Crypts of Indormancy by Ezra Claverie

I went to Dragonmeet a few weeks ago, and while I was there, as one does, I bought things. One of these things was Crypts of Indormancy, a dungeon for D&D in its various guises and reflections written by Ezra Claverie. You can buy it in print and PDF directly from the Melsonian Arts Council, or you can buy it in PDF on DriveThru, where I observe it is currently on sale. I have the hardback edition.

Quick disclaimer: the Melsonian Arts Council published a piece I wrote in an issue of their zine The Undercroft, specifically this one. So I guess I'm a little biased? I don't think so, but then I wouldn't. 

Warning, I guess? This review contains spoilers, so if you're going to play the scenario, don't read it.

OK, so what is Crypts of Indormancy? It's a relatively small dungeon: really only about 6 or 7 "rooms" depending on how you count. I would expect it would run for a few sessions, though, as there's a lot to take in and a lot to figure out. It comes in a slim, attractive hardback with illustrations by Andrew Walter. Apparently it came out in 2016, but I didn't get it at last year's Dragonmeet, once again reinforcing my view that I must have literally just walked right past the Melsonian booth. Oh well.

The premise of the scenario is pretty simple: ages ago, an elven general, who was, like the elves seem to be in this setting, a real swine, died. His tomb, presumably full of treasures and grave goods and whatnot, is just sitting up there in the mountains waiting for some enterprising scoundrels to come and loot it.

Now, normally, you would expect that the tomb would be full of traps and defenses, but the twist here is that the tomb itself is the trap, a complex magical device rigged up by the general's heirs and followers to resurrect their leader in a way that wouldn't be obvious to suspicious elven authorities.

OK, so far this is all pretty much straight D&D -- a tomb-robbing scenario with a bit of a twist. But what makes Crypts of Indormancy so interesting is the execution.

Like ... let's say you're approaching the tomb. It has a great big door, which you cannot get into because you don't have the various passwords. Should you try to cast a spell on the door, something called the Temporizing Duplicator swings into action. What this does is nullify the spell and then use the energy to reach back into your past and create a duplicate of you as you were a few moments before you cast the spell. The duplicate shows up and is bewildered and possibly hostile, as one might be, but only for a short time. Gradually, the weird temporal paradox sucks all the realness out of you and pours it into the duplicate and you literally die and now you're the duplicate, who was really you all along, I guess, or not, in some weird abstract philosophical sense.

And I love this. Because, here's the thing, the mechanical effect of this is "the spell doesn't work." But the dramatic effect is "the spell doesn't work and we are into some seriously weird shit here," which you probably ought to have concluded earlier when you were fighting the giant imaginary baby skeleton, but let that pass.

Or take probably the most obvious monster in the dungeon: the Stertorous Recapitator. These guys are basically guardian zombie types created by a bunch of cruel blasphemy, and they will emerge to attack intruders after a certain point. What they are is headless corpses, and what they do is gang-pile on you with knives and saw your head off, after which they stick your dead blood-gushing melon on their own empty stump, where it magically fuses and now they're chasing your friends around the tomb with knives while your severed head sits there on top of them just, I don't know, shrieking with helpless existential horror, I guess. And then your friends kill them and the last light of unnatural vitality fades from your eyes and you get to go on to the next life with the hideous knowledge that it was your friends that did it and/or that you were a helpless passenger while corpse guys sawed your friends' heads off with knives.

Like, mechanically, they're pretty much just sort of zombies, but they have this bizarre and horrible twist that makes them really fun and memorable.

And there's just a lot of that kind of thing, which I really like. Strange extradimensional monsters and arcane science and a certain amount of Gygaxian-but-for-the-21st-century intentional overwriting.

But all this idiosyncratic verbosity has its downsides, as well. Claverie sometimes takes time out to give a regular old D&D monster a vein of cosmic science-fantasy horror, but sometimes he takes time out to complain about DMs rolling dice behind the screen, a subject on which I assure you any person who is spending £16 on weird hardback art-dungeons already has a firmly settled opinion. And sometimes he spends two pages in a 64-page book on an extended gag about how the ancient game the elven general plays to train himself and his officers in the art of command is, y'know, Warhammer.

