Combat 3000

As much as I was fighting shy the previous post then this one is a much more cherished task.
Of all the games that I played before leaving school, this, a sci-fi skirmish set in the distant future, was the one that really fired me up...

Written by Halliwell and Priestly in 1979, it flung gamers into a universe of possibilities some of which were trailed on the inside as including...

"Command a squad of Star troopers, blast your way into the Galaxies richest banks and out of the strongest and most infamous jails. Boldly go where no man had probably gone before, swap insults with exotic aliens, then swap blows with insulted aliens..."

Front cover by Tony Yates

Which all sound great to me as a kid raised on Dr Who, UFO, Space 1999 and just discovering The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Combat 3000 seemed like an ideal jumping off point for the whole universe...

Not that there was a whole universe inside the rule book, this was a TTG product and the whole thing ran to 32 pages long, with just three alien races (plus humans) for the players to get there teeth into; Trimotes, three armed apes, lifted shamelessly from Larry Niven's 'A Mote in God's eye', Maniblax, bipedal insectoids, and Zarquins, which had a more alien hive-mind thing going on, but this was enough, along with what seemed like an endless list (50+) of lasers and blasters to arm your soldiers, and loads of armour and secondary weaponry to add, the game lent itself to highly personal squads.

Once again, looking back, the rules themselves were quite complex, a percentile system with everything; (range, movement, target size and situations, types of weapon,  types of fire; aimed indirect, covering, conditions etc) adding or subtracting from the chance to hit, and then all that armour and variable weapon effects to take into account for damage, once a hit had been achieved... which lead to quite small intense games, 6 - 10 each minis a side on a 4 feet square area would take a few hours for us to get through, with each -5% for being hotly (childishly) contested, each move/shot/throw or melee vital...

Space Marine by Nick Bibby

I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised that this game played so sweetly, and that I became so enamoured with it, Halliwell went on to become THE greatest British game designer of his generation, with a list of credits that include; Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and it's highly regarded but less well supported sister game, Warhammer Fantasy Role-play, Battlecars, the most entertaining car-wars game ever, and of course the classic Space Hulk.

This was also the first game I played outside school, the time needed play meant we (Simon, Mark, a lad called Richard Purseglove and I) had to meet up on Saturdays to play at each other's houses. In fact the only time Andy Chambers ever came to my house, was to play was a game of Combat 3000, he arrived an hour or so late, mocked my rudimentary modelling skills on a future-tank I'd made, and then nuked the playing field from some cool looking space-fighter he'd scratch built.

Which cuts to the heart of what I loved about Combat 3000, and the problem with Sci-fi gaming in general. This is summed up in a quote from Ripley in the Aliens movie... present with an insumountable number of menacing monster aliens she says..."I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit?", in that, in the far-future whole planets can be whipped-out at the press of a button, or alien cities reduced to dust by half a dozen power-armoured Space Marines with imploding mini-nukes, so that minor conflicts can't/shouldn't exist, without some kind of narrative to drive the game forward, scifi gaming becomes a power gamers dream.

Trimote, by Nick Bibby

How much better then, not to use all those high-end future weapons (Imperial Arsenals, the standard weapon of Imperial troops, +18% to hit, +5 damage effect!) "check your blasters at the door", and duke it out with pistols and laser sabres, rather than to fight armoured combats, with roughly man-shaped future tanks... Battletech anyone?

Combat 3001 was released in 1981, this time authored by Halliwell alone, and although it did add more depth to our imaginary future worlds; gravities, vehicles, more weapon types, more Aliens, it didn't really add anything much to the gaming experience, and apart from Laserburn, British Sci-fi gaming was heading to the doldrums for half a decade or so...

Future-Cafe from the inside cover of Combat3001, reportedly showing the Asgard crowd responsible for the game

Interested in reading these veteran rule-sets?
Check them out here on my Scribd page. Combat 3000, Combat 3001

Middle Earth

Ok, so then you look up and a month has flown by and I've not updated the blog... and...

Well to tell the truth I've been fighting shy of this one, coz the rule set that I found next in my lil'life in miniatures is Middle Earth, written by the South London Warlords and published by Skytrex in 1976, a wargame in the style that WRG were producing in the same period, and obviously based on Tolkien's world in Lord or the Ring et al.

the only picture from this 1976 publication

Now I had no trouble with the rules, slightly less involved than D&D but by no means simple, or the wargames aspect, it made a change to line up the few dozen minis we had in little warbands and advance them at each other, rather than 'roleplay' with them.

