Set the Controls for the Back Wall of Waldenbooks (Hobby Origins, Continued...)

 Alternate Title: The TSR Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog: A Gaming Rosetta Stone

As related last post, even as a primary schooler I rarely was without a book in my hand. Despite the plethora of free books available from the school and public libraries, Waldenbooks was my favorite mall store.

Similar to their feelings regarding the local public library, my parents must've considered Waldenbooks a fairly safe space, because I recall browsing alone while my dad looked for the latest Louis L'Amour novel in another part of the store.  While dad perused the cheesy Westerns, eight- to ten-year-old me navigated to the back wall of Waldenbooks.  I'm not sure if the upper management standardized the layout of all their stores, but the back wall, the back right specifically, of our particular Waldenbooks held all the RPGs.

Wait a second?!  RPGs?  The timeline of my last post saw me as a middle-schooler, still reading Choose Your Own Adventure and Endless Quest books and yet to fully grasp roleplaying or wargames.  True, but all those comic book ads I mentioned inserted, if subconsciously, the images of boxed games into my awareness.  I knew if I saw a box, wrapped in plastic and illustrated with lovely, glossy paintings, then I beheld one of the "real" games the big-kids played.  One seminal moment crystallized this association, so I'll detour from the mall back to the school playground briefly.

Sometime during fourth or fifth grade, a classmate who recognized my nerdiness offered me the Summer/Fall 1986 version of TSR's The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog, handed down to him from an older sibling.  I'm not sure exactly when TSR released this, but I assume it was actually in late spring, and I was still in fourth grade.  Funny how I've forgotten entire semesters of college classes, yet I can remember exactly where (but not when) I was, just outside the art building at recess, when this catalog entered my grasp.

Regardless of the vagaries of memory, this catalog showed me that the mythical "D&D" that we'd heard about in hushed tones (the Satanic Panic was in full swing), and that my first grade friend had futilely tried to show us years before, was far more than Endless Quest books.  Pictures filled the TSR catalog, showing the "real deal" Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets, and introducing me to the slew of competitor publishers.  I saw familiar, and by that time already beloved, properties such as Star Wars and Star Trek, as well as unpronounceable strangeness like the baffling but awesome looking "Call of Cthulhu".  The miniatures at the back of the catalog, especially those weird Grenadier sculpts for CoC, captured my imagination over everything else.  That however, is a tale for another day.

I poured over that catalog, dreaming about buying (or asking for Christmas) nearly everything in there.  Most of the games and accessories were unfamiliar, but a few I recognized not only from the aforementioned comic book ads but from the mall bookstore. 

The Rosetta Stone that was The Mail Order Hobby Shop Catalog transformed my Waldenbooks visits.  Previously, I had traveled to the right-side back wall of my local to search for Endless Quest and similar game books, as well as genre-specific guidebooks, such as Rovin's The Encyclopedia of Super-Villains.  The boxed sets in shrink-wrap and orange-spined AD&D manuals now became my focus, finally recognized for what they were.

The sensationalized accounts of D&D leading young kids astray influenced my parents, and although we were not a particularly religious household, I could always sense their apprehension when they came to gather me from the Waldenbooks back wall.      

Luckily, I set my heart not on the red-boxed D&D Basic Set, but the purple-pink box next to it that said "Star Frontiers Knight Hawks" on the side.  Although I recognized the Star Frontiers logo from my comics, it was the front cover illustration of battling spaceships that sucked me in.  My beloved Terran Trade Authority books disappeared from the local library a few years prior; now, here in Waldenbooks was something that not only featured TTA-adjacent art on the cover, but offered repeated fun beyond reading in the form of a game.  I had to have it. 

Initially, my folks thought otherwise.  "Too expensive" they said.  I had a plan however (and this is how I can isolate this purchase to the Summer of '86).  Our annual family summer vacation was approaching, and I knew that mom and dad's spending became a little more liberal on holiday.  Somehow (maybe I suggested it?) during our roadtrip through California we ended up at a mall and lucky for me that mall had a Waldenbooks. Even luckier, that Waldenbooks had a copy of Star Frontiers Knight Hawks and with a little strategically placed pressure (whining), I convinced my folks to buy it. 

I had no idea that Knight Hawks was actually an expansion to the original Star Frontiers boxed set; I didn't even understand the concept of RPGs, let alone that they could be expanded.  The multi-hour drive back to our home state gave me ample time to digest the box contents.  I puzzled over the "Campaign Book Expansion Rules", lacking the frame of reference from the base RPG.  The box back indicated that the smaller, gray-colored manual contained rules for a game that could "be played as a beginning or advanced game when played separately", and that's what I wanted to do.

