Not your regular Sunday session #2. Of gangers, competitors and winners

Getting wired inWednesday's first installment of this Conflict Scotland 2010 report was all about meeting people, seeing the sights, and loading up with swag. Today I'll be telling of how Andy and I fared when we joined in the fun, and of the results of the competitions: the event's purpose after all.

Underhive shootout
The game
Knowing that there was to be open gaming laid on, Andy and I took along some of our models for a game. Andy took his 1500pt, 20 model Space Wolf Wolf Guard army (Andy's tried this army out already- against David's infamous Tau: you can read Andy's battle report here). I'd considered taking a Penumbra's Talons army but decided against it in the end, preferring instead just to take along my gang for a game of Necromunda with Andy.

Now part of GW's Specialist Games range, Necromunda was originally released in 1995 in a big box stuffed to the gunnels in best GW tradition (a box whose contents included- IIRC, the first appearance of the now highly prized plastic bulkheads). The game was an instant hit and has since won itself a following whose fanaticism is matched only by that of Blood Bowl, another game hailing from the same period (Blood Bowl's definitive 3rd edtion was released just the previous year).

Not your regular Sunday session #1. Of GWers, gamers and swag

It's been a long time
With no gaming the previous week because we had decided to go for a walk in the lovely spring sunshine, last Sunday's session was also cancelled because Andy and I had chosen to accept our mission: to attend GW's premiere Scottish gaming event, Conflict 2010. My last Conflict- at which I was a competitor, was back in 2002, so it was nice to go to another and to see what had become of this event in the intervening years. Neither Andy nor I were competing this year so we had plenty of time to take in the sights.

The writer
The Black Library stand was the first thing Andy and I noticed on our entry into the venue- the Braehead Curling Rink, but we barely had time to register its presence as we were both making a rapid beeline for the bargain stand across the far side of the hall. On this first of several visits I spotted a shopworn copy of Heldenhammer: the Legend of Sigmar, the first in Graham McNeill's trilogy of novels about this founder of the Empire in the Warhammer Old World; a bargain at a mere £1. Result!

Chop'n'swap droolage

Incoming!
A scant three months after officially announcing the release date, and following the subsequent obligatory official teasers and fevered internet rumours and speculation, GW a fortnight ago finally released the first tranche of its new Blood Angels range. Readers who also follow RD/KA!@fB will know already that I have since bought myself the crucial two new Blood Angels boxed sets: the Death Company and the Sanguinary Guard. The BA are one of the 4 classic iconic space marine chapters; the Death Company have long been their signature unit; the Sanguinary Guard have joined the Death Company as another signature unit as part of a shiny new BA codex.

The new Codex: Blood Angels is the fullest treatment of the BA since the 2nd edition Angels of Death codex, which they shared with the Dark Angels. Since then the BA have had one of the infamous 3rd edition 'minidexes' intended to supplement the standard codex and their 4th edition list was a 2-part White Dwarf article. The new C:BA is therefore the first full-sized, stand-alone codex GW has ever devoted to this always popular army: an event of some note for 40K fans in other words.

A singular honour

A belated Easter surprise
The names Paul D. Selman and iL-Logic should already be known to site-visiting readers who have the habit of checking out the various lists of links in the sidebar here at RD/KA!. Paul is a freelance artist with whom I've become friendly after we hooked up online because the guys at EMOTIONALLY FOURTEEN are his buddies, and iL-Logic is a new webcomic written by Adam Di Stefano- who blogs at 52 Short Stories, and with art by Paul.

I've enjoyed following Paul's blog since we hooked up last year. His artwork is always interesting; sometimes hits me right between the eyes; and has lately forced me to rethink my longstanding and largely blind prejudice against abstract art, something which had sometimes made me feel uncomfortable because of the philistine company I would often find myself keeping. I also enjoy reading iL-Logic, checking it out regularly in a way I stopped doing some time ago with all my other favourite webcomics simply because I found myself too busy to keep up with them.

Glasgow Comic mart: fB strikes again

Another old haunt
It all started- as happens so often these days, with a 'friend of a friend' notification on fB, from which I learned that Glasgow Comic mart was to stage its next comic and toy fair in Glasgow University's Queen Margaret Union on Saturday April 3rd. Although I've never attended Glasgow University the QMU is another students' union of which I have fond memories, although I'll leave those for another time. I was vaguely aware of the Glasgow Comic mart from adverts for previous fairs in its old venue- Hillhead Library, yet- just like Conpulsion, the event had somehow always passed me by.

