The Gritstone walls before you seem imposing and dark, your footsteps echo along the hallway ahead as you make you way forwards. Blinking and dancing in the dark is the warmth of a candle, the light thrown into stark straight lines by the door slightly ajar.
Hinges creak as you open the heavy wooden door, breaking the quiet inside. A lush carpet on the floor hushes your footsteps, candles light the room all around, warming it and making it comfortable. A high backed chair sits in the midst of bookcases all around the outer walls, rolling ladders attached to reach the highest shelves.
As you look around, your gaze is drawn to one book in particular, an old favourite. Judging by the cracks on the leather spine, this book has been opened many times and drawn you back ever since that first time.
With the book in hand you make your way to the chair to read a favourite story again...
*****
Greetings gentle reader,
This post marks the start of something different for the blog, something I hope will be a somewhat regular recurring thing.
As before when I asked people why they take part in the hobby this is another of those, thanks to Chris for the idea for the series.
There are stories attached to this hobby. Not the "did you see" or "I won that game so easily" type stories.
No I'm talking about the stories of the world's which our hobby inhabits. The places, characters, battles, struggles, loves, losses, and everything that goes along with that.
From Codex histories, to Box-outs in various rulebooks, they've always been there from the very beginning of Games Workshops more professionally produced products*.
Black Library published novels and series's all based in GW's worlds and the authors have often done more to advance the richness of the world's they write in then the actual games designers who created the setting.
But it's not just Games Workshop who do this, obviously they set the standard, and a lot of other companies picked up on the format and wrote lore for their world's to similar depth**.
Privateer Press*** did a wonderful job creating the Iron Kingdoms and fleshing out the nation's from what started out simply as a Steampunk module for Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, the original Witchfire Trilogy. From there they worked forwards (well backwards to create history) and make a brilliantly unique, rich, steampunk world**** which has lots of lore tied to it.
Historical games often add short sections of fiction based off of first-hand accounts, but I always feel that these are not ideal, when you can pick up a memoir if the conflict is within living memory, either by soldiers of the time telling their experiences, or books like those written by Max Hastings who compile a unit's history through multiple interviews. The most famous of this type is obviously Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose*****.
Then there is some of the brilliant historical fiction books by authors such as Bernard Cornwell, Simon Scarrow and others.
I'm a massive Bernard Cornwell fan with both the Sharpe and Uthred series's propagating my bookshelves, but The Eagle series above by Simon Scarrow is another highly recommended set.
Stories drive what we do, whether it is to research for a particular unit or uniform, delving into real and fictional battles without having to put life and limb on the line.
"Research"
By doing so we can create a force from a particular conflict or even recreate battles from a particular conflict, whilst several historical conflicts fire the imagination, I've never felt the real pull to get involved as such, attempts have been made but never stuck. Things which have stuck with me over the years though are the fictional conflicts we've read about, one which I keep meaning to have a look at recreating (but keep getting distracted from) is the Battle for Macragge. Tyranids invading the Ultramarines home planet, the second company defending Cold Steel Ridge to buy time, a last stand of the first company defending the planetary defence network to the last man, the third and seventh companies retaking the bunker complex and the desperate space battles in orbit visible to the defenders on the surface...so much to draw from.
Likewise we can loose ourselves within a single character over a long running series, like Sharpe in the Napoleonic Wars or Gotrek Gurnisson in the Gotrek and Felix series. We can build a force around a particular character from a favourite novel and add to their narrative ourselves, or recreate parts of the story to see how things might have changed had this happened instead...
The artwork for the Sharpe TV series "Equipment of the 95th".
Speaking of, 95th is a semi-RPG/Wargame I've been meaning to look into, by Two Hour Wargames I believe.
The purpose of this exercise is going to be looking at some of my friends favourite snippets of the lore, I'm going to ask them for a couple of paragraphs about why they like the lore they picked and what, if anything, they would maybe change about it.
I'm not asking them for a full rundown of the particular piece, as I'll add a summary of what's going on, as well as my own thoughts on the lore after I research it myself (provided I can mind******).
So I'll kick off this Loremaster series with my own choice in a post in the next few days and see where we go from there.
Until next time, have nice day...
* I'm talking from Warhammer Fantasy 3rd edition and Rogue Trader onwards when the books started to look something like the prototype form of what we know today. Not the earlier versions which were much like the original D&D little brown books...
** GW created the template and other people ran with it, then GW started to mess things up with their much much more corporate image diluting the strength of their writing for more mass market appeal.
*** Another company which has had its troubles and lost its way in terms of their products.
**** Which they went and ruined after the company went into meltdown and they got rid of most of the original creators.
"Writers you're fired, get out".
"Well what do we do now?".
"I don't know I'm just a money-man".
"Let's just add demons and halloween into the world, who cares about being unique anymore".
***** I have read most of Ambrose's publishing and also watched Band of Brothers and The Pacific series, all of which I enjoyed. Maybe it's just British pride, but I always loved the Pegasus Bridge book a lot more then Band of Brothers.
****** Provided I can. Whilst I have a fair amount of gear, my library and collection isn't inexhaustible, there are obviously things I will be missing and can't get ahold of.
And I am NOT even going to entertain anything related to Iron Warriors creating new marines from Daemon women...go and be all edgy and stuff elsewhere, this isn't the place for that shit!
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