Vintage Wargaming

Some of you may be aware that British Pathe has begun uploading its archives to YouTube. A wonderful little piece from 1966 popped up on my feed the other day, and I wanted to share it here:



 Old school!

(Nice to see that "husband & wife" wargaming goes back a ways, too.)

On the Higher Standards of Being a Hobbyist

I've been involved in the miniatures hobby in some capacity or another for over 20 years now. Just a babe in the woods compared to a lot of old salts, but still long enough to see fads come and go and long-term trends play out. One of the trends I've been most simultaneously fascinated and disturbed by has been the rising standard in what's considered "acceptable" for a rank-and-file, wargame-ready miniature in terms of painting and presentation. Apparently I'm not alone (PDF link). Quoth Mr. Priestly:

Now, I’m not suggesting that this perpetuation of a style and quality of presentation is a bad thing. In so many ways, it is a very good thing, and an entirely positive way of presenting our hobby, both to fellow hobbyists and to prospective ones.  

The reason why all this leaves me feeling a little hollow is simply this – I know I can’t do it! Where, once, I could paint an army with a certain sense of individualism, with confidence, and with pride in the finished result, now I sometimes despair of picking up the paintbrush and showing the results to my fellow gamers.

There can be no doubt that the standard for wargaming miniatures has risen steadily since the dawn of the hobby. An interesting observation made in the essay is that the rising standard has also led to increased homogenization of style. I tend to agree. I certainly wish these days we'd see more John Blanches or Bryan Ansells held up as worthy standards of aspiration alongside the McVeys and the Dallimores.

Interestingly, my personal bugbear is not painting, per se, but basing. It's my own version of "back in my day . . .". Wellsir, back in my day, ya painted the base green, ya slapped some glue on the top (or, if you were really lazy/painting a big unit, you just used the paint while it was still wet as an adhesive), and ya dipped the base in a bag of Woodland Scenics flock and called it good enough. You did this even for your centerpiece figures, your exquisitely-painted masterpieces. But somewhere along the way, it was decided that bases needed as much attention as the figure itself. First it was texturing bases with gravel and stone. Then it was adding static grass. Now it's adding flowers and bushes and skulls and whatever else until the base becomes a miniature in its own right.

And in that, I echo Priestly's lament. Painting figures for the joy of it has always been a big part of the hobby for me (always secondary to actually playing, mind). But, even though I've gone along with the crowd along the Fancy Basing Road, it's enervating, just like in the quote above; the daunting task of spending another 30 minutes on a "proper" base after finishing with the figure. Basing used to be my favorite part of miniatures painting, because it was quick and easy while still giving the figure a nice "finished" look - putting the bow on, so to speak. Now it's my least favorite task.

Back when I was collecting old Grenadier and Ral Partha figures for my Fantasy Warriors armies, I intentionally used a more old-fashioned basing method (as pictured above), and it was a welcome relief. And yet I continue to base all my other figures in the latter-day styles. Because, let's face it, it looks good. I just wonder sometimes if there's a middle ground.

Current Projects Update

Here's the most recent shot of my work area. Two of my current projects are easily discernible; the third might be a bit harder to pick out, still being largely in bags, but it is, ironically, my current obsession.

• The Normandy project is moving along nicely. Shortly after posting those pictures of painted Highlanders, I decided that consistency of scale was more important to me than I had realized and I resolved to limit myself to a single manufacturer as much as possible. I plumped for Artizan, and all the figures have since arrived, been based, and primered. (And as a change of pace, I'm taking the advice of several other bloggers and doing the base texture before I paint the figures. Should be interesting to see how that pans out.)
  