The best laid plans
So, brimful of 'get up and go' after my exciting weekend at Conpulsion and a hot night on the town the Friday before; equipped with a fistful of my instruments of BSA and with my trusty digicam; and with some ready cash in my pocket, I set off last Saturday to investigate. Entering the venue I was immediately struck by the bustle: the place was stowed out. The press of the crowd was such that you had to squeeze through gaps to make any headway into the hall and you became an obstacle to general progress when you stopped to peruse the stallholders' wares.

My initial plan had been to check out all the stalls to see what was available before making any purchases, but that survived less than a minute's contact with 'the enemy'. Slipping through the crowd I immediately saw bargains too irresistible to ignore- TPBs at £1 each. I snapped up those which had caught my eye:

• Sinister Dexter: Murder 101.
• Legend of the Hawkman, ##1-3.

And I was off!

Mad March roundup #2. Grand geek gathering!

The place
Conpulsion 2010 took place last weekend in the Teviot Row students' union at Edinburgh University, as Conpulsion always does. The "oldest purpose built student union building in the world", Teviot Row is a place of which I have fond memories from the 1980s: I used to play a lot of Defender there- badly; the student wargames club used to have monthly games days there; and it was there- at a FilmSoc showing, that this lifelong fan of classic Trek first saw Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Teviot Row: the front entrance

You can imagine then, dear readers, that I was keen to see what Conpulsion made of this place so redolent of memory for yours truly. The short answer is that I was impressed.

Mad March roundup #1. Chivalry and... sorcery?!

Wednesday night woes: but for whom?
Badger was on holiday from work a week past Wednesday, so a day's gaming was called for. There was talk of playing Conflict of Heroes because of my imminent demo session at next weekend's Conpulsion 2010 but that'd've felt too much like homework for me, so we decided to play Combat Commander: Pacific instead. The CoH homework will be done solitaire next week I guess.

Combat Commander doesn't hit the table as often as it used to these days, so I was pleased to get in another game. Full CC battle reports here @RD/KA! have become less common even than that, the most recent being May last year. So I'll forbear from comment about our game until another day.

Stemming the varlet tide
Liam came round for dinner later, which curtailed our CC session after that one game. Dinner done, we turned to that old favourite- a new favourite of Liam's to boot: Ivanhoe. We managed 5 games.

Score
Badger 1 (15 tokens).
Liam 1 (17 tokens).
Me 3 (21 tokens).

I also owned the pwnage, with a game in which Badger and Liam's combined total was 3 tokens. Bragging rights to brave Sir John! :0)

Stepping out again!

I wrote last week of a "new project the exciting details of which I hope to reveal very soon". No prizes then for guessing the subject of this post dear readers.

Conpulsion compulsion
At some 15 years old, Conpulsion is Scotland's longest running RPG-oriented adventure games convention. Conpulsion is run by GEAS (Grand Edinburgh Adventuring Society), Edinburgh University students' RPG assocation, of which I was a member back in the 1980s. This year's con runs from Friday 26th to Sunday 28th March. After too, too many years of letting the event get past me, finally: this year I will be attending Conpulsion for the weekend.

Once more the culture vulture

Springtime for Glaswegians
If it's March in Glasgow it must be Aye Write!- Glasgow's Book Festival, now in its fifth year. Aye Write! had made little impression on me in previous years, despite my seeing the ads and the programmes in my local library each time. This was frustrating, so- determined to do better in 2010, I grabbed a programme as soon as I saw one and started looking for events. The first one which did more than just catch my eye was:

NEW SCOTTISH SCIENCE FICTION
The Early Days of a Better Future?

Presiding: Andrew J. Wilson of Writers' Bloc, Edinburgh

As if the due appearance of SF luminaries Ken MacLeod and Richard Morgan wasn't enough, this event was an instant choice for yours truly because the panel included Hal Duncan and Mike Cobley. Mike and Hal are old pals of mine from the Glasgow SF Writers' Circle, which featured in the first series of posts here @RD/KA!. It was this circle which drew me to Glasgow back in 1989, when I nourished active dreams of being an SF writer myself.

Just passing through...

I'm working on a big post which I hope to get up tomorrow. Meanwhile, I paid a visit to Glasgow's 2 FLGS today, in respect of a new project the exciting details of which I hope to reveal very soon.

Pleasure not entirely deferred
The latest eagerly awaited- and slightly delayed, expansion to Chad Jensen's Combat Commander: Europe series- Battle Pack 3: Normandy, hadn't made its way yet through the transatlantic distribution channels to land at the Dragon and George by the time of my visit yesterday. Just as well really, because it meant that the fact that I couldn't afford it anyway didn't leave me to sit drooling at home in hapless anticipation until I had lucre sufficiently filthy to lash out on this must-have product. Soon though, we go!

