It's for real; it's big; and it's incoming!

The GW company blog yesterday confirmed the rumours that've been floating round the net for some 6 months now: there is to be a new edition of the classic boardgame Space Hulk; and it will be about as spectacular as some were predicting. That this much is true can be seen from the pictures below, which I culled from the GW site. First, a look at the promotional video clip.


Next, a selection of the pictures (you'll find the rest on GW's site, naturally enough).

The box and its contents

The game will be released on September 5th, in what GW is calling "strictly limited numbers". I confess find myself wondering how GW might choose to define the term "strictly limited", if only for the simple reason that I can easily imagine a print run of several tens of thousands selling out via internet preorders in the scant 3 weeks before the new Space Hulk 'hits the shelves' (I preordered 2 myself thanks to Andy's kind offices; I know from the B&C that I'm not the only person in Glasgow to do so; and I'd even think about turning up and queueing on the day to get a 3rd set- yep, it's one of those games dear readers!).

In any event, months of rumour and anticipation coupled with some last minute stoking of the fires with talk of a 40K 'mystery box' means that however large a print run GW have prepared (and the company must've figured on having at least a day or two's stock available for their stores and their distribution chain, surely?), it will sell out in no time at all as fans old and new clamber over each other to get their hands on copies. Assuming this is what happens, will we I wonder see GW resort to this marketing strategy again?

Meanwhile, what about the contents of the box? I won't repeat the list of goodies which you can find on GW's site. Sufficeth to say that 40K fans are only too aware that the samples here are very high quality pieces even by GW's standards. The posing on that Terminator is extremely dynamic and I imagine modellers the world over will be setting to work in the weeks and months to come to make their regular Terminator minis look similiar. This all looks very promising.

Key questions right now for this ardent fan of the previous editions are:

• Will the board pieces be backward compatible with those from the previous editions? There is no reason why they shouldn't be, but you don't have to have been a GW customer all that long to be only too familiar with the built-in obsolescence at the heart of their marketing model. I guess we just have to hope that the design team will have proved every bit as keen to expand on their own existing Space Hulk layouts as are the rest of us.
• What will the heavy flamer rules be like with the obvious return to the larger flame templates as used in 1st edition? I confess I'll need something special to persuade me that these rules will be better than the 2nd edition flamer rules, which were one of the better features of the new edition.
• How will the extra wargear and characters work? There'll always be the option, as with the flamer rules, of returning to older rules or bringing using homebrews, but your silver tongue might fail you in the face of opponents who prefer the current official version.

But this is mere speculation right now. All these and other mysteries will be revealed very soon. ;)

Addendum, 19/08/09
One of Andy's comments referred to more pictures over at the Warseer forum. For those who are interested, they can be found here. It's also worth keeping a regular check on GW's Space Hulk product page, because it's being updated daily with new pictures until the end of this week.

Related @RD/KA!
- Part 1. In the beginning was the hulk
- Part 2. The timer rule and player point-of-view
- Part 3. Tactics, tactics, tactics!

Happy birthday to RD/KA!

Four years and counting
Today is RD/KA!'s 4th birthday. My gaming blog began life on Saturday 13th August 2005 with the first of a series of reports on the 63rd Worldcon. In those 4 years 350 posts have covered games, comics, movies, books, food, and sundry other topics of interest to gamers; but as the 'Labels' list at the bottom of the page shows, writing about the games I've played has been staple fare. There have been highs and lows as regular readers will know, but you can be sure of one thing: as long as I'm playing games, I'll have something to say about them. Onwards and upwards! :-)

Another Sunday session
We were the four for Sunday games we'd been the last time. Gav was keen for more Risk and Andy was hankering after a game of Roborally, which I fancied too. So that made a plan.

Roborally

Designed by Richard Garfield of Magic: the Gathering fame, and first published by Garfield Games in 1994, Roborally was published in a new edition by Hasbro/Avalon Hill in 2005. I own the original edition and 3 out of 4 of its expansion sets. I've not had a chance to look over the new edition in detail, but I confess I don't like the look of it too much. Or, to be more precise: there are 2 features of the new edition I don't much like the look of.

The first of these is the replacement of the original virtual bots- ie. counters representing each bot, with the docking bay. Virtual bots are a solution to the impossibility of stacking the bot miniatures when the situation demands 2 or more bots occupy the same square, eg. at the start. I'll freely grant that the new rules might be simpler than the originals, but I'm not sure they're more fun. That is to say: I'd like to think there is an extra layer of potential chaos offered by the old virtual bot rules.

One amusing example I can remember involved a bot, a virtual bot and a proximity mine. The 2 bots were adjacent to each other and the real bot dropped a proximity mine. The question arose: would the virtual bot set off the proximity mine? We perused the rules:

• Virtual bots don't interact at all with other bots, virtual or otherwise; they interact normally with everything else.
• Dropped/launched devices are active as soon as they are dropped except to the bot that set them, which has until the end of that register phase to move away.

And so the proximity mine went off under the bot which had dropped it!