  As an old fan of Necromunda and Mordheim, I couldn't be more pleased that the figures currently occupying space on my table constitute the entirety of what I need to play Operation Squad. Of course I plan on expanding by adding other squads and eventually moving into the game's vehicular supplement (see the primered Panther over on the left?) as well as playing larger, platoon-scale games of NUTS! once my collection gets big enough, but I'm loving the small scale that the basic OS game offers. Next up: ordering a few buildings from Paper Terrain, finishing up a couple other terrain-related odds and ends, and then playing some games! Hoping to realize the latter goal by the end of summer at the latest.
• Up on top of the plastic drawers sits another skirmish-level project, my 28mm samurai. I'm looking forward to Osprey's Ronin rules, but if those aren't quite what I'm looking for, I've always got Taiko. In fact, I'm planning on basing my samurai with magnets so that I can mount them in scenic movement trays in the style of Impetus to do larger-scale Taiko battles even if I end up using Ronin for my skirmish games. I plan on working on these guys slowly but surely, mostly as a colorful relief from the earth tones of my Normandy project.
• Lastly, there's the surprise project: my return to Epic-scale 40K. I posted back when I made an impulse purchase of a heap of classic Titans on the subject of my abiding love for Epic gaming and the many good times that Space Marine provided. Well, my old adversary Alex and I have been furiously exchanging emails, planning out our return to the fold. Amazingly, I just last week landed a complete boxed set of Adeptus Titanicus (styrene buildings and all!) for less than half of what I paid for it 20 years ago. And I've been slowly acquiring other pieces for my quickly-expanding collection, all the while trawling NetEPIC and ginning up armies. The plan in place right now is to build a Titan Legion/Space Marine army and paint up a few traitor titans as well - I've already picked out legions and paint schemes and can't wait to get started on that. The long-term goal is to build up an Ork army with my three old Gargant models as centerpieces. Alex is putting together a Knight-based Adeptus Mechanicus army with his long-term goal being the fielding of an Eldar army similar to the one he had in days of yore.
  
  This way we can play both the original Adeptus Titanicus rules with a handful of titans per side or have nice big bashes with NetEPIC armies. We only manage to get together about once a year at best (living 1,000 miles apart tends to put a crimp in social plans), but we're already planning to bring our tiny little armies along for whenever it is we see each other.

Oh, and I've also got plans for a third Armies of Arcana project, but that's projected to be a ways down the road and will warrant a post of its own, coming up shortly.

Twenty Questions

Who am I to turn down an opportunity for solipsistic introspection? Actually, I've never really done a proper introductory post for this blog, and this seems to fit the bill nicely. Thanks to Thantsants for posting his answers and inspiring me to do the same!

Yours truly, plus dog.

1. Favorite wargaming period and why?

I think based simply on the number of years I've doggedly attempted to game the period, World War II. All sorts of figure scales, engagement scales, rules, etc., have been attempted with varying degrees of success, but in the end I've thoroughly enjoyed the ride thus far. And it wasn't even my idea! A friend suggested we look into the genre shortly after we decided to ditch Games Workshop and go historical. I knew very little about the period outside the cod-Hollywood version everyone grows up with. Over 15 years later and there's still tons to learn from both a historiographical and wargaming perspective!

2. Next period, money no object?

Oh, don't tempt me! Seriously, though - I'd probably want to throw together another couple armies for my fantasy collection. I feel pretty satisfied (for now) in terms of historical miniatures.
ETA: I got bit, dammit! Great Northern War, 6mm. The "money no object" bit would simply have to do with the size of the collection.

3. Favorite 5 films?

Hmmm. These sorts of lists are always "of the moment" as far as I'm concerned. And so, in no pertikler order:

• Excalibur
• Return of the Living Dead
• Porco Rosso
• Evil Dead 2
• Tombstone

4. Favorite 5 TV series?

Same rules apply as the movie selections (although The Simpsons will always be on the list, I think):

• The Simpsons
• Arrested Development
• The Twilight Zone
• Venture Bros.
• The IT Crowd

5. Favorite book and author?

John Bellairs is an under-appreciated prose stylist, both in juvenile fiction and his one adult book.

And it may sound silly, but I could read The Sword of Samurai Cat by Mark E. Rodgers over and over again. (And indeed I have.)

6. Greatest general? Excluding oneself!

That's a thinker. I don't usually engage in those sorts of Great Man all-star competitions. Based on personality alone, I'm gonna have to go with Julius Caesar, magnificent bastard that he was.

7. Favorite wargames rules?

Whatever's currently caught my fancy!

Seriously, though: in terms of number of awesome games delivered, the 2nd edition Space Marine rules never disappoint, although they can be a bit clunky. In terms of elegant, flexible design, my money's on Armies of Arcana.

8. Favorite sport and team?

I don't follow sports, like, at all. But I have to admit I was quite captivated by the Ladies' Water Polo matches during the last Summer Olympics...