It took little to convince my middle-school best friend, a fellow nerd who shared my love of comic books and M.U.S.C.L.E. figures, to try Knight Hawks.  Our young age meant we probably got a lot of the rules wrong, and I remember the cardboard tokens fought a losing battle against the Atari 2600.

We enjoyed Knight Hawks though, which I can definitively say was my first "proper" non-gamebook game, and first wargame.  All thanks to Waldenbooks.        

Last two pics courtesy of RPGGeek.

Scholastic Book Clubs and Terran Trade Authorities (Hobby Origins, Continued...)

Preschool exposure to Star Wars and comic books started me on the path to nerdom.  Public school, particularly the school library, showed me I didn't walk this path alone.

Yes, nearly every little boy in the USA of 1982-83 had a few Kenner Star Wars figures in the toy box, but it was easy to spot those of us who were a lot more "into" the fantastical.  My best school chum Zack later became my favorite GM, and now is a published author of multiple horror novels.  Although we met at the bus stop on the first day of Kindergarten, I first marked him as a kindred geek spirit when he grabbed the Tusken Raider jigsaw puzzle during 1st Grade arts and crafts time.

A brilliant young boy named Colin shared Mrs. P.'s 1st Grade class with us, and he stood out for more than just his nerd interests.  Colin could already read.  Time may distort my memories, but I recall that while the rest of us struggled with our basic vocabulary, Colin got to sit quietly reading alone.  Not only that, he could bring and read the material of his choosing; that meant comic books!

Of course I was drawn to Colin's comics like a moth to flame, and he graciously shared his mags.  Colin inspired my lifelong preference for Iron Man (before he was cool!) over all other superheroes, except maybe ROM; the armored Avenger was Colin's favorite and hence the books he most frequently brought.

It was Colin who first pointed out the ad for Star Frontiers in one of these comics, and he who explained "it's a game."  I was blown away: a game you say?  He pointed out the blurb "from the makers of Dungeons and Dragons" gracing the same ad, offering "yeah, a game like D&D."  Later he brought in an example of this mysterious "D&D", probably a module, but only this wunderkind could understand this slim volume packed with text and esoteric diagrams.  Or maybe I misremember, and he only described it.  Regardless, it was beyond the comprehension of anyone but Colin.  We were only 1st Graders after all.        

Sadly I lost touch with Colin over the years but he taught me that far more worlds than just George Lucas' approved licenses exist, and that while glossy images drew us in, the written word held the key to accessing these worlds.

The school library quickly became a favorite place, where I discovered my first (quasi-) games in the Choose Your Own Adventure books and inspiration in the folklore and paranormal books that seemed to saturate school libraries in the early 80s.  Remember the Scholastic Book Club, and the order forms you could take home to show your folks?  My parents frequently denied me toys "you have too many already", but rarely said no to Book Order requests.  It didn't matter that I always picked the bullshit books about UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Ghosts, or even some CYOA nonsense.  Reading was educational!

Soon I discovered the public library in my rural hometown held an even wider array of CYOA books in the juvenile section, including the imitators like Which-Way and even better the TSR  Endless Quest books which claimed some sort of direct connection to those unfathomable games Colin tried to show us.

My parents reasoned no place in town was safer than the public library, so I found myself there many days after school, lost among the books.  The "grown up" library had many of the same colorfully illustrated books on weird subjects, and others in even larger format.  It was here I discovered probably the most influential works on my hobby aesthetic: Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority books.

I checked out the TTA books repeatedly, marveling at the illustrations through 1st and 2nd grade,   later absorbing the narrative of the Proxima Wars and other Great Space Battles as my reading skills increased.  The books (just the first two in Cowley's series) disappeared, obviously stolen, sometime in my early elementary school days.  Searching through the stacks, hoping the TTA handbooks had simply been misplaced, I discovered many new fantastic books, such as the Target Doctor Who novelizations, and the Usborne World Of... series.

A sympathetic librarian aided my mission to find the TTA books, teaching me to use the microfiche records of neighboring libraries' collections (pre-internet kids!).  Inter-library loan requests reunited me with the first two TTA books, and finally allowed me to read SpaceWreck (I would not see Starliners until buying it in college).

The TTA handbooks shaped my ideas of spaceflight more than any other influence, and were doubtless among the most important books of my childhood, an importance felt even in their absence.  The disappearance of the TTA handbooks left me yearning for spaceship imagery, a yearning that had me recall those ads from Colin's comic books… but that’s the next chapter in my self-indulgent story.     

  

Laser Swords and Spider Women (Hobby Origins, the Beginning...)

