspired by video games, in particular some of our favorites: Killing Floor, Left 4 Dead, and Dead Rising – focusing more on setting traps and using distraction in a tighter tactical focus than a broader more strategic battlefield. This comes across not only in your new loot tables but in the much expanded list of available zombie types, most of which will be familiar if you played any of the aforementioned games.

On top of all that, you get the mechanics for running encounters in scenarios where the protagonists/PCs/player-controlled-characters are zombies themselves, which frankly lifts inspiration almost directly from L4D and its four versus four, humans versus zombies combat experience. While this is useful for one-off scenario play, I can't see it being particularly important for anyone who wants to run a campaign or even an extended series with ongoing characters.

That brings us to the 13 Encounters that make up the second half of the book, most of which lift horror tropes from across the gamut of video games and movies. Most of them change the interpretation of the traditional THW nine-sector map from an extremely reified representation of battlefield terrain to something more abstract, in one case effectively a single winding hallway with rooms to either side through which the characters must go as if running a gauntlet, in another an equally abstracted mansion from which the PCs are fleeing psychotic cannibalistic people dressed as dolls, and in a third a long bridge onto which zeds are climbing from the sides. Each of the Encounters has their own map, some special instructions which determine where characters are placed and where potential enemy forces come from. All of them have special directions which create a specific ambience and most of them have unique objectives.

If most of your ATZ gaming is done as one-offs or you're looking for inspiration for scenarios to run between major events in your current gaming, TOD is going to be extremely useful for you. If you're looking to bring the FFO mechanics up to the most recent and add some more options, TOD is going to be absolutely essential thanks to the combination of rules updates and expansion in the types and behaviors of zeds. This might be the book that you want to pick up second if you're just getting into ATZ, unless you are specifically looking to expand your game into your characters establishing and holding a homebase, in which case you will definitely want to pick up Haven first, and then TOD.

The next time I look to run ATZ at a convention – which is always one of my biggest games of the year, anywhere I take it, any time I take it – I'm going to reach for Tales of Dread and my first consideration will be whether or not one of these scenarios is going to be usable straight out of the book, because odds are extremely high that one of them will be. That's a pretty high praise.

Tales of Dread is available on the Two-Hour Wargames website for $14 in PDF, slightly more if you would like the printed and pleasantly comb-bound version.

Space Engineers has followed through on Patchmas again!

This week, we get the ability to control turrets remotely – which looks like just an extension of the ongoing development for nonlocal control, probably leading into more automation features either next week or the following week – as well as the ability to place new asteroids in creative mode, which is going to help a lot of people get more mileage out of their Survival maps.

Really, it's kind of a slow week, but once in a while you need a little slower pace for things which set up for larger plays in the future. (I'm still waiting for my in-game scriptable programming.)

Making things a little spicier, Space Engineers is free to play all weekend! And on sale at 40% off, making it very possible for you to buy into one of the best construction games since Minecraft for roughly $12. Sadly, it is still Windows only, so you fine Mac folks will have to run some sort of emulator if you would like to get in on the deep space loving.

Hint: you want to get in on the deep space loving.

This week's Space Engineers Patchmas brings in a huge piece of the future development direction -- which is completely useless to me and my preferred play style as Survival Only.

Still, the addition of Blueprints as first-class entities that can be passed around up and down between Steamworks and online players is a huge thing for folks really getting into that construction architecture Creative Mode thing, and lays the groundwork for building things like Shipyards and the like for Survival players, where we construct an original bit in a modeling space and then feed it into a construction dock or whatnot for construction.

However, that said, this is going to make the fact that the blueprints, mods and such are stored under %appdata% on Windows boxes, and thus on the system disk not next to the program under Program Files in Steam, extra hideous. The sheer number of ship and ship parts that I can see accumulating will be -- quite heavy. That's going to be particularly bad for folks like myself who use an SSD for their system disks with limited space by comparison to their terabyte storage for applications.