In Case You Missed It

 I made the punchline to my current "Nightwatch" campaign clear with this satirical cover to a supplement that will never be written.

Who Cares What Non-Wargamers Think About Wargaming?

Karwansaray Publishing recently dropped a link to a low effort "scientific study" that used data collected by said publisher to reveal some surprising things about wargamers.  Did you know competitive people prefer competition games, and cooperative people prefer collaborative games?  You might have thought this, but thanks to the magic of science and with the gracious permission of our technocratice overlords we now have permission to say so - we now have that all important SOURCE to which  we can link.

So dumb.

Anyway, aside from the "no shit sherlock" portion of the "study", we also have the real impetus for conducting this research:

Read between the lines here and you'll find something a little more pernicious than the usual, "this needs more study, so make sure you hit that FUND button!" conclusion.  There is a strong push underway for the entire hobby to shift its focus from wargamers to non-wargamers, and down that path leads only madness.

Madness.

As usual, the people pushing this new narrative fall into two camps: those who see our robust, healthy, long-lived, fun, and exciting hobby as ripe for conquest, and those who are already in the hobby who stink of a desperate need for approval from outsiders.  So desperate are they for approval from people who want to radically and fundamentally change the hobby that they would burn the village to the ground to prove their worth to these outsiders.

As usual, this strategy - welcoming people who don't wargame to help define what it means to wargame - is being sold as a way to save the hobby.  From what?  Dunno.  We live in a golden age where we are spoiled for choice.  Rules, figures, paints, communities, you name it, we've got more than we can handle already.  It is a fun and exciting time to be a part of this hobby, and it's no wonder more and more people want to be a part of it.  The problem enters in when people who don't participate want to define what it means to participate.

Painting is a part of this hobby, sure.  Collecting is a part of this hobby, sure.  History is a part of this hobby, sure.  Math is a part of this hobby, sure.  Writing is a part of this hobby, sure.  But all of those aspects are buttresses that support the main cathedral of...wait for it...PLAYING THE DAMN GAMES.

You laugh, but people are already asking non-players what the hobby community should do to change the hobby to suit their non-playing desires.  The answer of course is that the hobby should keep on doing what it has always done, and those who don't like it can change themselves or go pound sand.

Because you are a psychopath.

The hobby is fine.  We don't need any johnny-come-latelies and hangers-on to tell us what we should do to cater to their whims.  These locusts will just move on once they've eaten all the seed corn anyway.

Just a warning that too few will heed.  I expect that wargaming will go the way of fantasy books, vidya, comics, TTRPGs, and a host of other hobbies.  The forces arrayed against her are too wealthy, too motivated, and too experienced to be turned back for long.

And you know what?  It's okay.  We built this hobby from nothing once, and we can do it again.  Hell, within the tabletop RPG community the BROSR is actively rebuilding D&D for the second time even as we speak.  (The first was the OSR, which failed to regress hard enough.  This time around we're reclaiming the Gygaxian method of complex games that never turn off.)  All we need to do is protect our tables and our conversations and our local (internet or meat-space) implementation.  We can build our own little redoubts, free from the brain-virus that has infected so much of our culture.  And when Big Mini crumbles, which will take some time but is inevitable, we'll still be here, plugging away in delightful obscurity and thumbing our noses at our would-be conquerors.

Gatekeep your hobbies.  Gatekeep your tables.  

Thanks for the Meme-eries

 Howzabout some light hearted fun using shortcuts to humor?

This one was somebody else's:

But it inspired me to make this:

Because sometimes it really do feel like this:

Of Interest: Wisdom from an Angry God

"Gaming, at its core, is a hobby which seeks neither mediation or approval from Johnny-come-latelies."

Heavens to betsy, I do believe I have come down with a terrible case of the vapors.

This one is pretty complicated.  Basically, there is an in-authentic and ham-handed movement being orchestrated to remove the influence of Western Civilization from the gaming scene and replace it with the pink slime skinsuit.  Friend of the blog, Jeffro Johnson, wrote a phenomenally influential collection of blog posts for the OSR that turned into a fascinating study of the works listed in Appendix N, and how they relate to our culture.  The Johnny-come-latelies who spent three years saying Appendix N doesn't matter, watching with horror the burgeoning reclamation of the gaming space, have launched a counter-offensive whereby they hope to shift the meaning of Appendix N from "the books that built tabletop gaming" into a label with no more meaning than "books some rando likes"

This review from the good guys at DMR Books goes into things in more detail, and thoroughly demolishes one of those astro-turfed project in fine style:

So give Bebergal’s book a pass. Go big instead. Put your time and money into reading the works of Appendix N (find the old editions), the Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Masters Guide. Form your own conclusions. Jeffro Johnson’s Appendix N is far better company on this adventure. Johnson shows there is more treasure to bring up from his passionate, engaging delve... Bebergal, though, just stumbles into the first pit trap on level one. He needs to roll a new character, hope for a better wisdom stat, and try a whole lot harder.

