Category Archives: Wargaming Hobby

Time is often against me as I am a rather busy chap but when time allows I like to chuck some dice, move my miniatures and explore missions and scenarios. All of this is part of my passion of Miniature Wargaming. Read about what I have been up to in these posts…oh and yes I always lose!

Orcs in the Webbe 2013 Advent Interview

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Another year has passed in my life as a wargame writer and general all around fine fellow and over the previous few years a marker of this passing has been the annual Orcs in the Webbe interview.  Now that the chaos of Christmas is behind me (and a Merry Mithras Day to one and all) I wanted to put up a short posting here on the blog about this year’s interview.  You can read it here and it makes for interesting reading.  Firstly thanks to Craig Andrews for the interview and for carrying on all his efforts into Black Powder Fantasy for wargamers everywhere not least Flintloque fans.   Secondly I often don’t realise just how many tasks I take on during a year and the interview gives me a chance to reflect upon this both for the past and the future.  I seldom take a day off and I think it shows in the loyalty of our customers to Alternative Armies, 15mm.co.uk and The Ion Age too.

I think the biggest thing for me to come out of the interview was that, as I expected, The Ion Age has taken up a lot of my year but also that my role in the company has changed.  We have a larger team on all projects now and where once I was sole creative input there are now several voices in this area.  I hope that this means I will have time for more side projects perhaps even some creative writing.

Lastly an apology to Craig to whom I had promised a piece of lengthy Dracci related fiction for the Calendar this year but due to a combination of atrocious weather which shut us down for several days, personal illness and sheer workload I was unable, the first time ever, to meet the deadline.   Sorry!  Looking at it, its not often I drop the ball but I am only Human.

Have a read at the Interview if you have the time.  Its fun stuff indeed!

GBS

WIP – The 15mm Duxis Battlesuit for The Ion Age

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Over the next month or so on The Ion Age blog of which I am the ‘webmaster’ as it were there are going to be posts all about the upcoming first major release for The Ion Age in 2014.  As you can see from the picture above the first posting is a bit of a teaser.  It concerns our lead designer Sam Croes and his ‘drinking at work’.  Following on this will be postings of fiction about the Duxis Battlesuit, of artwork, of concept drawings, of the miniatures and then details of the Early Supporter Offers which will be happening on the Duxis.

While I cannot say more just now you should, if you are keen on 15mm science fiction wargaming or you just love fight mecha, have a look at the blog every now and again.  I have the first finished battlesuit miniature on the desk in front of me here and let me just add…its superb!

Dreamed, Designed, Made…in Scotland but not from Girders!

GBS

15mm.co.uk gets a Blog

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I have just made live and announced that 15mm.co.uk now has its own blogger blog.  Out of the digital cold and into the hot light of cyber augmented reality the birth of the blog leads with a posting about the latest re-mastering and re-release of a classic Laserburn vehicle.  From white metal to resin and back to life.  Appropriate really for this new forum as well.

The blog is small just now but it will grow fast.  You can visit it on www.15mmcouk.blogspot.co.uk.  Its going to be a great read.  Plus you can see our new vision logo.

GBS

Bloggy Endus Hiatus!

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Hello All!

I have been gone some time.  Well not gone rather sitting here as always working away but rather working solid in my ‘downtime’ on the playtesting of Patrol Angis as per the last post here some six weeks ago.  Six weeks, gone by a flash aside from the warm summer evenings now dark and stormy.

Just a quick post to say I will be getting back to normal now and to thank everyone in the test group for their efforts.  You can see the six weekly blog posts about it by me over on The Ion Age blog.  They make for some fine reading.  I will be redrafting the rules engine based on the results of the playtest over the festive period for release next year.

A lot has happened with me in the last month and a half so perhaps some retrospective posts will feature plus some movie reviews and books reviews too now that I have time to leisure once more. Perhaps even a wargame or two if I can drum up a foe.

GBS

Bloggy Hiatus – Patrol Angis playtesting

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You all know that I work hard.  Some of you might even know that twelve or thirteen hours a day is not that unusual.  A few know that I work weekends too and that sometimes I just can’t get it all done.  Well one of those times has arisen and I have decided to take a ‘Bloggy Hiatus’ on my personal blog.   This means I will not be posting here unless it is urgently awesome to do so.

Why?  Well I am now in the midst of several projects including the public playtesting of Patrol Angis.  Patrol Angis is the main 15mm skirmish system I am writing for The Ion Age.  Its taking up a lot of my time replying to the thousands of words of feedback and I am doing this at home in the evening, prime bloggy time.  There are other things too but that is the main one.

Head on over to the Ion Age Blog for the latest and I will see you all at the end of the month.  I intend to do Movember again this year so pictures and fun will come from that.

