Attitudes of Soldiers in your Campaign
I've never served in the military, neither in my native country England nor my adopted country Australia. However I do run role playing games that contain worlds with soldiers in them. I play those soldiers to the best of my ability without really knowing how they think or feel. Sure, I can look at the characterization of service people in the movies but I have no idea how one movie character or another compares to real people who have seen action in the military.
So when trying to get ideas for how to characterize a military NPC I searched around for a bit of inspiration and found that there is a new research paper from the Pew Research Center that takes a look at the attitudes and challenges of American veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It gives some simple statistics that, while interesting on their own, can give some inspiration for military characters. I'll present a few of my ideas to start you off from a few of the statistics there. I'm using the same subset that was presented in the freakanomics.com blog post where I first found about the paper. read on...
Play a New RPG Quarter
The guys at Dice of Doom have been promoting October as Play a New RPG Month. A whole month where you put aside your regular game and not only try a new RPG, but also have someone else be the GM for that month. The idea is that you don't just play a game for one session but you stick with it for the month.
This came at a convenient time for me. My D&D game came to a satisfying conclusion a few weeks ago and we're just about to finish the season of Traveller to switch to Pathfinder in my other group. Now is a good time for PANRPG month. In fact my D&D player and I were intending on trying a few one shots of different games over the next few months as he is often too busy to play recently (he's expecting a new baby, yay). However, seeing that I've been getting excited over lots of different systems and settings recently we're not going to do it as intended. For one, we are not going to just play one new RPG, and two, we are going to spread it over three months. read on...