A bit of a catch up...

Ok Folks, sorry if the last three or four posts have been a bit of a hatchet-job, I didn't really intent for it to be read that way. I had hoped to start the blog in June with leaving school and starting at TTG, but one thing drove out another (TAG Tudors) and I didn't get started until September... which made getting to Nov 8th a bit of a rush.... and consequently the posts do come across as a bit of a... frenzied...

Tony Yates Illo

But this Blog is not necessarily about Citadel Miniatures, its about my life with in the minis world, and as I said in previous posts, a break with Citadel occurred in the late '83 so at that point I stopped following there mini releases as closely as I had been doing. And although TTG did keep up a relationship with Game Workshop for awhile, which I will blog about when the time comes, for the next few years most of these posts will be about TTG, their miniature range and rules, as well as the games that we stocked in the shop and some of the people who bought them.

Before that though, I would like to blog about one or two of the games that we played back at school, that were very important to me in a couple of ways, for the worlds they created, and the way that they did so...

So next time, back in full flow, with Combat 3000 and Middle Earth.

Arnold Hill D&D club

So my first ever game of D&D was with Andy Chambers, and a lad called Grant Wesselby.
I was given a Half-Orc character by Andy, and unusually we were in a wilderness adventure.
It took me 20mins of so for me to get the jist of the role-play aspect, I just though Andy, the DM was doing a lot of talking about the set-up, but after I got-it, the world(s) just opened up...

TSR's advertising tag-line for this period was D&D; A Gateway to Adventure, which is pretty good, but for me D&D proved to be a gateway to imagination.
The possibilities were endless, just by imagining what we were doing we could be anywhere doing anything... and OK, mostly we'd spend our times in imaginary 10' x 10' dungeon rooms killing Goblins, but in theory we could have been doing anything...

And it wasn't just D&D, there appeared to be loads of these types of games around, Gamma World, Tunnels and Trolls, and more traditional board games with sci-fi and fantasy twists; Rivets, Ogre, Dungeon, loads of them... and we used to make games up... all this stuff  stuck me as a perfect way out of dull Thursdays (any day!), so everyday from then on, it was off to L7 for an hour or so of escapism...

One morning I came into school, and fellow D&D'er Andy Black said, would I like to see these... and in a old bacca-tin  he had three or four tiny model dwarves, he said he'd got them from Asgard...

I can't remember if I gave him my dinner money there and then, but by the end of the day those minis WERE mine...

Next up... My First Minis & Asgard, where was this mythical place...

A chance encounter

I came across the Arnold Hill Dungeons and Dragons Club by accident...

Second year Integrated Studied lessons, a mix of History, Geography and RE, were I discoverer, a bit of skive if you knew what you were doing... If you wanted to wander-off to the library, for research on your project, you could... Same went for 'the labs', large tables outside the general classrooms, which could be used for painting or modeling, drawing-up big graphs and presentation materials, you were allowed to... So, nominally I was painting-up a star map for a project, but in fact I was listening in to a group of lads from the classes next to mine talking about pretending to be dwarves and killing goblins...
Fascinated I poked my head over the intervening bench and said "that sounds fun, can i play?"
They all sort of looked at each other, and at one lad in particular, Andy Chambers turned to me and said "Only if you pass a test... what does XP stand for"... slightly baffled and dyslexic, I stuttered... "Extra Power?"

Chambers stared at me...
He was a big lad then, and always promoted a hard man image, to the extent that he had been banned from the 1st year recreation of the Battle of Hastings, after hardening a tennis ball in plaster and paint, and fixing it to a chain and handle like a flail...

and stared...

"Close enough..." chirped a voice at his side... Simon Maze came to my rescue, "its Experience Points, but it leads to extra powers..." "Andy is starting a new campaign, he needs players..."

and stared...
"12.10, L7" Andy grunted...

I was in.

Best days of your life?

Ok, post two and I suppose I'd better get personal...

30th June 1983 is remarkable for me in three ways; firstly it was my sixteenth birthday, secondly, and completely co-incidentally, it was the day I left secondary school, Arnold Hill Comprehensive, and thirdly it was the day I started full time employment at Tabletop Games.

Its always make me smile to think of myself as working at 16, Old-fellas that you'd hear would say, "I started down t'pit at 14", or "I've been at the factory, man and boy" and although the work that I was just starting wasn't 't'pit' and the factory was only a cottage industry, not some huge old textile mill, I did rather enjoy being thrown-in at the deep-end, a boy in a mans world.

I left school with virtually no skills and very few qualifications, I'd always struggled to write, I'm dyslexic, so getting loads of O levels was never going to be an option.
I scraped a C at Geography on my Boy Scout map reading skills alone, and stumbled over the line for a C in Maths, simply because there were less numerals for me to muck-up, and numbers worked in a way that words never did...
There were I'm sure, other lessons (English Lit & Lang, Physics, Chemistry and Social Studies) but nothing inspired me enough to be bothered to pass the exam... And in the only subject I did enjoy, Pottery, no writing see, there wasn't an O level graded course...
I could see that me and formal education weren't going to get on...

Getting to 16 had been the easy part, getting out of school, only a matter of time, getting a job, let alone doing something that I enjoyed, might have proved more tricky...

In part 3 dear Reader, "Giz a Job".