Not the name of a new tabletop game but rather my earliest recollections of the fantastical.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't interested in fantasy and sci-fi subjects.  The original Star Wars film debuted while I was still in diapers, with cheap imitations saturating the media landscape while I took my first steps.  Kenner Star Wars toys and their knock-offs were ubiquitous and my toddler eyes no doubt saw them in the bedrooms of older cousins.

My first concrete memory of anything fantastical is watching The Empire Strikes Back upon its theater release in 1980.  I clearly remember the Imperial Walker battle scene and the lightsaber duel but little else, and I think I slept through most of that first showing.  

Star Wars toys featured prominently at that 1980 Christmas, and I was hooked.  My rural hometown routinely brought back popular movies (maybe this was normal back then?) and either the following summer in '81, or a year later in '82 I saw ESB in the theater again, this time soaking it all in.  Knowing the general thrust of the story (ice planet fight, swamp planet stuff, cloud planet stuff) but then being amazed at the Vader-as-Luke's-Father revelation (SPOILER ALERT!) stands as a very clear memory.  

The few readers of this blog know that comic books are my one true love.  Despite stupidly selling my collection decades ago, my earliest comics survived the purge due to their extremely poor and therefore unmarketable conditions.  Armed with these actual copies and the unparalleled Mike's Amazing World of Comics database (R.I.P. Mike), I reordered my jumbled memories.

My first comic?  Spider-Woman #34.  Curious choice for a young boy but then I remember economics and not my preferences played the primary role in my earliest, preschool, comic book acquisitions.  The spinner rack resided at the liquor store* and perhaps in early 1981 I spied a Star Wars comic, or maybe recognized Spider-Man from the old '60s cartoon that was in syndication.  The memory is fuzzy but I remember being told "no", only to have the gruff salesman intervene and offer my dad a discounted comic to placate me.  This happened a number of times, with the shop owner selling my folks comics that either were damaged or poor sellers about to be discarded to make room for the next month's editions.  I believe Spider-Woman #34 fell into the latter category.  None of that mattered to me... the bright colors, slam-bang action, and over-the-top characters were more than my pre-kindergarten brain could ask for.  Remember Hammer and Anvil, two escaped convicts connected at the wrists by an alien super-chain?  As I type this, my nearly 50 year-old brain realizes what a wonderfully wacky supervillain concept this was; there was no chance a child could understand.  But I was enthralled.  I think that my inability to comprehend the comic's plot (I couldn't read yet), coupled with the intense visual imagery (violence, Kirby-crackle, Spider-Woman's curves, etc.) suggested to me that comics were for "big-kids".  I felt like I was being let into a secret world.  And I was hooked for life.

*Note: this is not as seedy as it sounds.  Where I'm from in the western USA, "liquor store" was (in the 80s at least) a term for a general convenience store.  Dad was typically stopping in there to just grab the paper, a half-gallon of milk, maybe some chewing tobacco, or get some fishing tackle.  And yes, some beer.  As evidenced by the spinner rack right at the front door though, it was a kid-friendly place and the foundation of my comic book collection.      

(Pictures copyright original owners, used without permission but at resolutions intended for educational purposes only.  Buy Marvel Comics).

 

Bitten by a Radioactive Space Marine Miniature (Hobby Origins: Intro)

Recently I returned from visiting my parents out west for the holidays, an eight day trip by car with only my dog for company.  The USA is a damn big place.  

Despite the monotony of road, binging a handful of good podcasts made the miles fly by.  All the podcasts I consumed focused on gaming, naturally, with the biggest standouts being The Bedroom Battlefields Tabletop Miniature Hobby Podcast and The Crown of Command Podcast.

I noticed that I particularly enjoyed the episodes where guests recounted their "origin stories", telling how they first started into the tabletop hobby.  All that driving gave me time to reflect on why those episodes appealed to me, and I think the key factor is the commonality of experiences.

Of course, hearing all those stories about the adolescent glory days of hobby time in the 80s and 90s made me think about my own origin story.  How did it all begin?  When did it all begin?  As it turns out, questions harder to answer than anticipated.

The older I get, the fuzzier the memories get, with events getting transposed and intermingled.  Some hobby memories are burned into my soul, never to be forgotten.  Others are only vague suggestions.  I've therefore decided to start a number of short posts here to recount my hobby origin.

I don't anticipate anyone will read them (except the bots from Singapore), but really only I am the intended audience.  I hope that by writing down my journey into the tabletop gaming hobby I can not only experience that warm glow of nostalgia, but recover some lost memories and maybe even correct some false ones. 

Is There a Worse Hobby for Moving House?