As said above, there is a lot more to the story, and this review covers it all extremely well.

Go read it here. 

Wargaming is for...

 

It would be nice to have one hobby that wasn't sacrificed on the altar of the moral panicky crowds.

Wargame Theory

 Not judging.  Just observing.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average consumer.

Repetition and Redundancy

For those of you faithful readers who have been enjoying the fine vidya content that I've been throwing up all over the Tubes4You, allow me to explain-slash-justify something.

If it seems like there is a lot of overlap between content here for you dear reader, and there for the more video-inclined crowd, that's because there is.  If you're part of the overlap between readers and watchers, you are in some rarified company.  Most people prefer one or the other, and since the production of blog posts and videos takes considerably less time than the wargaming, it affords me the luxury of presenting my table in multiple formats.

It also is a defensive measure.  There are a lot of slash-and-burn the books types running around the internet these days, and rather than make myself vulnerable to the Great Cancelling, it makes a lot of sense to produce backup copies.  Having videos and blog posts about a given subject is just smart tactics.

You're a wargamer.  You understand the wisdom of redundancy and backup plans.

Take what you want and leave the rest.

Wargaming Social Media

Forums represent the best that social media has to offer the miniature wargamer.

I've been slowly accreting some solid wargaming bros on the Twitter, but the ephemeral nature of microblogging means that the pictures and tales and rule discussions held there vanish in to the void.  What the site gains in immediacy, it loses in functionality.  It also takes a long time to find worthy individuals to follow and communicate with on the regular.

All those tips, like tears in the rain.

Compare that to forums, like my favorite, LAF, where all your conversations are stored and archived and fairly easy to return to even after a hiatus of several years.  What you can't find through the site itself, you can usually dig up using your search engine of choice.  And you can instantly tap into hundreds of solid fellas slinging paint and figs, and jump right into the conversation.

It's a whole different, and far more thoughtful, world on the forums, and that's where I think I'll stay.

Oh, and here on the blog of course.

In the meantime, if you have a twitter handle or a recommendation for the best guys to follow, lemme know, would you?  It's hard to wade through the hordes of drama queens and 40K ONLY goofs to find the quirky sort of wargamers that really churn my butter.

More Fantasy Figures

Are these good guys or bad guys?  Sometimes it can be hard to tell.  They are all from the DemonWorld line of figures, that's for sure.  

Wizard, Barbarian Warrior 3, and Barbarian Princess

 That center figure could be a male or female.  You don't often see that kind of versatility.

These two fellows are the worst kind of good guys.  The one on the left is the Supreme Dark Lord, as evidenced by his shield emblem.  (It's actually a Dark Paladin figure from Ral Partha Europe.)  His minon, a Vile Faceless Minion, is a Black Knight figure.

One of the things that slowed my figure production over the last several months was the recording of a number of audio books for Castalia House, including a number of books by Martin van Creveld, a John C Wright book, and a pair of excellent short story collections.  Reading Jerry Pournelle in high school you would have bowled me over if you'd told me that one day I'd be professionally reading his works.  Truly an honor.  It's also an honor to work with Vox Day and serve alongside his Vile Faceless Minions.  So much so, that I stole their logos for the above figures.

But this isn't all about advertising my professional work using my hobby blog.  Rest assured, there is madness to my method.  The money earned from my audio work has been enough to fund a fairly major project that I'm excited to share with you lot.  I'm still in the planning, purchasing, and preparation phase, but rest assured that you're going to see some major new additions to the blog before too much longer.

Meanwhile, here are the SDL and his VFM, heading off into the sunset. 

Coming Out of the Box

If you liked this project,
you'll love 2017's project.

Completing Castle Meatgrinder, a large wargaming project from start to as-near-to-finished-as-any-wargame-project-ever-gets, was the least of my 2016 successes. Over the course of last year, my fire adopted a number of new irons, and by the time the Holiday season rolled around it was all I could do to keep them all in the air and not get burned.  So 2017 is going to see a few changes around here.

Long story short, Jeffro Johnson - one of the first bloggers that I really connected with - has asked me to write a bi-weekly column for the Castalia House blog.  In addition to that, one of my favorite authors, Schuyler Hernstrom, has asked me to collaborate on set of war game rules.  I eagerly agreed to both of these, and the natural result of these new project is my coming out of the box.