While that stuff doesn't thrill me, I feel like this module is as much fun as it is because it's the Ezra Claveriest module there is, and if I have to indulge some gamer grumbling in order to get all this good, chewy psychedelic horror that feels like a small price to pay.

Prep-wise, I don't think this is a scenario that drops easily into most campaigns, although weirdly it would drop just fine into my game world, where elves are a bunch of SOBs and did in fact conquer a load of Polynesian-influenced island cultures. A lot of this is going to make more sense if the characters are grounded in the fictitious culture of the islands, which will help them interpret the tomb in context and give them a motive to mess with it other than just to stuff their cheek pouches with valuables (although that works fine as well).

In fact, with all the focus on the various artefacts in the tomb and their cultural significance (there's even fake citations), I feel like the ideal premise for this dungeon would be to have it be an archaeological expedition. Not that that couldn't also be a treasure hunt, but I do feel like you're going to lose some of the "something's not right" sense if you're describing these weird, blasphemous wall paintings and the characters are just going "yeah, yeah, whatever." You're definitely going to get the most out of this scenario if you give the characters a reason to be invested in its history, maybe by running a few preliminary games set in the area.

Naturally, I got way into that stuff to begin with, but if I didn't like that kind of thing I probably wouldn't have lasted through a couple of history and archaeology degrees.

Ultimately this raises the question of what you're buying modules for, which is not a thing I thought I'd find myself saying when I opened this book. Is the idea to buy a labour-saving tool? That is, are you looking for something that makes it easy for you to run the kind of dungeon you would probably run yourself but don't have the time to write up, a sort of worked example? Or are you looking for something that is a bit different and weird but might take quite a lot more work to integrate? I don't have a clear answer to that: both, maybe? But this is definitely the latter.

Now, as it happens, I think there are probably enough regular old D&D dungeons sitting on my hard drive that I could run them from now until whenever, and honestly I'm more likely to read something and carve it up than run it straight, so this is right up my alley. It's flawed in a few ways: the organisation sometimes makes the exact role of the creatures in the dungeon unclear, and I had to read it twice and kind of keep a little mental sketch map the second time to make it all make sense. I did try to read it the first time on the train back from Dragonmeet, though, so maybe that wasn't ideal. But even with those points, I'm definitely in the more of this kind of thing please camp. I like the way the weird-art-OSR wing are producing things that are clearly D&D and yet clearly also their own thing, and I like the way they don't resemble one another.

So yeah; I liked it.

And now, a word from our sponsors

Just a short post today after Friday's novel! It's the Christmas in July sale over at DriveThru, and lots of things are 25% or more off. I thought I'd take a moment to go over all the reviews I've posted on this blog as well as last year's RPG a Day posts and see if any of the things I recommended are on sale. And what do you know, there are a few.

Maelstrom Domesday

A spinoff or reimagining of British classic Maelstrom (itself currently on sale for less than £3!), this is a game that's right up my alley and possibly no one else's, a scrub-level horror/mystery game set in England in the late 11th century with tons of period detail and a strong chance of being a disfigured peasant. I wrote a full read-through and a character creation post.

I do keep meaning to run this game, but when? Anyway, you can get it for super cheaps -- less than a fiver for the PDF -- on DTRPG right now, since there's an extra sale on.

After the Bomb

It's about cartoon mutant animals fighting in the wreckage of a nuclear-devastated America, and it started as a supplement for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG. Now it has its own system -- and OK, Palladium character creation is complicated and time-consuming, but it's dead easy to strip away the cruft. And you get a hell of a lot for just a few dollars with these After the Bomb PDFs. Road Hogs is my personal favourite -- and it's like £2.50! -- but they're all cool. It's the only post-apocalyptic hot rod samurai funny animal rockabilly western you're ever going to need.