Happy Wargaming!

GBS

15mm Limited Edition Miniatures?

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The concept of limited edition miniatures is nothing new.  In fact Alternative Armies has had them for twenty years now in 28mm scale and other brands longer than this (remember those awesome 1980’s Citadel limited runs including Space Marine Santa’s and the like?) but they are seemingly always of the 25mm and 28mm scale of miniatures.  I have had a dig around and found literally nothing limited in 15mm scale.  Why is this?  Is it because there is no interest?  Is it because until recently 15mm did not have the same glamour as a scale as 28mm?  Is it a cost issue with money making not being possible with having a sculptor make a 15mm that sells at a relatively low price only for a few hundred castings or so?  Or is it simply something that no one has thought of yet as the wargaming hobby endlessly repeats itself with the same cookie cutter ideas?

Well in response to these self set questions I can offer some self decided evidence answers.  I think there is interest as many wargamers play 15mm scale, more now than ever before especially in the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy and some of those wargamers will want limited’s as they do in the larger scale; stands to reason.  Certainly 15mm had nothing like the presence it has now only seven years ago when I founded 15mm.co.uk and brought Laserburn back to the wargames table so maybe its not come up before.   As for cost and money making this is different for every company but I think, having bashed the calculator keys, that as long as the run was of the five hundred or so mark it would be profitable so no get out clause there.  Has no one thought of it yet?  Well I admire companies like Critical Mass Games, Ground Zero Games and Khurasan Miniatures but they have no limited codes in their 15mm that I could see so perhaps like the rise in popularity of the scale it has not yet evolved as something companies do who produce that scale of miniatures will do.

This is something I have been thinking about for over two years.  In fact it was near the top of my brief while I was musing on what would become the new Ion Age.  Much like my idea to create the SHM Range on 15mm.co.uk which gave aspiring sculptors their chance to get something release when no one would take them seriously (which has been rather successful with more than seventy designs and a dozen designers to its ranks) I decided that I would give it a try.  After all without some fun and a sense of adventure what is the point of this hobby?   The Ion Age would be the perfect testing ground.

What would such a limited miniature probably be and how many would be produced?  Well I knew it would be produced in a run of 500 numbered packs that much was based on the hard numbers.  It would have to be TWO miniatures not one, to make the bulk up for packaging; that was a change over 28mm scale.  As for what it would depict I followed the same outline of rules that I have for Flintloque.  That being interesting characters but nothing unique or vital to a wargame system.  Purchase would be from interest and a sense of collecting NOT out of a resignation to needing the figures to play a certain mission or personality…that is cruel and something other much larger companies do.  So it would be a character officer to lead a lance or more of Retained Knights.  A perfect jumping off point to see if the concept had legs and would run!

IAFL01

IAFL01

The Ion Age will be releasing its first limited edition packs of 15mm characters towards the end of this month.  The pricing will be slightly more than the normal but not much and this is really only to cover the extra packaging and manpower this type of code needs as with all limited codes.  You can see IAFL01 above.  I will tell you no more about these two fine fellows just now though…you will just have to wait!

If you have any thoughts on this idea please do email me or comment against this post.

GBS

Beighton’s Shipyard’s short USEME Starship Battles review

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In the inky stellar darkness….

Mark over at Beighton’s Shipyard blog has posted a short review of a wargaming title I partially authored a couple of years ago along with Omer Golan Joel.  Its the sixth in the USEME series and its a set of rules for simple and fast fleet scale starship battles in miniature.

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I have to say he did a grand job.  Its not a simulation set of complex rules, it was never meant to be.  Its fast and fun and with enough variety and bolt on mechanics to be adaptable to most settings.  I have used it myself several times for everything from dogfights with five a side fighters to a whole fleet of dreadnoughts in the dark and also with Eli Ardnt’s fleet scale mecha for a special robotech style struggle.

Check it out!

Also if you are wondering what ‘The Big Mac’ is…well I know, I wrote it, but you will have to read it to find out!

GBS

Ex-Heroes 1 by Peter Clines – Book Review

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Superheroes and Zombies in the same place!  Awesome!  Why did no one else think of this?

That is how Peter Clines first book in his Ex-Heroes series was described on the book jacket and it grabbed my attention.  I am not a true fan of the risen dead or of caped crusaders but putting them into one pulp style story really appealed to me.  I am not alone.  The internet is full of glowing reviews of this book which, as normal for me, I only read after finishing the book which I did this week.

