Reinhardt mentions that Arab swords are among his favorites and they deserve their own chapter, but sadly he never wrote that chapter.  I am reminded of Sir Richard Burton’s Book of the sword, which similarly promises a section on Japanese swords which he never got around to writing.  I suppose you could use these two books together then, although Reinhardt is rather less enthusiastic about katanas than Burton is about scimitars…

Reinhardt concludes his survey of swords with a couple of chapters on playing and fighting with swords.  He has some suggestions for making practice targets for cutting, and also gives his advice for those entering contests and sparring.  He has a great deal of skepticism about the fechtbuchs that have recently been garnering attention (authentic manuals written by duelists).   I skimmed these chapters.  He also talks a bit about his field tests of various swords on an armored pork roast, which is interesting, but we’ve all seen that sort of thing on the History Channel and You Tube (search: “Cold Steel” or “Arms in Action” for some entertainment!  The Deadliest Warrior series had a few good sequences too but they always used very inferior butted mail rather than the riveted mail actually used by knights. )

The editors made a good effort at adding some bibliographical references to supplement his writing, but it’s not clear that they necessarily represent the sources of his ideas or facts; it is more of a selected bibliography of his personal library. (The introduction promises to eventually release a list of his personal books but that effort seems to have been abandoned.)  A few chapters have Reinhardt’s own suggestions for further reading and I’ve added a few to my to-read list.  The point of this post was actually not to review Reinhardt’s book so much as to mention a few books on weapons that I think are worth checking out.  I have a small collection of books on arms and armor that I draw on for reference now and again and Reinhardt’s book will certainly join them.  I’ve weeded my own collection a few times, and I think the ones I still have are all useful although not all of them are reliable.  But they are some of the more widely available books on weapons so I thought it might be worthwhile to give my own little bibliography of books on weapons.  I’ve noticed that although there are many, many books on swords, there are few if any books devoted just to hafted weapons like axes and maces.  At best you’ll find a chapter or two devoted to ‘other weapons’ in a swords book, with perhaps a dedicated chapter on polearms in some books too.  Granted there would be less romance and folklore to collect, but surely there is room for a book on maces?  Maybe it’s just me, but I find hafted weapons just as interesting as swords.  Anyway, here goes a list, more or less in chronological order:

Burton, Richard F. The book of the sword. Originally published in 1884, there have been many affordable reprints including a Dover edition which I have and, since it is now in the public domain, you can find scans and other digital copies pretty easily.  There is a terrible scan in Google books and very good one here at Archive.org  (as Google is listed as the digitizing partner at archive.org, I’m not sure why the two scans are so different…).  some of this is outdated, obviously, but Burton is one of the few modern writers on swords who actually used swords in combat and I understand he was a pretty good swordsman.  (Most books by fencers, duelists, and martial artists are more focused on technique and mental preparation, so it’s cool to see Burton’s views of the sword as an artifact.)

Ashdown, Charles Henry.  British & foreign arms and armour.  This book (originally published in 1909) has appeared under several different titles and in various sizes.  I have a large (folio) sized edition put out by Wordsworth Editions as An illustrated history of arms & armour, but it has also been published as: European arms and armour and Weapons and armour in the Middle Ages.  I was fooled by all these title changes and had two different editions for a while.  Again a digital scan is available at archive.org.  I have a theory that some of the confusion about the different armors (“banded mail,” “splint mail,” “ring mail”) might be due to the taxonomy of mail in this book, which seems to take every different depictions in Medieval art (especially funerary brasses of armored knights) to be different kinds of armor, rather than different ways of representing mail.  Probably someone else has already thought this, and I just forget where the idea was first put forward.  Still, it has great pictures and anecdotes.

Oakshott, Ewart. The archaeology of weapons.  1960.  A true classic, and given it’s early date it’s surprising how much craziness made it into RPG books and popular culture regarding the weight and lengths of weapons and so forth.  I remember my brother repeating the story his teacher told him around 1980 that Viking swords weighed 10 or 20 pounds.  Sigh.  Oakshott has a few other books on weapons I haven’t read, but which are more technical and narrower in focus.

Norman, A.V.B., & Pottinger, Don.  English weapons and warfare, 449-1660. 1966.  Also published under the title Warrior to soldier, 449 to 1660.  This book reminds me a lot of Ashdown’s.  The illustrations though are mostly original line drawings that look good.

