SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
No sign of snow as of writing, but my gaming tastes are running to the hibernal, so... it's time for winter-themed games! Frostgrave is my first thought for a wintery wargame. This is a fantasy skirmish game, reminiscent of GW's old Mordheim setting and premise: you are a 'warband' of unscrupulous types ransacking a ruined city infested with traps, horrors and other antisocial raiders. Frostgrave scores big on theme. The setting is Felstad, an ancient city that has been a frozen necropolis for 1000 years thanks to an ancient curse. Yup, arrogant wizards brought down a civilization-squashing blizzard on their empire. Now the city is thawing and wretched barbarians (you, the players) are trying to plunder the city for loot and magical technology. Frostgrave is popular for its fluid combat mechanics and the simple device whereby the wizard levels up but the disposable mooks don't. However, a big part of its charm is the setting itself: Felstad is part frozen tomb, part gladiatorial arena, part gigantic dungeon. Scenery can be treated with snow and icicles to bring out the atmosphere of ancient death. Brr-rr-r. The other appeal is that, although there are official Frostgrave miniatures and terrain, it's a game ripe for cannibalizing other products. Any fantasy miniatures can make up a warband. WWII scenery and terrain gets adapted for Felstad, as well as product lines like Ruins of Daldorr, but there's been healthy cross-pollination with Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40K, which also feature battles in ruined cities. The frosty battle mat for Frostgrave has inspired 40K players to visit a slightly different setting: the death world of Fenris, where the Space Wolves have been battling Chaos Space Marines and a demon horde led by Magnus the Red. Epic stuff on any battlefield, but all the better on an Icelandic landscape of volcanic vents and freezing snow. It's nice that the Space Wolves vary from the standard marine template, what with their beards, furry cloaks and big Thunderwolf hounds. Of course, the definitive winter battle for me is Hoth, where the Empire assaults the rebel base in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Star Wars: X-Wing seems to be crying out for the action to descend from the generic reaches of space to the chilly atmosphere of Hoth. Just stretch out a crisp white sheet on your gaming table and you're done. Actually, other gamers are well ahead of me and have worked out several scenarios for playing missions around the Battle of Hoth. Historical battles in snowy conditions are a bit rarer (campaigning season is the summer, right?) but there are examples crying out to be brought to the table. First of all, the Winter War (1939-40) in which Finnish troops resisted Soviet advances - notably the Battle of Suomussalmi where a small Finnish force used the frozen terrain to defeat a vastly large invading army (albeit one poorly equipped for the weather and with most of its effective officers recently purged by Uncle Joe). Bolt Action could do a good job here, with a few house rules for fighting on frozen lakes and cool Finnish ski troops zipping around! If you want to break out Test of Honour this Christmas, you could re-enact the Siege of Osaka (1614), which finally established the Shogunate by breaking the last resistance from the Toyotomi Clan. The winter campaign features some great set-pieces, such as 600 men defending a village against the Shogun's larger force armed with arquebuses and heroic last stands on the Sanada-maru earthworks - all to defend a big brass bell inscribed with coded curses directed at the Shogun. A bit further back, there are some great battles-on-ice in the medieval period. In 1242, Alexander Nevsky led the forces of Novgorod to victory over the invading Teutonic Knights (engaged in a doomed 'crusade' against Lithuanian pagans and Orthodox Christians). The "Battle on the Ice" put a stop to the Crusade and cemented Nevsky's reputation as a national hero. And you can listen to Prokofiev's epic score while you're playing: music that pierces your soul with chilly menace and heroism. Wait till the Slavic choir kicks in at 2:25....! Further back still, Norse sagas and the poem Beowulf record Battle on the Ice of Lake Vänern in the 6th century. The brothers Eanmund and Eadgils enlist Beowulf's tribe, the Geats, to recover the throne of Sweden from their usurping uncle Onela (reminds me of Hamlet... or am I thinking of The Lion King). In the