A REAL time travel experience: Going back to 1987 simply by car (no DeLorean involved...)

One afternoon last November (2019) I got in the car and drove back to the year 1986 with no problems. Or was it 1987? I made a little trip and visited the shop where I bought my very first fantasy miniatures. The shop has a different name today and also has moved, but it's still the same company. And although they now actually operate a different business, there are still remnants of the no longer actively operated gaming and miniature business to be found in a corner of the shop. (Yes, strange but true...)

What I found was a big surprise: I found the matching figures for the wood elves from Essex Miniatures of which I only bought a few pieces in 1986/87 in the same shop. Packed in the same blue blisters as I used to know them.

 

When I told the shop assistant (not the owner but also an expert in the hobby) that I had bought figures from that series from them decades ago, he told me straight away that these blisters had been lying around since that time. And the blisters did look old, the outside was crushed and the foam inside had seen to much sunlight.

Back home and back in 2019 and I did a little research. Company reports published on the Internet showed me that the address on the back of the blisters was only used by the manufacturer (Essex) until 1995. After that they moved. And the shop I'm talking about also had a kind of 'business interruption' between 1989 and 1995. They did not run a retail shop during that period. (They came back as a producer of their own line of miniatures, but thats a different story.)

So it is very likely that the photos above actually show exactly the blisters that were hanging on the hook right next to my first fantasy miniatures when I bought them.

Seriously, I have absolutely no doubt: These minis were waiting for me for over thirty years! I am sure, I will never get that close to the feeling of real time travel again. A year later and I am still extremely happy that I made the trip.

The old group of wood elfs was always much too small to form a real unit and therefore didn't really fit in anywhere. Thats over now.  They will be part of a small army of brigands : Brandors Avengers.

This block of lead, that I also found, is of course not a wood elf but what was a "giant" back then. It is the Essex figure Q83 "Giant", modeled by Bob Olley. With its rather low height of just 50mm probably too small to be a giant in a modern game. But nice, a bit weird and I really like it. Very 'old school'.

 

Above's another look into the past: In the "Agamemnon" magazine No. 2 from 1986 I found the announcement of the wood elves shown above (FN103-FN107). Also look out at the masterpieces of modeling art from Citadel on the right. Even big ones start out small.

This is how some hobby magazines used to look like. You didn't had photos of everything and if you weren't buying in a store, you often would order the 'Dwarf with sword', 'Three different wood elf archers' and the 'Adventurer number five with a dagger' from a simple list and then you were really curious to see what you would get. Back then, people still had the courage to take little 'risks', don't they? 

By the way: As I wrote in a previous post, Essex has stayed true to itself and is still producing its old fantasy miniatures.

And now : Guess where I will go 'shopping', when the Corona-Lockdown is over...

Riders of the Retrocalypse

Another unit for the Copper Mountain Army. I had riders from here and there and alltogether they now make up the Horsemen of Copper Mountain. Or as I call them: 'The Riders of the Retrocalypse'.

Some Essex miniatures, some RAFM barbarians (see last post), Excalibur dragon riders on Essex horses, knights from Nemo Miniatures...and the guy in front is of unknown origin, his horse is from Essex and his weapon is from... Games Workshop? Reaper? Who cares. He has a big axe, who wants to discuss that?

Only good glue and a great commander can hold these guys together.

By the way, I cover my minis in glossy varnish. I like the look. But it is not easy to photograph them, they are to shiny. Maybe I will change that, it is still possible. I once tried 'Anti Shine' from Army Painter and that worked really good.

Making this picture I realized that I need some backgrounds so that taking photos for the blog will be quicker and easier. That allready was on my 'list', but far in the future. I'm doing this earlier now.

Not that I am really working with a schedule or something. This 'list' is in fact a great amount of numbered (and titled) directorys on my computer related to segments of my projects and in which I collect textfiles, pictures, pdf's, ideas, notes, inspirational material and other informations for a single task or subproject. And a storage for everything that comes in. The numbers are used to produce a - more or less - usefull sequence of tasks.

The numbers of the directories are arranged in steps of 10 so that I can put one or more of them somewhere between two others to move them to a different position. From time to time I re-number all diretories to get the gaps again. Not manually of course, in the filemanger 'Thunar' (Linux) this task is done with a few klicks.

If you are a little bit older - I think (and hope) younger people don't come in touch with it anymore - you may remember this technique from BASIC programming. We sorted our source code like that when BASIC still had line numbers (later there were versions that did not need line numbers any more). 