Halbritter, Kurt. Waffenarsenal. 1977.  Translated as Halbritter’s armoury and Halbritter’s arms and armor through the ages. (I have the second version.)  This is a purely satirical book on weapons, armor, and fortifications that is very amusing and may provide some ideas for the sorts of innovations humanoids might come up with in your D&D games.  Some illustrations are reproduced in low resolution here.

Balent, Matthew. Palladium Books presents– the compendium of weapons, armour & castles. 1989.  This is a monster compilation of the old Palladium weapons & armor books from the 1980s, complete with the statistics for an unspecified system (which is not quite compatible with Palladium’s FRPG, either!).  The art is pretty good, and the listing of weapons is about as close to exhaustive as you will get. I’m not sure all the terminology is as precise as the book  suggests, but in terms of giving pretty much every weapon a name, it serves its purpose.  I owned the original Palladium books on Exotic weapons and Weapons & assassins; I think my brother ‘inherited’ them when I inherited all his minis; he had the Weapons & castles and Weapons & armor books too anyway.  (He’s the only person I know as interested in weapons as I am, apart from our nephew Quinn!)  I’m not sure the assassins book material is reproduced but everything I recall from the other books seems to be there, some with new or enlarged illustrations.

Diagram Group. Weapons: an international encyclopedia from 5000 BC to 2000 AD.  This book was originally published in 1980, then again with updates in 1991, and in 2007 under the title The new weapons of the world encyclopedia : an international encyclopedia from 5000 B.C. to the 21st century.  (Yes, the 1980 and 1991 editions both say “to 2000 AD”.  I only have the 1991 edition, and it is very good and fairly comprehensive, with a number of unusual weapons alongside all the familiar ones, and simple diagrams to explain how they work.   The book moves progressively from the simplest hand weapons to guided missiles and nuclear weapons, grouping them by types (all the knives in one section, all the spears in another, etc.)  I also liked the appendix which groups weapons by time period rather than types.

Paul, E. Jaiwant. “By my sword and shield” : traditional weapons of the Indian warrior. 1995.  A slim book that just focuses on India, which has an astonishing range of unusual and crazy-looking weapons.  I like kukris and katars quite a bit, and while I think the Viking sword is probably my favorite kind of sword, Indian swords look really scary.  This book gives a fair amount of detail on the construction and history of various weapons and is worth having.

Amberger, J. Christoph. The secret history of the sword : adventures in ancient martial arts. 1998.  (An earlier edition has less than half as many pages, but I haven’t seen it). This is a fairly entertaining read, and is more of a history of dueling and fencing than of swords or swordplay generally, but there are lots of great anecdotes and ideas sprinkled throughout.  The author is a little too in love with himself IMO but it doesn’t quite spoil the book.

Withers, Harvet J. S. The world encyclopedia of swords and sabres. 2008.  Also published as The illustrated encyclopedia of swords and sabres.  The illustrations here are all photographs of often gorgeous museum pieces and despite the title it also covers other bladed weapons like knives and bayonets, as well as a very few axes and hafted weapons.  The historical notes are solid and this is fun book to flip through if you like swords.  The same author is credited with several other similar titles that might be different versions of the same work. (It’s funny how  specialist books get re-published over and over with new titles.  I see this a lot at work as a catalog librarian and I’m pretty sure it has a lot to do with marketing — they will always appear as “new” books, right?  Cookbooks are also very guilty of this.

Honorable mention to several books I do not own:

Wagner, Eduard. Cut and thrust weapons. 1967.  A very comprehensive book focusing more on later period swords but also including a lot of information on the design and construction of swords. Very pricey on the used book market.

Wilkinson, Frederick. Antique arms & armor. 1972.  Also his Swords and daggers. 1968.  Two good books with photographs of museum pieces.

Sharpe, Mike. Swords and hilt weapons. 2012.  A nice coffee-table type book with photographs mostly of reproductions of the sort sold by Museum Replicas, Inc., Cold Steel, etc.  The big format gives plenty of space of reproducing the photos, which is almost all the book consists of.  There are several other books with the same title out there and they are more like the Withers book, showing photos of museum pieces.