Oddly enough, neither man asked Warren Abox to participate.  You see, I spent 2016 moonlighting as a writer and a literary critic over at another couple of blogs, and it was under that name - my real name - that they came to know me.  Of course, my decision to enter the literature lists was a direct result of my contact with him via our shared online war gaming circles, but I tried to maintain some separation between my nom de guerre and my nom de moi.  I even went so far as to publish a handful of guest posts at the Castalia House blog under both of my monikers, without letting the blog editors in on the secret.  They are now!

Over the last six months, it has grown more difficult to maintain that separation. For one thing, I just don't have the time nor the energy to maintain two profiles at the same time.  For another, my reading and war gaming are not really two separate hobbies, but two of the many struts that support hides covering the geeky little teepee in which my heart dwells.  With the advent of the blog series and the (as yet under wraps) fantasy wargame, it's time to ditch the anonymity and bring these two hobbies closer together in my online work.

You're a reader here, so your primary concern is probably, "what does all this mean for the blog?"

Rest assured, it's not going anywhere.  It may slow down a bit as my focus shifts.  More of my nerdery will wind up pasted at Seagull Rising, and my 2017 War In A Box Project will be documented over at the Castalia House blog.

I have no intention of shuttering this site completely.  Anything of a purely wargaming nature will wind up posted here.  The bulk of my painted miniatures and most of my actual play posts will appear here.  All the brainy stuff, the literary analysis, and likely even the RPG related posts, are going to be moving over to Seagull Rising.  This means that War In A Box will maintain its typical tight focus on wargaming that you've come to expect over the years.  If you want to learn more about me, and about my writing, then you're of course welcome to check in on Seagull Rising from time to time.

On Wednesday, I'll be kicking off a big wargaming project over at the Castalia House blog that you won't want to miss.  Don't worry, I'll post a quick link here to remind you, so you won't miss it.

Oh, and lest I forget!  Thank you for painting and pushing lead with me, even if only vicariously, for the last five and a half years.  It's been a lot of fun, and I look forward to continuing the enjoyment for years to come.

Time Out!

Getting a bit burned out and need to recharge my batteries.  As a homeschooling family, the fall resumption of class takes a larger than normal toll on my free time.  But don't worry, this old soldier won't be fading away any tome soon, nor will he be leaving any troops behind on the lead pile.

Instead, I'm going to make a push to get enough lead painted to run Castle Meatgrinder live and in the flesh.  Gimme a month or two to catch up, and then regular posting will resume.  In the meantime, I'll still poke around the online-scene and make my regular nuisance of myself.

An Old Man Looks at

For the most part, the things I review or talk about are those that excite me enough to sit down at the keyboard.  That means most of my posts are about things that I like, and that's a lot of things.  I like liking things.

That's not always the case, though.  At the risk of sounding like a ranty old fuddy-duddy troll, there's a trend I've noticed of games that just don't look at all appealing.  The blandly named Darkness Sabotage is one such game.  Let's get cynical and self-deprecating about it for a bit, shall we?

There seems to be a trend out there for big box co-op board games with enormous figures, massive amounts of equipment, and hefty price tags.  The latest offering to cross my awareness is the beast that is Darkness Sabotage, the Boardgame.  The backstory is something about 4 to 6 pirates(?) looting a chaos-hellship(?).  It's hard to tell from the KickStarter what's going on there, they seem to want the characters to be dark and brooding anti-heroes and heroic attack-the-gates-of-hell types at the same time.

Honestly, with concept art like this...

...and a strong suspicion that none of the figures in the box are built to scale with anything else on the tabletop, it doesn't really matter.  The clumsy poses, the weird balance, the odd choices for detailing, and the general 'feel' of the game just rubs me the wrong way top to bottom.  Even the strangely distended anatomy hurts my eyes, and I'm a guy that likes the impossible bone structure of your standard Space Marine.  The makers of this project seem to be trying so hard for each figure to look awesome, that they forgot to make them look good. 

Then there's the mess of accouterments needed to play the game.  Twenty dice in two different styles, countless cards, counters, and chits, and your bog-standard chaos style enemies with various special abilities seems way over the top.  If you need all those sub-systems to craft a decent game maybe you need to sit down and re-think the game's concept.  It worked in 1970's games because we didn't know any better, and it works in the OSR RPGs because that's a very different play style paradigm.  Here it just makes the prospect of picking up the rules make me tired.  I'm already a tired old man looking up at the chalk writing on the ceiling rafters and mentally measuring the rope, don't encourage me.