From the time when men where real men and manuals were real manuals.
Nothing to romanticize, but it was kind of fun. And the manual was great.

I had not planned to do it that way, it came with the process of sorting the stuff I collected. And it works.

So writing unorganized 'Spaghetti Code' a long time ago teached me to organize something else today. Take the good with the bad. The other good part was : If you survived BASIC, you were able to survive nearly every programming language. (My opinion. But please don't start with it today if you seriously want to learn programming, there are better options.)

Self made lances for my Runestone Warriors

The next unit are barbarian warriors from RAFM. They will belong to the army of Runestone which is part of Thule, the land in the north (who would have guessed that?).

I bougth the figures a few years ago and I was curious to find out how old they really are and whether they are still in production. First I looked into old RAFM catalogues and found them in 1989:

The barbarians in the RAFM catalogue of 1989, page 15. A time when miniature companys still had PRINTED catalogues!

As you can see I took no. 3821 and changed it into a lancer. The canadian company RAFM by the way ist still around and so are the barbarians that now have a new label: 'The Norse SAGA'. RAFM by the way offers a lot of interesting miniatures. I will come back to this.

 

The Lances in 10 minutes

Sometimes I feel a sense of stupidity. I have miniatures here that once were sold without weapons and others where the weapons simply disappeared somehow over the years. Or other weapons are needed like shown above. Magically I have a good amout of axes and swords in my bits & pieces box but nearly no lances and spears.

So on one of the last Crisis conventions I ran around like a headless chicken looking for packs of lances. The only ones I found were ridiculously thin pieces made of tin that I bougth although I thought they were way too expensive. 

A failure. They were completely crap because they bent with the slightest touch and became ugly and useless before I even could attach them to the figures. Meanwhile they have gone the way of all flesh : into the melting pot again.

Then, when I finally painted the miniatures, it suddenly was clear that I can make lances by myself: small steel wire rods (diameter ca. 1-1.5 mm) from the garden department of a hardware store (TOOM), clipped to length and made pointed at one end with my little Proxxon machine (a small grinding and drilling machine).

The whole process took barely 10 minutes and this homemade lances don't bend easily and the complete amount below cost only a few cents.

Note to myself: First think about doing it yourself before buying anything.

Oh well, of course I had these 'professional' made metal lances here that came up some years ago. We all thougth they were a great idea. So I once bought a package and after a while got rid of them again. They were spiky like needles! Whenever I reached out for a miniature that was holding a lance I stabbed my hand and very often started bleeding. That was anoying and they had to go. Realism is ok, but that was to much. My home made lances are not that dangerous

The Knights of Copper Mountain - my Fantasy Foreign Legion

If miniatures pile up for a long time and without a plan, then there are always some that don't really fit together and don't belong anywhere. Spontaneously I found a solution for this. I invented my private 'Fantasy Foreign Legion' that I called the 'Knights of Copper Mountain' and made this the home for minis that otherwise would not find one. This is especially true for older miniatures, which in the past were always bought a bit mixed up.

It started when I got my hands on the bronze paint and asked myself if I ever had used it for anything else than cannons. So I decided to made this somehow unusual color the trademark of 'Copper Mountain'. Miniatures that belong to this group now get bronze color on the armor or weapons, wherever it may seem to be 'appropriate'.

Oldies but gol... copperies(?)

So here are the first of the Copper Mountain troops. Miniatures mostly from Essex and some other Manufacturers. Decals (Axe) from Games Workshop.

More to come, there are still some guys somewhere who look for a home.

Wargamers loosing common sense?

Over at the 'Tiny Tin Men' blog Phil Dutré had a little rant about a 'soulless' plastic miniature that came with the last issue of  Miniature Wargames.

The magazine itself advertised it with the sentence below on its website:

...plus – for an exclusive for print purchasers – there’s a free Household Knight plastic miniature worth over £12.

OK, nothing against the magazine at all (I have a big pile of them and like Phil I am a magazine collector) and of course nothing against a manufacturer who does do everything to promote his product and brand.

 

The upper part from the cover of the December 2020 Issue of Miniature Wargames. The included miniature on the right, the 'value' in the upper left corner.

So far, so good. But, I must beg you: If you ever see me buying a single 38mm plastic mini like that for 12 pounds (13.14 Euros) ... please wake me up.