Out of the blue a couple of months ago, my daughter wanted to break out the ships again, and seemed to suddenly have a lot of recall about what the rules were (much more than she remembered the morning after the original game; go figure).  From her memories and my interpolations, we came up with a workable if somewhat simple game that engaged all my Man-o-War ships (well, the less breakable ones, and a bunch of card ships I’d been hoarding) as well as the sea monsters.  The goal of the game was to land on an island with a lighthouse, that was guarded by two vampires; defeat the vampires and you win.  Along the way you might be attacked by sea monsters and sunk and/or capture additional ships.

The original game had most of the players running ships and one player serving as the adversary (” the Merpeople”) who controls the sea monsters, but for two players I suggested we just take turns  moving the sea monsters, so that it played a bit like Zombies!!!

We used a large blue battle mat one of my players brought over for D&D, and that was the board; wargame hills served as the starting island and goal island; the lighthouse is from a decoration; a few small islands were marked with flat cards.

The mouse was not part of the game. I didn’t even realize it was there when I took the picture.

We set up with the two player ships touching the ‘start’ island, and all the ghost ships and sea monsters were off-board until placed.

The turn sequence was:

1. Move your ship (or 1 of your ships if you have more than one)
2. Place or move a ghost ship
3. place or move a sea monster

If your ship comes in contact with a small island, it can beach there and be safe from sea monsters.  If it comes in contact with the lighthouse island, you have to fight the two vampires in succession (one per turn) to win.  If your ship contacts a ghost ship, you claim it for your fleet.  If a sea monster contacts your ship, you have to fight it.  If you contact another player’s ship, you can fight it as well.

Sea monsters and ghost ships may be taken from the ‘reserve’ pile and placed anywhere on the board, but they must be at least 9 squares away from any player’s ship(s).  If there are none left in the reserve piles, you can only move ships or monsters already in play.

All movement is d6 squares, except that the sea monsters that take up more than one square can always move at least their base’s length.

Combat is just a roll-off of d6′s (high roll wins; re-roll ties).  Defeated player ships are returned to the start island or to the stock of ghost ships; defeated monsters go to the sea monster pile; defeated vampires are just removed from play.

A game took 15-20 minutes, and was actually pretty fun in a simplistic way.  Maybe some day we’ll add event cards to spice things up.

For want of other entertainment, I uploaded the above picture to Google Drive and inserted the rules in some text boxes and voila, a one-page minis game.  I’d LOVE to see more games like that which

• fit on one sheet of paper
• are suitable for playing with young kids
• use a picture of a set up game to provide examples/diagrams/explain the rules

I don’t know if there would be enough interest to do this properly but what I’d like to see is a one page game contest or something. Any takers?  Surely you can do a better job than this: Ships’n'ships (link is to pdf file).

Zak of “Playing D&D with Porn Stars,” thought that he might have seen something on my blog about why D&D clerics are prohibited from using edged weapons, and asked if I could recall it.  I don’t know if I’ve ever discussed this explicitly but he was pretty sure I had a really explicit quote about it.  That’s absolutely the sort thing I ought to have here!  OK, now I do.  Despite the many apocryphal explanations for this D&D trope (Archbishop Turpin in Charlemangian legends, Bishop Odo using a club on the Bayeux Tapestry, etc.) this must be the most specific reason the rule was introduced (apart from the possible game design purpose of denying clerics the use of magic swords!).

Probably this quote is also why the Inquisition always turned people over to the secular authorities for torture and execution.

I’m a librarian but I don’t work the reference desk, so this took me a while to figure out, and I kept sending him secondary sources instead of this primary source.    I wish I could say Google had no role in my finding this answer but I can’t.

One that doesn’t bite and is unlikely to escape its cage.

One that actually like to handled.

One that has a life expectancy of more than two years.

And most importantly one that will not aggravate her allergies and general fear of animals.

A guinea pig.  It took some convincing but I’ve had a guinea pig before.  So finally everyone was sold on the idea.

But guinea pigs are social animals and it is better to get a pair.

Also: pet stores don’t tell you this, but guinea pigs need a lot more room than the glorified litter boxes they sell.

So I did a little research and built a “C&C” cage:

That’s more than 8 square feet.  10 square feet would be better but  was not practical.  I think we’ll eventually add a “loft” for more room to roam, but I was able to build this in a couple of hours.  (It is still about 3 times as big as where they were living before.)  Difficulty: I could not find corrugated plastic larger than 30″x36″ locally so I had to splice several sheets together.   That added a lot of cutting and taping.  Also I made the ‘walls’ extra-high to reduce mess & drafts, and to keep them from getting their heads near the openings in the mesh.  That’s just me being over-protective though.