Sadly, the original TMNT game is out of print, but my experience is that it's not hard to find on eBay, and there's a new After the Bomb RPG that all these books are compatible with.

The Flying Serpent

Not a game at all, just a weird historical document that would make a great prop for anyone running a supernatural mystery game set in England. And less than a pound.

Tunnels & Trolls

My very first RPG, this game has a fancy new edition, but you can actually buy the first edition from the 70s in PDF for less than two dollars American!

Cyberpunk

Your pal and mine Chris wrote a guest post about this classic after picking it up for a song at the SELWG bring and buy. I don't think the first edition is still available, but you can definitely get the second and third in PDF for about seven quid each. 

Everything Sine Nomine has done ever

The only thing more tiresome than my love for Silent Legions (two-part review here and here) is my fondness for Stars Without Number and its spinoff, Other Dust. Come to that, I just read Spears of the Dawn and enjoyed it as well. So I'm just gonna go ahead and endorse pretty much everything Kevin Crawford does. Get you some. 

So anyway, that's what I've reviewed or talked about on the blog that's currently on sale at DTRPG. Get 'em before the end of July for, you know, big savings. Three floors of values! You know the kind of thing. 

Silent Legions: the long-awaited Part Two!

In a previous post, I began my review of Silent Legions, the Lovecraftian-horror sandbox game from Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing. I am a big fan of this type of game and its approach to worldbuilding, so I decided to put it into practice.

Pantheon and cults

Before starting to develop my setting, I created a pantheon, an alien race and some cults. I rolled for the gods and discovered that there were four of them, divided into two pantheons. One of the pantheons came up "monotheistic," so obviously that god, who I rolled as a god of fire -- the Sleeping Flame -- is the only god in its pantheon (I suppose that's not really a pantheon, then, but you know what I mean). The other pantheon has three gods, but they don't fully exist yet: I rolled "forerunners" for them, which means that they are waiting to be born into our reality. They are the Sultan of Cold, the King of Thirst and the Devourer of Pain.

So we have one god -- obviously, your passive, dormant type -- that already exists and three younger gods striving to be born. I'm guessing the Flame wants to make sure the others don't burst into our reality and displace it.

My alien race don't have a name yet, but the dice tell me that they've only been here for one to two hundred years and that they're capable of disguising themselves as humans. During their time on earth, they've created a concealed global network of underground structures to house themselves, and obviously one of these is located in the area where I'm going to set my game. They came to earth from another part of our solar system, and they use humans to incubate their larvae. They influenced astronomy -- I'm assuming to conceal the existence of their home -- until a group of humans banded together to stop them. I'll have to find somewhere discovered in the last few centuries to have them come from; Pluto is probably too predictable.

They fear the outer gods -- I decided to have this mean that they fear the new, yet-to-be-born gods. Perhaps they fled from their home to seek refuge from them?

They live within the human community, and they have the power of mind control, which they use to suborn the local government; they produce or have access to some kind of addictive substance they use to manipulate people. They place the highest value on reproduction -- I wonder if maybe they are dying out back home. In their normal physical form (when not impersonating humans) they are like half-intangible clouds with stalked eyes projecting from them. Their behaviour is ant-like; they have a queen and they obey her unquestioningly. They speak in airy, breathy voices, eat by liquefying and absorbing their food and seem to be motionless until they suddenly move with inconceivable speed.

When they die, they erupt into a swarm of immature larvae which will seek to burrow themselves into a human host. They won't mature, but they can do some damage.

By Luigi Castellani. 

I rolled up one cult, the Circle of the Iron Demiurge. They were founded in ancient history by an artist who received bizarre visions of something huge. They took control of a community in ancient history, recruiting their numbers from among artists; they infiltrated an existing faith and repurposed some of its temples, but they were opposed by a rival faith.