The other feature of the new game I'm not keen on is the timer: a 30 second timer is set when the penultimate player has finished programing their bot. I have stoutly resisted suggestions to use time turns in Roborally for years; I'm hardly going to applaud when a new edition makes their use official.

For Sunday's game I canvassed for a board a lot simpler than that we had raced across the last time we played. Winning assent I chose a layout which was fairly open and which used simple board elements, but on which there were still enough different elements for maximum entertainment value. The result was the layout below.

Back Stretch and Pit Row

I cleverly neglected to record the flag locations; but I can remember the start and the 1st flag, because Twonky reached those 2 locations.

The game was entertaining as ever. Highlights among the hijinks were:

• Donald lost his life on the first turn.
• Gav was the first to reach a flag.
• Gav's bot remained virtual for an unprecedented 4 turns.

Most entertaining perhaps were Donald and Andy's encounters with an express conveyor belt. Donald arrived there first. Calculating his move, he figured that he was doomed:

• From the start point (X marks the spot) they were unable to get off the belt.
• Whichever card they played then, the conveyor was going to move them to the edge of the board.
• Once there, they faced 3 equally destructive choices:

1. Let the belt carry them off the edge of the board.
2. Move onto the pit.
3. Move onto the oil slick, from where they would slide across to the conveyor, which would carry them off the edge of the board.

Fortunately for Donald, it turned out that he had an option which could save him: Overload Override which allowed him to rotate and move in the same register phase, thus handily escaping the express conveyor before it carried him to his doom. Andy wasn't so fortunate.

The final insult for Andy was that it was Donald's fault that Andy's bot had ended up on the conveyor in the first place. Andy had picked up the Robocopter option. He had finally decided to use it and his bot began to move at a fair clip. Then he was lasered by Donald: his Robocopter was shot off: and his bot was dumped back on the factory floor. His curses were colourful.

Gav was making solid progress while all these hijinks were going on. He won the game with a solid lead:

• Gav: 4 flags.
• Andy: 2 flags.
• Me: 1 flag.
• Donald: 0 flags.

Score
C++ CPU: 1
COBOL CPU's: 0
:-(

Afterthoughts
I really like Roborally, and this game was no exception. I'd like to play more often, to which end I think we'd have to consider how to stage the game as filler. The key to this is single board layouts, and choosing the right number of flags according to the difficulty of the board.

Risk

With time still at our disposal we turned to Risk as Gav had requested. With hindsight Gav might be regretting this because he was the number victim of circumstance in our game: he was playing yellow; eliminating all yellow armies was my mission; so Gav was the consistent target of my unrelenting attacks.

Missions

• Andy: occupy Asia and S. America.
• Donald: occupy Australasia, Europe, and 1 other continent.
• Gav: eliminate all red armies (Andy).
• Me: eliminate all yellow armies (Gav).

The turn order didn't favour Gav because his turn was after mine. I was able to pick 3 or 4 lone yellow armies with some opportunistic attacks in my first turn. After that I quickly took S. America, which gave me a solid base which was never seriously challenged. Nobody had paid any attention to N. America during setup and it was left untouched until the endgame, so I was able to leave a minor frontier force to secure the South and turn my attention to Africa. This too soon fell to my green hordes.

Meanwhile, Andy was trying to secure Asia. Unfortunately for him his efforts were constantly foiled by Donald's and my attacks from Australasia and Africa respectively; neither of us were keen to see 7 armies/turn appear on our borders.

Elsewhere, Gav finally bit the bullet and launched an attack against my strong Icelandic outpost. No one could understand why I was holding Iceland in such strength. The answer was simple: Gav had territories nearby and I was massing for an attack. Gav pre-empted me and broke through Iceland into the virgin lands of N. America, from where he later fought his way through into central Asia in an effort to put as much distance as possible between his armies and mine.

By this time my position was largely unassailable. I was eventually able to seize N. America with the help of a timely set of Risk cards. My mission long since evident to all, Andy tried to stave off my increasingly inevitable victory by finishing Gav off himself. This failed. I won the game next turn, cashing in another set of Risk cards to amass a huge army which I promptly sent through Kamchatka to finish off the handful of yellow units still on the board.

Final position

• Andy: 9 territories (all in Asia).
• Donald: 11 territories (Australasia and Europe).
• Gav: -
• Me: 22 territories (Africa, S. America, N. America, Kamchatka and Japan).

Score
Puny microprocessor 1
Glorious world conqueror 1
Grunts still counting on their fingers 0
:-)

Afterthoughts
I think I was well served by my mission which, barring lucky setups, I feel is a bit easier than one which involves controlling continents. This is because:

• The mission isn't geographically defined so that it is less susceptible to bad setups.
• Other players's attacks on the player you must eliminate contribute directly to your victory.

It'll take a few more games with these missions in play before I can be sure. ;)

Back to the beastly badger baiting!

Memoir'44

Badger's visit for gaming last night saw me still in the mood for light relief so we again eschewed Combat Commander. Left to choose, Badger opted for our old favourite, Memoir'44. We considered playing an Overlord game but we were starting late and Badger wanted to be sure we'd play more than one game. So we decided to start with the first scenario from the Air Pack, and to proceed from there.


