First of all, I am happy to announce that I have joined forces with Chris Parker in establishing a new web site called All Things Ancient and Medieval. We are both committed to providing internet users with a web site devoted to historical miniature wargaming. The address is printed above.

You will find in the center of your SAGA a membership form for joining the Society of Ancients. The Society journal, Slingshot, is the best buy around. It is huge, with 60 plus pages and is published bi-monthly, like SAGA. If you join up, simply mention that you saw their form in SAGA and the editor, Steven Neate, will send you the free game HE WHO WOULD BE KING! Now that's a deal.

With the final edits of Medieval Warfare in the mail, we should be seeing the Foundry version of the rules out perhaps before HISTORICON. There has been an on-going debate in Slingshot's on-line Guardroom section having to deo with an article written in the November issue attacking the Warhammer Ancient Battles (WHAB) rules. The author, Karl Heinz Ranitzsch, took Jervis Johnson to task for the tone of Jervis' rules article in a previous issue and Jervis' explanations of how and why WHAB is good for the hobby. It must be pointed out for the sake of fairness that Karl also took a mild swipe at my rules as well, so I'm not exactly impartial about his comments.

To me, this all boils down to the old "one set of rules" vrs. "the more rules the better" argument. Many gamers, apparently seeing the stagnation of the hobby (which I personally do not find at the conventions I attend) fear that fragmenting the existing Ancient/Medieval gamers by way of having a variety of quite different rules systems is a bad thing. They feel that we should all play a single system, DBM, or at the most two (Armati). This argument completely ignores the fact that many gamers do not want to play DBM or Armati. Fitting all of us into a convenient wargames box goes against the grain of most of us who are, I believe, individualists.

The other side of the coin actually is where most of us are coming from. A variety of rules systems is not fragmentary to the hobby. With several rules sets being demonstrated at the larger conventions each year, DBM and Armati tournaments are still breaking attendance records. They are both extremely well supported in print and on the web, and have done very well over the last few years.

Point of fact, though, how many gamers are actually introduced into Ancient/Medieval gaming through DBM tournaments? I dare say not many. DBA, however, has certainly been a popular recruiting vehicle (Phil managed to lose to my Normans within ten minutes in the first game I ever played!), as have Phil Viverito's HACK rules, Chris Parker's Day of Battle, Bob Bryant's Might of Arms and my own sets. What do these systems have in common? Very little. Which just makes the point even stronger that the more rules we have to choose from, the more people will be attracted to one or more of them.

There is room here for all of us, and arguing the point that we are fractionalizing the hobby is nonsense. Perhaps some gamers fear that their friends may gravitate to another system and thus they'll lose their opponents. If that turns out to be the case, then those gamers ought to get their heads out of the sand and actually take a long, hard look at these other rules. Perhaps they'll even find something they like.