Obligatory introductory post(ory).

I've written a couple of so-called "blogs" in the past. They're long dead and buried in concrete like the ambulance from the Salisbury Novichok incident, or Jimmy Savile. You know, just in case.

Unlike those former attempts though, this one will last a bit longer probably. I have better things to be doing actually, but this'll keep my hand in on the old keyboard tapping. I need to because I'm getting rusty and want to finish my novel during my work lunchbreaks. 

At my author's alchemist workbench, I came up with the winning formula of boiling together A Wizard of Earthsea, The Lord of the Rings, adding essence of Roald Dahl, The Worst Witch and a few other bits and pieces. I don't think anyone else has done that yet. I'm making it really obnoxiously middle-class, too. Should make me millions.

At home though, I paint miniatures and play games. It's the usual story for someone my age, I'm afraid. Fed on a diet of 80s fantasy and science fiction TV, films, books, comics, music and general popular culture, I eventually ended up with a copy of Heroquest, probably in 1990 or something.  

Guess what happened next? I developed a chronic tabletop (if the living room floor counts as a "tabletop") gaming addiction and could often be found grimly shooting up with purest Chaos Black Citadel paint at every opportunity, pocket money / Christmas / birthday permitting. 

Then there were some years in the wilderness. I'll save writing about that for my autobiography, which I'll have published on Penguin Modern Classics. Not Penguin Classics, because unlike Morrissey I'm terribly modest.

On my return to Warhammering, I didn't much like what I saw. There was no atmosphere to anything anymore, all too slick and polished, impersonal, dull. Still, having a hankering once more for the sweet highs of fiddling around with little men and rolling dice, I found myself in possession of a new big box Games Workshop game - Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game. It was the Battle of Pellenor Fields box, to be precise.

Some of my MESBG elves, posing heroically in a dark wood for some reason.

The rest of GW's model output now looked more like a line of action figures than anything else, so MESBG (as we wisely prefer to call it) with its somewhat dated, realistically proportioned miniatures suited me.

Now, I've always been a "narrative player", the idea of competitive gaming had always been quite weird to me and was in any case not as common as it is today. It seemed like tabletop gaming had, while I was away, morphed into some analogue version of "e-sport" (a term I find ludicrous and embarrassing). There's nothing wrong with tournaments, but I'm not a fan of the fact that competitive gaming seems to be the default nowadays.

But whatever, I could play as I wanted despite what everyone else seemed to be doing. As good a game as MESBG is though, and it is really good, especially using the Battle Companies book, I felt slightly troubled.

"Troubled" is over-egging it, but being a serious Tolkien-ite I couldn't help feeling that my options for narrative playing with emphasis on one's own imagination and storytelling was limited by the setting. Being set in the Third Age of Middle-earth where the history is well documented meant that battles outside of the known timeline of events felt contrived and weird. My brain and my slavish adherence to avoiding the wrath of Tolkien's ghost is annoying like that.

Then I remembered I'd always been really into World War Two. WW2 was almost as ubiquitous as fantasy and science fiction as far as childhood cultural food went. Before I was pitching little orcs and barbarians against each other, I'd had all my dad's Airfix soldiers to boss around. So, I got into 2nd Edition Bolt Action.

Some of my Bolt Action Soviets, Sovieting and probably Unioning.

Bolt Action was, and is, really good fun. Thinking back to my youthful days of 2nd Edition Warhammer 40,000, I realised I'd never truly enjoyed playing the damn thing. And here I had two games that were genuinely enjoyable (maybe I was just too young back then for anything more complicated than Space Crusade). Something was missing though. Ultimately, I missed that vast Warhammer Old World of the 80s and early 90s. A rich world that served as a sandbox to have adventures of your own in. That Old World map had a lot of blank spaces to explore.

Amazingly I still had my copy of Warhammer Quest from 1995, but what was really beckoning to me from the depths of memory was Advanced Heroquest. A game I had received one Christmas long ago and never really played (too complicated for my puny developing mind to comprehend at the time). I'd lost my copy during the wilderness years, but I could still remember its somewhat cheap-looking black and white rulebook resembling nothing so much as a death metal fanzine, and the overall browniness of its components and box cover.

Here, I am Advanced Heroquesting. That T-junction won't work. Idiot.

It's not just nostalgia, at this point it's aesthetic preference. The feelings and mood conjured by listening to some rough death metal demo tape from the 80s with xeroxed cassette inlay just can't be reached by a shiny professionally produced digital album. You can actually smell it, feel it, taste it. A heavy atmosphere like incense. The same applies to games. 

Warhammer Quest is of course great, the massive Roleplay Book alone was unprecedented, fantastic! But Advanced Heroquest is very different, it's strangely dour, grimy. Death is ever-present. A place where orcs are skinny gangling creatures and would scorn a bright red axe-handle. I'd found my way to what everyone today calls "Oldhammer", and it is sheer magic.

So yes, I'm going to be writing about all of this shit. Probably some other stuff too. Cheers.