battle Eadgils kills Onela - but here we have early Vikings fighting on ice and one of them is Beowulf!!! Would Saga be the best game for this? Saga features a campaign pack for 'Aetius & Arthur' (the Dark Ages proper) which is about right for Beowulf, date-wise - but the game also has an 'Age of Vikings' set which would look cooler, even if a bit anachronistic for the 6th century (Vikings are a few hundred years later). Board games are a bit easier to reference, because they choose a wintry setting precisely for theme and the obstacles it creates. Take Dead of Winter: A Crossroads Game. This is a fantastic zombie holocaust game with a fresh twist. The zombie plague has already happened, but you play survivors in a walled compound and winter has arrived. You have a mission to accomplish which sens you on trips out of the colony, scavenging for fuel, food, medicine or weapons. Meanwhile, the undead gather in greater and greater numbers, forcing you to build barricades. This would be a good enough game as it is, but there are two fantastic twists. First, every time you take your turn someone else draws a Crossroads Card which creates a dilemma for you: welcome in fugitives or turn them away? crack down on mutineers or back down from conflict? celebrate Christmas or stick to strict rationing? Secondly, although the game is cooperative, everyone has a personal mission that forces them to act against the interests of the group: maybe you're hoarding medicine for your sick daughter or holding onto weapons so you can strike out by yourself when things go south... The constant pressure of the undead, the weather and the need to find food gets ratcheted up by the fact that you can't entirely trust each other. This game is very hard to win, but so much fun you don't mind losing. Other games just have winter variants. There's a Winter Carcassonne, that lets you build your vast medieval city in a snowy season rather than creating an expanse of green fields. It looks cute (arguably, better than the original) but it's purely cosmetic: the game plays the same. Since it's so pretty, you might choose to get this version of Cacassonne instead of the original but beware if you get the Carcassonne bug (and for some reason people do) you might not enjoy mixing these winter tiles with the summer ones in the various expansions. Ticket to Ride: Nordic Countries brings this classic game out of the USA and lets you spread your railway (rather than railroad) tendrils across Scandinavia and Finland. This is also a stand-alone version of the game but it is significantly different from the original: ferries play a major role in setting up routes, it's only for 2-3 players and the geography leads to more aggressive play. I'm not the biggest fan of Ticket To Ride (I think you have to be one of those train-fans really to get into this game), but this grittier, nastier version of the game might appeal to me more.
Last up, two favourites Winter Tales is a complete oddity: a storytelling game with competing teams. Snow White has become as evil a queen as her stepmother and, assisted by the larcenous White Rabbit and the Big Bad Wolf as her enforcer, she has subjected Wintertown to a fascistic regime. The resistance, led by Pinocchio, the elderly Dorothy of Oz and various other magical outcasts, is trying to bring her down. Yup, it's fairytale characters doing bloody civil war. The board is BEE-YOO-TIFUL and you play the game by telling stories using cards with scribblings by ACTUAL Italian children. Mistfall is a cooperative deckbuilder fantasy quest game. The setting is the Valskyrr, an evocative northern wilderness (fantasy Poland, basically) and a corrupting entity called 'the Mists' is raising the undead, mutating the beasts and demonizing the wizardry. Out you go on a series of quests to drive back the Mists. The gameplay is dense and challenging and each character is utterly distinctive but the real star is the setting itself with its rime-crusted towers, glacial vistas and frosty forests. Brr-rr-r. One more blog to go then it's Christmas.
We’ve been enjoying the Conan board game by games company Monolith and publishers Asmodee. The game contains a vast horde of miniatures, attractive boards and imaginatively asymmetric scenarios. In each mission, the players get to be Conan the Barbarian, Shevatus the Rogue, Hadrathus the Mage or Belit the Pirate Queen. Somebody else gets to be the evil Overlord commanding the antagonists (pirates and Picts, mostly, with the odd necromancer and demon thrown in).