Alternate title: Worst Hobby Room Tour Ever

Seriously though, is there a worse hobby for moving house than wargaming? Maybe horse-breeding? Restoring old cars? 

OK, I guess any pastime where one collects things, living or not, is problematic for a big move. Wargaming proves no exception, especially for those of us who focus mostly on the DIY/crafting aspects of the hobby.

My wife and I have been planning a move since the springtime, and it’s finally here. The house is under contract and soon we’ll be leaving after 10 years in the same abode. Unlike past moves, we’re downsizing drastically instead of just shipping everything. Getting the house prepped for showing over the last month meant getting rid of many things, forcing me to do a lot of self-reflection. 

A decade is a lot of time to accumulate junk, especially when you have the “scratch-builder’s eye”. “Ooo, that food packaging looks like the perfect robo-tank turret. I’m sure I’ll use that soon; let me just put that here in the attic for safe keeping”. Of course, I never used most of the stuff I squirreled away, and that came back to haunt me when I finally had to get rid of it.

How much crap did I collect? Behold, the hoard!




Our house features a luxurious “crawlspace“ that’s closer to a basement, with enough headspace for me to stand and hang Christmas lights from the floor joists… the perfect man-cave. And a perfect place to store every bit of foam for terrain making. Of course, no major metropolitan administration wants to deal with foam so getting rid of this pile-o-plastic looked problematic. Luckily, one of my gamer friends came to the rescue and took it all! To sweeten the deal, I gave him a box of thousands of Middle Earth CCG cards. And you know what? I don’t miss them at all.

I also gave my friend my DIY airbrush spray booth. Since the prices of those duct fans have jumped so drastically in the last year, that one hurt a little. So why not take it with me? The missus and I are planning on moving internationally, and unfortunately, very few of our electrical devices will work properly or safely in our new home. Oh well; it’ll give me a chance to build a new and improved (sorry George Carlin) version of the spray booth.

My D&D compatriot saved me from the crawlspace hoard, but no one could help me deal with the real man-cave, the hobby room. Spending over half of my five decades of life in “conveyances of war”, as the VA calls them, has left my back, neck, and spine an angry mess. Prowling eBay all these years to slowly rebuild my RPG and wargame collection felt good; boxing them all up and carrying them off to storage in a single day did not. Why did I have to pick upstairs for the hobby space? 

Halfway through my packing up of the hobby space, I decided to capture its memory with a panoramic picture. A pity I didn’t think of this BEFORE I started dismantling it. Oh well. Below I present my half-dismantled hobby room, with the description that follows serving as the Worst Hobby Room Tour Ever.



I shot this panoramic photo sitting on a swivel chair against the middle of the north wall of the room. The far left side of the photo therefore actually shows looking directly East along that wall, while the right side of the photo shows looking directly West.  More simply put: the entry door and the window actually sit opposite each other.  Great lesson-learned for me: when shooting panoramic photos, maybe do two 90 degree shots versus one 180 degree pic.

Starting on the left, we see my custom computer desk. I got a bit of ribbing from my wife for this, but I constructed the desk out of insulation foam board for the table top, mounted on top of cheap MDF book cases. My design focused on two things: affordability and space-utilization. A small closet near the room’s entry door breaks up the space, creating a little “L”-shaped nook. Using insulation foam meant I could easily cut the table top to not only perfectly to sit in this corner, but also conform around my normal sitting position using an organic curve. The missus wanted me to get some fancy kidney-shaped IKEA office desk or some such, but I preferred the price on this custom build.

Continuing to the right we see a stack of nine plastic 3-drawer organizers. Although a jumbled pile and empty in this picture, during the hobby room glory days the organizers sat snugly in a nine-cube MDF storage shelf, each drawer crammed full of all manner of tools, parts, and supplies.

On the floor just in front of the stack of organizers sit three cardboard boxes, ready to ship off to Noble Knight Games. The boxes hold about 1/3 of my RPG collection, including all of my 1st Edition AD&D books. Yes, I finally sold them. Don’t despair though, I only sold those RPGs from my collection that I knew I could get (or already have), legitimately, on PDF.

Against the south wall lies a small door to the attic, which runs the entire length of the house and is SO convenient to access.   Just imagine how easy it would be to throw unfinished projects in there. Trust me, it was.  Oh dear...

Just past the attic entrance and almost hidden by the chair, sits an empty nine-cube MDF shelf system. Although we have (er… had) a separate library, I kept most of my RPGs and wargames on this shelf. It was a beautiful sight to behold, with every cube full and books and cards overflowing to cover the top. All of those games now sit in storage (or have been sold); all that is except my copy of Leaving Earth (and expansions), as seen in the picture. My absolute favorite gaming experience of the last decade, Leaving Earth will be hand-carried in my luggage so it can be the inaugural game in the new home.

