A to Zed - D is for Dirtside

Seems I've been off the ball for keeping these posts consistent. At the very least, I have an excuse for yesterday. My friend Evan got beat up pretty bad and we had a hospital day through till this morning. He's doing alright now though. There wasn't a concussion as I initially feared.

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On the bounce.

Here I figured I'd dedicate the letter 'D' to an explanation of just why I've chosen to name the blog so.

"Hitting Dirtside" was a game me and some childhood friends long-gone used to play, it had nothing to do with the tabletop game, 'Dirtside'. Depending on where we would play, and what was available, some days the game was akin to 'King of the Hill', and others still, 'Capture the Flag'. "Hitting Dirtside" was never anything more than our fancy way of saying drop troopers hitting planet-side.

So how do the two correlate? Well, in our little game world there were the ground-pounders, or any manner of ground force/garrison; the dirt-stompers, marine forces deployed from space; bug-stompers, marines deployed from space to kill 'aliens' (think the USCMC); muckers, or expeditionaries; and squelchers, the assassins, spies, and saboteurs. In this game, regardless of variants, the bug-stompers would hit dirtside, take the hill (or flag) and defeat whoever was playing the space-jerks, or at least they would try to.

On occasion we'd even play some proto-version of child role-playing game, back when people weren't afraid of using their imagination to make anything fun. We even made up military ranks for our assassin game, where a space-jerk would try to knock off the whole command element. The equivalent of Operational Commander was called 'Head', with second-in-command being the 'Lance'. The aim of the game was to 'cut off the head of the snake', as the old saying goes.

In addition, I do not play the rules system Dirtside, nor do I plan to, though I do have a copy of the rules, and I do at least admire its design aesthetic.

Jumping Starside.