Yellow Beach
The first scenario took us to France in August 1942 for the ill-fated Operation Jubilee, the experimental amphibious assault on Dieppe. Operation Jubilee is best known for the heavy casualties suffered by the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division in the main assault: a frontal attack on the port itself. The Yellow Beach scenario covers one of the flanking attacks made by British commandos.

The long road back to the painting table

Gearing up and clearing the decks

It's been three months since I wrote about returning to the miniatures hobby I'd put aside a few years ago. I still haven't picked up a paintbrush in anger in those weeks, but I'm getting close. In the meantime I had to empty a large walk-in cupboard to clear the space to reestablish my painting table. Although everything's packed away again so that I finally have a functional workspace I'm going to have to unpack and reorganise everything again at least once before I'm satisfied.

For the sake of the bloggery I've invested in the finishing touches to my layout for miniatures photography:

• A nifty wee tabletop tripod.
• A quality PVC backdrop.
• And a pair of cheap halogen spots; I'd've thought these would give bad light, but the guy in the camera shop where I bought the backdrop pointed out that digital image manipulation makes it easy to correct the light.

Fighting Formations preview #1: Some background

Readers who know me from the days of yore will remember the effort I put into designing a viable model of operational command and control for WW2 tabletopping. At the same time, regular readers should be only too aware that I regard Chad Jensen's Combat Commander as second only to Courtney Allen's classic Up Front as an exemplary gaming treatment of these matters, albeit both on a smaller scale (and that's a very close second, which has as much to do with accidents of history and biography as it does with matters of absolute quality).

Just to remind readers:- Chad's Combat Commander has enjoyed remarkable success in the past 2½ years:

• Two boxed core games - CC:E and CC:P (the first already in reprint).
• A boxed system expansion - CC:M.
• Two zip-locked battle pack expansions - BP1: Paratroopers and BP2: Stalingrad.
• The 3rd of the planned battle pack series - BP3: Normandy - sprinted through GMT's P500 system last April in record time.
• A similarly continuous stream of new scenarios, maps and counters appearing in C3i magazine.

Claymore 2009: expectations fulfilled but not exceeded

The new home
To cut to the chase: Claymore lived up to the cautious optimism engendered by its long overdue change of venue; and that's the "cautious" as much as the "optimism". The new venue is Telford College's new main campus, opened less than 3 years ago. So, while not pretty outside, the building is spacious, bright and airy inside. A far cry from the cramped and stuffy lodgings from which Claymore suffered at the old Meadowbank venue, this was unanimously praised by everyone to whom I spoke.

Spacious, bright and airy: the main convention hall (the college refectory)

That said, readers will already recognise there were reservations (and I'm here considering the venue not the event):

• The second convention room was in the gym; not quite as nice as the refectory; and a few minutes away - this didn't bother me as much as it did others.
• The bring and buy: the great failure of the new venue this was (again by unanimous opinion) more cramped and poky than it had been at Meadowbank.

Even though the bring-and-buy's room was too small for its purpose, the very fact that it had a room of its own was interesting. The painting demo had its own room too. I wonder how many side rooms like this there are available in the new Telford College campus, and how many of them could feasibly be put to use by Claymore? It'd be nice if there were possibilities like this which the event could use to expand. Time will tell I guess.

The painting demo
The painting demo was my next port of call after the bring-and-buy. This had its own room, showing already the new attractions on offer at the more spacious venue. The demo was quite well laid out, with a webcam, digital projector and screen; all of which showed the potential of the latest technology to make something really interesting of an event like this.

Our painters (in no particular order): Andrew Taylor, Brian Philips and David Imrie

Did our 3 painters make the most of this chance to showcase their skills and pass the fruits of their experience? To be honest I don't know because I didn't return after my brief early visit. Of what I did see I can say:

• Our painters looked as if they'd suffered a few teething problems with the basic logistics of their event, which is hardly surprising for a first go.
• There was no sign of a programme: it strikes me that a schedule structured around the 3 basic experience levels- beginner, intermediate and advanced; that this would've made for an event a more attractive showcase for the painters' skills.

What I do know is that I hope Claymore repeats this in 2010, and that I remember to take names. D'oh!

The tables
I did visit the 3 participation games I'd found listed in the programme. The first I found was the Dingwall Wargames Club's 1/144th scale Dambusters game (not much to see on the website BTW, but there are contact details). The table was full so I booked my seat and headed for the Dundee Skirmishers. When found this proved to be a demonstration game, but I took some pictures of the frankly quite impressive layout.

