25) Honored Adversaries: Social Contracts and Abyssal Daemons

Our Kings of War Wisconsin Facebook Group has thirty-six members now, of which about eight are VERY active and play more than once per month. We even did a little bit of recruiting by setting up a booth and handing out flyers at a local gaming swapmeet. The flyers have a QR code link to the facebook page on them. After the swapmeet, we had five people join the group, one of whom has already reached out to us and played a demo game at a game store out in Madison. He loved the game, and immediately bought a starter army to assemble and paint up! Shortly after that, yet another new player reached out to us for a demo game, and he is hooked as well!

With a few new players in the group, we decided to do an escalation league starting in March. Escalation leagues are great, because the league games start with very small armies, that slowly grow in size every month. This allows hobbyists time to collect, build, and paint new units steadily over the course of the year. We have also had discussion on our page about running a small, local KoW tournament sometime later this year. It's kind of funny to think that a year ago, there were only three of us. All it took to grow our player base and get people playing was a little bit of digital networking to help us find each other.

The games I have been getting in are great, the players are great, and the variety of armies in our little gaming club is great. A couple of the players are much more experienced than I am, and I learn more and more every time I play with them. One of them, Brian A, writes excellent and detailed battle reports for his own blog: Regnum Aeternum I highly recommend this blog if you are interested in KoW tactics, strategy, and one player's journey to achieve mastery of the game. It's also a really great look at how different army lists work or don't work. Brian A is a great sport, and it is always a pleasure to play him.

Sportsmanship is something that I think often gets overlooked in war gaming. It is, however equally important in any competetive activity. When I first got into Airsoft, it was a niche hobby. The community was small, and most games were private invite on private land. If you had a bad reputation, or you gave people good reason to dislike you, you weren't going to get invited to any games. The community policed itself this way. Players were always on their best behavior, because if they weren't, nobody was going to play with them anymore. As the hobby grew and got more mainstream over the last twenty years, a community of maybe 200 people in the tri-state area meeting up a few times a year gradually grew into a major outdoor activity with thousands of players and multiple dedicated airsoft fields hosting games every weekend all year round.

Unfortunately, that means that the community can no longer effectively police itself. It simply got so big that now you don't actually know the people you are playing against, and they don't know you. They also don't care how you or anyone else feels about them, because anonymity protects them from reprisal. Airsoft used to be like sitting on the floor in front of the TV with your friends, laughing, eating pizza bagels, and holding greasy video game controllers. Nowadays, it's more like an open Call of Duty server.

That shift is one of the things that has caused me to gradually drift further from airsoft and closer to tabletop gaming. I'm a casual. I'm not here to be especially competitive. I'm not here to pwn anyone, or prove anything. I just want to play a game with my friends. I just want to be social. I want to laugh with my friends and eat pizza bagels.

Airsoft can still satisfy if I play with people that I know and love, and don't get me wrong, I still love my teammates and my creaky toy plastic guns, but for me, tabletop gaming more comfortably serves my social needs at this point in my life. When you play a tabletop game, you are face to face with friends. There is also that same social contract of decency that airsoft once had, back when it was a niche hobby. If you are a lousy sport or just unpleasant to play tabletop with, nobody will play with you anymore. Tabletop players cannot hide behind the anonymity of a mob of people wearing masks. It's a one on one game, in person.

In fact, if you're really wise and you truly understand the nature of the game, you may even come to the realization that you aren't actually playing against the person sitting opposite you. You're playing against yourself. You're testing your list and your mastery of the game, and your friend across the table is doing the same. You're teaching each other.

It's called wargaming. Every match is just a sparring match. All your little toy Soldiers who died are going to get right back up and try again next weekend, so don't sweat it.

On the hobby side of things, I have managed to make good progress on my Abyssal Demon army. I painted up the Hellhounds regiment and the Lower Abyssals horde. I've been trying to stick to a pallet of oranges, reds, and browns, for this army. When I got to the Succubus regiment, though, I just wasn't happy with my initial paintjob. I made them a little bit more red, and gave them white hair, to really make them pop and stand out from the rest of the demons. That was what they needed. I'm very happy with how they turned out.

The most challenging paint project for this army so far, though, has been the smallest unit; The flame bearers. I don't know what I was thinking, but I decided to try doing the one source lighting technique, again. It was a frustrating evening to be sure, but the end result is better than I imagined it would be! My little demons dancing around the fire, illuminated by the flames, casting shadows on the base... It's just such a cool effect! As far as painting flames goes, I realized that I was struggling before because my fire was upside down, or inside out, as far as colors go. For some reason, I was putting the darker colors in the center of the flame, and the lighter colors like yellow and white on the outside and at the ends. With fire, the lightest part is the hottest part, and that is in the center. Flames get darker as they move out from the fuel source. Now that I know that, it is really obvious, but with a previous project I just couldn't figure out why my fire looked WRONG. Now I know! In the future, I won't be intimidated by painting flames.

Another quick little hobby project that I threw together was a troop of Revenant Cavalry. I picked up a ziploc bag full of skeleton and zombie parts, and another ziploc bag full of undead dire wolves at the gaming swapmeet. I threw together some skeleton riders and stuck them on the wolves. It was a quick and easy project that only took one evening to do, especially because the wolves were already assembled and painted. I also got around to doing some more undead banners.

And finally, I got that Ratkin Tangle painted up, and made a nice big banner for it. The model that I bought came with a very sci-fi looking attendant on the shrine, complete with a gasmask and some kind of futuristic looking weaponry. This is because the shrine itself does double duty for Mantic, and is also a unit for the rat aliens in their sci-fi game. In any case, I decided to put the birthing daughter mini on the shrine instead. She fits that spot so perfectly that I wonder perhaps if the sculpt was originally meant to be part of that kit. I was really excited to field the Tangle in its first battle.

It got shot off by artillery at the start of the game.

Next time, humans. Next time...

And I really do mean that, because as I said before, it's only a wargame. All my silly little toy Soldiers who died will get right back up to try again next weekend.