Milestones 2

In Milestones 1 I noted that my first introduction to proper wargaming with rules was with Introduction to Battle Games and Airfix figures.  I don’t think that I have any survivors of those figures.  I did a deliberately retrospective game a few years back, a medieval skirmish with Robin Hood and Sheriff of Nottingham figures rather than any of the more modern alternatives, to play with the idea of what I would have wanted things to look like back then, had I had the skill to make it work.

While I did accumulate a few Hinton Hunt 20mm Napoleonics (long gone), my earliest metal armies were for 25mm fantasy games with Chainmail.  I started with Minifigs ME (and SS to a lesser extent) range.  I still have a few survivors, all with more recent repainting jobs:

The “giant” is not much by modern standards.  In later years, I thought that he had a rather Narnian look to him, so he’s earmarked to be part of a Narnian Hordes of the Things army.  I have a handful of magnetic sabot bases for HotT to make it easy to configure individually based fantasy figures for the game.

Most of my remaining fantasy figures were rebased on uniform 60mm square bases for Fantasy Rules! a few years ago.  

Here’s an element of ME Nazgul on horseback:

I’ve never been particularly happy with miniature depictions of Tolkien’s Ents.  I have two elements of these ME range fellows, seen here with an ME Huorn in the second rank.  These were an experiment in mixing some Woodland Scenics products with the painting.

The ME armies never got too large; my budget as a 12-year-old was pretty limited, and the one hobby shop that stocked the figures was a long way away.  Most of my units were around 10 figures, except one “horde” of scruffy ME goblins of nearly 50.  This didn’t make for a very satisfactory Chainmail game.

The next wave of figures that I added were, I believe, Der Kriegspielers (or early Heritage, perhaps? Duke Seifreid, in any case), also from a Middle Earth range.  These Wild Hillmen are from that range.  At this remove of time, I’m not entirely sure whether they were billed as Dunlendings or as some sort of backwoods Gondorians.

McEwan Miniatures was an early player in the market, branching out beyond the Middle Earth or Conan influence.  However, I have only two of their products in my collection.

The first is this rather exotic monster, labelled, as I recall, as “Web-footed Everett” in the catalog.  I have long wondered whether Everett was some local gamer immortalized in metal.  I use this figure occasionally as a water lurker in HotT.

The lizard riders have seen a lot of action over the past 30 years.  I have 10 of these, with what I recall being early Ral Partha Huns mounted on McEwan riding lizards.

I haven’t had a large-scale fantasy game on the table in a few years.  Digging around in my storage boxes for this entry has me thinking I ought to do something about that soon...

Milestones I

Having spent the weekend playing Charge! instead of working on my freelance proofreading job, figuring that the one could wait and the other was time-limited, I need to get to it...and this post will therefore be incomplete.

I mentioned that my birthday was this past weekend, and that I hit 50, something of a milestone in life.  In gaming, it was also a milestone.  I received, for my 15th birthday, a now somewhat more well-know set of rules for "Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns", which shaped my gaming activities for years afterward.

(Yes, that's my original copy, tattered but complete.  The box also includes Chainmail, all four supplements, and the Swords and Spells miniatures rules.)

I've been considering some way to reconnect my original core group of three players and run a reunion game of some sort. We all still game, at least occasionally.  To the left, two of the former group, my brother Norman and long-time friend Joe Bargowski, play a 25mm fantasy skirmish game with my sons and me in November 2009.

Former group member Steve Doughty was most recently seen with his own sons in tow at the HMGS-East Cold Wars convention a couple of weeks ago.

I'd like to think that gaming has contributed to these long-lasting friendships.

The anniversary of our D&D game has a date, which makes it easy to remember.  But sometime this spring there is an unremembered anniversary of equal importance, without which the D&D game would never have formed in the first place.

One of the other treasures of my childhood is my copy of Terence Wise's Introduction to Battle Gaming.

A 5th grade classmate lent me his copy, sometime in the spring of 1971, which gave me a way to rationalize my play with the collection of Airfix figures I had acquired by then.  (My personal copy of the book was acquired at a slightly later date, probably in 1972 sometime.)  That's a nice round 40 years ago...time flies when you're having fun.