Some Monday Morning Musings

 It's interesting I think, to see how the life that I and my peers lived as gamers, being commented on, by people who were not there, with a sense of authority which,, would suggest otherwise.

I know that I and others who were there have had arguments both on line and in person, with those who weren't to the point that in the ednd we just said 'fuck it' and walked away.

Remember that A.I and the internet knows more than the people who grew up and in the hobby (rolls eyes). Some of us were in the business as it were 'embedded' by the age of 14, which raises eyebrows, but the world was a different place.

The current younger gamers (let's say under 40) sadly only know of a post Imperial Assault era Games Workshop, when the stormtroopers of the one true way, tried to take apart so many small companies, and of the padded, 300 page rulebooks, which drain the pocket and in my personal opinion (deal with it) something of the soul of the hobby.

 Those who came up in the hobby just after D&D started to boom, as a result of the James Dallas Egbert case and the Satanic Panic  conversely accelerating that boom, were often gaming with and learning at the feet of some of the earliest hobbyists, who, had taken those steps to earn a living or at the least supplement their income by monetising their hobby.

Many, many gamers, would adapt existing rule sets or come up with their own sets of rules, type them up, and get them photocopied or printed and sold at a modest price so that others could enjoy their efforts. 

Of course there were companies like WRG, who produced the sets of rules most often used in competitions, and thus which many clubs, back in the days when inter-club competetive gaming was BIG and we didn't have to all troop to Nottingham to worship at a selfproclaimed temple of all that is gaming.

I did that a couple of times, but all those shining faces and glassy eyes made me feel uneasy, and unlike Jerry Cornelius, I didn't have a vibragun with which to change the flow of time and reality - alas.

But I digress; what would you expect?

If we go back to the late seventies and and the very early 80s, TSR was doing exactly what GW has done, and entered an imperial phase, wherein it saw itself as the High Church of gaming. It had more money than it knew what to do with. No hobby games company had ever seen wealth of the type Dungeons & Dragons was generating. 

Milton Bradley you say. Hasbro you scream... Bollocks, I reply because in the end, they were actually so shocked by the money that a little box with a couple of books and some really crappy dice could generate that they rushed to try and tap into that market, but lacked the access to the creativity that the roleplaying and wargaming industry had, being run as they were in the same 'closed shop' manner as the music industry.

TSR eventually got a bit too big for it's admittedly large boots and started courting Hollywood and even bought a needlework company for Christ's sake, which began a 10 or 12 year spiral of death which I was unfortunate enough to witness during the time I owned Dungeons & Starships, taking down many great little businesses with it as the flaming wreckage spread outwards from the hull of the I.S.S Lake Geneva after Gygax was ousted and the Dilley and Blume families tried to milk the company dry, losing the support of the gaming public and indeed sight of what the core product line was.

TSR lost touch with the other luminaries of the early years who had not made it as big, and so were ignored, but those people had sucessful businesses and still have in many cases, and they talked with other designers and gamers, where TSR saw itself as being the King Rat, above the rest. 

GW has so far proved to be too big to fail, but I am certain that one day they will themselves, fiddle whilst the metaphorical Rome which is the hobby, burns.

So many companies now, seem to come along with what are just thinly veneered copies of GW's Grimdark and  Apocalyptic ideas, or a video game. Where I ask you are the unicorns, the true High Fantasy on which the hobby was built?  

I've read a a lot about the history I was fortunate to witness in person, as the hobby blossomed and grew, indeeed only missing 4 or 5 years of the initial big bang in which I was coaught and in which I and many others in my circle, felt a change in our personal realities, most of us never rejoining the time stream in which we were born. It really was as powerful as that for a portion of our generation.

Now, I love Warhammer 1st and 2nd edition; I can stomach 3rd ed if I must, but need to lie down for a few hours after playing it as it feels so modern, that first big book, that defining big book which then became the template for the future, which I have never come to terms with. I don't think I ever will - sorry.

But I still enjoy doing what we all did back in the day, across all facets of the gaming hobby, writing rules. I began, as I recall with a self contained little mini RPG/skirmish game, because I didn't have the Traveller rules, but did have several sets of the Cardboard Heroes cardboard stand-ups designed for Traveller, and the Adventurers set produced by Citadel for the Traveller RPG.