Then there's the recent trend towards multi-player, but co-op against the game, style games of which this is a proud member.  So it takes multiple players to beat the artificial system behind the game.  Every co-op game that I've played wound up feeling like I was playing solitaire, but in a way that forced me to jostle somebody else's elbows and wait until flipping over the next card.  This game could break that mold, but that's a hard sell for this grognard.

Especially with a price tag of ninety bucks.  If the game is any fun at all, they should be able to produce a map and counter version for twenty bucks that retains the exact same feel.

Taken altogether, it just seems like one big slapdash disaster of a game to me.  Yet somehow this Homer Simpson Car of a game earned around $150,000 in backing.  And this is just the latest in a series of games I've seen lately.  So somebody must like this style of board game play.  Probably those dang degenerate kids doing doughnuts on my lawn.  If this is what the cool kids are playing these days, pass me my 48-page OSR rulebook and six polyhedral dice, because that's all I need for an evening of fun.  You kids can keep this over-priced box of disaster for yourself.

If you disagree with my assessment, no hard feelings.  To show you it's nothing personal, here's that link to the KickStarter a second time. Now it's time to soak my dentures, drink some ensure, and check the TV guide to see what sort of hi-jinks that Gilligan will get up to this week.

Prayers for the Fallen

Guest Post at Castalia House This Week

Monday the good folks over at Castalia House published a guest post by yours truly:  Wargaming for Wargamers Who Don't Have Time to Wargame.  As a wargame-related article, I had thought it would go up today, but they snuck a high fast one past me here.  It's not too late - go check it out.  Then go back, that blog is one of the best out there, covering as it does such a wide swath of fantasy and sci-fi media.

Cirsova, A Review

Growing up in a stolid middle-class family with a sizable and hence expensive brood of children that pushed our life-style into the ranks of the lower middle-class, our entertainment was chiefly picked up from the free library and the low-rent flea markets that dotted the Midwest countryside of the 1980s.  The library was a great source of fantasy and sci-fi from the 1950s through the 1970s, but devouring those only came after the love of the genre had been instilled through exposure to the second-hand comics and short fiction magazines heaped up on the ten cent tables.  The bright and action packed covers and lurid titles of the stories may have been designed to appeal to kids of a previous generation, but they worked just as well on this child of the 1980s.

Like so many members of my generation, my love of the short fiction magazine faded over the years.  That loss of interest was chalked up to putting away childish things and the rise of digital entertainment against which no mere magazine could possibly hope to compete.  Both of those rationalizations made little sense when Project Gutenberg made authors like Burroughs and Howard available for a nostalgic re-read, and demonstrated that the old stories still held up.  Re-reading Tolkien every few years helped prove that the newer works generally didn’t live up to the high reputation of their predecessors.  An occasional foray into the magazine stacks at the big box bookstores only provided more evidence that the time of quality short fiction had passed for good.

The Cirsova announcement went unremarked on this blog.  Short fiction magazines were dead, why risk yet another disappointment.  The editor did claim that Cirsova was an attempt to recapture the spirit of adventure and exploration of the outside world.  That should have counted for something, but countless scoundrels have hidden their mediocrity behind the popular names of the past.

I'm just going to leave this here.

Despite wanting to believe, I just couldn't bring myself to order a copy.  When P. Alexander offered up free review copies, my last remaining objection fell apart, and I quickly volunteered.  Within minutes, I realized that my skepticism had almost cost me the prize I had been seeking.  While not exactly the Holy Grail of classic sci-fi/fantasy, this magazine manages the impressive feat of perfectly recapturing the feel and spirit of those old flea-market treasures.  The opening story features a sword wielding barbarian cutting his way through the wilds, tangling with evil wizards, and rescuing princesses (of a sort).  The writing doesn’t meet the level of a Howard, but that’s a high enough bar as to be an unfair standard.

The rest of the stories in the magazine consist of an eclectic blend of adventure yarns that run the gamut from  a solar system spanning planetary romance complete with evil queens and betrayals, to an alt-history tale where a lad must save London from a fleet commanded by the wizard priests of the victorious Spanish Armada, to a small set piece featuring a young Asian slave girl attempting to assassinate a demon-slash-prince.  If that seems like a crazy amount of stuff to pack into a single sentence, rest assured that it’s a crazy amount of stuff to pack into a single magazine.  Cirsova does just that, however; and does it with aplomb.

As can be expected, the level of writing quality varies among the stories, but even the worst prose is readable and doesn’t distract from the story itself.  In fact, each of the authors writes with such a strong voice that no two stories feel like any other.  Some are light, some heavy, and one is even a long form epic poem that does what this curmudgeon expects of poetry – it rhymes.  If that marks this reviewer as an unlettered barbarian, so be it.  The epic poem has wonderful rhythm and pacing, leaving this reviewer to speculate that if modern poetry was all this good, it wouldn’t be such a joke among the hoi polloi.