Conan is a fantasy of White male power. A fantasy in which White male power dominates and holds moral authority. And as Conan, you are the biggest, strongest embodiment of that White male power, able to ruthlessly cut down all your non-White enemies, surrounded by the lamentations of their women and by White women falling at your feet Hornbeck argues that the attitudes the game embodies are the reason Donald Trump got elected and if you like this game then you are colluding in the sexual abuse of women. Hornbeck’s article is worth reading, but the TL:DR is that she is either (1) a well-intentioned person making salient points about some sadly regressive attitudes towards women and minorities in the gaming industry, or (2) an idiot. Take your pick and let yourself be defined by it. Some things can be stated as facts. The base game set contains 72 miniatures – of which 2 are women and both are half-undressed. One of these is pirate queen Belit and her character board and miniature look like this. Belit's character board (left) and miniature (right, sculpted by Stéphane Simon, painted by Martin Grandbarbe) How unlike the dress code of our own dear queen. But wait, you say, isn’t this just being faithful to Robert E. Howard’s pulp stories? Isn’t that just how women in the Conan stories are supposed to look? Designers Asmodee/Monolith take this view: they pride themselves on authenticity and employ ‘Conan historians’ as consultants. In the original stories, Belit flounces around naked as a sort of radical fashion choice and lusts after young Conan in a very sex-positive way. Isn’t she just taking ownership of her alabaster body? American artist Frank Frazetta cemented the 'look' of Conan and his clingy/helpless and nearly-naked women (left) . In my youth, all fantasy novels had covers like this. So, is the game's pervy art (right) a faithful hommage or a mindless pastiche? To untangle this, it’s helpful to look back at the life of Conan's creator, Robert Ervin Howard (1906-1936). A bookish Texan, Howard’s childhood was shaped by his mother, who inculcated in him a love of poetry and an ambition to write, but who contracted tuberculosis from her constant caring for sick relatives. Howard acquired an obsession with youth and physical health and took up boxing and bodybuilding in his teens. His adventure stories reflect his own fascination with physical beauty and vitality and his fear of ageing. Howard wrote his Conan stories over a short 3-year period in the mid Thirties. His previous work had been Lovecraftian weird tales and historical adventures which reflected his fascination with his own Irish ancestry. Picts feature in many of these stories as Celtic heroes and anti-heroes – not as Native American Iroquois, as Hornbeck contends. Conan’s exploits in the ‘Hyborian Age’ before the last Ice Age also feature Howard’s beloved Picts, but this time as villains. After tiring of Conan, Howard moved on to writing Westerns in the years before his death. In fact, his last (and best) published Conan story, Beyond the Black River, features battles with the Picts in a setting clearly inspired by the American frontier, reflecting Howard’s new interests and explaining the confusion about Picts being based on Native Americans. Asmodee/Monolith certainly base their Picts on Native Americans rather than Celts - but also make them rather like Neanderthals rather than humans Howard supported feminism and tried to write strong female characters. He hated the pulp conventions that forced him to insert unnecessary erotica into his stories and tried to subvert them whenever possible – as he did in Beyond the Black River, which contains no love interest or sex scenes. Howard was delighted that he got such a story into print. So, yes, Belit goes around naked, but she’s a commander of men. In the game, contrary to Hornbeck's claim that "all she does is follow Conan around and boost his abilities," her character directs a team of warriors as well as engaging in battle directly. Expansions to the game feature other female characters, some semi-nude and provocative, but others (like the warrior woman Valeria) more sensibly dressed for action. The rather righteous miniature and art for Valeria (left) - and Sandahl Bergman's portrayal in John Milius' 1982 film Conan the Barbarian, which combines the roles of Belit and Valeria into one character Howard also created the more famous female warrior Red Sonya (sic). But before you crack wise about chainmail bikinis, Howard’s Red Sonya of Rogatino is a Ukrainian female mercenary in Istanbul in 1626 who fights with flintlock pistols. The sword-wielding barbarian heroine Red Sonja (with a J) was developed by Marvel Comics in 1973, porting the character into Conan’s Hyborian Age for their comic book adaptation of Howard’s stories. The chainmail bikini is Marvel's distinctive contribution to the character. Red Sonya/Sonja: 17th century mercenary (left), under-dressed Marvel heroine (centre) and Brigitte Nielsen in the 1985 film Which goes to show that Howard’s legacy is a complicated one: you've got Howard's original conception, compromised by commercial pressure; then there's later artists and writers (notably Marvel) focusing on elements in the stories Howard himself disliked. To their credit, Monolith/Asmodee try to honour Howard’s stories in their game, rather than the comics or movies. Red Sonja does not appear in the game. But