5... 4... 3... - Counting backwards from Middlehammer

It's important to realize that we do actually finish (or nearly so) most of these products which we launch ourselves into. Except for the 30k campaign, which we have words about constantly, casting into the future over and over as a someday project which we won't get to until we're old men. Like a year ago, when we had a lovely Path to Glory game going. That went on for a good few months with our once a month binges. That happened, we remember it. The problem is that we never really have time to write side stuff as much as we'd like with our other responsibilities, which are all writing intensive. Plus the lighting isn't always great playing outside every month because going inside was a possible death sentence there for 16 months (we're both vaccinated now and probably invincible).

So it's time for another project now that we have most assuredly completed the last one we wrote about this time last year, which is to play a short interlinked campaign counting down from Warhammer Fantasy Battles 5th edition to 4th to 3rd (we'll elaborate on that in a later post). And we're going to try to actually update the blog this time.

Why those editions is a complicated thing. Briefly, there's a fan movement to reclaim and perpetuate certain styles of old school Warhammering. It started on blogs and in small UK-based conventions as Oldhammer. The ins and outs aren't relevant here, but it can be broadly construed as a celebration of Warhammer from 1st through 3rd editions, and of Rogue Trader (1st edition) Warhammer 40k. This led to the inevitable question "what about the other editions?", which led to further periodizing of a Middlehammer era consisting of 4th and 5th editions (and sometimes but rarely 6th).

The whole thing is fascinating (and Ian has a co-authored paper on Oldhammer as it relates to craft and memory out in a scholarly version of "soon") and we're very amenable to it. Now, sometimes the nostalgia curdles a bit, and you get a really vicious rejection of stuff like Age of Sigmar, which is a game which we love precisely because it's so different. For the most part, however, we've seen it as a pretty positive and vibrant community, even as we mostly lurk.

But we are participants to some degree. Because we are of a certain vintage which means we started in those eras, specifically with 3rd edition WFB and Rogue Trader. Now, we weren't precisely good at any of the painting or understanding all the rules, but like most kids we fudged things by making bases to the right dimensions (so many bases) out of poster board to represent our armies or spray lacquering a dead spider to be a giant spider on a base (neither of us did this but a guy we knew in 1989 did; Ian somehow acquired the base with the long disintegrated spider on it and found it two years ago in an old shoebox, which was then thrown away). We want to give a little space to playing the older editions more intensely. By the time 8th edition was done and WFB had moved so far from what we'd found interesting about it, and AoS turned out so enjoyable for what it was rather than what it wasn't, we were very detached from WFB.

So we settled on 5th, largely because it has some very nice campaign rules which allow us to build our armies from. And things were still local, perhaps the last time that happened; mostly Warhammer becomes a story not about Your Guys but Their Guys. We don't like that.

6th is actually Ian's edition, followed by 3rd, with 4th and 5th as odd ducks. But 6th isn't quite of a piece with what we wanted to do and is best taken as its own thing. The miniatures started rapidly changing in style (the orcs, for instance, become the hulking brutes we know today rather than the goofier big headed orcs of prior) and in material production (plastics become the norm, which in turn changes the potential for army size). And 3rd will eventually be a part of things as we count down, but 5th forms a tight chain with 4th. We kind of want to unwind the game, rather than build forward.

So we're doing high elves vs dwarves with (largely) era appropriate miniatures. We have a narrative about a long-running war which is fated to repeat; this allows us to go backwards in narrative time and edition concurrently. And we'll do some posts.