Today, they have embraced their uncontrollable artistic visions to the point that many of them are incapable of functioning in normal society. Each member has a hidden tattoo which they use to identify themselves; the cult is bounded together by a twisted form of familial love. The leader is a mad high priest, but he has possibly untrustworthy second-in-command. The cult wants revenge against someone -- maybe the descendants of the religion that fought them in antiquity? They are masters of diabolical sorcery, which is their chief weapon.

Here are the three major and three minor characters I created for the cult:

• Seductive femme fatale
• Merciless crime boss
• Monstrous entity that resembles a human -- maybe one of the alien species has switched sides to work for the unborn gods rather than the Flame? 
• Foolish street thug with grandiose plans
• Sweet old lady carrying on a hideous family tradition
• Ambitious young academic seeking cult secrets

The second cult I didn't bother rolling up; the alien race description made it clear that the other cult in the mix was going to be the mind-controlled slaves of the aliens. I assume they work in tiers with actual shape-shifted aliens at the top and the addicted thralls at the bottom. 

Basically all of this was generated randomly, I want to point out, and it all fits together into quite a nice little antagonist group. Certainly much more detail than I would probably have created in an hour of just thinking about it. And more importantly, not solely the kind of thing I would think of (and therefore the kind of thing my players would be able to predict). 

Locations

I decided to set my campaign right here in Cambridgeshire. The book recommends picking three urban locations, three rural locations and three remote locations, some of which are to be "red herrings," ie locations with no occult tag. I only did eight instead of nine. My locations were: 

• Cambridge (city)
• Cambridge (university)
• Ely
• Little Stukeley (red herring)
• Westley Waterless
• Ramsey Forty Foot
• Ouse Washes
• Gallows Hill

For each of these locations, you generate two tags, each of which contains an enemy, a friend, a scheme, a secret and a place. You pick these from a list of suggestions for each one. 

Cambridge City: Foul Faith. A local religion has been corrupted. Enemy: popular demagogue. Friend: concerned relative. Scheme: consecrate a place with an evil rite. Secret: the religion supports social services for the needy, despite its evil nature. Place: secret fane in important building. 

Crushing Despair. The people of Cambridge have lost hope in things ever getting better. Enemy: political machine boss. Friend: Successful expat returning home. Scheme: discredit source of hope. Secret: Constant plans for renewal always disappoint. Place: street with half the houses empty. 

This is an example of a location and its tags; I'm not going to type them all out because there's nine of them, so here's the summary. 

Ely: Horrific Wealth, Creeping Plague. Ely's privileged residents have some corrupt secret behind their wealth -- but can even that save them from the contagion that's about to break out? Are they, in fact, linked? 

Cambridge University: Drug Epidemic, Damnable Saviour. A new designer drug is doing the rounds among students -- it's even being made by students. But the drug has side effects that one of the cults is keen to harness or put a stop to. A wealthy patron tries to battle the problem, but has secrets of her own. 

Little Stukeley: Clannish Silence, Old Grudges. Stukeleians (is that a word?) don't trust outsiders, and anyone who tries to tell people about what's going on gets put down by the brutal clan leaders. Two factions within the village fight, with an unscrupulous gun runner selling to both sides. 

Westley Waterless: Senseless Violence, Buried Power. A local archaeological site has a hidden being beneath it -- a zealous young archaeologist struggles with the local landowner for access. Does the site have something to do with the bizarre rash of violent crimes in the area? 

Ramsey Forty Foot: Depraved Clergy, Entrenched Poverty. In this poor village, a violent strain of old-timey witch-hunting religion has arisen. 

Ouse Washes: Poisoned Ground, Inhuman Masters. Chemical spills are contaminating the area -- they come from a hidden lab run by a rogue scientist. Is it tied in to the aliens' attempt to create a device to communicate with their offworld allies? 

Gallows Hill: Hateful Tradition, Predator Entity. Bigoted locals enact a cruel local rite believed to appease an evil spirit. There is an evil spirit -- but it isn't appeased. Bodies of the locals' victims are believed to be consumed by the monster, but in fact it eats something less substantial -- a part of the soul, or the sanity. 