The Soviets move out from the cover of the treeline

Duncan - "The Little General" - shows off his handiwork

Some nice terrain

"Bombs away!"
It was soon time for my Dambusters game with the Dingwall club. This game was delightfully simple:

• Objective: 4 Lancasters must breach a Ruhr dam in Operation Chastise, as immortalised in the 1955 movie The Dam Busters.
• Gameplay: Make a bombing run lasting 6 turns, taking your luck with the flak and trying to bring your Lancaster to the ideal speed and height before you dropped your famous bouncing bomb.
• Rules:

1. Each turn, you could accelerate/decelerate or climb/dive.
2. Roll 1d6 to determine how many feet or mph you gained or lost.
3. Flak was likewise a simple roll of 1d6 to generate results varying from damage to enforced changes in speed or height.
4. Each player had 3 'jokers'; cards they could use once each, eg. for dice modifiers or rerolls.
5. The final bombing run was a simple percentage dice roll with modifiers for damage, and for degrees of variance from the ideal speed and height.

And that was that, except that, with rules that fit easily on a single sheet of A4 and which could've been squeezed comfortably onto a single sheet of A5, the game was actually simpler even that than summary.

Dambusters in action (note the white tape which marked each turn's movement

In our game I was Y for 'Yankee', number 3 in line. By the time I'd seen the previous 2 bombers move for a turn or two I had an idea of what I thought would be good tactics: we were coming in hight and fast; and with 6 turns of flying I was going to have to adjust for a few turns before I could hope to pull into straight and level flight. So I opted to climb straight away rather than dive then find myself having to climb again. The reactions of the Dingwall gamers told me that this was quite smart.

Yours truly prepares to brave the flak again

After this promising start it all went pear-shaped with the dice so that I ended up providing some light entertainment for everyone else. The 'high point' was when I needed to roll high; rolled 1; decided to use my 'joker' for a reroll; and rolled the inevitable 1 again. The hilarity of my bombing run notwithstanding I was able finally to hit the dam with a lucky roll of 29%. Three of our four planes hit the dam on that run, for 69% damage. It was the highest score at that time but we were well down the day's rankings in the end, including at least 3 who managed to blow the dam.

Thirty minutes on 'Bloody Omaha'
The tagline for this game staged by Royal Air Force Wargamers Association (Leuchars) was (I paraphrase):

"The average life expectancy of a US Ranger in the first wave at Omaha beach on June 6th 1944 was 30 minutes. Can you survive that long?"

Six hardy volunteers led a squad of 12 US Rangers fully equipped with bangalore torpedoes and satchel charges, led by none other than Captain Tom Hanks (AKA. Captain Miller) himself. Our objective was simple: get up that beach and blow that bunker!

Two of the RAFWA guys beside their lovely table

The picture above shows the details of the table:

• The brewed-up Sherman complete with poor GI who'd lost his legs when the tank ran over them.
• The beach obstacles, including the damn wire.
• The bunker.
• And our landing craft.

You can also see the survivors of the previous attempt huddled by the shingle where they'd failed even to breach the wire.

The rules were simple again:

• We were mortared.
• We were machine-gunned.
• We moved (8" minus wounds).
• Then we fired - 1, 2 or 3d10 depending on weapon, needing a 9+ to hit (pesky bunkers).
• Then we took our actions, eg. doing first aid or setting a bangalore.

So, our 6 brave volunteers had a quick planning session, in which yours truly suggested splitting to go up each flank, meaning that half of us would've had to have run twice as far diagonally across the beach. My 'plan' quickly forgotten, we piled out of our landing craft, spread out, and took the short route - straight ahead.

My BAR man (each of us had 1 character from Saving Private Ryan: I think mine was Pvt. Reiben with the BAR) was in the front, so he was targetted first. He was dead in 2 turns, but not before he'd managed to lay down some effective fire on the bunker. Quickly out of the landing craft and doubling in bounds via the beach obstacles our squad soon managed to reach the shingle bank, led by my #2 character, who proved to be the day's crackshot with 2 KIA's to his credit. We were helped in this dash by the inaccuracy of the German mortars, which constantly missed us, and which finally only hit the landing craft once we'd all made our exit.

Four of our brave team, including (on my right) the hero of the hour: our medic

Safely hunkered by the shingle, we reorganised and waited while a bangalore cleared a weak section of the wire. Then our men were running towards that bunker as fast as their legs could carry them. We'd picked up a flamethrower from a casualty at the shingle, and our flamethrower man proved deadly. One attack disposed of the HMG and a 2nd attack cleared the trench in front of the bunker.

The rest of us sprinted round the back to finish the bunker off with our satchel charges. Of course, in our haste we'd forgotten the 'murder hole' (about which we'd been quietly reminded by one of the RAF guys; I'd actually thought he was just talking 'in character' so to speak). We were lucky: we managed to set our satchel charges before the German in the murder hole opened fire, killing my character with a single shot just before the bunker blew. We'd won, and our casualties had been remarkably light, all things considered.

Afterthoughts
Both of these games were great fun: simple concepts cleanly executed for maximum ease of play on the day; ideal public participation games in other words. The 'Bloody Omaha' game was my personal favourite:

• It was a lovely piece of work, featuring Tamiya models which were a bit of a nostalgia rush for yours truly.
• The combination of simple rules; just enough players to generate command confusion; and the relentless pressure of the GM's made for a tense and dramatic half hour's gaming.
• On top of all that, my hooting and hollering was largely in celebration of success instead of in an ironic response to ever more hilarious failure.