I never had heard before from 'Conquest - The last Argument of Kings' and I must confess that I am a little bit ignorant nowadays when it comes to the newest and coolest wargaming products. It feels like a new player enters the field every few months now and it simply is impossible to follow all of them. It is not easy to keep up and keeping up is of no real use anyway.

In the comment section beneath his blog post Phil guesses it's a system played with fewer figures and so they have to be more expensive. A quick look at the website of the manufacturer and the onlineshop revealed that it is not. It's a mass combat game with 'real' units and so on. 

From the Onlineshop. 42 Euros for three miniatures means 14 Euros for one. In plastic. And there is no Bourbon in it I suppose...

Wow, this is, from my perspective, expensive. I would never give that amount of money for three plastic miniatures of that size - regardless how fancy, complicated and 'modern' they are designed. When I see people buying wargaming stuff like that I have the strong feeling that we in the western world are going to loose more and more the economic common sense.

Another example from the shop. Infantry units seem to have a more reasonable price tag. To be fair, 12 Miniatures for 36 Euros does not sound so bad. 3,- Euro per figure is not too expensive - if you like plastics. And if you don't know that you still can buy metal minis that are much cheaper...

But I fear you will have no chance in any 'Conquest' game without some special characters (20,- Euros per mini...Wow again!) and some expensive monsters. And there is a rulebook (49,- ), Army Support Packs with 'Spell Cards' and the like (25,- Euros) and so on. It is not easy to see how much you will have to pay to get a sensible setup without studying the rules in detail, but I guess it will cost you a minimum of around 300 Euros. To be honest, I think the average player will invest around 450-500 Euros or more for his first army. 

Wargaming isn't a cheap hobby most of the time. (It can be cheap, but thats another story.) But the new trend to sell plastic miniatures more expensive than a lot of the metal minis on the market is strange. And that people buy the stuff is nothing that I will ever be able to understand. Yes, they are 'modern'. And?

OK, maybe my opinion isn't so important because I am nearly out when it comes to new products and systems. I don't need them. But as an experienced wargamer I still can do the maths and see the system behind this product. 

The most dangerous part is the unusual 38mm size that binds you to 'Conquest' because you won't find very much fantasy minis from other manufacturers. No exchange, no cheap addons or substitutes from the outside. (Correct me if I am wrong.) No use for the minis in combination with other wargaming systems and miniatures if you ever stop playing 'Conquest'.

You will be bound to this system and that is a stupid decicion in a market that offers you an abundance of fantasy miniatures - old and new - that more or less fit together. In the IT business we call that a 'vendor lock-in'.

The wargaming hobby isn't always about making sensible decisions. But you can try, it's still allowed.

Season 3 from The Outpost is here...

...and I feel a great relief. I expected a collapse of the production due to the Corona crisis. Never seeing a solution to the Cliffhanger from Season 2 would have made me really sorry. And a little bit angry I must confess. I feel more relaxed today. Nerds. They are all crazy.

I really like the show. And not only because I want to see the extremely attractive (big understatement) Jessica Green. No, I like the style. The fantasy elements of that world are not so prominent (means : not everybody flies around and pretends to be an elf or a super hero) and it has a good mix of action and humor. Story and the setting are understandable without having to refer to a flowchart of characters and events. A series that is solid and straigthforward screen entertainment where not everything is big and shiny and comes out of the computer. 

Finally and very important: whithout a mental breakdown of one character in every episode. That's a problem with a lot of TV today.

(My proposition to all fictional chars:  If you have mental problems : Stay out of Fantasy and Sci-Fi series. And especially stay away from zombie apocalypses. Please. We have all seen you run around and it wasn't funny. Stay home next time because... if we meet in the story I would not shot the zombies first... Yes, Rick, I mean you and your bunch of psychos. And wash your hair! There is plenty of shampoo in all the empty houses. And clothes.)

The third season of The Outpost is now available and 13 more episodes have been announced. Because these additional episodes are not referred to as a season, I'm afraid that the show will be over then. That would be a real loss and I hope the end of it lies far away in the future. I would like to watch it for many years to come if it remains true to itself.

The Outpost has a Facebook page : Klick here. I would also like to link to the show on the website of 'The CW' but here (outside the USA) I can't even open their website due to 'licencing restrictions'. Wherever you live you will find it in your TV program or streaming channel. And if not : Season 1 and 2 are available on DVD now.

Is there any landscape renderer?

A landscape in Retrosia. Made with the landscape renderer 'Vista Pro'  (DOS). An old picture.

