Est. Dec. 2017
Motto: Voluptas supra victoriam!
The Second Saturday Scrum Club was born of founder Joe Procopio's desire to establish a regularly scheduled gathering with fellow miniatures gamers who are passionate about the hobby but prioritize fun at the table over cut-throat competitiveness (see our motto). Below are the core members and a bit about each of us. In addition to the core members below, we also maintain an unofficial auxiliary of like-minded folks with similar gaming proclivities who we invite for role-playing and miniatures games, when seating permits. In fact, you'll find a good number of the auxiliary running games at Scrum Con in any given year!
Joe Procopio is the founder of the Second Saturday Scrum Club. He went into a deep gaming freeze after an adolescence mildly obsessed with role playing games, only to re-emerge in middle age to discover the joys of miniatures gaming. His gaming blog is Scrum in Miniature (miniaturescrum.blogspot.com), and he launched a small miniatures company named Above the Fray Miniatures in 2018. His other passion is Picture This Press (LostArtBooks.com), a publishing venture that preserves the work of under-appreciated illustrators and comic artists from earlier in the 20th century.
John Sears has been rolling dice for decades and painting figures for even longer. While he loves role playing and board games, miniature wargames combine his passion for modeling, research, crafting, and gaming, which have proved irresistible to him. He documents his projects on his blog 1000footgeneral.blogspot.com, and hopes to release a long gestating set of game rules in 2019.
Jared Smith has been gaming since he was six, and plans to keep doing so forever. His Cthulhu Mythos RPG magazine, Bayt al Azif, can be found at BaytAlAzif.com. He also publishes comic books as Retrofit Comics (retrofitcomics.com) and sells comic books at Big Planet Comics (bigplanetcomics.com).
Rich McKee has been running a persistent Stonehell game across several groups and many conventions for almost 10 years. He intends to destroy the dungeon this year and move on to something else.
Zach Howard entered the dungeon in 1982 with a copy of the original 1977 D&D Basic Set, now known as “Holmes Basic” after its editor, J. Eric Holmes. Since 2011 he has blogged at the Zenopus Archives (ZenopusArchives.blogspot.com) about Holmes Basic and the early history of D&D. In recent years Zach has contributed material to the gaming zines Dungeon Crawl, Fantastic! Exciting! Imaginative!, and Bayt al Azif, and the book Tales of Peril, a collection of Holmes’ D&D-based fiction published by Black Blade Publishing.
Walt O’Hara is a charter member of the Second Saturday Scrum Club. As a callow youth he was introduced to a relatively unheard of pastime that was still very new—role playing games, which became one of his fixations. Later, he started his long involvement with skirmish and naval games. His gaming blog is the Third Point of Singularity, and his audio blog is Airy Persiflage on Podbean.
Steve B. began wargaming when he first got little plastic army men and has been exploring dungeons since there were just three little books to tell you how to do it. He loves gaming because it fosters creativity, builds cooperation, and challenges critical thinking skills. He has been helping other kids become gamers for over 20 years in an effort to repay those that got him into gaming.
French the Unnamed Gamer is willing to play just about anything as long as someone else is running it.
Josh O'Connor won two ENnies in 2015 for Best Monster/Adversary and Best Cover for "Terrors of the Secret War," published by Modiphius Entertainment. He is also the creator and host of Tankard Talk, which produces professional-quality, interactive videos about the tabletop games industry for Twitch and YouTube.
Club Combat Photographer
Ellen Levy has been photographing our games from the first Scrum Club meeting onward, providing most of the photos to be found scattered throughout the Scrum in Miniature blog's various posts. More of her lovely work can be found on Instagram at EllenProLevy.
The Club's Extracurricular Activities
Within a few short months of its existence, the Second Saturday Scrum Club decided to organize and launch a small local convention it titled, oddly enough, Scrum Con, equally split between miniatures games (the club's focus) and role-playing games (something everybody in the club also loves). The inaugural Scrum Con was held in College Park, Maryland on Feb. 16, 2019. It was a rousing success, selling out of tickets a week ahead of time. The Scrum Club intends to make Scrum Con an annual event, filling a niche in the Wash., DC-area convention gaming scene.
A read through our bios above demonstrates that we're a fairly industrious bunch, so it seems only fitting that we'd be tempted to add another extracurricular activity to our monthly game gathering. Launched in May 2019, Scrum Club TV will include post-game discussions, convention field reports, and perhaps the occasional interview with game designers, artists, and miniatures sculptors.