It's spookier if you know it's called the Devil's Dyke. 

So there you have it -- that's probably a year's worth of sessions, although they're not all developed, and it took me about two hours while watching television. And as you can see, they're not necessarily Mythos-y; the plot concepts are sufficiently broad that they can fit anywhere. I like enough of these plots that I may well use them, and several of them are not what I would have thought of without using the generator. I particularly love the aliens, the cult, all that stuff. 

There are lots of tools for me to quickly create the next steps as well -- I'd start with this level plus local knowledge, improvisation and charm, and then when the players wanted to actually go somewhere in the sandbox I'd quickly whip up the relevant spells, critters, artefacts and so on. Probably the only thing I'd do more of in advance is the cult's sorcery; given that it's important to them I would want to make sure I had some strongly-established visuals and names to act as clues. 

By Luigi Castellani.

I have discovered my first flaw in the game, though! Well, it's not a flaw per se, more like a caveat; it's just that the tags will require a little adjustment to make them work in a wainscot UK setting (rather than a World-of-Darkness-type setting), and of course they'll need even more fiddling to make fit a specific city. The second point is true anywhere; Cambridge is filthy rich; that's its problem, and the idea of a street with empty houses, rather than people paying £200K to live in a shoebox and be beaten with rods, is risible. But I'm the one that chose it; I was shooting for a more WoD-y concept anyway. And that would be true anywhere; a tag that makes sense one way in New York needs a little work to make sense in Muscatine. 

The national point is a little more an artefact of the game itself; it's set in America, and some of the tags reflect that, assuming that guns are everywhere and there's lots of murders and so on. I struggled with fitting some of the tags to really remote locations, also; if I were to do this again I think I would make it a big city and not bother with the remote country stuff; I'd make "village" the lowest level of resolution, rather than somewhere really out in the middle of nowhere. Mind you, I think that some of the crime assumptions would work OK in London or even somewhere like Birmingham or Glasgow or somewhere; you can believe that film-noir stuff in a way that's hard to believe about Cambridge. So maybe my home is just weird. 

I hope this has given you an example of how the sandbox generation works and why I think this game is so great; I'm not rolling to see how many of this or what type of columns are in the lobby or what kind of guns the thugs have. I'm rolling for the narrative elements, and then I'm fitting it all together like some mad game of Iron Chef. You can see how useful this is for modern-horror setting creation. Honestly, it should be in every World of Darkness ST's tool kit; that's probably the closest thing on the market to a modern horror sandbox, and it lacks anything like this, at least as far as I know. 

Seriously, you guys; if you run any kind of modern horror game, get this one. Link's at the top of the post. 

Salute 2015!

Salute, hosted every year by the South London Warlords, is the UK's biggest wargaming event, or at least the biggest one that isn't a company thing. I haven't been since 2005 (I believe I said earlier that it was 2004, but I was misremembering). This year was pretty impressive!

Salute is so huge that it's very hard to cover everything that's going on -- I'm sure there were things that I missed, and there were definitely things that I was interested by but didn't get much chance to see. Friend Buzz, who went with me, took a lot more photos (and probably better ones) than I did, so hopefully there will be more to share with you soon.

The other thing that everyone knows about Salute is that people spend tons of money there, but actually I managed to get away with a relatively low expenditure -- good news for me, as I just came back from holiday. But I still got a lot of stuff. But first, the things I saw.

This Death Star trench run participation game seemed very busy. 

Infernal is a horror-y skirmish game Kickstarting this coming May. Their board
was built around a ruined Saint Clement Danes -- a non-GGWSWGG church!

This western table was put on, I believe, by North London Wargames.
The posters inviting players took the form of Wanted posters, which was a nice touch.

This lovely Samurai table was put on by Oshiro Model Terrain. 

