Padre
Member
This is an experiment I had wanted to do for a long time – like a reenactment of my earliest days playing warhammer. By that I mean playing a wargame using first edition Warhammer rules, and using only figures and scenery available at the time. I have tried to make it as ‘authentic’ as possible. There are some anachronisms along the way, but hey, it's a reenactment, and a few anachronisms always creep in, eh? Question is, can you spot them?
First some background for the 'character' I will be playing.
Let's go back more than two decades … (weird, wibbly-wobbly, going-back-in-time music) …
Prologue
It's 1984, and 16 year old ‘Eddie’ thinks of himself as a GamesMaster. He even has the T-shirt.
He has the right to wear it, oh yes, having run Traveller roleplaying scenarios for years in school and at the weekends (garage gaming for his neighbours, with a gas heater to keep them warm in the winter months). His player' characters have been everywhere, seen it all: springing prisoners from high-tech asteroid prisons to scrabbling for the last handful of bullets in Mad Max type post-apocalyptic wastelands, and much more. Two years back (about 1982 I think) he turned the Traveller combat rules into wargame rules, so that he could fight 1:32 scale Napoleonic battles with Airfix soldiers in his garden, then invading other gardens as more kids joined in. After this came all sorts of wargames, from alternate-universe WWII technological level games with hundreds of the 1:32 Airfix soldiers, to commandos attacking James Bond villains' private armies.
He could have used 1:72 scale figures, getting more for less and not needing anything like the space, but the bigger guys (54mm) just seemed like lots more fun. And they were cheap as the local shops were selling their Airfix stock off. It was heaven when the local 'paper shop' let him into the stock room to choose loads of stuff they wanted rid of, selling it for virtually nothing. It did not occur to Eddie at the time that he was in effect entering Airfix heaven just as the hobby was dying.
When he did go smaller scale it was by converting lots of Airfix tanks and planes (same cheap source) into grav-tanks and space fighters, and inventing a rules system he called, simply, ‘Sci-Fi’. Every other boy in the street got involved, and he became the envy of all them with his flying polystyrene packaging ‘Death Star’ style base, packed with hardware and troops for assault landings in anyone’s garden. This all went pear shaped as soon as the kids incorporated 'nukes' into the games so that entire garden empires could be reduced to ash. If just one missile evaded the anti-missiles, perhaps using it’s piggy backing anti-anti-missile-missiles to make sure it got through (the boys never modeled a missile without adding little defensive missiles onto it's back - thus anti-anti-missile-missiles), then what was the point of modelling and painting those armies? All one really needed was a missile launcher, what the boys called a 'silo' (in other words a deoderant lid painted in camouflage colours hidden under the flowers), and a missile. Boom!
But I don't want to show you photos of all those things, instead I want to show you pictures of the particular form of Traveller derived wargame really relevant here - what he and the lads called 'medieval'. Knights, bowmen, catapults, etc. This once involved spending weeks secretly preparing lollipop siege towers while his neighbour’s dad secretly made a castle. Days spent worrying whether or not the towers would be tall enough to reach the neighbour’s as yet unseen parapets. Thankfully they did, just, and a massive siege game taking a full afternoon ensued. All that work for one afternoon!
The figures were all 54mm, and his armies included Britains’ knights (1847 onwards, but these little fellers from the 1970s) ...
... and Timpo knights (producing plastic figures from 1954 until they ceased operations in 1978) ...
...allied with many a painted Airfix man-at-arms (bought in 1979), from longbowmen ...
... to halberdiers, axemen, swordsmen and morning star wielders.
He did not know it at the time, but these 'medieval' games were like an apprenticeship for a certain fantasy battle game that was just about to be invented and which would one day invade his world big style. So it was that in 1983, something happened that was to change everything. He bought a new fantasy wargame called “Warhammer, The Mass Combat Fantasy Roleplaying Game.”
Warhammer first edition ©1983, Forces of Fantasy ©1984
It was perfect, and promised a whole new direction in his gaming. Very soon he was buying, molding and painting 25mm lead figures by the score, drawing maps of worlds, regions, cities and wards …
… and running home-made roleplaying scenarios by the dozen. There was no actual warhammer world, just rules, races and spells. He had to make his own realms. Slowly his fantasy world grew and grew, and in amongst the roleplaying by groups of adventurers, there were battles to fight. Soon, fighting army against army would be as frequent as creeping through dungeons.
