Disenfranchisement, Age and Hobby (Part 2 of 2)

Last week I was talking about my disenfranchisement with Games Workshop - this time, the topic will be a little more personal, as it is about me, my generation and my hobby.

First things first: I am an 80s kid. For those who were not alive back then, the 80s are a time of shoulder pads, cheap synthesizer pop and weird hairdos. For me, it's Star Wars (the original trilogy in all its analogue glory), Mad Max, Robocop, Philip K. Dick (and, although he does not fit into this list, Stephen King), Terminator 1 and 2, Alien, Isaac Asimov, Blade Runner, and the list could go on and on. This was our science fiction - it was dark and dystopic, and it was like that because, as science fiction always does, it takes commonly perceived elements of the present and strips the fat away until only themes remain. In the 80s these were, to name but a few, the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the threat of nuclear extinction and the general feeling that the west was not at all "holier than thou".

It was the last heyday of the Cold War - mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) was still very real, and  it created the necessity to look on the other side of the iron curtain in order to understand the people who were threatening you (just as you were threatening them). It bred a thinking in greys instead of blacks and whites, because whenever a crisis arose, careful steps of de-escalation were needed if one did not want to continue on a downward spiral. The Reagan era nonwithstanding, it had become mainstream to expect that communism was always going to be around, and that maybe it was merely a different outlook on human society instead of inherently evil. At least in the west, where this was possible, almost any action in the Cold War provoked a series of protests, discussions or subversive pin-back button wearing. Contrast this with today's conflicts, where there seems to be a great rush of newspeople, commentators and even politicians to immediately identify one side as "good" or "bad", making the other side the polar opposite by default. Understanding a situation before reacting? How old school, and how unnecessary if you already know who the bad guys are, anyway. This simplistic way of viewing and explaining the world is beginning to ingrain itself on the younger generation, which in turn influences the art aimed at it - the books, the movies, and indeed the games.

The 40k of Rogue Trader or even early 2nd ed. days lived off the idea that there were no good guys, and that the definition of evil changed as you changed between points of view. Forget the Kenwood chainswords and the Punk hairdos for a moment, and Rogue Trader's bleak depiction of a chaotic society in eternal war with outside and inside forces is actually more serious and thoughtful than today's version, with its host of misguided-but-genuinely-trying-to-do-the-best heroes and likeable-but-comically-evil villains. The setting is moving to accommodate players viewing "their" faction as the good guys who are ultimately right, and entitled to do whatever is necessary to further their own goals.

It is this utilitarian notion of a good end that justifies all the horrible means which is turning me off about the current tone of the setting. To me, that is much more cynical than the previous impartiality, which was able to acknowledge that none of the options presented were justifiable or even sane. This is why "my" 40k will always be the loony, hopeless and anarchic 80s' version, and why reading the Oldhammer blogs of like-minded people always seemed like a breath of fresh air to me.

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only Hair Metal

Like everything else, the things I particularly enjoy about my hobby changed over time. When I started out many years ago, the game itself was the axle around which the other hobby aspects turned. I bought miniatures that were available and that I liked, and painted them so that my game would look better. It was very similar with the terrain, which I built solely to provide more scenery for my models to fight about and around.

As I stated before, the beginnings of my collection date back to Rogue Trader days, and even in 2nd ed. I bought a lot of non-Citadel miniatures to use them in my games. However, around the time third edition was introduced, the combined advent of plastic kits along with the better availability of the models themselves led to me fostering a kind of mono-culture, where everything I bought was from Games Workshop. Funnily enough, most of the miniatures I bought, built and painted back then have long been sold or traded away, but the old models that I did keep because I never had the heart to give them away are mostly older sculpts. 

With the onslaught of adult life, I also had less and less time for actually playing the game, and if I did, I found that I wanted to do it with the armies and miniatures that I loved rather than a gimmicky force that could "do" something special. I began to consider buying models just to paint them and put them in my cabinet, and grew more and more frustrated with being forced to incorporate my ideas into full-blown armies. A perfect example, both in context of what I just wrote and what brought me into the Oldhammer fold, are the Gaunt's Ghosts models released around the time the first trilogy of books about them by Dan Abnett came to a close.