I think the thing that struck me about a lot of the best tables was how they emphasised transitions. It's not totally clear in my photos, but the Oshiro table went from the walls of the Imperial city at one end, through a built-up area, to farmland at the other. The same was true of a lot of other successful boards. Probably old hat to table designers -- and of course the purpose of the board was to show off all the different things Oshiro makes -- but I found it interesting.

 Another samurai board, this one for the feudal-Japan system Daisho. This was two boards side by side, with terrain from, I believe, 4Ground (although the thatching is brush bristles). I really liked the seasonality of these boards -- the fallen leaves and red trees on the one, and the bright spring colours on the other. That's the kind of thing that most of us don't do in our home terrain -- because we're shooting for universal utility for obvious economic reasons -- but that is really eye-catching.

 This Dambusters game was a sort of pilot simulator -- players sat in a chair with a control stick and tried to pilot their plane to the dam at the end, dodging flak and delivering a bomb on target. This wasn't the game board, just one side of the display -- but I like the use of repro historical documents to support the theme.

I don't know nothin' about Wolsung, and I'm not in the market for a new exclusive game
(or any exclusive game, pretty much), but that is a pretty car, no denying.

I saw a lot of Conflix houses, most of them with the rendering in the original grey.
This English Civil War skirmish game was by Gravesend Gamers Guild. 

Warploque's demo game was based around a ship battle using, I believe, toy pirate ships.
With my own campaign taking to the sea, I'm very interested in this idea. 

Speaking of ships, this Cold War Gone Hot game involved a massive, multi-layered
vessel with highly detailed removable decks. That locker room!

The Warlords' Stingray game was big, simple, colourful and apparently popular. 

I too have used a broken toy sonic screwdriver as part of a piece of terrain.
I feel bad for having clumsily broken it, but it lives on.

This display for Crooked Dice featured a fantastic Paranormal Exterminators board.
There seemed to be a lot of people wanting a go on it, and who can blame them?

Hawk Wargames was promoting Dropzone Commander with this huge carrier.

It's in scale! The glare gets in the way, but there are pilots in there. 

4Ground terrain was everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I like those patterned tiles.

Every time I see a display of Baccus 6mm miniatures, I wonder if I'm playing in the wrong scale.
They just look like an army, which with the best will in the world most wargame armies do not.
I mean, I mainly play skirmish, but still. Those are good-looking models.  

There's those Conflix houses again.

 'Ardhamma are Oldhammer types from the Northeast, and they put on this stunning 3rd ed game with a mix of models from all editions and many different manufacturers -- that's the real stuff.

 Copenhagen 1392 by Dallaupror; a beautifully-imagined medieval city fight.

 Beasts of War's 28mm Battle for Hoth was visually stunning, but I do not want to think about what it cost. There was a whole separate little battle going on in the base at the other end of the table, but it was hard work getting through the crowd of players and spectators.

Classic GW artist Tony Hough strikes a pose while showing off his portfolio. Seeing that was one of the real highlights of the show for me, and hearing about the process behind it.

I had the sneaking suspicion that this AWI battle was inspired by the Bernard Cornwell novel The Fort. 

If I had all the money in the world, I would buy a lot of Hydra's Retro Raygun line.
As it is, I just have a Space Chimp. I am content. 

You don't get many cosplayers at wargames shows, but they go all-out. 

Anvil Industry walked away with a well-deserved award for this table promoting their new game, Afterlife. My photos don't do this futuristic table justice; it had not only a light-up elevated train track and station but this great multi-level street/park/habitat thing.

So what about my show?

I bought a lot of stuff, which I'll get to in a moment. There were two things I was disappointed not to get -- I should have preordered a Viking shieldmaiden from The Dice Bag Lady to be part of my SAGA army. But that stall was doing a roaring trade when I got there and they were already gone.

I'm very pleased by the existence of this model because I think it shows an incredible response to a problem that Dice Bag Lady has been talking about for some time. Last year, she tweeted some pointed questions about miniature design -- I wrote a post in response, which you can read. And she began, either then or earlier, to sort of curate reasonable models of female characters and sell them through her site -- and then from there she's gone on to produce her own! I'm definitely gonna get me one of those.

