After a hilariously long break, Season 2 of Maiden Voyage is out! Join myself and my old pal Ed Coleman (who wrote the Paranoia chapter for Experience Points) as we set sail for the choppy waters of Iron Maiden's later discography.

Start with the trailer, as Ed kindly provides a recap of the saga there, then dive into the first full episode featuring Blaze Bayley's debut album. For your convenience, I've also cross-posted the entirety of season one over here as well, check the sidebar on the site for that.

I've been painting miniatures for a couple years now and one of my ongoing projects is Nick Lund's orcs, sculpted for Grenadier in the late '80s and early '90s. They have great personality, I love all of them and I thought it would be fun to have an army of orcs, wolf riders, some trolls and maybe a goblin war giant on the shelf. I never had any intention to, you know, field it and play a wargame. That's for nerds.

Except, the truth of the matter is more complicated. Back in like, 8th grade, my pal Ed (see Maiden Voyage, above) bought Fantasy Warriors from the local comic shop, a wargame produced by Grenadier to compete with Warhammer. I am not sure why he did this, and I suspect he no longer remembers. But he did. At the time, I had a small collection of miniatures, consisting of selections from RAFM's Call of Cthulhu line painted with Testors and a handful of Lund's dwarves and orcs (unpainted). As it happens, they were part of the larger Fantasy Warriors line. Somehow or another, we wound up merging the metal minis with the plastic ones and trying to play the game on the expansive floor of Ed's attic bedroom. There was improvised terrain, including encyclopedia fortresses. There was much house rules-making (the rules, penned by Lund, were...a lot). We had a lot of fun for a couple weeks, and then we stopped. This was my lone wargaming experience and it really probably boils down to a last hurrah for playing with toys than aligning with the larger hobby in any meaningful way.

Fast-forward to me buying Hobgoblin, light and fast wargame rules for miniature carnage clocking in at as little as 45 minutes a session. I am so fucked. I bought terrain. I told Ed I'm gonna teach him how to paint so he can get his (entirely non-existent) dwarf army in shape, and he said, "I have the workbench for it. Now, I just need to figure out how to add more time to my day..." I may have bought some dwarves to paint to help Ed along.

Send a doctor. Send a priest.

A quick reminder that I have a bunch of stuff from my collection for sale. Have a look at the list, there are RPGs, books, games, all sorts of things. If you buy stuff, I can optionally stamp them, with both the stamps below. Prices go down the more you buy!