The Tau bite back

"Bring me the head of Shas El Quixo!"
So last Tuesday, Ezekiel Cromwell's Penumbra's Talons expeditionary force and the maverick Shas El Quixo's Tau battlegroup had their latest encounter on that as yet unnamed planet in a still unidentified system somewhere in the Eastern Fringes of the Imperium of Man. I'd been looking forward immensely to Dave's and my second game after the thrills and spills we'd enjoyed only a fortnight before. I was not to be disappointed.



Inevitable tactical adjustments
The Talons
Composing my army list for the upcoming game (lists here), I knew I couldn't afford to chance everything on another favourable roll on the Mission table, which'd've given me a 2/3 chance of being screwed before the game had even started if I chose to go with the Troops-light army I'd run the last time. My must-haves were the jump packers- as ever; dreadnoughts Elias and Stirner- they're the only heavy armour I've got just now; and a tacsquad with the free missile launcher (ML) and flamer options- the points shaving had begun.

The pen: mightier than the sword?

But whose pen will it be?
Dave and Tony joined the regulars to give us a full table of 6 last Sunday. First choice fell to Andy. After a short swither which included a disparaging nod in the direction of my mention of Battlestar Galactica, he plumped for History of the World. This choice pleased me because I'd been hankering lately to revisit this fine old game.

History of the World and all that
Looking back from the vantage point of the second decade of the 21st century, it is possible to see 1991's History of the World as the last word in a unique moment in British games design; a moment which- though quite self contained, was simultaneously widely influential; far more so surely than anyone could really have imagined at the time.

Laughter and rage from page to stage

Yer actual culture
Thursday night there I teamed up with Gavin, Michael and Liam at Glasgow's Tron Theatre to see the Communicado Theatre Company's production of the late poet Adrian Mitchell's adaption of Nikolai Gogol's classic 1836 play, The Government Inspector. (Check the poem on Mitchell's homepage and you'll get some idea of why this man- whose name was utterly unknown to me before Thursday, has been so lamented: poems like Song in Space could conceivably finally heal the scars inflicted on yours truly- as on so many others, by poetry at school.)

Gogol: titan and progenitor
The father of one of the greatest literary movements in world history- the great Russians; of whom Dostoyevsky once said "We all came out of Gogol's 'Overcoat.'"; Gogol's works weren't new to me. A friend had lent me Dostoyevsky's (Memoirs from) The House of the Dead back in mid-80's Edinburgh. Astounded and entranced by the world I had entered, for several years thereafter I read as many of the works of these Russians as I could get my hands on. Dostoyevsky was my favourite and I also sampled Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov as well as Gogol. Later I became fascinated with the Russian revolution- whose conseqences reverberated down through history as strongly as ever back in the 1980's and 90's, and I read up on that subject more avidly even than I had consumed the literature.

Web 2.0 and tabletop roleplaying #1: the past

A big day for all concerned?
World-historical anniversaries are all very well but today also happens to see my 400th post here @RD/KA!, so I've been racking my brains trying to think of a topic suitable to highlight this latest small landmark in my bloggery. What could be more apt I decided, than a subject which has its roots in my halcyon days- the 1980's; about which I wrote right back when this blog was but a stripling; which represents furthermore one of my major unfulfilled aspirations as a roleplayer?

Phase 1: "When ah were a lad..."
My fascination with what Web 2.0 can offer tabletop roleplayers is rooted in experiences predating the invention of the World Wide Web itself. It all began, naturally enough, with Katana: Sword Against Evil™, that renegade ninja who has set out to destroy the Evil that spawned him.
(Graphic via Trends in the Living Networks)

Talons tear into the Tau

A newfound opportunity
This story begins late last year when I was invited to join a fB group called 40K for Glaswegians, which needs no introduction. David- the group's creator, contacted me to ask if I was interested in playing some 40K. I confess my feelings about this were mixed, echoing those evoked in me by the 40K game itself: I just love GW's 40K Dark Millenium- which I think is one of adventure gaming's great subcreationist endeavours; my DIY Space Marine army Penumbra's Talons is one of my proudest hobby creations; the tabletop rules though have long frustrated me because they're so like the Windows OS- buggy as all hell edition after edition.

Feelings mixed or not, my beloved Talons were just too much too leave lying- I knew I'd be playing sooner or later: I had been hoping for this since last year after all. David and I did the usual coffee meet last month to check each other out. We quickly hit it off. A game at the earliest opportunity was soon agreed upon. That opportunity finally arrived last Tuesday.