Actually, come to think of it, my first rule set was to allow me to use the ten or so Galactic Grenadiers miniatures I'd bought at Hopkinson's Toys, where two sides entered a sunbterranean cave system from either end and hunted each other down. Simplistic, certainly, but great fun at the time. 

The third set was a simple system to allow Alan and I to fight battles with the 1/300 micro armour models I'd picked up at my first Sheffield Triples (you can read about that in one of my Memory Lane' series of posts)

For the last 3 years, I've been working on a set of fast play Fantasy warfare rules, which allow fun and big battles and which use a single number and a couple of notes to describe a unit. We have played them a lot and they give a good game, with mechanisms which allow players to direct the battle to some degree, totally ignore basing sizes and work with any models you have.

The magic is straightforward and affects the playing area in many cases.

It's a homebrew set, but maybe one day I'll put it out there as a PDF. The point is, it's a labour of love and a group of us have had some really fun days, with lots of bad dice rolls, good lunches and great stories resulting. Surely, that's what is important?

And I guess that comes from the formative years of both me and the hobby where the DIY aspects were normal.

I sometimes wonder if the reason that so many rules were simply produced affairs, was because people wanted to get their ideas out as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

As I said earlier, people were learning how to supplement the increasing costs of the hobby with side hustles, and many a kid would write a scenario, draw a simple but passionately done cover - often copying the style of the TSR and Judges Guild modules which we were starting to see in the stores,. Many Mums and Dads worked in offices and could be pressured into photocopying  10 or so sets which the 'authors' would charge 50p for, perhaps to friends or other kids at whichever clubs they went to.

And that was the same method albeit at a larger scale, how so many companies built themselves up. Some of the best adventures I ever bought, had quite poor production, but the love was there, the content was there, and that was what mattered.  Often, these sold as many as a glossy TSR product did. Indeed, some 'big bucks' products completely flopped, because, whilst they were shiny and colourful, the actual content was piss poor.

And this brings me back to where I started, because there is a myth nowadays that Warhammer was an instant hit - it wasn't - it really wasn't, becuase it was neither fish nor foul, but was, a good red herring of sorts.

Those highly coveted but never played sets you see today being offered at stupid prices were stacked high and sold off for a fraction of the cost on pallets at the fromt of the 5 GW stores. Having bought, read and got rid of our sets, we thought 'what the hell' in many cases, and bought them again for £2.99, and tried to look at the game differently.

The idea was to 'role play' the smaller character based adventures and then switch to the mass battle system for the larger fights. Indeed the Redwake River Valley campaign in the set did just that. 

Whilst the majority of gamers back then were either historical wargamers or roleplayers, a lot were embracing both disciplines, looked askance at by both sides, but we were actually , unknowingly playing our part in the evolution of the hobby to the next stage. 

Of course some of the pioneers like Tony Bath, Dave Arneson etc, had been mixing the genres for a decade, but largely, as history records, this was far from the norm, becuase wargamers came from their owm community whilst many of the roleplayers came from science fiction literature fandom.

Somewhere in the middle, a minority of heretics met in no man's land and shook hands. And that's when the fun really began.

TSR had a total stock value of $300 at the outset, thus you see just how humble were our origins.

You need to understand that what you see as normal now, the high cost, high gloss industry is like the sweetcorn plant. It's a freak that was curated.

I like sweetcorm, indeed I grow it, but sometimes I just like to sit in a patch of common, natural grass.

Perhaps those of you who have only ever known sweetcorn, should read a few books about common grass, because I think that you'll not only learn something about your roots as a gamer, but you'll learn some really great stories, and see just what a privilege we all enjoy.

 

There are some great books out there both retrospective histories and some written during the darkest days of the hobby's founding, written by fundamentalist witch hunters who could have destroyed our worl and who, unless you learn about and learn from those time, come again and this time they will prevail.

That said, it may not be a bad thing, as gamers will become an underground community again.

It's athought... 

 

TFN