The magazine is not perfect.  The planetary romance story runs longer than it should.   Unlike the rest of the stories that leave the reader wanting more, this one wears out its welcome before wrapping up. 

That’s it.  That is Cirsova’s sole downside.  A hack would claim the magazine being too short as a second complaint, but that sort of modern-day drollery is no more fitting in a review than it would be in this magazine.  It looks like future editions of Cirsova will indeed be longer, for which we can all be grateful

In short, Cirsova is just like the old stuff, but new.  I can think of no higher praise.

If you agree, you can get your copy - digital or real-world - from Amazon.  You can also back the Kickstarter for the second issue.  I hope you will do so, because I've already backed it, and the more people that back it, the more likely we are to get more Cirsovan goodness.  The world needs more Cirsovan goodness.

Jumping in the Social Media Pool - League For Gamers

I'm not a huge fan of social media.  That toxic purple sewer burned me out on third party sites where the powers that be tow the Party line.  I deleted my Facebook account when it's spergy CEO abandoned it's neutrality in favor of under-the-table activism.  Twitter?  Warren Abox ain't jumping on that ship - not while Captain Jack Dorsey is steaming full steam ahead for the iceberg of Full Convergence. The latest sign of Twitter's impending implosion is the banning of Mark Kern - one of the chief brains behind a little thing called World of Warcraft - for engaging in crimethink.

Clearly, they want to send a message - if you don't submit to the Narrative you will be outcast - and this wargamer reads them loud and clear.  They won't have to worry about old Warren Abox spreading hatefacts around, or potential ad dollars they could earn from his eyeballs, because he found a better social media site.

Mark Kern's own, League for Gamers, "a consumer focused gaming league encompassing video games, and also board games, and pen and paper gaming. We come together to promote positive gaming, good sportsmanship, research, learning and advocacy for our hobby."

That's all I needed to hear.  To add a little sugar on top, it even has a group dedicated to Tabletop Wargaming.  Join in the fun, or there won't be any.

[Edit:  Was just informed there's already a tabletop wargame group on the site:  HERE.  Deleted mine, because who needs the duplication?]

Someday, My Pets

Is there anything more pathetic than 'nothing to see here' updates?

Cleaning the living room revealed this sad tale of my long neglected hobby.  What you're looking at is the dust shadow left by my bag o' brushes which have sat untouched lo these many moons.

Champing at the bit, though.  Shouldn't be too much longer before I've got something to show you.

On Hiatus

It's been a good year.  By breaking things up more than normal, I've been able to produce content every other day for the first quarter of 2016.  Unfortunately, it is probably going to be a while before anything else appears in this space.  My month long business trip is turning into two months or more, so no real progress can be made on the blog until I can get home and get some serious brush time in.

Stay tuned, it's just a temporary setback.  And thanks for stopping by.

Marching On Saint Francis

Looks like your humble host is going to be working in San Francisco for the month of March.  If any reader out there has some time and could shoot me an email about the gaming scene, or maybe wants to get together with a poor wayfaring stranger hit me up at myname@gmail.com - you know my name, it's your old pal WarrenAbox.

The Podcast We've Been Waiting For

If you're one of those poor bastards that grinds through a long commute on a daily basis, then you can't get enough decent podcasts.  There are a hot steaming pile of them for tabletop RPGs, a few of them are even worth a listen, but very very few for tabletop wargaming.  Those that exist for wargaming are mostly dedicated to the big production house games like 40k and...I don't know, Infiniti?  I'm a 15mm guy who loves himself the boutique publishers, so you'll have to find the big boys on your own google-time.

But if you are also a boutique style 15mm wargamer languishing in the wilds of a fairly obscure corner of this fairly obscure hobby, then there is finally a podcast just for you, for me, and the rest of our tiny little clique - In the Garage.  It's run by the guys at Clear Horizon Miniatures, but the first podcast takes a nice spin around the genre with positive mentions of Osprey rules, GZG, and a fair few others.

After one episode, I can't tell you the names of the two hosts off the top of my head, but they are fun guys who take things just as seriously as they deserve.  Wait a second, that's not entirely true; Mister Harold, who you may know around the net from the Lead-Adventure Forums is one of the hosts.  If you know him from around the net, then you know he is both knowledgeable, friendly, and enthusiastic.

You should give it a listen.  For my part, I'm looking forward to hearing more episodes in the future.