the general vibe of adolescent sexuality definitely does. Certainly, some design choices are ... unfortunate. Making nude Belit the only playable heroine in the base game instead of armoured (and better-known) Valeria is a weird choice. The first scenario tasks Conan & Co. with rescuing a drugged princess from the Picts: she is literally an object that must be carried across the board. Conan faces off against a big snake while the princess takes a nap (left) - which I'm sure Cynthia Hornbeck LOVES in comparison to the strategy board game Age of Conan (right) in which there are three rewards for Conan to earn: treasure (fine, really), monsters (trophies, I guess) and actual women! All of this in a context where the gaming industry increasingly offer gender variants for playable characters and goes out of its way to represent women as capable and autonomous. Sometimes this works beautifully, such as Mistfall’s non-objectified heroines (one a lesbian by the way). Others are more controversial, such as EA Games' decision with Battlefield V to depict a woman combatant on the cover, leading to accusations of political correctness gone mad by people who failed GCSE History (women certainly did fight in WWII in small but not insignificant numbers). Mistfall's Elatha the Misthuntress (left) and Valkea the Myrmidon (centre) offer positive representations, as does the troll-baiting cover for Battlefield V (right) This leads us back to Cynthia Hornbeck, who makes two impassioned pleas: the first ill-conceived but the second important for a number of reasons: As a gamer, start refusing to purchase or even play a game that objectifies women, excludes women, excludes non-White people, makes non-White people the enemy, etc This is ill-conceived. People don't play or refuse to play games to make political or moral statements - or rather, those that do are jackasses. Many gamers want to explore conflicts set in the world as it is (or was), not the world as we'd like it to be. Fantasy and SF gamers want to explore dystopian rather than idealised settings. An ancient-world setting will include features like slavery, for example. But Hornbeck follows this with a better point: As a designer, start making very deliberate choices about what themes you work with and how you represent people of other gender, races, and sexualities than your own ... Conan has gained lots of acclaim for its mechanic innovations and the thorough realization of its theme and setting. But why can’t those innovative mechanics and immersive gameplay be matched with a setting that treats women as something other than sexual objects and minorities as something other than enemies? She is right about this. Monolith/Asmodee missed a trick with Conan. Any adaptation of a literary product is also an interpretation of that product and the designers failed to avail themselves of the chance to interpret Howard’s female characters more positively in this game. It's a mistake on an artistic as well as a political level. I’m sure Howard himself would have approved of revisionism. He hated the limiting conventions of the adventure genre of his time and would not have wished to see those conventions still being mindlessly perpetuated 80 years later, still less justified for being in the 'spirit' of his stories. The 'spirit' was a concession to what magazine editors demanded of pulp fiction in the '30s - and it was a spirit that Howard resented and delighted in subverting whenever he could. Now don't get me started on whether they should be banning Baby, It's Cold Outside... ...
Oh all right then. The 1949 original (left) isn't as depraved as you think, because it pairs Ricardo Montalban seducing Esther Williams with a foil where Betty Garret (rather more successfully) seduces Red Skelton. Meanwhile, the 2016 version by Idina Menzel and Michael Buble (right) cleverly uses child actors and defuses some of the more troubling lines (like "Say, what's in this drink?" and substituting soda pop for alcohol) - now that's how you interpret something rather than just recycling it. Merry Christmas.
It was the summer of 1978, the nation was retro-rocking to Grease and I was visiting my mate Simon in Welwyn Garden City. Simon had been my friend at Junior School and was much cooler than me, as evidenced by his musical tastes (2-tone, ska) and the fact that his parents had divorced and remarried (mind-boggling in 1978). Anyway, when I arrived to spend the weekend with him, he revealed his new hobby: fantasy Role Playing Games (RPGs), namely Dungeons & Dragons. The ground had been laid for this already. I'd read The Lord of the Rings and was a huge fantasy/SF fan, a massive Greek/Norse mythology nerd and board games player (such as they were back then: I'm talking Waddingtons, not Avalon Hill). Earlier that year, my mother had showed me a newspaper article about D&D which sounded intriguing, but the concept of a game without a board or a winner surpassed my understanding. So Simon produced these rulebooks: the Players Handbook and the Monster Manual and the old blue 'Holmes' Basic Set (you see, the Dungeon Masters Guide had not yet been published so people had to cobble the game together as best they could). I created a character - Tristan, the Elf - and Simon was Dungeon Master and in search of the unknown we went, venturing into the now-classic introductory dungeon. I was instantly, utterly and compulsively