16:00, March 1st 2003
This page has now been launched, more by accident than anything, as part of the new, Official GASLIGHT website. Buck & Chris liked this site, so they asked me to produce and maintain a site for the main game. I really must stop showing those guys stuff, I only end up with more work to do! Anyway I've sneaked the A&E site onto the gaslightrules.com domain webspace, while they weren't looking, which makes for a much friendlier URL than "http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/pipexdsl/o/aoqz52/gaslight/a&ebyg/" !!!!!
Anyway new today is the first of the paper fold-up figures on the Modelling page. I am now a firm believer in the use of paper miniatures for roleplaying, instead of lead or plastic. For one thing a page of 27 paper figures costs less than a single 25mm lead figure, and all the figures can be assembled in about 10 minutes, ready for play. No painting, no worrying about figures being lost or damaged - just print more. Secondly, they're light. As a GM who runs games at other people's houses that's a godsend, as I can carry literally hundreds of assembled figures in an old computer game box and it weighs nothing. If I just pre-cut the figs and glue them as and when I need them during the game, that same box could carry thousands!! Try doing that with white metal figs! Finally you can make sure that the figures match what they're supposed to represent. As a GM, you can afford to print & carry figures for any occasion, and as a player you can design a paper figure that exactly matches your character.
Designing a paper figure is much quicker than painting a lead one. I use the Heromachine version 2.0 Beta, which is less focussed on superheroes than version 1. Once I'm happy with the figure, it takes about five minutes to grab the image, use Paint Shop Pro to scale it to the right proportions and create the back silhouette (a common shortcut in commercial card figures - which saves having to draw the backs of the figures). Once I have enough designs for a page I start importing the images into a Corel Draw template I have pre-drawn which holds twenty-seven figures. This takes about twenty minutes, depending on how many figures are individuals and how many are duplicated "grunts". So in a couple of hours work I can produce figures for a typical scenario from scratch, each matching perfectly the in-game character it represents, for less than the cost & time spent on a single lead figure. Somebody show me a downside!
And here's a thought for you - how about printing those same figures at 50mm instead of 30mm!
Figure manufacturers need not despair though, for wargames I'll still be buying metal & resin! But for roleplaying, paper rules!
18:00, January 18th 2003
Welcome to Adventures & Expeditions by GASLIGHT, or A&EbyG as I prefer to call it (believe me it saves a lot of breath). There's an "About" button somewhere around here which will give you the full gen, but to summarise briefly: A&EbyG is a roleplaying game based on the GASLIGHT VSF wargames rules. I wrote it (A&E that is, not the original G) and this here's my little corner of the web devoted to it. And this News page is where I get to waffle a bit about... well whatever I feel like really, it's my page so nyah. Oh OK I'll try and keep it to things relevant to GASLIGHT, both developments in A&E and the overall GASLIGHT line.
So lets start from the top. GASLIGHT is an excellent set of Victorian Science Fiction wargames rules written by Chris Palmer and Buck Surdu. I'd been an all-round gamer for years, and I'd just gotten into historical colonial wargaming, using first GDW's Soldier's Companion rules, then Larry Brom's excellent "The Sword and The Flame." When I say "historical" I mean "mostly historical". My games were all set in the fictional subcontinent of Olistan, which mixed elements of my favourite 19th Century theatres of war, the Sudan and the North West Frontier, but were otherwise entirely VSF free. The nearest we got was the occasional steam gunboat.
While TSATF was great for mid to larger sized battles, I was on the lookout for games suitable for smaller actions in Olistan (for a lot of our games we split the 20 man units into 10 man sections, as many people do). Wessex Games "Voyages Extraordinaires" had seen service in a couple of games - they're a very simple set of individual skirmish rules, lacking in any real flavour but giving a good game, when I heard about GASLIGHT. So I bought a copy and used it for an Olistan scenario. It gave a really enjoyable game, even without the steampunk elements (although we did use the Start/Sustain rules for sailing dhows, which caused much hilarity when the Wazir's Personal Guard commandeered a dhow and spent three turns trying to get it moving.
Then we had 9/11 happen. Now this is purely a matter of my personal feelings, I don't judge anyone for thinking otherwise, but in the aftermath & with the invasion of Afghanistan, I really didn't feel like gaming Western vs Islamic conflicts, however lighthearted the intent. So I took my little redcoated Brits, and grey-coated Prussians, kitbashed a couple of plastic vehicles adding smokestacks and the like, and ran GASLIGHT VSF at the club. And that was pretty much the end of my aspirations as a historical wargamer :-)
Flashforward a few months. I'm on the GASLIGHT Yahoo Group (see links page) and Peter McDonald asks if we could recommend a rules-light RPG that his group could use to play out events leading up to and resulting from the tabletop GASLIGHT games. There were various suggestions (mine at the time was R. Talsorian's "Castle Falkenstein") and somebody suggested just expanding GASLIGHT itself, since a lot of RPGs have at their heart a skirmish combat wargame of some sort. We warmed to the idea, and a few suggestions are bounced around the group.
Time marches on a couple more weeks, and I find myself sat at my PC one night, unable to sleep, so I start tapping away on the keyboard. GASLIGHT has Shoot, Scuffle and Save... .what other attributes beginning with S would a nineteenth century adventurer have? Science? Definitely... Shoe Size.. probably not relevant. By the time sleep reared its ugly head I was in "the zone" and fought it off with Caffeine. Finally, well into the wee small hours of the morning, I hit Save, uploaded it to my webspace and sent a mail to the GASLIGHT group inviting them to take a look. Then I slept.
A couple of days later, Buck & Chris asked me to contact them off-list. It was then I suddenly realised I'd produced a big-ole derivative work without the original authors' permission. Oops, time to call my lawyer. But no, far from being litigious, B&C asked me to develop the game further with a view to publication.
Cue "work in progress" montage. You know the one they always use in films where they want to gloss over months of work in a few seconds screen time. Close up shots of me scribbling in a notepad, tapping at a keyboad, long shot of me pacing up and down, reading aloud from a book, then running a game for a bunch of chaotic playtesters.. more typing, fading to me slumped asleep over a desk with hair slightly tousled.... get the picture?
Cut to today.and I'm sat in front of the same PC, this time working on this website. Sat on the desk nearby is a printed out and stapled mock up of Adventures and Expeditions by GASLIGHT. On the wall in front of me is a printout of the proposed cover art, and my calendar has "26-29th June 2003 - Go To Origins USA for A&EbyG launch" pencilled in. It's a pretty freaky feeling I can tell you.
End of waffling. Time to unleash A&E on the world. At the risk of sounding like every other half-started website out there...
"There's not much here now, but I'm updating constantly so check back later."