I heard later that this game won a well-deserved Best of Show.

The swag
I bought some stuff as you'd expect, mostly books. Of particular note was a pile of 6 (count them: 6!) Osprey Campaign series paperbacks for a mere £25. You can be sure I availed myself of that offer with enthusiasm dear readers. The same trader had many fascinating books at irresistibly reduced prices, one of which was an odd little volume: Britain, France, and Belgium, 1939-1940, by Brian Bond. I say "odd" because books on this campaign are relatively rare; rarer still are books which deal with the geopolitical background to the Anglo-French strategy instead of merely rehashing the familiar story of the German blitzkrieg. I may have more to say about this book in the future.

And I treated myself to a new game, naturally enough. More about this too in due course no doubt.

The verdict
This year was as much fun as I've had at Claymore in many a year. The sheer pleasantness of the new setting played an important part in that, as did the comforting rituals of catching up with old friends. Most important though was the simple application of the lesson I learned at UK Expo'09: have something to do. You can be sure I'll be applying this to future visits to Claymore. Meanwhile, a big thank you to the guys from Dingwall and Leuchars, as well as to all at SESWC for all their efforts. ;)

Looking to tomorrow

Fingers crossed I guess

I commented last month that the new venue for Claymore has revived my interest in this venerable event on the Scottish gaming calendar, which I've attended in recent years mostly for the sake of nostalgia and the chance to catch up with my old Edinburgh buddies. I'm not quite sure what I'm expecting, since there is no sign that there are any radical departures in the programme; eg. there is still no open gaming space laid on, as is the norm at boardgaming conventions and which is commonplace across America AFAIK.

I could turn this post into a rant about the oddity that so many gamers seem to find nothing strange in conventions the primary purpose of which is not to enable them to indulge their primary hobby passion, ie. actually playing games. But no, instead I'll just get on with making what I can of the Claymore 2009 programme.

A low and dirty business

Andy, Donald and Gav were round for games on Sunday. I'd asked for requests and Gav had suggested Risk or History of the World. I played HotW for the first time last April and am certainly keen to play it again, but on Sunday still laboured under the lassitude of the same vicissitudes which had occasioned Badger's and my recourse to Ivanhoe on Friday, instead of the habitual Combat Commander. So I plumped for Risk and a consensus in favour soon followed.

Risk

Celebrating its 50th birthday this year, Risk is a hardened veteran par excellence of modern gaming and is surely the closest thing to a board wargame most casual family gamers will experience. It's certainly the first game of its ilk I ever played: we got the edition with the cylinders and triangular prisms for playing pieces for xmas when I was 10 or 11. In our first game that xmas day I was well on my way to victory- I'd secured Australasia and Asia, and had just captured Europe; when we had to clear the table for dinner. Were Napoleon's world-dominating designs ever similarly foiled I wonder?

Curse you you varlet!

The recent gaming drought ended with a visit from Badger on Friday. I remained under the cloud of those recent vicissitudes, so we ended up playing a few rounds of Knizia's everfresh cardplay gem Ivanhoe. Everfresh? Clunky neologism? Quite possibly. A touch hyperbolic? Not at all.

I've recorded 68 games of Ivanhoe since I started reguarly recording my games played @BGG back in 2007. This filler from 2005 reminds me that I've owned the game for some 7 years now, so that even just 1 game/month in the forgotten years would add about 50 more games to the total. Ivanhoe thus merits its place in the 2nd division of my most played games ever: games which I've played some 100 or more times (that's games #6 to #10 below BTW).

Snippet snackage

I've not played any games for nearly three weeks and, vicissitudes having abounded, I'm reduced to a rummage through the ragbag in search of a posting.

Expo rolls!

Hot on the heels of the success of Expo'09, UK Games Expo a couple of weeks ago announced dates for 2010, 2011 and 2012 (the last two still TBC). Organising an event on the scale of UK Games Expo must be something of a mammoth undertaking and an often thankless task, so it's an encouraging sign for the long-term future of the event that the organisers are already looking ahead into the next decade of this 21st century.

After the success of CC@Expo'09, you can be sure that I've already set aside the long weekend of the 4th to the 6th of June 2010. More in due course, naturally enough.

Here's another I prepared earlier...

A quick introduction
Regular readers might remember that I posted, last December, my long-delayed recantation on the topic of roleplaying as art. This here post has nothing to do with roleplaying (in the sense of tabletop rpg's, just in case there are those among you who immediately think that there is an element of roleplaying in costumed historical re-enactment); it's just that it too has been sitting on the rack for a couple of years.

So, why post it now? Or, to put it another way, why not post it then? On the latter point, there were 2 reasons I can recall:

• I had (and still have to some degree) mixed feelings about using my blog as a platform to intervene in actual ongoing discussions from afar, ie. when I'm not joining in at source. "But that's exactly what blogs are for, dummy!" I hear you cry, dear readers. Well, you live and learn, eh?
• I felt the article was too political for RD/KA!.