Are there any tools like that nowadays? Maybe something for Linux? Any suggestions?

Shall I stop selling stuff online?

Why do I ask that? Its simple. I am doing this for a long time now and sales are going down, down, down. Nobody buys anything from the miniatures I offer. Corona did not start it but it made the situation worst.

And if a sale happens I can only sell for ridicoulus low prices. Yes, I need the money and I have too much of the stuff. But do I have to sell it super-cheap? Below the price for the metal? Old rare mithril minis for example? Don't feel like that anymore.

NOT leaving: EM4 painted heroes. Now forever prowling the steppes of Retrosia.

I see myself doing the following: Sell minis for 2.50 Euros per piece that are worth 5 and then, after a while, buy some other stuff that has (of course!) the full price tag on it. That's like splitting my money into two parts and then throw one half out of the window. 

Whenever I look at a piece in the boxes I have for the sales stuff, I see opportunities. I see how I could paint that piece and what I can use it for. And I see another one: Being in the state of simply having more than enough hobby stuff. And absolutely no reason to spend a single Euro, Dollar, Pound or Banana on miniatures 'n stuff for years or maybe a complete decade...

Still running well?

What I can't understand is : why do I hear in the news how great things are going for Ebay? And yes, also during the Corona crisis, a time when a lot of people are having panic and some have no or low income. I use the plattform now for 16-18 years or longer (must dig out my first account to find the exact date) and I can't see a growth or creative changes. And where are the really good sales that I had when the plattform was new? And cheaper by the way.

Or a redesign? When I am in my account and klick on an entry in the menu, every subpage looks completely different. It looks like they tried to redesign parts of it some years ago, switched the plan several times and then forgot about it. In fact, it looks the masterpiece of an webdesigner who has no clue what he/she is doing or someone had an accident and was the only one who had the password or the plan.

When I see a website that has 'glitches' not fixed for a long time and things look 'un-professional' for years, especially from a company that has the money to fix it and that is one of the frontrunners on the web, my alarm goes off. Loud.

A billion dollar company that can't get their website ready? A standstill is normally a sign for the beginning of the end.

Ah, found just out that they ended support for the infamous 'Turbo Lister' software this July. That was fast. The software was nearly braindead for about 15 years or so. But today - month later - I can still find the help sites for that discontinued tool on the ebay website...

Of course it is not easy (without great technical effort) to see what's going on on the site. But think of this : I hear nobody saying anymore that he or she bought or found something on Ebay. Never. It's really true : I haven't heard that for several years now! And there was a time when you would have heard people talk about that very often.

A bubble? The history of the web is full of once invincible but now dead dinosaurs.

The knights who made the new beginning

And so it begins. I wanted to organize all the existing fantasy figures. Seperated into the good, the bad and the ones in between. Sorted by 'species' or 'race', nation, armies and units.

A handful of knights on horseback made the start. A friend had given them to me because they had been lying around for ages and he couldn't get up to paint them. For these guys I finally had to decide which color they should get. At first it was difficult for me not to drybrush the guys with silver color. Then I simply took the risk and decided that every knight had to get his own main color (yellow, red, green, etc.), which was to become part of his coat of arms and that of his soldiers. So these knights became the starting point for an organization scheme. I decided that these knights are the rulers of earldoms and leaders of the human army.

The weapons are not original and the decals are from Games Workshop.  I am using what's lying around.

The Miniatures are very old and from Essex Miniatures (Late Medieval Period). Just took a look at the series and found they are still available. I think if I am going to add minis, I buy there. I like that style.

Fantasy invites you to fantasize. You sit, glue and paint, your head goes empty... and names, places and these things come to your mind. I named the following earldoms or hometowns for my knights:

• Blue : Bluewater
• Light Blue : Isenstein (Isen = old german for iron = Ironstone)
• Gray : Blyburg (= Bleiberg = Lead Mountain)
• Green : Greenwood
• Yellow : Löwenstein (=Lionstone)
• Red : Zornburg (Zorn = rage. A city located near to a volcano.)

And I can tell you, once the head is clear, and you can create new things, the fun comes back. Feels a bit like in the past when the genre was new: An "unknown country" that had to be discovered. A form of fascination that is coming back now. 

Now these earldoms have to be located somewhere on a map. And soldiers have to be attached to these Warlords.