9. If you had a one use only time machine, when and where would you go?

Okay, seriously, this is just cruel. I'd be so paralyzed by all the "big" choices, I'd probably just end up going back to 1870s New York to have lunch at Delmonico's. Wait...do I get to come back, or is it a one-way trip? If it's the latter, then I'm quite happy where I am now, thanks.

10. Last meal on Death Row?

For old time's sake (long story) I'd go for two Choco-Tacos and a bag of Gummy Worms.

11. Fantasy relationship and why?

I'm going to steal the answer provided by another blogger and say my maternal grandfather. He died of lung cancer while I was still an infant, so I never got to know him, but all indications are that a big part of my personality and temperament, to say nothing of my interests, map very closely to his. Don't smoke, kids.

12. If your life were a movie, who would play you?

My wife has reliably informed me that any role modeled on my life could be ably handed to Colin Firth for an eerily accurate rendition.

13. Favorite comic superhero?

Much to my chagrin, I've never been able to get into mainstream superhero comics. On the other hand, anything by the Hernandez brothers is likely to catch my interest.

14. Favorite military quote?

While I was recuperating after a surgical mishap last year, I re-read John Keegan's The Face of Battle (getting cut open made me want to read about other people getting blown up, I guess) and I jotted down this quote, which pretty much sums up why I game primarily at skirmish level:

'Battle', for the ordinary soldier, is a very small-scale situation which will throw up its own leaders and will be fought by its own rules...

For a long time, though, my favorite "military" quote has been one provided by H. G. Wells, commenting on why he (like me), could claim himself a pacifist and still enjoy playing wargames:

Lead soldiers leave neither lead widows nor lead orphans.

15. Historical destination to visit?

Does the entire continent of Europe count? Because I'd like to spend a few years doing that.

16. Biggest wargaming regret?

Don't think I haven't thought about this! On a practical level, it's the fact that my years of Games Workshop fandom coincided almost perfectly with their greatest nadir of creativity and quality (a.k.a. the mid-90s) and that I ditched the GW hobby right before they started getting good again!

On a more conceptual level, my greatest regret is that for far too long I haven't had more time to devote to this particular hobby.

17. Favorite fantasy job?

Brilliantly successful hermit/novelist.

18. Favorite 5 songs?

I'm going to cheat on this one and just go to my Last.FM profile and see what the numbers have to say, then pick from among the top tracks. These aren't necessarily my favorite-favorite songs, but they're certainly songs I've seen fit to listen to a lot!

• My War Black Flag
• Cosmic Dancer T. Rex
• Danny Says The Ramones
• Sound and Vision David Bowie
• Lament for the Auroch The Sword

19. Favorite wargaming moment?

I'm 14 years old. I'm playing Warhammer with my friend Alex. He's got his High Elves, I've got my Empire army. Both armies are maybe 1,000 points and we've got probably three or four games under our belts. He's recently acquired the Silver Helms boxed set and they're the centerpiece of his growing army. I use my Knights Panther to draw the Silver Helms into a charge...that takes them right across the field of fire of my own recently-acquired Volley Gun. Three rolls of the artillery die later and the Silver Helms were no more than a delicately-floating crimson mist. I was hooked on miniatures wargaming forever.

20. The miserable git question, what upsets you?

Like everyone else, I've got a whole passel of petty hang-ups and irritations. But in the end, what really upsets me is when we, as a species, keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again, often, it seems, at greater and greater cost. Thinking about that too much, though, just makes me want to go off and paint some miniatures.

An Epic Acquisition

Adeptus Titanicus was the second miniatures game I ever bought, and in many ways it's responsible for my miniatures wargaming hobby.

The game came out in 1988 and was (I believe) Games Workshop's first "epic" (i.e. 6mm) scale game. Set in their Warhammer 40,000 continuity, but thousands of years earlier during the Horus Heresy, it was a game of giant robot combat, which naturally appealed to my young adolescent sensibilities when I saw it sitting on the game store shelf. I still remember walking out of the store with the box tucked under my arm.