The main reason why I chose to post it now was simple enough: I needed some material because I'll be unable to attend to the blog this week. I daresay the Euroelection results also made the topic seem sadly all too pertinent. This all the more so since, not long after the furore over the SBG at Salute, a BBC reporter went to a militaria fair. And what did he discover? Yes, you've guessed it dear readers, the SBG's ranks were replete with neo-nazi ultra-reactionaries.

NB. As with the article on roleplaying and art, there are some temporal references which are well out of date. Again I'm just leaving them as they were first written.

New Timeframes?

Sunday gaming was cancelled a couple of weeks ago due to an impromptu daytrip to Dundee, my old home town. The visit was occasioned by my discovery, from his twitterfeed, that Warren Ellis was due to appear as a headline speaker in Timeframes, the comics programme of the Literary Dundee festival (as fB friends and tweetfellows might remember). Warren Ellis' Wildstorm superhero series The Authority was instrumental in reviving my interest in contemporary comics after a layoff during the 90's, and I set off thereafter on the familiar completist's quest: to get my hands on as much of his work as possible.

Alan Grant's name in the programme was just the icing on the cake. Grant wrote many of the seminal comic stories of my youth, Judge Dredd being the best known. On top of that, I'd bumped into Alan Grant once in a comics store in the old Dens Road Market in Dundee back in the early 90's. He proved to be genial, interesting and generous.

The journey to Dundee was uneventful, although finding the venue for the event wasn't quite so straightforward. I grew up in Dundee as I said, and my dad was a university lecturer, so the area in which the event's venue was located was quite familiar; or, at least, it used to be. As I doubled back in search of what, inevitably enough, turned out to be the first likely looking building I'd seen, I was amazed at how much the area had changed in the past decade: new buildings were everywhere; none of which had anything in particular to recommend them.

I arrived late. At this remove from the event it is impossible for me to give more than capsule impressions of the talks I sat through.

The throng of fans descends upon the stars!

The programme
The first programme item I attended - under the 'British Science Fiction Comics' heading - was Bill McLoughlin and Keith Robson's talk about DC Thomson's Starblazer, a comic of which I was only vaguely aware during its 1980's heyday, and which I never read. The pair weren't the best speakers but their subject was interesting and they came to life when, their individual contributions done, they began to bat the topic back and forth. An interesting snippet was how many of the writers and artists who went on to enjoy fame on both sides of the Atlantic in the 80's and 90's began their careers on Starblazer. There was an open hint of resentment on the part of McLoughlin and Robson at how little this has been acknowledged.

There followed Peter Hughes Jachimiak's lecture:

' Days of Future Passed' [sic]: 1970s Britain, Economic Downturn and Utopian Futures in Children's Science Fiction Comics.

The academic styling of this title was matched by the tone and poor delivery of the speaker. It was a real shame that Jachimiak apparently can't tell the difference between being scholarly and being academic because his subject was fascinating, and one that I hold close to my own heart (cf. eg. 'A Parcel of Rogues' - tangential I'll admit, but germane I'll avow). All I can here add is that Jachimiak at least succeeded in awakening in me an interest in the literature of comics' studies.

Jachimiak's lecture left me with no appetite for another taste of comics being drained dry of their abiding thrills by the inappropriate register of the academic text. This was a bit of a shame really, because the subsequent item sounded promising:

David Bishop, 'Time Twisted': A look at Alan Moore's treatment of time frames in 2000AD.

In any event, I don't know how Bishop's session went, because I spent it in a nearby pub.

Alan Grant signs my Batman/Judge Dredd: Vendetta in Gotham graphic novel

Keynote #1: Alan Grant
I returned in time to hang around awaiting the first keynote presentation of the day, by Alan Grant. Billed as 'My Adventures in Comics', Grant began by announcing that the intellectual standard of the preceding lectures had led him to rethink. And so we were treated to a cogent and highly stimulating cri de coeur appealing for story, a case made by the grandfather of 4 young children (11 years and under) who also just happens to be equipped with the insights of a lifetime's writing in comics and multimedia.

It is obviously impossible to give more than the briefest of hints of the themes of Grant's half hour talk, especially at a week and a half's remove. The best I can hope to do is to pick out a few of his key themes:

• Grant's central bete noire was the role of corporate marketing and branding in reducing stories to bland, conflict-free narratives where they're not removed altogether (ie. in puzzle/activity books).
• Thus we find that young readers aren't being exposed to essential features of the role of story in character building; that is to say, narratives dramatising:

1. Morality.
2. Hope.
3. Rebellion, and the irresistable lure of the ever-necessary challenge to authority.

• The consequence of all this Grant argued is that we are seeing a young generation grow up who lack the frames of reference that'd enable them to avoid being swept along with what Grant called the 'Platonic stories' of the powers that be; eg. the drive to war in Iraq in 2003, to note just one example cited by Grant.

There was a lot more to the talk than this, naturally enough, but that's the gist of the key themes. I have to say I didn't agree completely with all of Grant's points; but he was never less than interesting. I'd really like to hear more of what he has to say on this subject.

