Intro (or A Self-Indulgent Self-Analysis of Why I'm Doing This)
The Backstory
I got into wargaming by mistake. When I was young and I’d go to Braehead shopping centre with my mum and sister, I didn’t want to be dragged around all the clothes shops, so I’d be allowed to wander wherever I wanted and I’d get a call from mum on my Nokia 3410 when it was time to leave. That’s just how things were in the early noughties, kids roamed freely and it was fine (honestly it’s a minor miracle I didn’t end up on a missing poster).
Anyway, on one of those trips I saw a shop I’d somehow missed before, nestled between Claire’s and Timpson’s - Games Workshop. “Cool! A video game shop!” I thought. Turned out it wasn’t, obviously. It was something so much cooler. Amazing miniatures, vibrant paints, hand-built tables with lava rivers, books stuffed full of exciting stories, colour schemes, possibilities and the kinds of numbers that made the autistic synapses of my wee brain fire on all cylinders. I’m sure mum was over the moon when she came to pick me up and found an extremely eager kid who’d discovered his new favourite thing and it just happened to have a starter set for forty quid.
Twenty-two-ish years later, here we are. You can’t even get a Kill Team starter set for forty quid and that only has fourteen models in it, but those same synapses are still firing away. I’ve been into wargaming and Warhammer for two-thirds of my life but until last year, never really had an outlet. I’d always wanted to be more involved with it than I am. I’d devour rulebooks, dream of the unique armies I wanted to convert, spend hours browsing STL sites and third-party mini companies and pick up the occasional box for projects that never came to fruition. My biggest stumbling block was not having anyone to game with or anywhere to play. I had the odd friend who was into it, sure, but they weren’t into the side of things that meant getting stuff onto a table and throwing dice around and hey, more power to them. It’s a big hobby, with so many ways to engage, and I love that folk can tailor their experience to get exactly what they want from it. It’s just that what I wanted was to, well, get stuff onto a table and throw dice around.
It sounds stupid and the most first-world of first-world problems, but it was genuinely starting to bum me out. I was questioning why I was spending so much time on a hobby that I wasn’t able to fully commit to. Every penny spent on models that I knew deep down would never see a table felt wasted, all the dream projects that I knew would remain dreams became disheartening. Then my partner talked to me about it, and instead of being dismissive over my sadness at not getting to play with my space soldiers, she took me seriously and validated me because she’s the most kind and caring creature on this sinful earth, and she suggested looking for local groups. That’s how I found Crossfire.
I could extol the virtues of Crossfire as a club for paragraphs, but I’m already a wordy git and I need to get to the point eventually, so I’ll maybe save that for another day. The long and the short of it is: Crossfire changed everything. I found that place to throw dice. I gained a community full of passionate, talented and like-minded people. I got to play games I’d always wanted to, like the gleeful chaos of Necromunda. Hell, I wrote thousands of words of lore for the club’s Underhells campaign (basically everything in italics in those linked posts). I’d found my people, and it sealed the deal that tabletop wargames were it for me.
Get to the Bloody Point
I’m getting there! Anyway, things have been…not exactly what I envisioned for myself. My degree in animation wasn’t really worth anything because 1. Scotland hasn’t got an animation industry you can just step into like Dublin or London and 2. I don’t actually like animating. I like storytelling, creating worlds, characters, all that good stuff. So for the last three years I’ve been working part-time in payroll. It’s not glamorous but paying other people’s bills lets me pay mine, and gives me enough free time to do the creative stuff I wanted.
What those creative projects are changed all the time. Blame the ADHD for that. Could never commit to any one project as “the thing” that I’d see through to the end. I’m 31 in under a month and despite always working on something I haven’t ever finished or released anything.