Next up, preparing for the battle.
First some background for the 'character' I will be playing.
Let's go back more than two decades … (weird, wibbly-wobbly, going-back-in-time music) …
Prologue
It's 1984, and 16 year old ‘Eddie’ thinks of himself as a GamesMaster. He even has the T-shirt.
He has the right to wear it, oh yes, having run Traveller roleplaying scenarios for years in school and at the weekends (garage gaming for his neighbours, with a gas heater to keep them warm in the winter months). His player' characters have been everywhere, seen it all: springing prisoners from high-tech asteroid prisons to scrabbling for the last handful of bullets in Mad Max type post-apocalyptic wastelands, and much more. Two years back (about 1982 I think) he turned the Traveller combat rules into wargame rules, so that he could fight 1:32 scale Napoleonic battles with Airfix soldiers in his garden, then invading other gardens as more kids joined in. After this came all sorts of wargames, from alternate-universe WWII technological level games with hundreds of the 1:32 Airfix soldiers, to commandos attacking James Bond villains' private armies.
He could have used 1:72 scale figures, getting more for less and not needing anything like the space, but the bigger guys (54mm) just seemed like lots more fun. And they were cheap as the local shops were selling their Airfix stock off. It was heaven when the local 'paper shop' let him into the stock room to choose loads of stuff they wanted rid of, selling it for virtually nothing. It did not occur to Eddie at the time that he was in effect entering Airfix heaven just as the hobby was dying.
When he did go smaller scale it was by converting lots of Airfix tanks and planes (same cheap source) into grav-tanks and space fighters, and inventing a rules system he called, simply, ‘Sci-Fi’. Every other boy in the street got involved, and he became the envy of all them with his flying polystyrene packaging ‘Death Star’ style base, packed with hardware and troops for assault landings in anyone’s garden. This all went pear shaped as soon as the kids incorporated 'nukes' into the games so that entire garden empires could be reduced to ash. If just one missile evaded the anti-missiles, perhaps using it’s piggy backing anti-anti-missile-missiles to make sure it got through (the boys never modeled a missile without adding little defensive missiles onto it's back - thus anti-anti-missile-missiles), then what was the point of modelling and painting those armies? All one really needed was a missile launcher, what the boys called a 'silo' (in other words a deoderant lid painted in camouflage colours hidden under the flowers), and a missile. Boom!
But I don't want to show you photos of all those things, instead I want to show you pictures of the particular form of Traveller derived wargame really relevant here - what he and the lads called 'medieval'. Knights, bowmen, catapults, etc. This once involved spending weeks secretly preparing lollipop siege towers while his neighbour’s dad secretly made a castle. Days spent worrying whether or not the towers would be tall enough to reach the neighbour’s as yet unseen parapets. Thankfully they did, just, and a massive siege game taking a full afternoon ensued. All that work for one afternoon!
The figures were all 54mm, and his armies included Britains’ knights (1847 onwards, but these little fellers from the 1970s) ...
... and Timpo knights (producing plastic figures from 1954 until they ceased operations in 1978) ...
...allied with many a painted Airfix man-at-arms (bought in 1979), from longbowmen ...
... to halberdiers, axemen, swordsmen and morning star wielders.
He did not know it at the time, but these 'medieval' games were like an apprenticeship for a certain fantasy battle game that was just about to be invented and which would one day invade his world big style. So it was that in 1983, something happened that was to change everything. He bought a new fantasy wargame called “Warhammer, The Mass Combat Fantasy Roleplaying Game.”
Warhammer first edition ©1983, Forces of Fantasy ©1984
It was perfect, and promised a whole new direction in his gaming. Very soon he was buying, molding and painting 25mm lead figures by the score, drawing maps of worlds, regions, cities and wards …
… and running home-made roleplaying scenarios by the dozen. There was no actual warhammer world, just rules, races and spells. He had to make his own realms. Slowly his fantasy world grew and grew, and in amongst the roleplaying by groups of adventurers, there were battles to fight. Soon, fighting army against army would be as frequent as creeping through dungeons.
Next up, preparing for the battle.