The concept behind Ex-Heroes is brilliant in its simplicity. It can be summed up as: superheroes surviving in post-apocalyptic zombie infested Los Angeles. Traditional shuffle and eat brains types.   It’s been two years since the plague of the undead has spread across the globe, killing basically everyone and resulting in the collapse of civilization. In that time a fortress has been established on the premises of an old film studio and the survivors exisit. The heroes, under the command of ‘Stealth’, go out on scavenging runs to keep the Mount supplied. Zombies, or ex-humans as they’re called, are an ever-present danger but deep in the city stirs a greater threat to the residents of the Mount.

What is a superhero novel without heroes.  I will not go into details but characters such as Stealth, Might Dragon, Zzzap, Gorgon and so on can all be linked to more famous versions of themselves.  The setting makes for another great point. The ‘Moun’t is a clever construction, making use of the natural fortifications of a film studio and augmenting them further for defensibility. The best part of L.A. is all the pop culture references from Doctor Who to It’s A Wonderful Life. The regular humans compare ex-celebrities they have killed, injecting some levity.

Ex-Heroes is told in past and present tense, in first- and third-person respectively. The past tense comes from multiple first-person perspectives, in some cases detailing the origins of the heroes and in others detailing the early stages of the zombie outbreak. The first-person past tense is much stronger than the third-person present tense, infusing the heroes with a sense of individuality. The plot is lean and fast paced. The action is over the top, just as you would hope for when you pit super powered vigilantes against the carnivorous Undead. There is plenty of carnage to go around in any case. The ex-virus, from its the origin to the symptoms – the virus does not kill you; but it does revive you.

This is a superb pulp novel and I have already got my hands on the second one (there are four in total at the moment) as I want to see where it goes.  Its a fun read and if you like those genre’s go and get it!

On a side note I think that adapting USEME Zombie Dawn to this setting would be fairly easy.  Working up some rules mechanics for the super heroes and also the effects of this.

Top Marks!

GBS

The Ion Age by Gavin Syme….now live!

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Today is the day that the hardest secret I have had to keep in my professional working life becomes common knowledge.  Today I personally told five thousand wargamers and by extension of that over this week maybe two or three hundred thousand more through forums and news portals about the existence of The Ion Age.   A brand new wargaming website, brand new products, brand new approach and all based on my favourite science fiction setting which I first learned about nearly twenty years ago.

Its been a slow build and a lot of work but over the last year the pieces have been put in place and the future literally written as I expanded and hardened the fiction that already existed into a bigger and better format upon which a lot can be hung.   It is one thousand years since the end of the great Khanate War and the betrayal of Prydian space by the fanatical Templars and after an age of darkness and an ongoing bitter civil war between powerful Marcher Barons a great leader has emerged to take command of the Prydian Army and its knights.  Princess Daphne Cyon has her work cut out for her though for as well as the Leagues of Yordan and Canlaster there is the situation in the Camarthen star cluster to now contend with…..

There is a blog for The Ion Age upon which I will be putting the majority of my thoughts on this subject as it grows and encompasses more and more.  Have a look and bookmark it or follow it.  The blog will fill you in on the rest of the details such as the free miniature with every order (changed every month see below), the weekly releases, the loyalty system with earned goodies, new rules sets and more.  Oh and what is coming on Thursday of this week.

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That is it for now.  After all I have a universe to build but stick around to see a future filled with hope, bravery, mighty deeds and not the same old hand cranked gaming fodder.  This is the Ion Age and  its going to be a blast!

GBS

Fjodin adds some cracking miniatures to the SHM Range

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Creatures and Nightmares!

Today I added four more new 15mm scale miniatures to the SHM Range on 15mm.co.uk.  All of them created by the talented Fjodin who resides in Australia.  Its true that Fjodin has other miniatures in the range but these ones, as you can see above, are excellent and to me his best yet.  Three sort of ancient creatures and a nightmare horror to go with them.  Useful for all sorts of things I am sure.

Only a Pistol? You are in trouble my friend!

I have included another image of the new miniatures above, a scaling shot with a standard sized Human for comparison.  The point of this posting aside from virtually patting Fjodin on the back is to once more make the point that I am justly proud of the whole concept of SHM.  While I do not know if these miniatures will sell well enough to cover the costs of molding and so on that is not the point with SHM.  Yes, money is not the point.  The point is that above you can see four miniatures (five if you include the Human Commander) which most likely would NOT EXIST without SHM.   The talent that Fjodin has developed and the exposure he has had to gain more work would have been MUCH more difficult for him to achieve.  So the wargamer benefits and the designer benefits too.  To my knowledge I am the only person offering the chance for novice designers to get virtually any concept into production if they have the talent.

SHM gives the wargamer awesome and odd miniatures and the designer the confidence to grow.  Sometimes all you need is a chance.

Well done Fjodin!

GBS