So over the past few months my team in work has had three people laid off. My job is secure but it still makes you think about getting out before it all comes tumbling down. Makes you think about what you want to do with your life, all that introspective stuff. Outside of my job, what would I want my career to be? I could have a load of different answers depending on when you asked me - making my own animated series, being an independent fantasy novelist, making turn-based tactics games in RPG Maker - but if I had to pick any of those to do as the only thing I did for the rest of my life, would I? What could I happily dedicate myself to, on the off-chance I completely lucked out and turned a passion into a paying, standalone career?
Wargaming, obviously. So the day after having that thought I sat down and wrote thirty pages of a skirmish wargame.
Then I didn’t touch it for weeks.
That’s the usual path of my creative projects. An initial burst of manic productivity and then getting distracted by the next idea that grabs my attention. I definitely hit both the attention-deficit and hyperactivity parts of ADHD, that’s for sure. But jesus, I’ve got to do something to break that cycle - it’s not like it’s ever worked for me if I’m in this position, is it?
So that’s what this is - accountability, mostly. But also an effort to socialise game development, to bring you all on this journey. To get feedback, to lean into the communities I’ve found, to give something back to the folk who have already had a profound impact on my life in short spaces of time.
I played Space Gits for the first time last week and had an absolute blast, to the point I immediately wrote a bunch of house rules and scenarios for it, and I’m playing it again tonight. More than that, it felt like Mike Hutchinson provided a career template for me to aspire to. Do I think I’m ever going to be on Mike’s level, able to do this full-time? Fuck no, he’s a great designer with wicked original ideas and I’m not that good. He’s been doing this for ten years and only managed to go full-time like a year ago, and that’s with heavy-hitters like Gaslands published by major companies like Osprey under his belt. Any wargame has to contend with the fact that Warhammer is so monolithic that at best, you’ll be able to get a single table running it in a hall of forty tables (and that even extends to Games Workshop’s own non-40K games). I’m not trying to be Mike Hutchinson. I’m never gonna capture a sliver of even smaller companies like Privateer Press or Mantic or OPR or Corvus Belli’s success. The current thing in indie wargaming is the whole grimdark, Blanchitsu, 28mm scene with stuff like Turnip28 and Trench Crusade, and I’m not about that (right now, anyway) - I like my games to be goofy, chaotic, and as a vector for stupid shit and having fun in failure. But I’m not trying to. I’m being realistic about my expectations here - maybe a dozen people will play something I make if I’m lucky and I’d be over the moon with that if those dozen people loved it. I’ll be taking it seriously, though. When the time comes to actually sell stuff, I’ll register as a lone trader. I’ll even come up with a fancy publisher name to tie all my wargame and tabletop stuff together and make it seem like it isn’t just me on my couch creating Google Docs. Most of all, I’m doing this for me. I’m making games I want to play, I’m making games that I want to share with friends and have a laugh over. Maybe selfishly, I want to be able to answer the question of “what do you do” with “I’m an independent game designer” instead of “I work in an office and then do creative…stuff on the side and no it’s not finished so you can’t see it”.
Jesus Christ, Are You Done?
Pretty much, aye. Well done for holding in there, champ.
That’s a lot of what this is going to be, I reckon. Overly-long, meandering, navel-gazing guff with occasional progress on developing a game. But if you want to come along for the ride and see what that journey looks like, great, welcome aboard!
Currently, I’ve got two games on deck that I’m thinking of pursuing. Both are skirmish games and both have an over-the-top comedic hyper-corporate tone. One is the thirty-page one I mentioned earlier, the other is a lot more nebulous and just in the basic ideas and exploratory stage. The one with more development is probably, paradoxically, a much more complex game with a lot more work to do on it - so for now I think I’ll focus on the second one. I think it’ll be quicker to get finished and it being at such an early stage means it fits the needs to this blog better, so we can all see how it goes from idea to finished product.
So that’s what we’ll do next time. I’ll introduce you to the ideas and goals behind the hottest new skirmish game literally no-one’s ever heard of: Miner Threat.
And I’ll probably waffle a whole load of utter shite besides.
Till next time!
~ Ross “onipunk” Brennan