Then we drove down to Amish country to buy a couple of guinea pigs from a guy who needed to find a home for his g.p.s.   Sadly they’d grown up in one of those cramped little commercial cages.

Attica! Attica! Attica!

I got their new home ready, and they seemed pretty happy in it, but I’ve read they really some time to settle in and should be given a chance to acclimate, so we’ll to leave them alone for a day or so to get used to their new digs before handling them too much.

We haven’t had time yet to make fleece bedding so for now we’re using the pet store shredded paper.  Ideally they will also get another hiding place so they feel more secure.  And I need to build a little hay feeder, since g.p.s really ought to have some access to hay as well the usual pellets and fresh veggies.

For now though they just need to get used to their new, more roomy home.

Troll call (troll + roll call): a census of nerds, geeks, gamers, and/or trolls.  “I sent out a troll call by email to see who’s coming to the D&D game.”

Crapbook (scrapbook + crap/crappy): a book of souvenirs and/or pictures of bad times. “I should put these photos from our stay in a Mexican hurricane shelter in my crapbook.”

Both were typos I made this week but as is sometimes the case, good ones.

Enjoy your weekend!

A good while back I wrote a series of posts on Bruce Galloway’s Fantasy Wargaming.  (A compilation is in my “Pages” area but lacking the comments that you have to search the blog posts for!)  That was published in 1981 by Patrick Stephens Limited (PSL), a publisher that also published a number of wargaming books by Bruce Quarrie (one of the contributors to the first FW and an editor at PSL before the firm was bought by Rupert Murdoch and dissolved).

In 1990 they published a new book with the title Fantasy Wargaming; this time by Martin Hackett.  The credits indicate he mainly thanks his parents for helping with photography and typing, and his gaming buddies for playtesting etc.  I’m not familiar with anything else he’s written apart from the revision/sequel, Fantasy Gaming, which came out in 2007.

But Fantasy Wargaming is an awesome mess.  There are copious illustrations, both line drawings (sketches of figures — a real joy to identify) and photographs of figures and set-ups.  There is also a set of maps.  There is a plain “outline” map, a copy of it overlaid with hexes (“players map”) and a second hex map with a simple key indicated the dominant terrain of a hex (for setting up battles, etc.).  Very cool.

The photos of figures show a nice overview of the state of the art of fantasy miniatures.  I think the golden age of fantasy miniatures ended in the early 1990′s, when the lead scare, changes in the RPG and gaming industry, etc. changed the field immensely.  A lot of companies went under or floundered about.   Styles and fashions changed.  New sculptors entered the field.  Execution and mold-making evolved enough to attain a new look, and the use of more tin and even zinc alloys increased the strength of the castings, making more delicate poses and features possible.  The stuff that followed was not necessarily bad, but it was different and more standardized and more conscious of belonging to ‘product line’ with a uniform look.

But Fantasy Wargaming shows a great survey of everything from the golden age:  early Minifigs (who have character but must be admitted to be very crude in same cases) to Citadel slotta-based minis, as well as scratch-builds and a few conversions, and even plastic toys suitable for use in wargames.  There is a lot of terrain pictured.  And even period RPG books.  It’s quite a visual feast.  The only thing I complain about is the poor quality of the black and white photos, and small size of all images.  I wish this were a folio rather than an octavo.  The later book has better photography and better reproductions in the book, but far fewer and not many are old figures.  It really documents the changes in the state of fantasy minis — not something the author necessarily intended, but fascinating.  You can see some more details about the book (and images) here.  The reviewer there is not as enthusiastic as I am!

As to the game, the rules are spread across a number of chapters that also provide some background information on the hobby.  It suffers the same problems of presentation that the first FW had, although the two books are hard to compare really.  In all honesty I have not tried the rules out.  Hackett says that the later book presents an improved version of the game and I’d be inclined to try that first. But FW has some interesting ideas for inspiration.

There is d100 table of ‘campaign events’ for a fantasy wargame campaign.  Things like:

• 5 trolls from the nearest hill attack each hex until killed.
• Horses struck by mystery illness. No movement for this move.
• New mine discovered, produces 50 credits for three years.