Moving on, we see in the center of the picture, my gaming table, which indeed occupied the center of the room. Another custom creation, the table consisted of three layers of insulation foam board, resting on top of more MDF bookcases and covered by a felt gaming cloth. I stored my terrain in cardboard boxes wedged between the bookcases; these served to prop up the table’s center and prevent sagging. The stitching process of the panoramic picture makes the table top appear triangular; in fact the quite rectangular table top had 1.0m x 1.2m sides.

The bookcases on the far side of the table held all my old CCGs. Closer to the viewer we see the white cabinet with the door ajar. My miniatures lived in here, stacked tightly in storage boxes that shared space with boardgames. My miniature collection took up a surprisingly small amount of room but only because most of the figures are not based or painted, if even removed from their packaging at all!

Various hobby gear sits on top of the table, my trusty Milliput and Sculpey, my faithful paper cutter, my cliche Crown Royal tin of dice, and my pewter casting kit in the foreground.

Just left of the west-facing window sits my three-tiered supply shelf. The photo shows a cluttered top shelf but in normal practice I kept this surface clear for measuring and mixing silicone, resins, plasters and such. The plastic bins hold all the various media I dabbled in but never mastered: oil and polymer clays, sculpting and casting waxes, and all the requisite tools.

We have a wonderful organization here in my (current) hometown called a “creative reuse” where folks can donate crafting supplies that are then resold to generate money for charity. The store portion is “pay-what-you-can” so it’s incredibly fortunate that I never discovered this place years ago. I would have so much more to get rid of! Anyways, I found this organization when we decided to downsize, so a majority of the hobby room ended up there. I’m already kicking myself about a few of the donations. I had a beautiful slab of homemade toy wax that I could’ve easily shipped to the new place.

Still with me? Almost done.

Our final stop, sitting right of the window is my primary crafting space, the drafting table. The mouth of my homemade airbrush booth rests at the back of the table, with the remaining components neatly tucked underneath. My reliable, 14 year old Ott light illuminates my craft tool bag, a fancy shaving kit I was gifted (and promptly repurposed).

Over one hundred square feet of dedicated hobby space (not even including the crawlspace). It was great while it lasted!

If you’ve made it this far, I’m amazed and appreciative. In hindsight, I think this post was more for me than for you, just so I can remember the good hobby times in this house.

My Prescription: Two Comic Books a Day

Slowly rebuilding the collection...

The world sucks right now. My prescription for the pain? Two comic books a day.

I sold off my entire ~1500 issue collection of Marvel comic books in 2003, a collection that included some real gems like an entire run of Rom Spaceknight, the entire run of GI Joe, and first appearances of some cool characters like Captain Marvel (Mar-vell of the Kree), The Stranger, and the Abomination. I still regret that decision.

I stopped reading comics around 2001 but really my interest began to wane earlier, in the late ‘90s with all the “Heroes Reborn” garbage and the first reboots of the classic Marvel titles. It just wasn’t the same Marvel I grew up with. I convinced myself I “outgrew” comics about 20 years ago.


I was contemplating my favorite tabletop games the other day, as well as perusing my bookshelves and suddenly I realized: I still love comics! My bookshelves are filled with artist biographies and in-depth histories of the creation of our favorite spandex-clad mythologies. Meanwhile, Super Mission Force has quickly become my go-to wargame while my favorite RPG experiences have always been comic-book games like TSR’s Marvel Super Heroes and Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game, as well as Mayfair’s DC Heroes. Surprisingly, I haven’t been too interested in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, catching (but thoroughly enjoying) only a handful of the movies but still upon reflection I realized: yeah, I still love comics.

Work, school, and domestic duties still occupy nearly all of my time but I can usually steal just a few minutes of each day to read. I try to always have a novel going or an interesting website cued up. Then it hit me: why not read the Marvel Universe, from the start?

I managed to pick up quite a collection of the official high-quality scans of Marvel comic books on DVD-ROM released by GIT Corp from 2005-2007. Unfortunately, those discs came out right when the MCU, and associated interest in the source material, really started to gather steam. Instead of continuing the contract with GIT Corp and offering scans of the entire library, Marvel stopped licensing the scans. The technology has almost caught up now to bring Marvel’s plans to fruition: there are now streaming services allowing one to read almost any title at their heart’s content. Unfortunately these books are recolored when digitized and just don’t look the same. I’m thrilled that all these old comics are available, I just want to see everything: those benday dots, the old sea monkey ads, just to maximize the nostalgia.