Warren Ellis with my copy of Planetary, Vol. 1: All Over the World and Other Stories

Keynote #2: Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis' style stood in sharp contrast to Alan Grant's, beginning as a rat-a-tat-tat of aperçus and anecdotes drawn from what is obviously a wealth of material, and woven together with biting wit into a whole which became increasingly greater than the sum of its parts as the talk gathered momentum. The naturally meandering style of the born raconteur meant that there was less of a definite theme to grab hold of in Ellis' talk than there had been in Grant's. So I really can't comment all that much on what Ellis said, other than to note that it was never dull, often provocative, and well worth the price of entry. I'd be keen to hear him talk again.

Elsewhere
No comics event featuring star writers and artists would be complete without signings, which duly took place. I also made an effort to talk to other people there. I particularly enjoyed meeting some young GW fans, with whom I shared a pleasant chat about all things Warhammer- 40K especially, naturally enough.

Who's watching who? The official photographer and I share a wee jape

Final thoughts
Timeframes was the 2nd comics programme to feature at Literary Dundee. My caveats notwithstanding I enjoyed a stimulating day out; my complaint wasn't so much the scholarly approach to understanding the place of comics in culture as it was the overly academic way in which this scholarship was put across. In any event, I was pleased to be in such an intellectually challenging environment, and hope to be able to return next year. A palpable hit then, I guess. ;)

Games a gogo!

The vicissitudes of everyday life have taken their toll on my blogging- key amongst which has been my labours to get my painting table up and running again after my long layoff; and a future onslaught is already on the horizon. Meanwhile, here is a quick roundup of last weekend's gaming.

Combat Commander

Badger was due round for another dose of Combat Commander last Friday. He was expecting us to continue our Stalingrad campaign. What he didn't know was that Mark and Robert were due to visit again. Hoping therefore that he might get chance to taste revenge after the pastings he'd suffered at Mark's hands last mayday, I suggested to Badger that we play an official scenario, something we could set up and play more quickly than the campaign with its decision tree and record keeping.

I have the power!

As fB friends and tweetfellows will already know, my computer chair (AKA 'the Seat of Power' - not my idea, honest!) broke on Thursday evening.

Just as I'd sat down to write a new blog, I felt myself keeling over. I'd barely had time to register my expectation of falling to the floor when I was left sitting at an odd angle (the picture doesn't show the full extent unfortunately). That explained the peculiar and ominous creakings which'd been emanting from my chair for the past week, I realised. The breakage itself was startling: in a very convincing demonstration of the laws of metal fatigue, the base connecting the seat to the pillar upon which the seat rested had simply sheared, almost halfway through.

I tried working at the keyboard while perched on the chair, but the twist the pose put in my spine would so obviously've become rapidly unendurable that I gave it up immediately (I'm already seeing a physio to get advice about dealing with the accumulated consequences of 12 years' bad posture at my computer table).

Donald came to my rescue. On Friday we made a trip to a local mall, where I became the proud possessor of a snazzy new chair. I'm very pleased with it:

• It gives much better back support than did the old chair.
• Its arms fit under the desk upon which my keyboard sits, so that I have much better posture at the computer. This will be a boon in the months ahead.

Farewell oh Seat of Power MkI, you served me well. All hail the new improved Seat of Power MkII, may you live up to your forebear's legacy. ;)

Bulletin from Belon

My recently revived interest in miniatures has led me back to my old haunt The Bolter and Chainsword. An enduring feature of the gaming ecommunity, the B&C is now what it always has been: the best online hangout for fans of 40K power armour; and a model of how to run an ecommunity.

The B&C has been through several upgrades, as befits its veteran status, and it is now a much more fully-featured community portal than the simple ezboard of 10 years ago. With more to come, the features already available include:

• Image-hosting: members' albums can be seen in the Gallery.
• Downloads: lots of stuff created by gamers for gamers.
• Gothic power armour's own special subsector of the blogosphere.

Talk of the blogosphere brings us to the point, naturally enough: Bulletin from Belon is my new B&C community blog.

I've never used a community blog before, because I had no reason to divert content from RD/KA!. Chapter Astartes Penumbra's Talons though is frankly one of my proudest creations; returning to work on them then, I felt they deserved more than just the occasional post here. This all the more so because I had a title ready and waiting which'd rattled around in my brain for several years, a title which I knew I wanted to headline all my blogging about my lads. A B&C blog followed by a process of ineluctable logic.

And why Belon? Well, if you don't already know the answer, and you want to know, you know where to go... ;)

PS. Thanks to Ange for her help with hosting my shiny new link to Bulletin from Belon. :-D

In the news

The bad news
The DiceCon website has officially announced the sad news I'd learned from Gordon Lamont at UK Expo'09: there will be no DiceConWest'09, because the Central Hotel has been in administration, leaving DiceCon without a venue. Searching for details of the Central Hotel story, I stumbled on the latest news @Evening Timesonline: the Central Hotel has found a buyer. Does this mean that there will still be a future for DiceConWest at the Central hotel? Only time will tell.