Sure they are kind of generic but there are 100 of them.  Likewise there are brief guidelines and tables for creating regions, filling a hex map with terrain types, settlements, and monsters, and generating the rulers of areas.  There are simple army lists for various cultures and monstrous races.  There is also a gazetteer for a fantasy land, with random encounter tables and so forth for hex-crawling with an army.  That sounds like a hoot. He has a bestiary of traditional and original monsters, but their descriptions, game stats, and other factors like move rates are dispersed through the book.  Some of the new creatures are interesting, for example the “Lubin” (a wolf-goblin were-creature); but all are very loosely defined.  There are 100 magic items (some apparently cursed) that are mostly original (e.g. the Staff of the earth that lets you talk to plants, a magical talking wolf, and similar) and many are clearly designed to be of use in a wargame rather than RPG campaign (for example a magic mirror that reveals enemies in neighboring hexes).  There are some simple economics guidelines with costs for supplies, construction, and recruitment in “credits”.     

The RPG part of FW looks very simple and appealing.  There are five primary abilities (Power, Fitness, Agility, Luck, and Learning) and three secondary abilities (F.A., M.A., and Stealth).  There are three “Fighting Ability” categories: Piercing, Staff, and Missile.  Then there are six skills: Craft, Fauna, Flora, Languages, Literacy, and Perception.  The sample character is an elf and has a list of ten spells (there are many later in the rules) and two languages (elven not included; presumably you don’t need to list your PC’s native tongue).  The primary abilities and skills look like they are 1-100; the others are mostly single digits, and all under 20.  But the actual rules are not given; we are left to infer the game from the character sheet.  (The “sequel” does indeed provide the missing rules, and we learn that “F.A.” is fighting ability and M.A. is “magic ability,” as well as being treated to details on the races, classes, and even level, er, rank titles.  I love that the various different races have different titles for the same rank in a class.)

There is a concise review of Fantasy Gaming over here for the interested.  It made me rather interested in trying the RPG rules out.

As an RPG, you really need the second book to flesh out the game, and the wargaming rules are much more coherently presented in the second book as well.  I suppose the first volume is obsolete as a game manual, but it is certainly the more interesting of the two to skim for ideas and pictures of old miniatures.

The first book reminds me of a number of old RPG books — Arneson’s First fantasy campaign (because it is disorganized but filled with wonderful little ideas here and there); Bruce Galloway’s Fantasy Wargaming (because it attempts to survey the hobby and then offers disorganized rules); Dicing with dragons and Holme’s Fantasy Roleplaying Games (because of the glimpses of one man’s journey in the hobby, and the discussion of moral and educational aspects of gaming).  Like all of these, it is clearly a labor of love. And like the first two, despite it’s obscurity it has some detractors.  Still, as an artifact of a bygone era in gaming, and a reminder of what might have been had the industry not consolidated so much in the 1990′s, it is a joy to read.  For a miniatures lover like me, it is worth owning just for the pictures; for a role-player, it is possibly less useful now unless you plan to run a ‘domain management and war’ endgame.  It also makes me think of the original Warhammer rules — the first edition battle rules that were also a simple RPG.  But what I know of WFB 1st edition is mostly just gleaned from the Citadel Compedium and a few White Dwarf ads; I’ve never seen the original.  I discovered Warhammer when the second edition came out, and although it provided a bit for skirmishes the RPG side was gone.

Copies of both of Hackett’s books turn up fairly regularly in the used book market, and both are for sale on Amazon through ‘Amazon partners,’ so you can find them pretty cheaply if your curiosity is piqued!

Commodations: (kahm-MOh-day-shuns) (n.) The quality of local bathroom facilities.  (accommodations + commode)  “You spent a month in rural India? wow, how were the commodations?”  “I never eat at McDonald’s but they have OK commodations, better than a gas station.”

Another one just occurred to me one day at work:

Unonymity: (YOU-non-nim-ity) (n.)  A group decision made with no responsibility assumed by any member of the group.  Unonymous: (You-non-im-ous) (adj.)  (unanimity + anonymity / unanimous + anonymous)  “The committee made some unpopular decisions, but they were unonymous so no-one on the committee would defend the decisions to the rest of us.”