Anyways, I’m giving myself 5 years to read the first 30 years of Marvel comics. Actually I can’t cram in every Marvel title, far from it. I’ve got seven of the biggest titles on DVD-ROM (Hulk, Iron Man, Amazing Spider Man, Uncanny X-Men, Avengers, Captain America, and Fantastic Four). In addition to these I’ve added Thor, and Daredevil (to get the street-level perspective). I’m also anticipating a few “floater” spots in the reading schedule, so I can work in old favorites with smaller runs, like Captain Marvel (Mar-vell of the Kree from the 60s-70s), or X-Factor, or Secret Wars, or something.

My start date is November, 1961, with Fantastic Four #1, and I’m reading the books in publication order. My stop date will be November, 1991, exactly 30 years after the publication of FF #1. I’ve selected this seemingly arbitrary date because: 1) I don’t want to continue this project to my death, and 2) it lets me avoid the Liefeld years at the X-Men, teenage Tony Stark, Onslaught, the reboots, and all the other stuff that showed that comics should’ve ended in the 90s. Really I just want to read the height of Marvel like Gruenwald and Claremont in the 80s, while finally capturing all the key moments those creators built on like Lee/Kirby/Ditko’s 60s work, and the Buscema/Thomas 70s.

My goal is two books a day. Right now it’s easy since I’m reading the early 60s stuff which was frequently 10-13 pages of material max, with less exposition than the real angsty stuff of the 80s. Also, when I finally get to the books I had as a kid (~’81-’96), I should pick up speed, as I read some of those books backwards and forwards a hundred times. Some of the panels are still burned into my psyche. If I can keep up the pace, over the next five years I’ll read the first 30 years of continuity for approximately 10 Marvel titles.

‘Cause you gotta have goals.

Project Focus and Sustainable Gaming

Completing a squad of Rogue Trader-era Space Marines energized me to keep hacking away at my long list of projects.

Opponents for the beakie-marines seem the most obvious next endeavor, right?... nah! Instead I've flitted between at least three, totally unrelated painting, crafting, or game-writing ideas. Which brings me to the topic of this post: Project focus and sustainable gaming.

Sustainable gaming is not my term but one apparently coined by Dan Adam on his Paint All the Minis (PATM) Podcast. I discovered PATM during the holiday slowdown and it's quickly become my new favorite podcast as I find myself pivoting away from RPGs and back towards tabletop wargaming. I particularly enjoy the "why I love (XYZ Game)" episodes but the discussions on sustainable gaming also top the list.

So what is sustainable gaming? I hope I don't corrupt Dan's definition by paraphrasing but essentially I understand it as: "play more games". As in focus more on getting games to the table, avoiding the pitfalls of buying more systems than one can possibly play, or endlessly preparing miniatures and terrain but never rolling the dice in anger.

Of course, we all like to try new things, so buying new rules (or home brewing our own) forms a key part of the hobby. And some folks (myself included) take more joy from creating/finishing the models than from actual game play. And that's OK too. Practicing sustainable gaming doesn't imply some monastic devotion to one game project, just a general push to try to to avoid the ruts that actually inhibit gaming.

My personal rut is endless experimentation. I'm always (buying and) tinkering with new materials and new techniques but before I can actually employ them I move on to the next idea.

All this said, I've laid down some guidelines for myself to help me focus my projects and I'm listing them and my goals here for accountability.

The short term goal is to play a single tabletop game this Spring. Between work, grad school, and domestic life this seemingly simple goal is challenging but achievable. By the year's end I would like to have played multiple wargames in different genres.

Following the guidelines below should help me get there:

1) No more buying. No new systems, no new miniatures. Play only games that I already have miniatures for.

2) No new homebrews. Playtesting a homebrew system is acceptable, as long as it uses miniatures I have on hand. Also, the homebrew needs to be fairly complete with the rules actually written somewhere (laptop, notebook) and more than just a faint idea.

3) No more miniature fabrication. This may be the hardest one for me to follow. I have too many commercially produced and DIY miniatures that need paint however so until I reach my short-term goal, no more sculpts.

4) Guideline 1 above means no new scales. Furthermore, I'll focus on scales used by multiple game systems, so I can make terrain usable across many games.

5) Active projects must fit on my drafting table. (I'm currently violating this guideline...) I can work on the project elsewhere (like by a window for ventilation/lighting, setting terrain on a side table to dry, etc.) but when I clean up, the projects must fit on the drafting table. If there's no longer space on the table, no new projects until something is finished to make room.

6) Speaking of clean up, I'm working really hard on trying to keep all my tools and work area tidy, setting up for a quick hobby session, and then putting everything back in its place. Unless paint is drying or plaster is curing, projects need to go back to the drafting table and tools in their cubby. This is probably the hardest guideline to honor.