When they were advertised in White Dwarf, I immediately bought a few packs, even though I was at a loss how to make them work as a force; they were missing special and heavy weapons options, and the prospect of building a sizeable army out of a handful of sculpts seemed none too enticing. Still, I tried to use them in low points games, but expectedly the army never fared well and simply was no fun to play. The models were serviceable in the special skirmish mode that fourth edition provided, and a handful of games of that kind became the only action these guys ever saw.

In the end, fifth edition came along and administered the coup de grâce to my Ghosts: the skirmish rules were gone. To add insult to injury, the new Imperial Guard Codex removed almost all the options that had made it at least possible to field them as a regular force as well; even the sergeants were not allowed to be equipped with lasguns anymore. However, as there were only a few basic infantry sculpts for the Ghosts, it simply was not possible to give those sergeants the "correct" equipment. Although it might sound petty, I took this as a sign that the days of my little non-conformist force were over. For years, they collected dust in a drawer, which is a shame, because I always liked them a lot.

Commissar-Colonel Gaunt shouting at a Sergeant 

who forgot to turn in his lasgun, seen on the left. 

Not too long ago, as I was cleaning out my hobby stuff, I came across my Ghosts and began to wonder how to use them in a game. I figured that I would like to pit them against a chaos force like in the books, fighting over the ruins of some world ravaged by the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. In order to do this, I would need to amend the rules for the Imperial Guard in order to use them. I would need to build another specialised force for them to fight against, one that would take their limitations into account so the Ghosts would not simply be steamrolled by them. I would need a lot of things. In the end, the to-do-list ended up being so long that I realised it would be more of a hassle to cram them into the current 40k environment than not using the 40k rules at all. The seed of "streamlining", of "building armies", that had been planted in 2nd ed., had blossomed into a system that simply did not allow for this kind of creativity anymore without a lot of work and goodwill from your co-players.

For a while, I was looking for suitable alternative systems. Having gathered some experience with historical games in the past, I had no qualms about going to publishers other than Games Workshop for a candidate. I gave Stargrunt a whirl, which was so generic that I would have to start making up most of the rules all over again. Dirtside was the wrong scale in terms of force size. Tomorrow's War is a beautiful system and seemed like a good fit at first, but it really does have a pronounced "hard sci-fi" slant, which made it difficult to fit 40k's "sci-fantasy" into its rules.

I had almost given up on the idea again when one day, while reading a very nicely done Oldhammer battle report on Warlord Paul's THE BLACK HOLE. blog, I caught a glimpse of the forest I had not seen for the trees: Why do I not simply do what this guy is doing and go BACK instead of FORWARD? There was a system that was 40k through and through, while still allowing you to play with whatever you wanted. It was called Rogue Trader, and I still had the book that I bought because many players were hesitant to adopt 2nd ed. back in the day, although its pages had begun to come loose years ago. It allowed for all the zany stuff you would expect in a game of 40k, it gave you a point system to customize your own forces, and it even did away with trying to "balance" games because you were supposed to play out a story with a game master, anyway. For granted, Rogue Trader tended to become a bit convoluted at points, but wherever I did not like something, I could simply replace it with the streamlined rules from 2nd ed., which I also always liked. And that would even be very much in the spirit of the gaming ethos the writers back then had in mind.

So, this became my first Oldhammer project, very much a work in progress, but that will change soon. At this point, I can bring the "story that led to my Oldhammering" to a close and begin with adding real content to the blog. I hope that, for all my rambling, a few of you might have found this a worthwhile read. If you did, or even if you did not, let me know in the comments or drop me a line over the contact form at the bottom of the page; even though I might not reply as quickly as other bloggers, I appreciate all the feedback I get!

I hope you will join me next time when I begin to hammer out the details for my first projects, and as always

Take care!

Allod