My name is Howard (Hi Howard!) and I am a wargames addict. My gaming activities divide up if I felt like dividing them up - into several categories: Conventions: Every year I attend probably four or five conventions, putting on my trademark 'loud and smelly' exercises in what I tend to think of as improvisational comedy theatre with toy soldiers and scenery as props and stage. Certainly my games don't resemble most peoples' idea of a wargame very closely, with lots of noise, not many rules and a general air of wild chaos swirling about. Last year I did an enormous western extravaganza in 25mm at Nashcon, with 8 umpires and 22 players, and another episode in my deeply primitive dinosaurs and cavemen series. This year I added to the deep historicity of the game by a new ingredient- a UFO arrives on a mission to collect specimens of prehistoric Earth fauna, which includes dinosaurs. Problem being that the aliens (cuddly E.T. types) cannot move anything that big, and need the cavemen clans to help moved the immobilized beasts. A very sophisticated concept involving communication between aliens and cavemen, eh? Of course, it didn't work that way, with herds of triceratops rushing the UFO and stomping the alien scientists. In the process the specimens already seized by the aliens (Queen Victoria, Napoleon, Fox Mulder and Karl Marx) are released and run away, mostly to become lunch for pterodactyls. I've run this scenario twice, to great acclaim by small boys, troglodytes etc. I also ran a scenario for Battle Troll, my Viking era man-to-man rules, which I'll address in a bit. Does anybody else recycle games after several years? I didn't have much time to prepare anything new for the Wargamers' Reunion last September, so I dusted off 'Tamai 1884', a veteran Science vs Pluck scenario noted for its concealed Fuzzy-Wuzzies and poor communication between the British officers and various Syrian interpreters and Abyssinian scouts. This game was unusual in that Cowan Hunter, acting as British G.O.C., took charge at the moment when total chaos was about to ensue, gave everyone a good collective chewing out, and got them to cooperate against the enemy rather than squabble among themselves. It was a great victory for the soldiers of the Queen. Usually, well, it isn't. Good news on the Science versus Pluck Front, by the way; a new edition, much expanded and clarified and generally improved, is being published by a British company, the Mercian Model Soldier, and (according to Arthur Brown, CEO and bottle-washer of said company) ready for the world at some date as yet unknown. I'll keep you posted. The Chattanooga club goes along each Wednesday night, with the usual 4-6 people. Club games give us the chance to practice for the big events and work out the bugs, but also test out our rules systems as they develop, play campaigns and odd one-off games that don't require the full banquet effect. Four of us have a group project involving Greek city states - I have the long-haired proto Fascists of Sparta, and have recently been stomping all comers, thanks to my policy of always fighting on my private battlefield outside town (I always set up on a hill I have declared sacred) and intimidating the foe by combing my hair and beard at them. That and singing old Gary Glitter songs to intimidate as they roll their dice. Americans have probably never been exposed to the ftill horror of the recorded works of Mr Glitter, sheer dreck from the early'70s. We have a spaceship campaign too, which isn't really my cup of tea, and I have never yet painted up my 'Planet Alabama' redneck space fleet, all rusted trucks, space dogs, stock cars and dented trailer space stations. Painting Not much time this year for painting. Mostly 15mm Dark ages Picts, Scots, hish, Arthurian British, some more 25mm gunfighters (I have about 9 Earp brothers and 3 Doc Hollidays it seems, all black coats and moustaches) and 25mm Vikings for the Battle Troll project - enough for heroes and their retinues 20+ players in a grand scenario of double-dealing and derring do. I badly need to rebase my 15mm. Napoleonic British, who lost their cardboard bases to a flood in the basement of my old house. Model Making Oh yes, as usual. Lots of scenery for paying customers. The whole of the Little Big Horn Battlefield, 4 tables each 6 'x 10' for Old Glory, done in an absurd hurry (all Pete Panzeri's fault he got the deadline wrong by a month, din'cha Pete? I've been teasing him for months about this --) and not initially as nice as I'd have liked, but I later had the chance to finish it the way I'd have wanted to, and much improved.. Khartoum from scratch in 25mm, which had a bit of a disaster in transit when all the cardboard buildings warped, damifino why. Most of the North-west frontier of India. Some big civil war - both the real civil war involving King and Parliament and the American disturbances of the 1860s - things for various people. A lot of painting and basing commercial buildings, including the amazing Hudson& Allen Alamo (10 hours painting). Still can't get the medieval buildings to smell right, need more dung in the paint. Just got a big box of WW II Russian front things to paint for my friend Tim Mullen, not my favourite period, but, hey, everything's rubble, so how hard is that? Plus there's a tractor factory, and who could resist the romance of a tractor factory? Battle Troll is the name of my Viking Age man-to-man rules, begun as a 4 page set in the mid-eighties, which have expanded into a broader system of wargaming the Scandinavian Dark Ages from a deliberately heroic perspective, with lots of feuding and insults and holding grudges and a tremendous amount of deviousness. Let me quote myself "Personal combat in the Norse sagas is notable for its combination of grim humour, gymnastic violence and a graphic interest in the details of wounds, especially those with fatal consequences. Blows result in smashed shields or heads; limbs fly off with astonishing regularity, to the wry amusement of the saga-teller and the considerable chagrin of their erstwhile owners, whose life expectancy has suddenly dropped considerably. Minor wounds are seldom mentioned, except in terms of multiple accumulation; it is with Great Men, Great Deeds and, of course, Great Blows that the sagas are concerned. This short set of rules presents some basic mechanisms for modeling this sort of combat, where pithy taunts and well planned insults play their part alongside acts of the most grievous bodily harm. This is not a 'complete skirmish system', as if such a thing were possible, but simply a vicariously amusing look at these appallingly bloodthirsty times, conducted in the warmth and comfort of our own homes. I've added some scenarios and other material that may be of some interest to budding sagamen. If something isdt covered by the rules, make up your own." The basic rules are Dead Simple, using a variant on the time-honoured 'Paper Scissors Stone' method, in which you have a deck of cards for attack and defense, choosing what you want to do, and comparing them to find out how many dice you get to roll. There's a lot more detail for our chosen heroes than for the grimy other blokes who make up the numbers, so you can have a fair number of these types without slowing down the game. Back to MWAN #100 Table of Contents Back to MWAN List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1999 Hal Thinglum This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com