"Hello - My names John and I'm a Wargamer".
I thought I could handle it but I can't. I kicked the habit for a long time but the old adage "you are only one game away from relapse" is too true.
Many years ago like 40 years ago!!!! I was a traditional wargamer, re-fighting massed battles, 25mm and 15mm even some 6mm armoured. Think Donald Featherstone and Tony Bath, although I'm not that old. Then I became a member of the Society of Ancients and took winning very seriously. This went on for a number of years, I was a founding member of a wargaming club they were a great bunch of guys, but I decided I had had enough of competitive (argumentative) style gaming and stopped playing regularly.
I did have a few solo games, but missed the element of competition and surprise also with equal points based armies it was quite boring, I rarely finished a game. The guys would come out of the closet line up and then get put away again without moving very far at all. The rules at the time were usually either very complex with lots of record keeping or quite simplistic and not realistic enough to suit me then, how times have changed.
Everything would have been fine, I could have lived a normal life until I discovered Smirnoff. No sorry that's another blog ;-)
I moved house - lost the 8 x 6' table, that seemed like the end, finally clean. I kept the old armies but it was only to prove I was never going back to that life.
This was the case for about 25 years and then trawling the internet I came upon Vampifan’s blog. Here was this guy playing games on a 3’ square table, with some amazing looking scenery, all printed paper and with not many figures, so no great investment cost and he was having a whale of a time playing solo games against a games system that continually threw up new challenges.
There was no even points sides, you had no idea what would occur, sometimes the games were easy and some times he just had to run away, the alternative was for his figures to die. This was All Things Zombie (ATZ) and he had so much invested in the characters that getting them killed was a really bad idea and painful as well.
I had never played any RPG’s and never come across this concept before. Usually you fought to the last man or the morale system made you run away, this was narrative gaming with a vengeance and I was hooked.
Even reading the games reports was exciting, I was always rooting for the good guy’s but unlike a novel or a film where it always ends well, with this game it didn’t always end well, there were casualties and that hurt in a weird sort of a way.
The other person who set me back off on the gaming trail was a guy from Germany called Whiteface. He also played with the ATZ rules, he started off with little and sometimes inappropriate scenery but this improved as time went on. His blog was dark and very bleak and the campaign didn’t go well, he lost his wife early on, his daughter disappeared, his games very often ended badly but they were a gripping read, with tongue in the cheek dark humour. Eventually he stopped posting and I was really sad that this source of dark tales in a zombie infested world had ceased.
These two gamers showcased very different tables, one a masterpiece and one a work in progress, but they had two things in common, a set of rules that gave them a dramatic and exciting solo game, and they both had a gripping narrative style in the way they played and recorded their games. This was what I had been looking for and never found. I fell off the waggon with a big bump.
I had some Copplestone Street Violence type figures just because I liked them and thought they would be nice to paint, but of course never did anything with them. However after reading the zombie blogs I bought some zombies and painted them all, that was about 6 years ago and I started gaming again.
I hadn’t seen a zombie film and still haven't, and zombies per se don't interest me at all but they make amazing opponents in a game with their simplistic, can I see food - Yes/No if Yes go and eat it!!!
This brought me back to gaming but about the same time I discovered the Lead Adventurers Forum, it's a very special place full of talented enthusiastic and encouraging people, the forum is full of ideas and inspiration and has kept my interest in gaming on a high heat ever since.
Well as this is my 1st post I probably ought to say a little about how I envision my blog in the future, which is a bit of a problem as I'm not too sure where I will end up and I don't suppose anyone is really interested.
My reason for starting this is to catalogue the games I have been playing, I have posted a few on LAF but there are lots more, I have enjoyed doing the write ups as much as playing the games and I would like to be able to keep them all in one place.
I hope to get some feed back from other like minded lost souls with ideas for scenarios and mechanisms for improving and running games and maybe even how I write about them, I am very long winded, but you know that by now.
I don't envision showing off my figure painting skills for reasons that will be apparent, fortunately my failing eyesight makes my figures seem better than when they are photographed and magnified. I am however re-doing a lot of my scenery to try and improve the look of my games and advice will always be welcome on that subject.
Having finally set up a google account specifically for wargaming it will enable me to keep up with some of the Blogs I read on an ad hoc basis, so that should cut down on my gaming and painting time no end. ;-)
So to wrap up I am going to post a picture of my last game played a few nights ago, just to see if I can.
If there's anybody out there let me know – thanks for reading.