Where the issue lay was with the whole Tolkien background, implied but not exactly explained in the rules, a world similar to the one of my D&D experience, Orcs, Elves, Dwarves, even Dragons are allowed for in the rules, but there seemed to be so much more...

And this off is course the problem...
Of there is "so much more", because Tokien's world is huge, vast, a history and a mythology of a continent, over 1000's of years, and I hadn't read a single word of it...

I wanted to play, I loved the idea of battling armies of dwarves and elves but I was a complete wooden-top where Tolkien was concerned. 

"No..." Simon Maze would cry "...Nazgul do not have wings..." as I tried to rope in my Ral Patha demons as the Dark Lords servants...

a better draughtsman than writer?

It wouldn't be another three or four years (after I left school) before I even attempted to read LotR, even then it took me a couple if attempts to get through it, and as anyone who has known me at all in the last 30 years will probably be able to tell you, I am not a fan of JRR.

I find there is just 'too much' LotR; the prose is leaden, the plot drawn out, and the dialogue stilted, I admire the scope of the book, and his work in general, bringing together all the tradition elements of the myths of Northern Europe into one whole as he does, you can't doubt he knew his stuff but, but, but...

Like a huge Christmas dinner, where with the need to accommodate everyone's favourite tradition goes into the meal, it gets larger and denser with every element added, until the whole thing is fit to burst... Now everyone likes a blow-out meal now and then, but Tolkien servers his spicy stodge all the time, page after page for 100's of pages...

Ok, ok, ok, I know it's not a popular opinion, and in the Geek World in which I live, it is almost considered heresy to say you aren't a fan, but there ya'go, I can't lie to you folks can I?

So, my introduction to The Master comes not from his great work, or his kids intro book, or the film (the Bakshi version kids, go ask your Mum) or some other kind of tie-in product (like there were any), but this little fan made rule set.

Check out my copy of Middle Earth here on Scribd

Ral Partha Demons, not Nazgul.

Next Combat 3000, where stealing ballpoint pens on far away worlds, is a distinct possibility.

Asgard for the first time.

Ok, so my first Visit to Asgard was a bust...

But luckily I was making better friends with the lads at the D&D club and on one Saturday Simon Maze suggested that I go with him into Nottingham to have a look at the place...


Now from what I remember this was probably my first trip into Nottingham on my own, OK I wasn't on my own, I was with Simon, but without a parent, if you see what I mean...

I went to his house in the morning, he lived a mile or so from where I did, and we caught the bus in the City Centre... Simon had said that we should save our bus fare and walk, but Nottingham seemed like a million miles away to a lad of 13 so we spent the 7 or 8p that was the cost of the ride and got into the city as quickly as the bus would carry us...

The Asgard shop I first visited was on Commerce Square, which I was lead to believe was their second shop in roughly the same area of the City, off High Pavement, in what was then, quite a run-down area called The Lace Market.
The Shop, which was really nothing more than a front to a warehouse or old mill, was up a couple of big stone steps, with what I assumed was a little workshop and storage space to the rear...
The walls were lined, as was the fashion in those days, with a large areas of 'peg-board' racks, on which were hung all the miniatures they had in stock... Some Citadel, mostly fantasy adventures, some Ral Partha, and loads of Asgard minis they had made on the premise... and that was about it... No painted minis that I can remember, no gaming tables, no racks of rules and modules, just minis and a few old copies of White Dwarf magazine...
The chap behind the counter, I later learnt was Paul Sulley, who at this time owned Asgard...

I'd seen White Dwarf at the D&D club, someone would always have the latest copy, but a back issue took my fancy, so I came away with one mag and one mini... The front cover of the mag that had taken my interest was issue 20 something, with this excellent Les Edwards Ghoul on the Cover...

And the mini... well it was this this Ogre, FM63, a cracking model with tonnes of character...

 

So, I'd broken my duck with Asgard, it really did seem like a cool place, hidden away as it was, filled with all this stuff, and inhabited with what looked like an 'interesting' crowd of people... but little did I know that at this point, that the next time I was going to set foot in a wargames shop it wouldn't be Asgard but a new shop, almost on my doorstep... TTG was just about to come into my life..

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.