hooked. On and on, into the night we played. Then I lay awake, scouring the books by torchlight, poring over the black-and-white illustrations that held rich and unnerving fascinations for me: flesh golems ... green slime (it drops on you!) ... trolls ("loathsome and rubbery") ... demonesses with actual breasts. Yes, I was Sandy and D&D was my Danny Zuko and I was Hopelessly Devoted from that moment on. Tell me more, you say? Well, I dashed home and told my parents I wanted D&D for Christmas (5 achingly slow months away). To Welwyn Garden City we must go, to the department store that sold this odd and (to my father's mind) hugely overpriced game. I think it cost £10, which was a big deal for a Christmas present then, and the box was unprepossessing. But Christmas finally came and I unpacked the slim rulebook, the oddly-shaped dice, the venerated dungeon module (so replete with secrets, but not, I discovered, any actual green slime or breasty demonesses) and subjected my hapless parents to the game (they played along, mystified), then recruited likelier gaming buddies: fellow 12-year-old boys. From now on, D&D owned my imagination and my very soul. The following Christmas brought the long-awaited Dungeon Master's Guide, which was a monumental piece of reading material with some vocabulary-expanding prose in it. White Dwarf subscriptions ensued and, when I moved to Scotland at the age of 13, I made new friends by seeking out the only kids in the school who played D&D. Puberty, romantic love, sexual angst and moodiness came and went - or I presume they did, because I was too busy drawing dungeons to notice. A lot of ink could be spilled on the subject of why D&D grips adolescent boys so compulsively. It's an escape, obviously. It's a fantasy alternative where problems can be solved with magic or brute power. There's world-building, problem-solving and narcissism. Those demonesses aren't wearing any clothes. And so on. But I don't want to knock it because it was a pretty constructive hobby. I was DM in an ongoing campaign with schoolfriends Andrew, Chris, Gareth and Douglas - or Micdor the Mighty, By-Tor Madrigal, Bron-Y-Aur the Gnome and Riethor Thalion the Ranger. You guys, your characters names are still as familiar to me as Frodo and Bilbo and your adventures were, frankly, just as worthy of big cinema adaptations. Who can forget when you stormed the assassin's guild? or the vampires of Wizard Street? or the land of the Frost Barbarians with its comedy berserkers? True friendship, epic tales and my mum bringing us a tray of tea and sandwiches as the Sunday afternoons slipped away, away, far away and long ago. If there's a heaven (and how can there not be?) then surely we will all meet there, unwearied by age and uncondemned by the years, and play our D&D campaign again. And my beloved mother will bring us tea. But I digress (and am making myself tearful). A long interval must be dispensed with: university, career, marriage; important things but the turning of the wheel was waiting for me when I started teaching schoolkids to play D&D again, running little clubs, presiding over a new generation of heroes, watching the spark kindle a fire of obsession in some eyes, but not others. Why some and not others? It's an interesting question. I've probably introduced a hundred people to D&D in my life and I've never yet met someone who didn't "get it" - who couldn't, after a few moments of following along, realise that you were playing a character, imagining a story and who wouldn't immediately start making their own contributions to the narrative: "I'll hit him!", "I'm going to open the chest", "I'll search for secret doors", "I'll hit him!", "Can I jump over it?", ""I take the treasure", "I'll hit him!" and so on. Nobody is too clever for this to appeal to them or too stupid to grasp the basics. It's so immediate and so accessible that it feels eerily as if storytelling like this is some sort of innate human potential, like singing or playing with babies or cheering at sports, something that we all do naturally and would do a lot more often if our culture didn't direct us away from such activities. Perhaps that's true - perhaps our culture teaches us to think of imagination and storytelling as activities assigned only to experts and people employed by Disney, encouraging us to be passive consumers of other people's stories when really it's our human inheritance to create our own. But even though everyone 'gets it', not everyone likes it. I've introduced D&D to people who've said afterwards (or half way through), "Yeah, it's OK, it just goes on a bit - I'm going to wander over there for a while and watch bugs hit the window." And I've got to say, I play RPGs much less now than I used to. They're tiring, imaginatively and socially. Board games feel much more like relaxation, especially if you're not super-jazzed about winning But then time passes and I get the old itch. I want to get a bunch of people to the table and deliver a round unvarnished tale, then sit back while they squabble and scheme, twit each other and have dazzling insights, crack the funniest jokes ever, draw more creativity out of me than I knew I had, rush to each other's rescue, piece the clues together and screw everything up on a final calamitous dice roll. Yes. Yes I think it's time to play D&D again. Fresh faces very welcome.
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