7) The most obvious one: choose a game and work toward that. Not just a general system but a specific scenario in the game. Decide on the board layout, the opposing forces, and any other accessories needed. Like I said, obvious but not something I normally follow.

With these guidelines in place, a spaceship game would be the obvious choice. I have tons of completed ships, the minimal terrain required, and a fully-written homebrew ruleset needing playtesting.

Spaceship gaming is weird however in that none of the models or terrain transfers to other scales or games. In order to expand my range of potential games with painted miniatures and terrain, I'm purposefully avoiding spaceships for my next few games.

I've narrowed my next game down to Scott Pyle's great looking Super Mission Force (2nd Edition). I've already statted up the eight characters, grouped them into two teams, and started painting. Doctor Who miniatures at 28mm act as proxies for my super teams, which means I also get painted figures for later games set in the Whoniverse. Terrain-making is in progress.

MS Excel based game emulator

 Super Mission Force just barely beat out my other choice for my next game: micro-armor battles using my homemade future tanks. It ticks most boxes as I already have the miniatures and detailed notes for my homebrew system (working title Tracks, Turrets, and Tokamaks). I do not however have the terrain, so the tanks will have to wait. Happily, I can still playtest the rules using MS Excel as an emulator.

OK, back to making 28mm trees. I might just be playing a game in a few weeks.

Who You Calling Old(hammer)?

Or... Rogue Trader strikes again.

So glad I kept this stuff

I'm still alive out here, still chipping away at little gaming/art projects. I mentioned in a previous post that 2020 has seen a vast decrease in my blog posting but a monumental increase in actual gaming. 

About this time last year I found a really great local group to end a two-decade hiatus in roleplaying. Due to the global pandemic we quickly transitioned to Discord and didn't slow down. Nearly a year later and we're over 20 sessions into an AD&D 1st Edition campaign.

Even better, I finally got back into the GM chair after nearly 25 years, running a variant of FATE. It's supremely satisfying to create a world and have players tell me they are totally immersed. That immersion comes at a huge time cost however; the long interruption in my GM career made me forget just how much work goes into being a good GM. Therefore, even as I'm just getting back into GMing RPGs, I find my attention drifting to other, arguably less time-consuming interests. Funnily, this follows the pattern set 30 years ago in my gaming heyday.

It was 1989 and I was heavily into RPGs, running or playing campaigns every day at lunch and making monthly pilgrimages to the local small-town hobby store to spend my meager preadolescent funds on ever more gaming stuff. On one of these trips I picked up a copy of Challenge magazine, issue 37 specifically.

Flipping through the GDW magazine, I was enthralled by all this reference material for games I'd only heard of in TSR's "Mail Order Hobby Shop" catalog. When I reached the article titled "The Undead of Space" my RPG train derailed.

"The Undead of Space" featured a new faction and associated scenarios for Warhammer 40000, a game I'd never heard of. I still remember to this day reading the random equipment tables in that article and marveling over esoteric words like "chainsword", "lasgun", and "bolt thrower". I didn't know what to make of all this but even without knowing any of the actual game mechanics I was already hooked by the tone.

My friends and I dabbled in tabletop wargaming via Battletech but the look of this strange British game fascinated us more. Soon one of the group showed up, fresh from the hobby store, with the actual rulebook: Warhammer 40000 Rogue Trader.

Roleplaying games quickly took a back seat as we collected miniatures and built terrain in earnest. We were never ones to paint our figures but we packed the games in; so many battles, so much fun.

Leaving for college broke up our game group and post-college time demands convinced me to give up gaming in the early 00s. Yet, even as I purged near complete collections of such classics as TSR's Marvel Super Heroes, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu, and a respectable Ral Partha miniature collection, for some reason I couldn't part with my Rogue Trader stuff.

And now, the pattern repeats. I've returned to the gaming hobby and after years of searching I've finally found a stable RPG group. Instead of prepping my next GM session however, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the closet where my old miniatures lay waiting. Some, including two boxes of 60 or so beakie space marines, have lain dormant since I bought them off eBay nearly 20 years ago.

So, while I should be fleshing out NPCs, closing plot holes in my stories, making diagrams, and establishing plausible reasons for PC motivation, instead I'm stripping paint off 33-year old miniatures and planning new color schemes.

And I'm loving it.

Two weeks off for the holidays gives me time to work, motivation, and a definitive goal: field two small painted forces on a table with some decent looking terrain.

I doubt I'll get the forces done before the new year but I'll give it a go, likely pitting a squad from my own homebrew chapter of Space Marines versus a handful of Space Slann.

