Promulgating the Hobby Back in 1981 when several of us met in “Wally’s Basement” because of the perception that the Historical Miniature Wargaming hobby was dying, we formed HMGS to promulgate and build the hobby. The initial result was that we provided support to existing conventions; Origins and others. Because these conventions, at that time, didn’t want to be bothered with us, we began our own conventions, Historicon, Cold Wars and now Fall In! But we never lost sight of the fact that our main purpose was to grow and promulgate the hobby. The reasons are selfish -- a larger hobby means more manufacturers providing more and better gaming materials at, what we would hope,better prices. The results of the most recent Fall In! indicates that HMGS has lost its way in that mission. The the idea was that we can advertise in the general media and have high profile fantasy or Science Fiction games at Fall In! that we would draw many Fantasy and SF gamers, not to mention general hobbyists to the convention and then to the hobby. The result was perhaps an extra 200 visitors at a cost to HMGS of a $10,000 lost for the convention! Some reports have the loss as high as $17,000. I, personally, have no problem with spending $10,000 or $17,000 (well the later may be a bit much) on promulgating the hobby every year BUT lets do it right! The money should be used to put on High Profile HISTORICAL games at Origins, Gen Con, and the major Science Fiction and Fantasy Conventions around the country. THAT is where we would have a captive audience of gamers, many miniature gamers and at Boardgame conventions (there are still some), many historical gamers. Now I don’t mean to pay for painted armies and terrain, but we can support the Game Masters who have a history of a gorgeous and fun presentation of Historical Miniature games by providing for con expenses. It seems to me that $10,000 can cover several games at a number of cons - and the potential gaming audience will be infinitely great than advertising in local newspapers! VOLLEY FIRE This is our first issue without the Dummy Cover that contained the Volley Fire response card. I had hoped that most of you would reply via our website (www.thecouriermagazine.com) or would make the extra effort of sending a post card or letter with your responses on it. The actual result is that the response have dropped by almost half! A 2 to 2 1/2% response is enough to get a feel for how you, the reader, feels about each issue, the subject matter, presentation, etc.. If the response doesn’t pick up on this issue, Volley Fire will no longer be worth while and will be dropped. Then again this response may be a vote on Volley Fire itself and it should be dropped. MWAN CHANGES HANDS I have had word from Hal Thinglum that he is retiring from the editorship of MWAN! I have know Hal for some 22 years. You could never find a nicer guy in the hobby or out. I and the many fans of MWAN will miss him. Hal has threatened to do this several times as the task has come close to being overwhelming (and I know how that can be....). Now Hal isn’t going completely away and will continue to write a column for MWAN, but no matter what the new owner will do with it, Hal’s page by page loving touch will be sorely missed. Good Luck Hal! More information can be found in the Courier Dispatch. Back to Table of Contents -- Courier # 90 To Courier List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by The Courier Publishing Company. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com