When I got home, the game contained within did not fail to disappoint. It came with four expanded polystyrene buildings and six plastic Warlord Titans. The rulebook dripped with good old-fashioned grim-n-gritty gothic-punk flavo(u)r and was my introduction to the joys of the 'Eavy Metal painting team and rulebooks with full-color photos. (Fantasy Warriors, my first miniatures game, didn't go much farther than pixelated line art for its rulebook.)

At any rate, I never played much of Adeptus Titanicus, but I enjoyed painting up the titans, and the photos in the rulebook caught the eye of my friend Alex, who was to become my first gaming buddy thanks to the conversation the rulebook sparked. A scheduled game turned instead into a broader interest in tabletop RPG gaming, and we didn't actually play a miniatures game until a couple months later (and Fantasy Warriors, at that!). But it certainly fired our imaginations, and it's no coincidence that a few months later we each asked for and received a Games Workshop game for Christmas (he: Warhammer 4th edition; me: Space Marine 2nd edition). We played a lot of both games over the coming years, but we both agree that our fondest memories from those years were courtesy of Space Marine and the truly "Epic" games we played. Over time, all those excess Titans (and the styrene buildings) from the AT box were lost to the sands of time, although I hung on to my metal Ork gargants (one Great and two Slashas) and still have them today, even though the gargants have for years served mostly as symbols of good times long past.

I was giving some thought to those memories a couple weeks ago, specifically in regards to the "Oldhammer"movement. As much as I admire the vintage Citadel sculpts of the 80s, my heart and soul lies with the epic-scale minis of the early 90s. So I went to eBay to see what was on offer...

Imagine my surprise when I found a lot of fourteen vintage Titans (including three metal Reavers and a Warlord still on the sprue) for a seriously reasonable price. I put the auction on watch on followed it as it got closer to the finish line. By the final day, the price was still not terribly exorbitant  so I started bidding - and I won. In the end, I paid about $8.25 per Titan, a very reasonable price considering that one often sees single titan figures being offered for upwards of $25.00.

What's more, the lot came with a bunch of "extras," stuff I was only dimly aware of back in the day - custom heads, new weapons, and various other add-ons and ephemera. Clearly this lot belonged to a devoted Adeptus Titanicus gamer.

One of the things I love about picking up stuff like this on eBay is how you sometimes get these fun little personal touches in the lot. For example:

Considering this was probably painted in the early 90s, that reference isn't perhaps as dated as it may first seem. Nice to know The Hammer is still enjoying some level of popularity in the 41st millennium.

By far the weirdest feature of the auction was this Reaver Titan, which has some sort of home-wired attempt at creating a light-up system for tracking void shields. (Normally you just use a spinning disc set in the base):

What you can only barely see in the picture is the massive watch battery case required to power the lights and switch, nor can you see the rather sophisticated wiring under the base. It was a noble effort, but I think I'll stick with the spinning discs.

I emailed Alex about my purchase and he immediately wrote back, enthusiastically offering to take some Titans off my hands. How could I refuse? We don't live in the same city anymore, but we do manage the occasional visit, and when we do hook up, we'll be sure to bring our minis along and finally have that game of Adeptus Titanicus.

In the meantime, these guys have a date with a Dettol bath. (Yes, even "It's Hammer Time" - hey, it's preserved in picture form, at least.) I'm quite excited about doing these Titans up properly, with lots of banners and heraldry. Pics will, in due course, follow. I'm also now cagily monitoring eBay, looking for more deals on vintage Epic figures. I'd like to re-acquire a nice collection of infantry and vehicles to go with my Titans, and my Gargants will need some Ork Boyz to swarm around their feet. I'm also thinking of giving Future War Commander a look by way of rules for any game that isn't purely titan vs. titan, in which case I'll use the original Adeptus Titanicus rules.

Quite unexpectedly, it looks like I've found my niche in the Oldhammer movement. Go figure.

July 4th Memories

I am 16 years old, sitting at the desk in my bedroom as my Dad works the grill outside. I've got the Twilight Zone marathon playing on my six-inch black and white on KTLA (this is back before SciFi/SyFy/PsiPhy/whatever bought up the rights) and I'm working on some 15mm Napoleonic Prussians (the first of many forays into historical miniatures - this one didn't work out too well in the end). It's a sweltering L.A. day but I've got my desk lamp on and I'm painting.

Ever since then, despite the heat, summer always puts me in the mood to paint miniatures.