Old map of my first fantasy world

 

Just to take a look. An old map of a fantasy continent that I once created. The name wasn't Retrosia, it had the working title 'Askalon' until I found out that there is a city that has this name. Made for a campaign but never really used. I take this as an inspiration for the new world. But the new one should have more sea and islands because sailing and seafights will be an important part of the rules. Maybe I can break this continent in into pieces?

Empty your head and go back to the start

So there I was. A lot of old fantasy and medieval characters. Remnants of this and that. Very old stuff, middle-aged stuff, something newer. Individual figures and also larger groups, some painted and many unpainted for ages. Lots of old lead, a bunch of plastics (from the times of Heroquest and Battle Masters), troops of Normans painted poorly or half finished, and finally a horde of SAGA Vikings, that I (a novelty for me) had bought already painted (in a large bag!) on a convention.

For the few role-playing games - actually "dungeon crawls" - that we played now and then over the last years, I had prepared a lot of old minis. So some monsters, heroes and enemies who lay forever in a drawer were finally painted and used. But nothing else had been going on for ages. A SAGA group, started with a lot of wind and the usual babble, did not materialize. So ​​much for the above Normans and Vikings.

Glossy Oldies and Dungeon-Folks

 

The next boiled-up project was a 'Frostgrave' setting but it never materialized. But I knew that beforehand. Then there was was 'Congo. All great games. But the only one doing something was me. Last year my complete african project (a village, 70 Africans and Adventurers and lots of plastic palms etc.) ended up as a complete set on Ebay. Too much is just too much. No Congo Bongo.

For me, fantasy (battle) wargaming ended on December 11th, 1999. After that, our group of that time never played again. The decision to change the ruleset from 'Phalanx' - the brainchild of a local games store owner - to Warhammer was the fatal blow. We played a few battles but the fun was going away.

The reason was obvious. That version of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules (4th or 5th edition) had some quirks that were quite unpleasant and it later got the nickname 'Herohammer' for it. It enabled you to have some extreme powerfull characters or units that made every game practically pointless because they were so effective and hard to kill that they could destroy anything and everyone. And one of my favorite enemies was also able to 'fly high' and land everywhere on the battlefield. So much to your carefully planned deployment. That was like fighting with a wooden stick against an F-18 jetfighter. Or the other way around: if you lost your 1 or 2 powerful special characters, your army was practically nothing but cannon fodder. I understood that at the time, others didn't want to or couldn't understand it.

Today it's on Wikipedia:

"The fifth edition in particular became known pejoratively as "Herohammer" because of the imbalance between the very powerful heroes, monsters and wizards in the game and blocks of troops which existed effectively as cannon fodder."

After that game - if I remember it correctly - the group dissolved silently. A shame. We would have had a lot of fun and over such a long time each of us could have built up a large and impressing collection. But some people prefer to stick to the words in books instead if thinking for themselves. A common problem.

The Area in the Wolf Hills

The Battle

The Battle in the Wolf Hills on December 11th, 1999. Three armies meet and fight for the possession of magical artifacts. A 'Capture the Flag' scenario. This is the only battle from which I made a kind of battlereport and I was happy to find it in an old notebook. I couldn't remember it, but the text speaks of destroyed elven and dwarf troops and ends with 'I took the 2 elven rings and one from the dwarfs.' So I still have them I believe. Somewhere. Lucky me.

Time passed. I was constantly involved in the miniatures and wargaming hobby - especially when I ran a brick and mortar games store and an online business - but with very few real gaming. From time to time I made some historical miniatures but fantasy wargaming was never really gone for me.

So a while ago I made a list and I counted more than 600 fantasy and medieval miniatures and creatures that I could use for a new start. And there are still some minis to come because I want to cast some from Prince August molds. And because I will never really stop collecting minis. There are also sorted out pieces from my private collection that may never find the way to Ebay but to the battlefields of Retrosia...

Design done ...for the moment

Three days later the website looks like something. What I did not expect was that the first thing I had to to on Blogger was to dig into the html of the template to make it work.  

The worst mistake was that every background picture I tried (regardless of the size) was tiled in the header section that stretches completely over the screen. Looking into the forums I found that I wasn't the only one who had this problem. (I posted my little solution.)

I am not the big CSS guy - maybe because most of the times other people stack the boxes and elements in a different way I would do it and I really hate it to fix that rubbish - but a little search, try and error brought the solution. So it's not a great design, but it does not look like a standard blogger template anymore. Ready to go now.

Bing ... I have a new blog

And this is the most important post of all : the first one. Stay tuned (ha!) I am working on it.