The Zhodani Are Coming! The Zhodani Are Coming!

One of my great pleasures, as a blogger, is in reading the blogs of other old-schoolers. Even when we don't agree with each other, there are pearls of wisdom to be gleaned from what those other bloggers are saying and playing. I don't get to comment on as many of your posts as I would like (real-world responsibilities intrude, unfortunately) but I do spend several hours a week catching up on what people are doing and saying.

In addition to reading the blogs of my current blog-roll, I sometimes discover a new blogger, quite by accident, while looking for the answer to some arcane RPG question. Other times, a blogger will comment on one of my posts, or will start publicly following my blog. In those instances, I will "check them out", and that almost invariably leads to them being added to my blog-roll.

There was some recent unpleasantness in the blogosphere, about old-school bloggers being an insular and elitist lot. While I don't believe that to be the case, any one of us could, on occasion, come across that way. For what it's worth, i'm a populist, not an elitist: I want to see more bloggers talking about OS games, not fewer.

I say this as preface to a recent (reverse) discovery. Trev of The Bits Box started following my blog. Trev has been posting regarding the Zhodani, a topic close to my heart. The Zhodani was one of my favorite Traveller aliens: human, yet so alien to their Vilani and Solomani cousins. Mostly though, I just loved their clamshell helmets, turbaned nobility, and organic looking spaceship designs. Trev has painted up some 15mm miniatures to resemble the troops, robots and grav tanks of a Zhodani strike force.

Almost makes me want to go buy the original Striker rules and play some tabletop Traveller battles.