The other thing I would have liked to get were a set of the lovely Breughel- or Bosch-esque chaos creatures from Eureka. In the end, I dithered about it and decided against it, but I should have gone for it. They're very reasonably priced and I could have used them in my D&D game. Well, I will get some in future!

Naturally, I got this year's giveaway figure -- an Agincourt archer from the Perrys. In fact, friend Sim didn't want hers, so I have two! I can assemble one of each variant.

I got some parts for my upcoming Deathrace 40,000 vehicle conversion from Zinge Industries (who had a big £1 bin full of wonderful conversion pieces), some wattle fencing and bases from Renedra, various 28mm animals from Irregular (via Fighting 15s), some architectural bits from terrain making from Antenocitis and Warbases (and a free bonus casualty counter from Warbases -- good eggs!) I also picked up a replacement for my Viking tent from Warbases; these are brilliant and I need to do a post about them.

I swung by the em-4 stand and picked up some of the lovely Spacelords figures that Doug is recasting (these are not available on the website, so look on LAF for the images), as well as a monster for my Cthulhu collection. I also found some lovely Hasslefree post-apocalyptic kids from the discount bin at Troll Trader (which is full of bargains but constantly mobbed). Speaking of Hasslefree, I want to give them a shout out -- I was looking for a model for my wife's character in my D&D game, and Kev from Hasslefree helped me look. I didn't actually get any of their stuff -- it's a tough character to find a good model for! -- and I feel bad about that because he was so helpful.

Another purchase was from Colonel Bill's -- this one a Belt-Fed Gaming model of Aethelflaed, the "Lady of the Mercians." Most of Belt-Fed's stuff is pin-up material, but I thought this was actually not a bad model of this fascinating historical character. I doubt she actually fought, but Aetheflaed did command armies, and I suspect she will be a Warlord in my Anglo-Saxon SAGA army. If I get the Lagertha for the Vikings, I'll need a Norman female warrior -- Sigelgaita would would be the obvious choice, although I guess technically she was a Lombard. I wonder if I can find such a model anywhere.

Finally, I bought some more Bones for the D&D game from the dudes who make DMB Dungeon Tiles.

I was excited to see that Conquest Games are putting out plastic multipart early medieval archers. I would have been even more excited before I bought all these metal ones, but I have to say Black Tree Design are very affordable. Still, might pick up a few to beef up the levies for some of my other armies.

I got to meet some people I knew only online, many at the Oldhammer meetup hosted by Orlygg of Realm of Chaos 80s. That's always a great part of shows.

After the show, I went for dinner with, among others, the proprietor of The Responsible One's Gaming Blog, and we talked about what we'd seen at the show. He bought a lot of great miniatures, including the beautiful Nightfolk from Northumbrian Tin Soldier. I asked him whether he thought we were entering a bit of a golden age for minis games, and he agreed. I feel the same way, actually: I said the same thing about roleplaying games back in January or so. Maybe it's crowdfunding, maybe it's a fad, maybe it's an increasing willingness to treat miniatures as art, maybe it's an increasing willingness to fuck around and be silly, maybe it's all of these things, but I don't know. I can't claim to understand the business side of things, but I personally am energised about miniatures in a way I haven't been in a long time.

I am not really interested in commercial wargames with attached minis lines (SAGA is an exception because it is historical), but, y'know, much luck to those that make them; they seem to be doing well, much better than such games have done in the past. And the proliferation of teeny-tiny companies ... there were actually lots in the past, but it seems much easier for them to be in touch with their customers now. Maybe it's just me being more informed than I used to be? I don't know. But I am feeling pretty good about it. I am curious to hear if anyone else feels the same way.

So, anyway, that was my trip to Salute. I will definitely try to make it back there next year; I also have one or two more shows on the calendar for this year, although real life can always get in the way.

Next post: my promised but much-overdue implementation of Silent Legions. Unless something comes along and distracts me, like, er, painting all these models.