Happy New Year folks! Yep, we're in a new year with new opportunities and challenges. Warparty, Drums, Origins, Warband, ATC -- let alone all of the other local cons and conventions in other regions like Little Wars and Historicon! We have loads of great clubs and groups as well as some great shops that help us out. On the whole things are going pretty well. That doesn't mean we can't improve. Part of that improvement means getting more dealers for ATC. More information on that is located in The Herald. Please look at the article and feel free to contact us. This is the time of year when most of us go into "winter quarters" to work on various projects. I know I have a few I'm working on. Right now, I'm building a couple more DBA armies (Viking and Assyrian); finishing off more ACW figures and starting work on my forces for the Russo-Japanese War. This is a new period for me and started by a comment on the Naval Wargames Society Yahoo Group. It was a simple message about the commemoration of various important naval anniversaries this year. One of them was Tsushima. That was the battle that sparked my curiosity about the Russo-Japanese War. At about this time, I read an article in Military History magazine on the Battle of Mukden. This led me to Richard Connaughton's excellent book on the war, Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear. Now, I'm going to actually look into running land battles of that war for Origins and ATC! It's kind of funny how you get started on a new era. I had never really had a prior interest in the Russo-Japanese war period. I've read some things on Tsushima and Port Arthur, and I admit an interest in the naval aspects of the war, but never really thought about doing anything with the land war. After reading Connaughton's book, I now see a great deal of potential for the war. I'm amazed at how I got started on this new project. I read a couple of articles and now I'm planning armies and thinking about gaming it in a serious way. How did I get into this mess? Oh yeah, I read a few articles. Darn it! I need to stop reading magazines, books and online articles! It makes me spend money! Still, if I do that, I'll be cutting myself off from one of my primary sources of entertainment. Oh heck, it's not that bad. This is really the first major diversion off from a period I had planned on doing. Well, second actually. DBA was my first diversion. I'm not that bad off am I? Anyway, time to get back to the old lead pile. Good Luck and Good Gaming! Back to The Herald 63 Table of Contents Back to The Herald List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2005 by HMGS-GL. 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