London days #3: We hit the gaming table, again

On Friday night then we turned to the "star attraction- specially requested by Mike" to which I'd referred last Thursday; that being Battlestar Galactica. I confess I was just a tad daunted at the prospect of this play of the game I like so much. It's one thing to teach a game like this to a bunch of confirmed gaming geeks including some experienced rules interpreters; it's quite another to teach it to people whose face-to-face gaming experience doesn't extend beyond card games and classic family boardgames.

Thank goodness then for the excellent setup guide in the rules, which provides both a nice picture of the game's layout on the tabletop, and a step-by-step list of how to go about getting the game up and running. Of course that didn't stop me from screwing up on Friday night. Jo had chosen Gaius Baltar and Mike had chosen Sharon "Boomer" Valerii: both are characters who change the composition of the Loyalty deck used to determine who is Cylon, which was something I forgot. D'oh! Fortunately the most important mistake- Gaius Baltar's extra Loyalty card at the start of play, was spotted early enough to be quickly corrected; and the other- Boomer's extra one in the Sleeper Agent phase, was easy enough to correct before it mattered too much.

London days #2: The big city hits me

Confessions of a small town boy
I've often summed up Glasgow as "big enough to be cosmopolitan, but small enough so that you can encompass the city as an individual instead of getting lost in it, as in, eg. London." This long-held viewpoint took a knock after the last time I expressed it- to someone I met during my recent trip to Prague.


Back in Glasgow shortly thereafter I was listening to BBC Radio 4 in the kitchen, as I do. It'll've been Front Row I was listening to, because that's the mid-evening arts show that often accompanies my cooking. I was struck by one of those sudden realisations of something you've always known but never quite fully understood: in this case, that pretty much all of the arts and culture discussed in Front Row is London-based; and that certainly little or none of it hails from Glasgow.

London days #1: I hit the big city

Ain't life a bitch?
I flew down to London on Tuesday for a short holiday, visiting with my cousin Jo and her boyfriend Mike. Mike's a gamer, so that 3 choice games from my collection are in my luggage. Of course there is more to life than gaming, eg. food; so Tuesday night began with a visit to Strada, where I finally found the perfect pizza I've sought unsuccessfully these last few fmonths in Glasgow. And it is too good to be true because sure enough- there's no Strada in Glasgow: the search continues. :-(

Card-sharps or just sharp at cards?
Pleasantly satiated on pizza and chocolate pudding and ensconced chez Jo and Mike, we start as we mean to go on: getting down to some gaming. The hour is late and my hosts have early starts because they have jobs to go to, so the star attraction- specially requested by Mike, has to wait for a more appropriate occasion. I decide therefore that the elegant simplicity of Fluxx is called for.

You get what you play for

Plus ça change?
Saturday night party animal Gav being the last of yesterday's five to arrive, I foolishly left Andy, Dave, Donald to decide what the filler would be while we waited. I say "foolishly" because I'd finagled Andy's agreement to a game of Ivanhoe before Donald's appearance; and I just knew that given the choice, Andy and Donald would gravitate to a different game. And so it proved, as we sat down to Fluxx.

It's not that I don't like Fluxx; far from it: Fluxx remains for me an exemplar of conceptual ingenuity and clarity of rules exposition in games design, and a lot of fun to boot. I just rather prefer the cut and thrust of Ivanhoe to the chaotic antics of Looney Labs' best seller.

Now where did that come from?

Irritating memory lapses having become for yours truly just the most obvious symptom of how faculties taken for granted in the fullness of youth are now withering under the impact of advancing years, it was a pleasant surprise last month to receive an unexpected package from Dalen, a Welsh publisher of "Celtic Graphic Novels… in English and in Welsh." Inside I found a copy of the shiny TPB Druids: The Ogham Sacrifice. Apparently I'd entered a competition on the site of my epals @EMOTIONALLY FOURTEEN; I'd won; and here was my prize. Sometimes what you forget does you good then!

Francophone finery
Druids: The Ogham Sacrifice
Writers: Jean-Luc Istin & Thierry Jigourel.
Artist: Jacques Lamontagne.
English adaptation: Lannig Treseizh.

The first thing I noticed about this TPB- after its Welsh origins and its striking cover, was that it was originally a French production. This intrigued me. Comics afficionadoes among my readers will no doubt already know that France is a country in which comics don't labour under the false impression that they're all kids' stuff, so that comics culture is mainstream in a way unfamiliar here in Britain.