Last night I couldn’t sleep and spent a few hours revising, redrawing, and scanning a dungeon I made for my first D&D campaign (Telengard).  It was level 2a — a sublevel accessible from level 2 of  the Telengard mini-megadungeon, although it was also accessible from an outdoor feature (“The Salt Fens”).  It is now posted my “downloads page” (see the sidebar on the right) and you can also just click here for the pdf: The-Misty-Pond

The main change I made to the dungeon was removing a trick/puzzle that would take too much space on an OPD to explain.  In th OPD it is just a trapped chest, but in my campaign there was a “room” with a sign that said:

One casket holds a treasure. The other two are empty or hold evil spirits. All the inscriptions on the caskets are either true or false. The riting on this sign is all true.  You have one minute to open a casket, or all will open.

There are three caskets: one brass, one tin, and one copper.  They each have an inscription.

Brass: The treasure is in here.

Tin: The treasure is in the copper casket.

Copper: At least two inscriptions are false.

I handed a player two index cards — one with the inscription on the signs, one with the three caskets drawn and labeled on it, and started a one minute timer.   (In my campaign he opened a casket with treasure inside and kept th other two caskets in his pack for many sessions, just in case he found a use for them.)  The evil spirits were wraiths.  You will no doubt figure this puzzle out, as the player did.  He also snarfed the two unopened caskets, “just in case” he might need them later.  I can think of a lot of uses for a box that might have a wraith in it.  Sadly that PC did not ever get a chance to use the caskets.  The PC ‘went bad’ and became a villain for a while but I can’t remember if the villain ever got to use the caskets either.

Anyway the OPD version of this dungeon has some treasure, some monsters, and some tricks or traps, but the main thing that I liked about it is that the “dungeon” is totally open, strictly speaking; however line of sight and movement are blocked by the fact that the “wall” areas are waters infested with monsters and covered with mists that reduce visibility to 10′.   Falling into the water is very dangerous, but a capable swimmer might bypass some dangerous “rooms”.  I also like that it is a fairly surreal location, with giant lily pads, a flail snail (which I was using LONG before the OSR got that flail snail meme, dammit!), and its own logic.

You still have time to create your own submission.  I used Google Drive to upload a scan of the crude drawing and the “Drawing” editor to add a key, text, etc.  It looks kind of crude but is usable!  You could scan your own small map and add the key etc. in a few hours if you want to enter the contest.

Here is the a coupon code for the Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day

SWAD252013

Full disclosure: blogs and web sites that mention this are put in a drawing for some prizes too.  But even if I had no hope of profiting by this post, I’d still say you should check out S&W.  The rules and many add-ons can be downloaded for free from the publisher.

Swords & Wizardry is one of the simpler retro-clones that basically tries to recreate the original 1974-1976 D&D game.  I own a “White Box” set of S&W that I got in trade with another blogger some time back, and I keep wanting to run it, but have yet to find the right opportunity.

People are offering various content for S&W on their blogs as part of S&W Appreciation Day.  My offering is just a simple monster, the Black Hodag:

The Black Hodag

Armor Class:                 2 [17]

Hit Dice:                       10

Attacks:                        Claw/Claw/Bite or Gore (d6/d6/d10 or 2d6)

Special:                         Wallcrawling, charge attack, surprise

Move:                           12

HDE/XP:                      12/2000

The Black Hodag is dungeon-dwelling variant of the common Forest Hodag — mammalian but with plate-like spines on its back, about 7 feet long and 2 1/2 feet tall at the shoulder.  Black Hodags are covered with shaggy fur, and while they can change the color of their fur, they are usually black.

Black Hodags can walk along walls and ceilings like spiders, at their normal movement rate.  They normally stalk their prey from ceilings or walls, and surprise on a 1-5 due to their stealth and chameleon-like ability to blend into their surroundings, changing colors and even texture.  They charge into combat (+2 to hit, goring for 4d6 damage and victims must save or be knocked prone; if they miss, they will continue moving their full speed past the target and cannot turn or avoid hazards); if they have the advantage of surprise, they will try to carry off a victim to eat later (they can grab a surprised opponent with a successful bite attack).

It seems that I actually attract followers more when I put up book reviews than when I post pictures of painted miniatures or rant about Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s all good.  I’d like to think that everyone who subscribes actually reads most of the posts, but I know I follow some blogs that I only read some of the time, and if you are one of the people delete most of the emails my blog sends you, that’s OK too.

As a thank-you for stroking my ego thus by clicking the ‘follow’ thingy, let me introduce you to Thug Kitchen, the most badass vegan cooking blog I know of.