Games of Times Past

While sorting through my 30 years plus of 'stuff' I came across some old photos of minis and games.

This is a scene from a Flintloque game I made up based on the TV version of Sharpe's Gold.  It was an easy switch to make the rogue band of guerillas into ghouls (in the show they are bloodthirsty Aztec cultists, not what Cornwall wrote at all).  If you don't know Flintloque, it is still published by Alternative Armies, and is essentially a fantasy version of Napoleonics, with orcs as the British, elves as the French etc.  The game initially focused on the exploits of a certain officer named Sharke and his rifle-orcs.  It's also a great source of truly awful puns.

I can't remember much about the game, except that I played the orcs and Merlin played the elves.  I do recall that I prepared three games for Merlin's visit, all using the cliff terrain you can see in the picture above. The other games were a fantasy game involving dwarves attacking goblins, which I think used the old Fantasy Warlord rules, and a SciFi skirmish using the recently released Havok rules. I remember we played the fantasy game, but not the Havok game.    

I made the cliffs in spare moments at work (lots of great crafting materials to hand) and they came in useful, though not perhaps as useful as I thought they would, as they afterwards lay abandoned in the loft of shame for two decades.  I've had to throw them out as they were falling apart, and it will be easier to build them anew rather than repair them.  I've access to better materials now, such as XPS, and I may well produce something similar in the near future. There will certainly be more areas for individual minis to stand, ideal for skirmish games.

You can also see in the distance some buildings I made based on the card buildings in Terror of the Lichemaster and The Tragedy of McDeath.  The ruin the cowardly elves are hiding in is the one from Bloodbath at Orc's Drift.

Speaking of which...

These pictures show our mass game of Orc's Drift.  I mentioned this a while back, but briefly we played through the campaign as a send of for Merlin as he was moving up north of  The Wall back in 1999. You can see the full set of Orc's Drift buildings, I still have some of them, but they haven't stood the test of time very well.  They should be repairable though.  I'm sure the roads are Merlin's, and the elves probably are too, though the high elf with bow (standing in for Brommedir - near dead centre on the top photo) was mine. The orcs and dwarves from the old plastic regiment were mine too, but most of the players chipped in with minis to make up the armies. The strange green thing between the buildings in the bottom photo is an old wyvern (Hincliffe Models?), the mount of King F'yar.

I'm afraid I can't remember the outcome, but I do know we all had a lot of fun.