I confess I hope so, because I have a sentimental attachment to this particular relic of Victorian imperial pomp. Quite apart from beginning there my acquaintance with DiceCon, the Central Hotel was the venue for my first ever SF convention - a memorable Albacon - some 20 or more years ago. There was another games con there too, which was unfortunately never repeated. So I can't help but hope the place'll provide more pleasant geekish memories for yours truly.

The good news
The premiere event in Scotland's gaming calendar - South East Scotland Wargames Club's Claymore - makes a long awaited move to a new venue this year. The new venue is Edinburgh's Telford College, which should be a better space for a games convention than was Meadowbank Stadium. It certainly enjoys better onsite facilities, according to the details on SESWC's Claymore page. That Telford College is, if anything, less central than Meadowbank is not really a complaint: many will arrive by car and there is ample parking; otherwise, public transport should be quite adequate.

Old hands and regular readers will know I'm a longstanding visitor to Claymore underwhelmed by the event in recent years. This change of venue gives me a renewed interest in Claymore. I don't know what impact this move will have on the event, but I can say that I'm looking forward to finding out.

The other news
Battlestar Galatica, your humble scribe's favourite new multiplayer boardgame of late is to be expanded, as had been anticipated by many fans, not least Andy and myself. Announced a couple of weeks ago, Evolution and Rebellion adds new boards, characters, cards and playing pieces to bring the game up to speed with more of the show.

Catching up on the show- I'm into season 3 now thanks to Andy's DVD's, I've been increasingly impressed at Cory Konieczka's adaption, as plot-twist after plot-twist exposed the logic underlying the game's dramatic dynamic. Cross-media adaptions are hardly new in geek culture; but I have particularly enjoyed in recent months the unique experience of having the primary source and a major adaption unfold in parallel as object and image. I look forward to seeing how the designer fills out the rest of the story with this new box of stuff. ;)

Back to reality?

June opened with a tumultuous couple of weeks for yours truly. Last week saw normal service resumed at the gaming table if not quite here at RD/KA!:

• On Friday Badger and I returned to our Stalingrad campaign in Combat Commander; I won, saving the day for the Russians amid the rubble atop the Mamayev Kurgan.
• Dave, Donald, Gav, Tony and myself made 5 for games on Sunday; playing our way through:

1. A game of Ivanhoe - victory to me.
2. Two games of Settlers; the first went to Dave, with a spectacular 4VP leap to victory, which included 3 VP cards; the second to Donald, who sneaked in just ahead of Gav.

Scores
Badger 0
Dave 1
Donald 1
Duffers #1 and #2 0
Brave Sir John 2

There came a wanderer #4: the wind-down and the send-off

Creeping tiredness which drove us much earlier to bed on the Friday night, coupled with Keith's plan for a lunchtime meet with ORC (the Open Roleplaying Community) in a bar in Edinburgh, meant that Saturday dawned blearily early. One coach journey later, Keith was introduced to his Edinburgh host, while I set off for a wander around the city of my birth; Scotland's Athens of the North.

As I said last month, the shiny new Codex: Space Marines and lovely new plastic kits mean that the siren song I've been hearing from the painting table for many months now has become particularly insistent in respect of my Penumbra's Talons (colours left, thanks to The Space Marine Painter V3.0 over at The Bolter and Chainsword). It was a cinch therefore that my first port of call during my unexpected visit to Edinburgh would be the local GW, located on the Royal Mile.

I was having a nice chat with one of the staff there when, to my surprise, a familiar face appeared. Last known to be in Stockholm, it was John. He'd been the manager in the Glasgow store when my Talons won me best painted army in the mini-tournament the store staged to mark the release of 40K4 back in 2004. We spent a pleasant few minutes catching up and gloating over new stuff in the GW ranges before I departed on my main mission for the day- tracking down a copy of one of Keith's Eberron novels; with John's injunction to visit again soon ringing in my ears.

Keith, me and John

I proved unable to find even one of Keith's novels, but I was able to fulfil John's injunction sooner than he'd expected, when Keith declared his wish to visit GW; visiting local games stores being part of his globetrotting plan.

And that, dear readers, is pretty much that. Saturday evening was to be a quiet night in so that Keith could recharge his batteries; Saturday's dinner was to be a choice of leftovers, zapped in the microwave. Sunday saw us visit Static games to meet Kenny (nope, none of Keith's Eberron novels there either!) while we awaited Sunday office hours at Glasgow Cathedral where Keith had to file some tourist paperwork. I left Keith in Glasgow airport on Sunday afternoon. He was heading into a coffee bar to get some work done as he sat down to wait for the arrival of his girlfriend's flight from the US.

So, Keith. Thanks for visiting. I was very pleased to be part of your big adventure, the scope of which frankly boggles me just a bit; and I enjoyed hanging out with you. My best wishes to you for the future. ;)

Related@RD/KA!
- Epic adventure!
- There came a wanderer #1: Well, that was unexpected!
- There came a wanderer #2: Return to Eberron
- There came a wanderer #3: Dining out and gaming on!