So awesome... so tedious to put together

Even in 1997 I paid an absurd amount for these guys (11 of my 14)

Despite my love for the old Rogue Trader book, I'll instead use homebrew rules for the actual battles, combining original ideas with great nuggets borrowed from various systems like Stargrunt, Song of Blades and Heroes, and others.

I guess I could try the newest edition of Warhammer 40000 but... why?  Did you know GW is on the 9th edition? 9th?! They can't get it right after 8 attempts??

All joking and faux GW-bashing aside, I'm not using any contemporary rulesets because my fights will be solo and my homebrew is built from the ground up to be a solo skirmish game. And besides, for me there is no other WH40K than Rogue Trader.

My friends and I eagerly jumped on the Warhammer 40000 2nd Edition bandwagon when that boxed set came out in the early 90s. It only took one play for me to decide it wasn't for me. Too slick, too homogenized, too dumbed-down. The rest of my group embraced 2nd, and even 3rd edition, but whenever it was my turn to pick the game I insisted on using the Rogue Trader rules.

I guess even back in the early 90s I was doing "Oldhammer". In my mind though, it's just Warhammer 40000. The only 40K that matters. Stripped of mystery-killing "lore" and standing proudly at only 28mm.

Blogs I Enjoy and a Possible Change of Programming

I haven't abandoned this blog, I've just been too busy with real life to be creative.

Also, I've been fairly demotivated to upkeep this blog due to a Blogger glitch: I am unable to comment.  I cannot reply to other people's comments to my blog, nor can I comment on (most) blogs.  Curiously it seems there is one I still can post comments to.  All this has left me less than enthused to continue spending time in the blog-o-sphere.

A number of bloggers I follow don't share my malaise, and I'd like to point out their outstanding work.

Kaptain Kobold's The Stronghold Rebuilt.  The most prolific poster of all the bloggers I follow, I appreciate the time he takes to crank out so many battle reports.  I've discovered a few new games through his play-throughs.

Chris' Just Another Wargames Blog.  Lots of good stuff here but his focus on micro-armor closely parallels my own interests.

Metal Earth.  Excellent art, characterized by gloriously heavy black ink work.  Love it.  More importantly, the art depicts some of the coolest original ideas I've seen in a long while.  And his recent descriptions of discovering West End Games' Star Wars RPG brought a tear of nostalgia to my eye.

The Lone Animator.  Awesome monster sculpts.  I'm not sure why he's not been hired to make big budget Hollywood movies but then again, if I lived in Sweden like him, why the hell would I want to move to Hollywood?

RC Sci Fi.  Best blog on the internet.  Old school scratchbuild model making using techniques he learned as an actual film professional.  Movie quality spaceships that blow away any CGI "model" out there.

Regarding a change of programming here, I've really been getting into Amateur Telescope Making (ATM) recently and I'm tempted to use this blog as a platform to document my progress.  I wonder if I can change the blog's title?

Don't worry, I'll still be gluing spaghetti together and calling it a spaceship but expect photos of fused glass in the future.

Homemade Molding/Casting Agitator

A long time has passed since my last post, my time having been filled with major work and life events.  Pretty soon I'll be starting a year-long school and will have to cease gaming and put this blog on hiatus.  So before then I'm trying to cram in as much scratchbuilding as possible.

I'm finishing the scratchbuild tank I started way back, and starting on another spaceship.  As I've discussed, I'm using water-putty to make the masters, silicone for molds and resin for the casts.  In each of these materials I have to vigorously tap the respective container to ensure air bubbles don't form.  I'm some cases, especially with the water-putty, I don't get all the bubbles out.  To remedy this I cobbled together a crude agitator, inspired by a blog post on the Ultrawerke site.

First I bought a 4x6 inch wooden picture frame for a US$1.00 at the dollar store.  I cut up the fiberboard backing to make legs to elevate the frame.  I cut the bottom out of a cardboard coffee bean  container, leaving a 30mm lip all the way around.  I suspended the coffee can platform from the frame using springs from the hardware store.  I then mounted a 1.5V motor to the side of the frame.  The motor and associated wires, switch and power source were all left over parts from a graduate course I completed last winter but could easily be purchased from Radio Shack for US$5.00 to $7.00 total.  I fixed a weight to the drive-shaft using epoxy putty and turned it on and to my amazement it worked.  It worked a little too well and the frame starting scooting across the kitchen table.  My wife suggested placing the whole contraption in a cardboard box, which worked beautifully.

I"m off to pour the top and bottom hulls of a new spaceship sculpt.  I think this agitator will go a long way towards making more crisp scratchbuilds.

Agitator